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Updated: June 28, 2025
I learned years later that this was definitely not recommended healthwise but that's what we did many times and we survived. The train stopped at various towns and villages on the way, As Samawa, Ad Diwaniyah, Baghdad, Samarra and lastly outside Mosul. At no stop did we venture far from the train we were guarding.
The Arabs call it the Sawâd or Black Land, and it is a striking change from the bare ledges of Arabia and Iran which enclose its flanks, and from the Northern steppe-land which it suddenly replaces at Samarra, if you are descending the Tigris, and on the Euphrates at Hit. The steppe cannot compare with the Sawâd in fertility, but the Sawâd does not so readily yield up its wealth.
The escape would leave the Tigris to the S. of Sâmarra, the proposed Beled Barrage being built below it and up-stream of "Nimrod's Dam". The Tharthâr escape would drain into the Euphrates, and the latter's Habbânîyah escape would receive any surplus water from the Tigris, a second barrage being thrown across the Euphrates up-stream of Fallûjah, where there is an outcrop of limestone near the head of the Sakhlawîyah Canal.
After we had been occupying the town for a few days, orders came through to prepare to fall back on Samarra. The line of communication was so long that it was impossible to maintain us, except at too great a cost to the transportation facilities possessed by the Expeditionary Forces.
A small caravan is here seen approaching the city at sunset before the gates are shut. Samarra was only founded in A. D. 834, by the Khalif el-Motasim, the son of Harûn er-Rashîd, but customs in the East do not change, and the photograph may be used to illustrate the approach of an early Babylonian caravan to a walled city of the period.
When I was at Samarra an amusing incident took place in connection with a number of officers' wives who were captured at Ramadie. The army commander didn't wish to ship them off to India and Burma with their husbands, so he sent them up to Samarra with instructions that they be returned across the lines to the Turks.
The army commander put all divorce cases into the hands of an officer whose civil occupation had been the law, and who arranged them without the necessity of granting home leave. A week after our return to Samarra a rumor started that General Maude was down with cholera. For some time past there had been sporadic cases, though not enough to be counted an epidemic.
The country around Samarra is not unlike in character the southern part of Arizona and northern Sonora. There are the same barren hills and the same glaring heat. The soil is not sand, but a fine dust which permeates everything, even the steel uniform-cases which I had always regarded as proof against all conditions.
Close by Samarra stands a strange corkscrew tower, known by the natives as the Malwiyah. It is about a hundred and sixty feet high, built of brick, with a path of varying width winding up around the outside. No one knew its purpose, and estimates of its antiquity varied by several thousand years.
We had a pleasant camp on the bluffs below Tekrit high-enough above the plain to be free of the ordinary dust-storms, and the prospect of returning to Samarra was scarcely more pleasant to us than to the men. Five days after we had taken the town, we turned our backs on it and marched slowly back to rail-head. We returned to find Samarra buried in dust and more desolate than ever.
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