The Leicestershires beyond Baghdad | Page 3

his force raced back to Kut. On December 7 Kut was invested by the Turks. Townshend's stand here saved the lower country to us.
Relief forces disembarked at Ali Gharbi, between Amara and Kut, and some of the bitterest fighting the world has seen began. Sheikh Saad (January 6 to 8) was a costly victory. A gleam of hope came with the Russian offensive in Northern Asia Minor. On January 13, at the Wadi, six miles beyond Sheikh Saad and less than thirty miles from Kut, the Turks held us up, but slipped away in the night.
All advancing was over flat ground devoid of even scrub-cover, through a region the most desolate in the world. Above Amara there is a place called 'Lone-Tree Village,' which has a small tree ten feet high. Except for a handful of draggled palms at Sheikh Saad, this tree is the only one till Kut is reached, on a river frontage of sixty miles.
On January 20 the British suffered a heavy repulse at Umm-el-Hanna, five miles beyond the Wadi. For nearly seven weeks our troops sat down in the swamps, and died of disease. The rains were abnormal.
On March 8 a long flank march up the right bank of the Tigris took the enemy by surprise, and reached Dujaileh, less than ten miles from Kut. Time was wasted in an orthodox but unnecessary bombardment. The Turks swarmed back into the redoubt, and we were bloodily thrust back, and returned to our lines before Hanna, with heavy losses in men and transport. After that very few cherished any hope of saving Kut.
April was a month of terrible fighting, frontal attacks on a very brave and exultant enemy. The 13th Division, from Gallipoli, took the Hanna trenches, which were practically deserted, on April 5. The day went well for us. In the afternoon Abu Roman lines on the right bank, and in the evening those of Felahiyeh on the left bank, were carried by storm. But next day the first of the five battles of Sannaiyat was fought. We were repulsed.
The Turk's procedure was easy. He shot us down as we advanced over flat country. We dug ourselves in four hundred yards away (say). Then we sapped up to within storming distance, and attacked again, to find that the lines were thinly held, with a machine-gun or two, but that another position awaited us beyond, at the end of a long level sweep of desert.
On April 9 came the second battle of Sannaiyat. The time has not come to speak frankly of this day; but our men lay in heaps. So from the 16th to the 18th we tried frontal attacks on the other bank, the right again. This was the battle of Beit Aiessa. We did so well that the enemy had to counter-attack, which he did in the most determined manner, forcing us back. It cost him at least three thousand dead; but by this day's work he made sure of Kut and its garrison. Our one hope now was in the Russians. But their offensive halted; and we fought, on the 22nd, the third of the Sannaiyat battles. On the 29th, after a siege of one hundred and forty-three days, Kut surrendered, and with it the biggest British force ever taken by any enemy.
A summer inexpressibly harassing and depressed followed; but towards the end of 1916 affairs were reorganized, and at last a general was found. On the night of December 13 we crossed the Shat-el-Hai, and Maude's attack on Kut began. Ten weeks of fighting, very little interrupted by the weather, followed. It was stern work, hand-to-hand and trench-to-trench, as in France. By the end of the third week in February Kut was doomed. The Turk had made the mistake of leaving small, unsupported groups of men in angles and corners of the Tigris. Maude destroyed these, and between the 22nd and the 25th launched his final attacks simultaneously on both banks. A badly managed attack on Sannaiyat had failed on the 17th; but now, on the 22nd, the lines were stormed. Fighting continued here, and the river was crossed and bridged behind the Turks, above Kut, at Shumran. The Sannaiyat garrison fled precipitately, and the 7th Indian Division occupied successively the Nakhailat and Suwada lines with no opposition worth mentioning. Kut fell automatically, the monitors steaming in and taking possession. The infantry had no time to bother about it. Kut had become a symbol only.
So the infantry swung by Kut and on to Baghdad. The cavalry and gunboats hunted the enemy northward, till he made a stand on the Diyaleh, a large stream entering the Tigris a few miles below Baghdad. Very heavy fighting and losses had come to the 13th Division, and the 7th Division would be the first to acknowledge that