A YEAR’S CAMPAIGN

After a long year of anxiety and ill success the little town of Kut-elAmara once more flies the Union Jack over what remains of the public buildings in the battered square. Only by a grim touch of fate tempered by geography, could an insignificant point like Kutel-Amara ever have become the battleground of a year’s hostilities in this great war. Yet it is certain that among the many Kuts of Irak and the neighbourhood this poor little collection of hovels – fronted by decent two-storeyed houses along the Tigris and around the town square, and graced here and there by the tottering minaret of a mosque – will acquire the proud distinction of being “Kut ” par excellence. And its new dignity will have been due solely to an accident of geology. The reason is clear enough. Between Basra and Ctesiphon – which is within an afternoon’s excursion from Baghdad – there is but one point along the Tigris where the river bank rises twenty-five feet above normal high water, and that is at Kut. At Kut alone along the twisting and doubling banks of the Tigris is there a certain stability and protection from the floods which cut off all other, bridge or ferry-heads along the ancient river from use or habitation when the Armenian snows come down. Therefore, when – in November, 1915 – the battle of Ctesiphon proved but a barren victory, there was no half-way house. Short of Kut there was no halting-place for Townshend, and he made no stay between Nov. 24 and Dec. 3, when he re-entered the little town in which he was doomed to remain fighting till the bitter end, almost in sight of the waves of relief that broke themselves upon the German fortifications of Sanna-i-Yat and Es-Sinn. The approach to Kut from the south naturally lends itself to defence. The marshes from each side creep inwards towards the river from east and west, and the actual line of defence is shortened just as it is shortened in Belgium by the flooding south of Dixmude. There is no fear of a turning movement.