While we were in the church, Kut fell. Some of us could hardly believe it at first, especially those who had belonged to the 6th Division. It seemed too bad to be true. After what we had heard from those few who had already made the march from Mesopotamia to railhead, it was plain that the march of thousands of exhausted men along those desert ways would be a very terrible tragedy. But how terrible it was going to be I don’t think even the men who had made it quite realized. The story of that march from Kut is not for me to write. But the impression that the arrival of the survivors made upon us earlier prisoners will be told in its time.
It was a long while yet before they reached us.
To me personally there came a great piece of news while we were in the church, for a letter dated a couple of months back told me that I was the father of a daughter. The telegram dispatched upon the same day reached me just three weeks after the letter. At that time I was singular in having so close a relation as yet unknown, but before the end came, as new prisoners dropped in, there were quite a band of us gaolbird fathers.
Beside the flagged path there were two Armenian tombs of some pretension, built of marble and carved with the usual imaginary fauna of heaven, all heads and wings. Further East, by the way, these things are flora, and grow on trees. They were crude affairs, of no interest except to their owners, but there was a space between them, and that was of interest to me. For, when the iron door was first opened in the morning, I used to come out and hide myself there and write verses. This is so largely a personal record that I make no apology for the recurrent references to my own method of killing care. It meant very much to me, as each man’s method did to himself. In this quiet nook, before the path was thronged, I wrote a long description in verse of a Russian concert held in the church and of the riotous feast that followed it. Far from the riot I wrote it. But in the church itself, in the very vortex of hellish sound, I wrote a long poem on the great forests of Northern Ceylon. Far from peace, I wrote of the most peaceful place I know. And this paradox holds good, held good with me at least, all through. For in the next winter, with my feet in the Arctic and my head in the Tropics, with a freezing hand I used to write of that sunny land near the Equator. I believe it kept me warm.