We were still in suspense yesterday morning, till at 8.30—­just about the latest time for completing a morning movement—­two huge barges appeared with orders to embark on them at 10!  Not only that, but although there are scores of straw-roofed barges about, these two were as open as row boats, and in fact exactly like giant row boats.  To complete the first situation, the S. and S. had not been apprised of the postponement, and so there was no food for the men on board.  Consequently they had to load kits, etc., and embark on empty stomachs.

Well, hungry but punctual, we embarked at 10 a.m.  It was 102 deg. in my cabin, so you can imagine what the heat and glare of 150 men in an open barge was.  Having got us into this enviable receptacle, they proceeded to think of all the delaying little trifles which might have been thought of any time that morning.  One way and another they managed to waste three-quarters of an hour before we started.  The journey took six minutes or so.  Getting alongside this ship took another half hour, the delay mainly due to Arab incompetence this time.  Then came disembarking, unloading kits and all the odd jobs of moving units—­which all had to be done in a furnace-like heat by men who had had no food for twenty hours.  To crown it all, the people on board here had assumed we should breakfast before starting and not a scrap of food was ready.  The poor men finally got some food at 2 p.m. after a twenty-two hours fast and three hours herded or working in a temperature of about 140 deg..  Nobody could complain of such an ordeal if we’d been defending Lucknow or attacking Shaiba, but to put such a strain on the men’s health—­newly arrived and with no pads or glasses or shades—­gratuitously and merely by dint of sheer hard muddling—­is infuriating to me and criminal in the authorities—­a series of scatter-brained nincompoops about fit to look after a cocker-spaniel between them.

Considering what they went through, I think our draft came off lightly with three cases of heat-stroke.  Luckily the object lesson in the train and my sermons thereon have borne fruit, and the men acted promptly and sensibly as soon as the patients got bad.  Two began to feel ill on the barge and the third became delirious quite suddenly a few minutes after we got on board here.  When I arrived on the scene they had already got him stripped and soused, though in the stuffy ’tween decks.  I got him up on deck (it was stuffy enough there) and we got ice, and thanks to their promptness, he was only violent for about a quarter of an hour and by the time my kit was reachable and I could get my thermometer, an hour or so later, he was normal.  There was no M.O. on board, except a grotesque fat old Turk physician to the Turkish prisoners, whose diagnosis was in Arabic and whose sole idea of treatment was to continue feeling the patient’s pulse (which he did by holding his left foot) till we made him stop.

The other two were gradual cases and being watered and iced in time never became delirious; so we may get off without any permanent casualties; but they have taken a most useful corporal and one private to hospital, which almost certainly means leaving them behind on Sunday.