Following the East India Company’s lead, the Government of India had long continued to weave into closer mesh the fabric of British influence which covered the land-locked Persian Gulf. In Nejd, Koweit and Mohammerah, in the maintenance for more than a century of an Agent at Bagdad, there lay the seeds of a British Arabian enterprise comparable to the great enterprise of British India. The Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907 ensued and in 1914 the Government of India diverted a brigade of Indian Expeditionary Force “A” for Egypt and France, to the Persian Gulf where it lay off Bahrein Island to make a lightning stroke against Basra, the key to Bagdad. As soon as war was declared, it was heavily reinforced and, having been designated Indian Expeditionary Force “D,” it moved at once on Basra which it occupied in three weeks. Its Political Officer urged an immediate advance on Bagdad, but the Government of India was already groaning under the pressure from London. “D” Force succeeded, however, in advancing slowly north against a stiffening Turco-German opposition until it reached Kut-el-Amara. At this stage, the tired Government of India suddenly woke up and ordered a bold dash to Bagdad. This turn of events changed the whole basis of “D” Force’s operations from the defensive to the offensive, a change for which the Force as then constituted was quite inadequate. The result was that the Turco-German command was able at Ctesiphon to throw General Townshend back to Kut-el-Amara where he was surrounded and held out for five months while the Government of India launched successive failures to relieve him. Kut-el-Amara was finally starved into surrender, General Townshend was removed to Constantinople as a prisoner of war, and the Government of India was forthwith relieved of its command. Indian Expeditionary Force “D” now became the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force under War Office command, although the Government of India retained its political command in Sir Percy Cox. It was not until the end of 1916 that the War Office was ready to begin operations for the recapture of Kut-el-Amara, and by the end of February, 1917, the enemy was in full retreat. On the heels of his rout, Bagdad was occupied on March 11 and, although the Turco-German command made repeated attempts to recapture the city, its British defense held and Germany’s Berlin-to-Bagdad scheme was left in the air. The Russian Armies by this time had not only advanced deeply into the eastern provinces but had occupied their zone in northern Persia in sufficient force to link with the British in Mesopotamia. A very few of them had even been permitted to travel to Basra and below it to gaze upon the blue and British waters of the Persian Gulf. But on March 12, 1917, the Czar abdicated. On May 16, Kerensky’s Republican Cabinet was set up at Petrograd, and the British Foreign Office entered at once into cordial relations with it.