The Secrets of a Kuttite: An Authentic Story of Kut, Adventures in Captivity and Stamboul IntrigueMousley, Edward O. (Edward Opotiki)
History
The Secrets of a Kuttite: An Authentic Story of Kut, Adventures in Captivity and Stamboul Intrigue
Mousley, Edward O. (Edward Opotiki)
Al Kut (Iraq) -- History -- Siege, 1915-1916; World War, 1914-1918 -- Prisoners and prisons, Turkish
We get news of the place by the drafts that now and then
reinforce the post on relief. The story goes that the other
day a party of Turks peered over their trenches and cried
aloud to our Mussulman soldiers not to fight against their
brother followers of Mahomet, but to go over to them who
had plenty of food. This sort of thing had gone on quite a
time when the officer on picket duty got about a dozen sepoys
to fire a volley at the Turks just by way of exchanging compliments.
The Turks replied, and general fire ensued. That
highly intuitional body over here, Headquarters, believing that
Woolpress was being attacked by all the spare Turks in the
Ottoman Empire, gave our artillery enthusiastic orders, and
Woolpress began to think they took some part in the siege
after all, in fact that they belonged to us. And although it
was a storm in a teapot, no doubt for those in the teapot it
was highly interesting. It is even said that senior officers
struggled out from beneath spider-webbed blankets where
they had hoped to complete their hibernation until the siege
was over, to see the reason for this turn of events. Woolpress
are a gallant little band, no doubt, and there have been times
when no insurance company on earth would have looked twice
at any one of them, although a philanthropic society might
have stretched a point for those certified able to swim; for a
red Turkish crescent ringed them in and grew ever closer to
them, and once the river took sides and offered to drown them.
But that was months ago.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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