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Updated: May 19, 2025
As we left Kurna and entered the fair, broad-bosomed Shatt-el-Arab he suddenly swept his arm round the horizon. "All this show of ours out here is nothing in itself," he said. "It's a beginning of something that will materialise a hundred or two hundred or a thousand years hence. We are the great irrigating nation and that's why we're here now.
A period of quiet followed, broken only when the Turks took the offensive, which failed, in April, 1915. Late in May the British won a decisive victory over the Turkish troops at Kurna. In July, 1915, the ill-fated expedition against the enemy forces guarding Bagdad was planned.
At Kurna we entered the Garden of Eden, and one could quite appreciate the feelings of the disgusted Tommy who exclaimed: "If this is the Garden, it wouldn't take no bloody angel with a flaming sword to turn me back." The direct descendant of the Tree is pointed out; whether its properties are inherited I never heard, but certainly the native would have little to learn by eating the fruit.
During the first half of November detachments of the Indian army sailed up the Shat-el-Arab, the joint estuary of the Tigris and the Euphrates, defeated the Turks at Sahil on the 17th, occupied Basra on the 22nd, and cut off Kurna, which surrendered on 9 December.
British dominion in India and in Egypt had grown upon that principle, and it grew in much the same way in Mesopotamia. The security of our control of the Persian Gulf required, we discovered, the occupation of Basra; the defence of Basra demanded an advance to Kurna, and from Kurna we had proceeded in June to Amara.
I spent half a day on the west side of the river in what was the burial ground of ancient Thebes, where also numerous temples were erected. My first stop was before the ruins of Kurna. The Temple of Sethos I. originally had ten columns before it, but one is now out of place. The Temple Der el Bahri bore an English name, signifying "most splendid of all," and it may not have been misnamed.
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