DUST, HEAT AND FLIES

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXVII, Issue 17283, 26 September 1916, Page 4

DUST, HEAT AND FLIES

THE ..PLAQUES' OF MESOPOTAMIA

Mrs J. O. Phillips, of Gloucester Street, Linwood, has received from her eon, who is on active service in Mesopotamia, the following clipping from tho "Basra Times," which ho states affords a true idea of conditions in that part of the world :

At the end of February someone was saying that for six weeks at any ratebetween the mud aud tho heat.—in the clear air, cloudless days and fresh nights, we wore better off than our companions in Franco. He was of " tho French school." An old campaigner in the country, ono of " tho Mcsopotamian school" rebuked his bptimism. "Touch wood," ho said, "to-night I saw a fly."

There is no respite or truce in the plagues of Mesopotamia and tho only normal thing in tho country on which, one can count is that the plague-cycle is unbroken and continuous, that tho. plagues overlap. Tho plagues of May aro dust, heat and flios; and the greatest of these is flies. The flies tho tents, dugouts and trenches, unites seen, are unbelievable. To describe them is to hazard onols reputation for truth. You cannot eat without swallowing flies. You wave your spoon, of porridge in tho air to shake thorn off, you put your biscuit. and bully-beef in your pocket, and snr•reptitiously convey thorn in closed list to your mouth —but you swallow flies all tho same. They settle in clouds on everything. As I write, T cannot see tho end of my pen. I overtook a squadron of cavalry tho other day, and in that stato of semi-coma in which the heat wraps one, I thought they were wearing chain-armour. I had walked my horse beside them some minutes before T discovered that what looked like mail was the steely-bluo metallic mesh of flies. At tho beginning of tho fly season, I saw a distant squadron of horso waving their handkerchiefs rhythmically in the air, as if. they were cheering. . A hardly credible demonstration on tho part of tho undemonstrative trooper; and I* took it for a trick of the mirage until T discovered that they vrcre waving off flies. Tho Mosopotamian variety is indistinguishable from tho English house-fly, except that many of them, one in twenty perhaps, can hito or sting. These apparently _are not a different species;—only moro impregnated with vice 1 . At night, tho flies disappear and the mosquitoes aiid sand-flies relievo them, completing tho vicious circle. Mosquities arc local. In many places you •may be spared them altogether, but there 'aro districts where they aro employed by tho gods which plague us as the chief scourge. In one camp I struck a species which could bite through cord ridijig breeches. The habitat of this mosquito was in a cam]) between the " Twin Pimples " and "The Boil.."

I There is something almost BunyanI esque in the nomenclature we.have to I use in Mesopotamia. The "Pimples" and " Boils, and worse, on the map may be chargeable to your surveyors; but much of it wo have fallen into quite inadvertently. Nothing could be move appropriate, for instance, than that our army should be called "Force D"; or that so much of its energies should have been directed against a position called "Sinn." Sand-flies are another and more insidious plague. A net with a mesh fine enough to exclude them is suffocating, and they keep one awake at night with a hose of thin acid playing on , one's face. J Iu tho first week of May the old ' campaigner consoled us w'ith the remark that the flies would soon be dead. "Tho heat kills them," ho explained, " frizzles them up like wool in a flame." This by way of consolation when it, was 105 degrees in the shade, recalled the story of that fabulous stream which, as the nigger explained, was free of alligators, the alligators being "too plenty afraid of sharks." Still, we looked .forward to the heat which would kill the flios. "You'll see they will,when it gets really hot," the old campaigner said, smiling unsympathetieally at our air of relief. "What do you call really hot?" I asked.

"Oh, about 112 degrees! In one's tent, of course, it soes up to anything. The flies won't bother'you then." I thbught of the week in tho Punjab, which is the climacteric in the hot weather, when the mosquitoes die, the crows gape' and the brain-fever bird ceases to sing. But in India, heat is tempered bv houses Ono is armed against it externally with punkahs and cold baths, thick walls and roof, and doors and windows that shut it out, and internally by.ico and cool drinks. Spreading trees' aro planted by the roadside; but in Mesopotamia, where we are fighting, there, is no shade—not so much as a single scraggy date palm. • Naturally, one's thoughts go back to Fiance—to Sunday lunches at Bethune, fruit and flowers and coffee and rolls, or the. patisserie of Madrrne Celeste, and the white cloth spread under the linden trees.. The smell of those lindens'.was sweet. A year or moro in this country with'no leave, or billets, or change to look forward to, makes a long lap in one's sendee. No doubt, the taste of civilisation will bo the sweeter for it.

Tho morning's work done, you lie in your tent with the flap open and the side-flies lifted up and gasp through the long day waiting for the sun to 20 down. Your only apparel is a sola topee or a wet towel round your head. But you are clothed iu dust and'sweat. The thermometer raits up to l!3odeg in the tent, where the temperature is. of course, much higher than tho Government standard reading. Outskte one seldom wears a coat. Force "D ' leads the simple life, and is brought up against elemental needs. The Mesopctamian sun corrodes all pride. It is so corrosive of vanity that tho Staff Officer will ride abroad in his shirtsleeves innocent of re'.! tabs. But one wears a sun-guard over one's helmet, and a spine-pad; for one can got sunstroke here through the small of one's back.

Tho persistent hot wine! ; '- better than comnlets stillness though it

bounces off ' the ground and buffets you, ftinging the and daist in your face. •, You cat .sand, breathe sand, lie in sand, have sand in your cars and eyes and clothes. Sand-flic's by night; flios by day, until they shrivel up; sand and .suffocation by day and night. There are other kinds of discomfort, different kinds of heat—the moist and tropical heat of the swamps of the Euphrates and the S,hatt-cI-Ava!>, the parched and desert he.it of the Tigris and tho Karun. Each variety has its attendant insects and peculiar ailments, which* often take the form of boils and eruptions. On tho Karun you may bo stricken with what is locally known as "dog-rot, 1 " the Icguc'v of some poisonous fly. The Bagdad boil and the Aleppo date are other ills of the country of which nno hears, though I have not encountered them. .They leave a permanent impression of Mesopotamia burnt into you—a cicatrice for life. I have just paid a visit to Ahwaz and the Persian oil-fields, reputed to be the hottest spot in Asia. There is a place .called Ralidar, where I spent, n night, between the Pnl-i-Khayyat and tho Imam Raza ranges. Jn a tent there last August the thermometer never fell below 120 deg. for three days and nights, and it reached a.maximum of 129 deg. At Ahwaz now our troops are nearly all under roofs, and tho miseries of last year are a memory. It was from hero that the Twelfth Brigade mndo their burning march to Amarah last June. An exploit of which little nas been heard, but one which will bo numbered with tho great classic marches of

history when tho story of the campaign is written.

Even at Basrah, where there are houses and punkahs and ico, one hears complaints of tlio climate. For it. is a moist heat, and Ahwaz is preferable, if one has a roof. No one under a roof has any right to complain; it is only in tents that tho heat is insupportable.

. Ono home journal last year spoko of "Our picnic." in Mesopotamia. The author of the phrase would have had a thin time of it if ho had been run to earth by our troops. Thanks to a saving sense of humour and his native resiliency of spirit, tho British soldier is unbowed by these climatic buffeting*. Ho "keeps his end up " through all tho plagues of Mesopotamia. . " When it's 'ot, it's— 'ot; and when it's cold it's— cold; and there's uo —• in-between.*' Tho British s-.oldier has only two adjectives. Supply the staple epithet in the first two blanks and the second and less picturesque one in the third, and you have a succinct definition of the meteorological conditions of Mesopotamia from the popular point of view. . ■