Baghdad Dec 29 Dearest Father. At last I have had letters - Mother's of Oct. 24, 30 and Nov 8 and yours of Oct 24 and 29 the latter extending to Nov 1. They were a source of great satisfaction after so long a silence. I am however deeply grieved that you should have had a night of anxiety about me. You may be quite sure that if I were seriously ill Sir P. [Percy] would telegraph to you via the India Office, so do not let any like gossip trouble you in the future. I am very glad to hear that Maurice is better and congratulate Mother on her pleasant nights with Zeppelins - they can't yet have caught her in her boudoir or the stairs or I should have heard. But you do certainly live in the war zone, which is more than we do; I think it has moved to Syria for good, which leaves us free to take on more administration in Mesop. and busy ourselves with irrigation and agriculture. I'm going down Euphrates way myself next week to learn about geography and tribes, the world having dried up a little after the rain. I seem to have spent most of my leisure moments in visiting hospitals. On Sunday I took Sir P. out riding and then to a tea party at No 31 which is in the old Turkish barracks. It was a very select tea party with the C. in C. and other generals. On Monday, to vary the programme, I took the C. in C. to see some fine carpets and went back to tea with him. It had rained in the night and the town was unspeakable. On Tuesday (Xmas Day) Sir P. and I rode out to a tea party at No 23 which was the Turkish military hospital and has a beautiful garden in the middle. I went to see Gen. Lubbock who has had enteric and is to be sent to India to recover, but incidentally we were shown all over the hospital which had been beautifully decorated by the men with palm fronds and festoons of coloured paper and paper flowers - even mistletoe, wax berries on olive branches. And next day I went to the Civil Hospital which we have repaired and reopened. It is run by Major Carey Evans, Lloyd George's son in law, and very competent he is; 4 of the nuns are the female staff, not so competent I should say, poor old things. And there I talked to all the patients, Arabs and Jews and Armenians, and my very old friend Madame Mustafa Pasha, the Kurd, who has just had an operation and was sitting up in bed coiffed in her black Kurdish headdress and most chatty over her cigarette. So I walked home through the bazaars on the opposite bank, muddy and dingy and enjoyable, because they are still like the old Baghdad and comparatively free of motors and soldiers and the Occupation. I wandered along by the river, talked to men who were caulking their coracles with pitch and to other pleasant persons and felt at home. It's seldom that a breath of the East I used to know creeps in among the files and office stools. I had Xmas presents, you must know; baskets of oranges and bunches of narcissus and violets. On Xmas day I dined with Gen. Stuart Wortley, a Ladies' Dinner, the other guests being matrons and nurses, a quite agreeable evening, but I've crept, on the whole, into a very long shell and seldom care to be picked out of it by anybody's pin. Also I've got a temporary (let's hope) anaemia of the brain which makes me work so slowly that I never get through my jobs and bring work home every night to finish after dinner. Incessant interruption at the office adds immensely to the fatigue of putting together reports or compiling information. I've no sooner got hold of the thread than it's broken by someone with a petition or a complaint or what not, and my slow mind must laboriously gather it up again. Perhaps a fortnight's absence on the Euphrates will make me a little less imbecile. There are times when I can scarcely find words to talk or write in French, much less in Arabic. And memory is a lost art. Though half witted, I'm physically well. I've liked this cold weather and not felt cold as I did last year though it's much colder here than in Basrah [Basrah, Al (Basra)]. But it's the general sense of being too much driven though not working quickly enough - because I can't - which is tiresome. I would like to take a month off, learn Arabic and see people - but the awful amount one would have to catch up at the end of it deters me. I'm almost reluctant to go away because I know what a task it will be to write the next fortnightly report when I have to look everything up instead of jotting it down as it happens. But I very much like doing the fortnightly reports, which are the record of our work here, and though I haven't leisure to do them as well as they should be done, they will still be valuable. Also there's no other person to do them at all. It's so funny the mingling of old and new - Arab shaikhs presiding over committees to receive subscriptions to the Maude Memorial Fund, wedged in between less fortunate activities, such as their knifing one another to revenge a blood feud and little things of that kind.
Did I tell you of a visit I paid to the home for Armenian girls? Over 100 of them have been collected here, from all places and of all ages. There's an American fund to provide for them. Some had lived for months with the Arabs and were tatooed like Beduin women. Some had just borne children and some were such children themselves that they could not remember whence they came. The Beduin coming down to our frontiers from the north bring hundreds of these girls with them. One woman when she first saw the Tigris burst into tears. "Ah" she cried "the mass of water here! and my sister died in the desert of thirst." And ah! the rivers of tears, the floods of human misery that these waifs represent. Some human kindness too - "the Devil Worshippers saved us" they say; "the Arabs saved us -" There has been no persecution in Arab countries by Arabs. But I couldn't feel that if I were they I should have been glad to have been saved. If the Russians retire from Van there will be another heaping up of victims. What is life worth in this age of violence?

I write every week and if you don't get letters it is not because I don't send them. Ever your very devoted daughter Gertrude

Edward Pease is at Basrah. I've heard from him. I'm so sorry Annie isn't well.