I've been out all day, usually riding the whole morning and motoring somewhere in the afternoon - if you can call it somewhere when it's just desert with the scoring of old canals and mounds of dead villages far out in what is now uninhabited wilderness. The river has risen 3 feet. I fear there has been nothing. We are dealing out seed corn, pledged against next harvest, which Heaven send may be good or we shall have famine. We are feeding the people here as at Baghdad, making them pay where they can and giving doles where they can't pay, but they complain a good deal at getting nothing but rice, the truth being that wheat and barley are not to be had.
Meat is fairly plentiful.
It's a terrific problem everywhere, the war shortage. We gather it's worse with the Turks and the tribes are all coming down to us in consequence. It doesn't make things easier for us through gratifying in other respects. All the cultivators are set to work, but the real nomads don't do a hand's turn and we can get nothing from them but camel transport. Already, after the rain, the grass has begun to grow in the inner desert.