day. Many were bowled over by the heat before they had gone two miles.

Most of the native camel transport, carrying water, ammunition and supplies,—and yet unescorted and not even attended by a responsible officer—sauntered off into the desert and vanished from the ken of that ill-fated column.

Meanwhile the advanced guard of 250 men (mostly Indians) and two 10-pounder mountain-guns pushed on with all speed to Lahej, which was being attacked by several thousand Turks and Turco-Arabs with 15-pounder field batteries and machine-guns. They found the palace and part of the town on fire when they arrived, and fought the Turks hand-to-hand in the streets. They held on all through that sweltering night, and only retired when dawn showed them the hopeless nature of their task and the fact that they were being outflanked. They fell back on the main body, which had stuck halfway at a wayside well (Bir Nasir) marked so obviously by ruins that even Aden guides could not miss it. Shortage of water was the natural result of sitting over a well that does not even supply a settlement, but merely the ordinary needs of wayfarers.

This well is marked on the Aden protectorate survey map (which is procurable by the general public) as Bir Muhammad, its full name being Bir Muhammad Nasir. There are five wells supplying settlements within half an hour's walk of it on either side of the track, but when we remember that the column's field-guns got no further owing to heavy sand, and that the aforesaid track is frequently traversed by ordinary tikkagharries, we realise the local knowledge available.

The column straggled back to the frontier town of Sheikh Othman, which they prepared to defend, but Simla, by this time thoroughly alarmed, ordered them back for the defence of Aden, and they returned without definite achievement other than the accidental shooting of the Lahej sultan. This was hardly the fault of the heroic little band which reached Lahej; that ill-starred potentate was escaping with his mounted retinue before dawn and cantered on top of an Indian outpost without the formality of answering their challenge. He was brought away in a motor-car and died at Aden a few days later—another victim to this deplorable blunder. Any intelligent and timely grasp of the enemy's strength and intention would have given the poor man ample time to pack his inlaid hookahs, Persian carpets, and other palace treasures and withdraw in safety to Aden while our troops made good the Sheikh Othman line along the British frontier. I am presuming that Aden was too much taken by surprise to have met the Turks in a position of her own choosing while they were still entangled in hilly country where levies of the right sort could have harried them to some purpose, backed by disciplined, unspent troops and adequate guns. What I wish to impress is that the Intelligence Department at Aden must have been abominably served and organised, for I decline to believe that any G.O.C. would have attempted such an enterprise with such a force and at such a time had he any information as to the real nature of his task. As it was, the British town of Sheikh Othman, within easy sight of Aden across the harbour, was held by the Turks until a reinforcing column came down from the Canal and drove them out of it, while the protectorate has been overrun by the Turks and the Turco-Arabs until long after the armistice, and the state of British prestige there can be imagined.

Official attempts to gloze over the incident would have been amusing if they were not pathetic. Needless to say they did not deceive Moslems in Egypt or the rest of Arabia.

Here is the most accurate account they gave the public: