TRANSFORMED MESOPOTAMIA.

Ohinemuri Gazette, Volume XXIX, Issue 3942, 10 July 1918, Page 1

TRANSFORMED MESOPOTAMIA.

THE BUSINESS OF WAR,

I According to Eleanor Franklin Egan, writing in the "Saturday Evening Post," the business of war has been very efficiently organised.. She ' says :— I "On the way up the River Tigris, I went ashore at one point after-an-other, following the course of the long-drawn out struggle for Kut, and of subsequent operations which culminated in the capture of Bagdad. , "The lines of communication from I the base at Basra to the furthest out- ' post on the wide circle of defence round Bagdad are now so thoroughly ( organised that it is difficult to visual- ] ise conditions as they once were, but ! one has a record of the facts —unbej lievable as they are. To-day there are I more than sixteen hundred boats — I paddle-wheelers^ stern-wheelers, barg- ! es, tugs, hospital ships, launches, and j steam craft of every description —ply- , ing in an almost unbroken line up and down the river Tigris, but, when the first advance was made there were less than a dozen boats all told, and I none of them of the best. Moreover, the .great unruly river is now patrollI ed, its channel is buoyed and its narrows are under lock-signal control, whereas in those days it was a constantly changing puzzle to be solved with varying degrees of success and not infrequent disaster by each man at a boat wheel on each trip up and down. "Where now there are railways along the banks of both the Tigris and the Euphrates and branch lines spreading fanwise from fully tocked rear bases of supply to advanced bases at points behind the furthest battle lines, there were then no rails at all, and the armies at the front depending solely upon the iniquitously inadequate river transport, where living literally from hand to mouth.

"Now every town and military station between the gulf and Bagdad is ablaze with electric lights, where before all .was in absolute darkness; and whereas now the overland routes for troops and animals and wheeled convoys are marked, protected from floods by bunds along the river banks and broken at intervals by strongly stockaded and defended marching posts, then all was practically an unmapped straightaway into the desert and the treacherous marshes."