THE ARCH OF CTESIPHON.
THE REGIMENT PASSING THE ARCH OF CTESIPHON EN ROUTE FOR BAGHDAD, MARCH 1917.
| WOMEN DRAWING WATER FROM THE RIVER. | "GUFAS'" OR CIRCULAR BOATS AT BAGHDAD. | THE ENTRANCE TO THE MOSQUE KADHIMAIN. |
Besides the Median Wall, there remain two outward and visible signs of the older civilisation that flourished in happier times. There are, at frequent intervals, low flat mounds composed of old sunbaked bricks the sites of ancient cities; so numerous are these that they seem to justify the Chaldean proverb, boasting of the prosperity of the people, that a cock may spring from house to house without lighting on the ground from Babylon to the sea. The other are the walls of the canals that served to irrigate the country between the two rivers. These canals have for centuries past been dry and useless, but their walls, twenty or thirty feet high, and many miles in length, remain as the most conspicuous monument of the fallen greatness of Mesopotamia. That they will again be put to their original purpose was the confident assertion of Sir William Willcocks, and with Turkish misrule finally banished from the land, a few years may see these canals again filled with water, bringing wealth and plenty to a happier generation. But to-day they seem to have but the one use of acting as tactical features on the battlefield, as was indeed the case in this fight near Istabulat.
For some days before the 31st April, the British had been collecting behind the Median Wall, facing the Turkish position which lay some three miles to the north of the Wall, and some twelve miles south of Samarrah.
A very well selected position it proved, and a very difficult one to attack. The Turkish left rested securely on a re-entrant bend of the Tigris. Thence the line ran east and west across the Dujail River, and continued for a mile along a dry canal, until it met the railway a little to the north of Istabulat station. Both the Railway and the Dujail run roughly north-west to south-east, but the Tigris towards Samarrah bends due west. Consequently the Turks by refusing their right were able to rest that flank on the ruins of the ancient city of Istabulat. These ruins consisted of some low mounds and the high walls of an old canal that had run from the Tigris across the present line of the Railway four miles to the north of the station. The whole country was absolutely flat and bare, except for the broken and uneven walls of the Dujail River and Istabulat Canal.
The so-called Dujail River is a canal that takes off from the right bank of the Tigris some four miles north of the Median Wall. It has been dug and re-dug, till it now flows below the level of the surrounding country, but its walls are fully twenty feet high, and so form the one dominant tactical feature of the level Tigris plain in this district. A couple of miles south of Istabulat station, the Dujail cuts through the Median Wall about a mile to the east of the Railway, which runs from Baghdad through the Median Wall, past Istabulat, and so on to Samarrah.