"(Signed) CHARLES TOWNSHEND, "Major-General, "Commanding the Garrison in Kut. "Kut-el-Amara, "10th March, 1916." * * * * * The rank and file of the garrison, from what one overhears, are all for sympathy with their G.O.C. They are quite sure that "Alphonse would have got through" and have altered the name of the relieving general to Faylmer. Why wasn't the action delayed until the new division could have taken part? As a matter of fact, one should suspend judgment until all the facts are in, and in the last analysis the blame must rest on Governments rather than on generals. When first besieged we expected to be relieved within a month, and so far as the Government knew we could hold out for about two months. Fortunately we secured various supplies of corn from Woolpress, and from dismantled engines we erected milling facilities which enabled us to turn corn and barley into bread. But reinforcements have been sent into the country at a slow trickle and the enemy has found no difficulty at all in out-reinforcing us. When one considers the state of Turkey this is most incredible. One would think that the lesson of Ctesiphon was sufficient to chasten the authorities out of the belief that the Mesopotamian campaign could be dallied with. By sheer brilliancy of arms a whole country had been conquered by a single unsupported division. This achievement was not enough, however, and the cheap methods in vogue further required this one division to risk the whole fruits of a campaign in a single doubtful throw, and this against the advice of its generals. Through the same cheap methods of having insufficient forces to follow up a brilliant victory, our army was badly let down and several thousand lives flung away. Then only the same brilliant generalship of General Townshend disengaged the division from a force several times its size, and completed a masterly retirement for ninety miles, with the whole Turkish forces on top of it. Extraordinary success of the rearguard action at Um-al-Tabul enabled the division to reach Kut, where it is intended to hold up the Turkish advance and keep back the enemy tide from reswamping Mesopotamia. The post was surrounded and bombarded at once, but the public evidently does not know this owing to very necessary censorship. The garrison, then, can hold out for a certain time. It can forestall disaster for that time only.