memoir

Guests of the Unspeakable. The Odyssey of an Australian Airman -

T W White, 1928

Named on the page for Battle of Ctesiphon (1915).

machine-read Machine-read (OCR) from a scanned book at the Internet Archive: expect misread words and names. The scan itself is at the library.

draft Matched to the battle automatically; not yet reviewed.

Passages that name the battle; the whole book is at Internet Archive.

22–25 November 1915

Battle of Ctesiphon (1915)

PACING PAGE
Ruins of the Palace of Chosroes at Ctesiphon .

OF BATTLE AND MURDER
The Roman Emperor Julian, when invading Mesopotamia in the fourth century a.D., marched his army to a rendezvous midway between the two rivers, so that the Persian Commander might be uncertain as to which river would form the ultimate line of advance. Similarly, Sir John Nixon, the Army Com- mander in Mesopotamia in 1915, based his army at Basra; and by alternate thrusts against enemy positions, after concen- trating first on one river and then on the other, this little force of about twenty thousand souls, under the able tactical leader- ship of Major-General Sir Charles Townshend and Major- General Gorringe, fought its way, gaining surprising victories under extraordinary difficulties, for nearly three hundred miles inland, to within sight of Baghdad. That it should then be constrained by losses sustained in the sanguinary encounter at Ctesiphon, to retire to the strategic position of Kut-el-Amarah, where, with a few reinforcements the Sixth Division was

NEAR ANCIENT NINEVAH 85
From the new arrivals we first heard details of the battle of Ctesiphon and the retirement of the British towards Kut. Ctesiphon was the first check received by the Sixth Division in an unbroken series of victories. Four days of desperate fighting resulted in the main defences before Baghdad being wrested from the Turk, but with 4267 casualties out of a total of 11,000. Withdrawal and a retreat before superior numbers to the strategic position of Kut-el-Amarah, was the only alternative.

NEAR ANCIENT NINEVAH 85
The failure of the British attack upon Baghdad, and the historic and remarkable battle of Ctesiphon, whether it be regarded as a victory or as a defeat, will always redound to the credit of the troops engaged. But for the timely arrival of a Turkish Division from the Russian front on the first day of the battle the British victory would have been complete.

Public domain. Text from Internet Archive.