As a matter of fact, the capture of Amara was, in its way, a startling and most dramatic affair, and proved, if proof were necessary, that the nerves of the Turks had been considerably shaken. For though the advance-guard of the Expeditionary Force advancing towards Amara was of but slender proportions, it met detachments of Turkish troops coming towards it, troops anxious to surrender, so that the town of Amara was seized without so much as a shot being fired, and was promptly occupied by the British. But the task of the Expeditionary Force to Mesopotamia was not yet completed, not by a great deal, for now there came news of that channel, the Kut-el-Hai, leading from Kut-el-Amara to Nasiriyeh, and it became necessary to seize both points before our troops could have any security. Preparations were therefore made to attack both places, and, to the delight of Geoff and Philip, they were both detailed to accompany an expedition, designed to strike at Nasiriyeh, through those marshes which they had already penetrated. Meanwhile, to bring our tale up to date, one needs to mention that, as the months had gone by, as that trench line had been dug firmly across Belgium and France, and had held up the advance of the Germans on Calais and Paris, the Russian line too had checked the enemy, had advanced across Poland and into Galicia, and was within an ace of invading Austria-Hungary. In the Caucasus, a Turkish army corps had been severely dealt with by the Tsar's forces called to that inhospitable region; while an ambitious if reckless attempt on the Suez Canal, on the part of Turkey, had met with dismal failure. The taking of Amara, in fact, coincides with the period when Britain had recovered from the first shock of this sudden and unexpected conflict, when she was training those hundreds of thousands of volunteers who had answered the call of their country, and when, while fighting beside the French in France, she still had troops sufficient to attack the enemy elsewhere. Even as those gallant Indian and British troops with the Mesopotamia Force charged down upon the trenches at Shaiba, other British troops--men from England, from Australia, and New Zealand--were gathering in the neighbourhood of Egypt. Indeed, within a few days there occurred a landing on the Peninsula of Gallipoli, a most desperate and gallant undertaking, which launched Great Britain and France into a conflict the difficulty of which was stupendous, and the result of which cannot be said to have been altogether a failure, though it failed to gain for us the capture of those forts which line the approach to Constantinople. A conflict, in fact, abortive, as it proved, yet one which struck the Turks an exceedingly heavy blow, and set up a record of bravery and determination on the part of British and French which will never be exceeded. Was there ever such an expedition as that which set out for Nasiriyeh?