Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 313
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[Page 313]
154
Joseph sadly, " that was the second-in-command of the theives".
The hospital buildings at Hamadan were finished enough for occupation in November, and a big Royal Army Medical Corps unit, without its nurses, moved into occupation. Some of the medical officers were qualified in, and equipped for, dentistry, so I was able to obtain some much needed dental attention. The hospital was no sooner occupied than very heavy snow-storms occurred, and the drifts in many places were four or five feet deep.
Most of the officers and N.C.Os of the original Dunsterforce, including nearly all the Australians, had now gone back to Baghdad, and on down to Basra to be shipped home as soon as possible and demobilised, which made me feel rather lonely and a bit homesick. I had my Christmas dinner in the officers' mess at the hospital; a very hilarious and convivial gathering. The Commanding Officer, Lt-Colonel Parry, was wheeled into the dinner in an old wheelbarrow that a few merry officers found in the snow.
Late in January the Commander Royal Engineers, Lt-Col Young, agreed to release me, and I proceeded down the main [road] to Kermanshah, and on to Baghdad, with an English Major who had the use of three vanettes: he rode in one, I in another and we piled our considerable baggage into the third vehicle. My impedimenta included a pair of lovely Kashan sleeping carpets I had bought after I had been searching around for six months. Good carpets made with natural dyes were hard to come by: they were painstakingly hand made in the homes over a period of two or three years: there were none for sale in the bazaars except a few course woven ones coloured with analine dyes.
A lot of the new road construction was still unfinished, and this and the thick blanket of slushy snow made heavy going for our overloaded Fords, which kept boiling their radiators dry. The drivers were Burmese, and in the absence of water, two of them kept putting handfuls of snow into their radiators during our frequent halts, but the driver of the baggage vanette in rear was either too stupid or too lazy to do this, and as we crawled