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The logic was sound enough for those who had the means to enforce it; and in spite of the torrid heat, the river route and our gun-boats enabled us to master Nasiriyeh on 25 July. Early in August began the advance up the Tigris from Amara to Kut, whither the Turks had retired. They had been well taught by their German instructors, and their position astride the river was well entrenched.
We had to fight a rear-guard action all day and marched twenty-seven miles before we halted. After lying down for two or three hours, we marched on fifteen miles more to within four miles of the Kut. Here we had to stop for a time because the infantry were too tired to move."
It seemed a tenable theory, but I could not account for all this bother on his part because James Augustus Trenholm, of the Amalgamated Press, took passage in the Kut Sang. It seemed absurd to me that Meeker or anybody else would be concerned because I was leaving Manila for Hong-Kong. It was plain enough that he, or somebody, had done their best to keep me from sailing in the Kut Sang.
The men were cheery, and a mouth-organ and a mandoline wafted us on. Something dark and indeterminate swept by on the swift current. It was said to be the body of a dead Turk, bound for the Persian Gulf, after its voyage of two hundred odd miles from Kut. We landed, uncomfortably hot. The men fell in and we prepared to march off.
When it was the Two Hundred and Sixty-first Night, She said, It hath reached me, O auspicious King, that the Caliph said to the damsel Kut al-Kulub, "I would have thee play him upon the lute an air, of fashion sweet and rare, that he may be solaced of his cark and care." So she rose and made sweet music; and the Caliph said to Ala al-Din, "What sayst thou of this damsel's voice?"
Those two battles and his heroic endurance of the long siege of Kut have given his name a permanent place in the annals of the British army. "Townshend has always attributed his success as a soldier to his constant study of the campaigns of Napoleon, a practice which he has long followed for a regular period of every day wherever he has happened to be serving.
"I must not be left and yet you must take these clothes from her!" the Gul Moti said, while they helped the old man to the ground. "Then go to her neck oh, Thou Healer-without-fear! She will not wait long she follows Nut Kut, the demon! and Gunpat Rao, who both got away with everything on!" Still hoping, the Gul Moti slipped over the edge of the big howdah and climbed toward Mitha Baba's neck.
She had a feeling of sadness and anxiety as things went against her at Mons, Ypres, Gallipoli, Kut. She was wild with joy when the war was victoriously concluded. And she was proud of herself as she thought how among the sister nations of the Empire of which she was the centre, and among the allied nations, she had played a great and noble part.
Erzerum was reckoned the strongest fortress in the Turkish Empire, but amid the distractions of the Dardanelles and Mesopotamian campaigns it had escaped proper attention from the Turks and their German experts, and the Grand Duke profited by the fact that Turkish troops, relieved from the pressure at Gallipoli, were sent to Kut and not to the Caucasus.
General Townshend was surrounded in Kut, and the morale of the Turk was excellent after the successes he had met with in Gallipoli. In the end of August, 1916, four months after the fall of Kut, General Maude took over the command of the Mesopotamian forces. On the 11th of March of the following year he occupied Baghdad, thereby re-establishing completely the British prestige in the Orient.
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