Next morning our orders of the previous night were confirmed. The enemy were supposed to be holding the 'kilns' (actually these were tombs) behind Tekrit. The 28th Brigade were to go through the 8th and 19th Brigades, and drive them out. We were very doubtful of their being there. However, we went forward in the usual artillery formation. Every house in Tekrit had a white flag. This was the place where Townshend's men were spat on as they limped through it, prisoners. Nevertheless there was the same surprising display of fairly clean linen to which the villages before Baghdad had treated us eight months previously, and the Arabs were most anxious for us to realize how extremely friendly their sentiments were. We went forward, but found the Turks had gone. There were crump-holes everywhere; the amount of our shrapnel lying about, wasted, would have broken a Chancellor of the Exchequer's heart. Parts of the spaces between the Turkish successive lines were just contiguous craters. But there had been disappointingly few direct hits on trenches. The cemetery, hard by, possessed one or two craters also. The enemy had left abundant live shells, shell-cases, cartridge-cases. But there were very few dead. I saw only two; and a few places where the parapet had been pulled in for a hasty burial. The old question was raised, Did the Turk dig graves beforehand, against an action, to hide his losses? If he did, one can imagine few more effective ways of putting heart into his troops than by detailing them for such a job. I heard that the Seaforths buried sixty Turks. But their losses were certainly far less than ours. We took a hundred and fifty-seven prisoners. Corps claimed that evidence collected after the battle showed that the enemy losses for the three actions of Daur, Aujeh, Tekrit, were at least fifteen hundred. The Infantry, who had not access to Corps' means of information, assessed them much lower. Myself, I think eight hundred would be nearer the mark.