There were but a sprinkling of them in Flanders, a few Sappers and Miners and two companies of the 107th Pioneers. It was left to Force "D" to discover that the Mahratta has as big a heart for his size as any sepoy in the Indian Army. To follow the exploits of the Mahratta battalions from the battle of Saihan on the 15th November, 1914, to Ctesiphon is to follow the glorious history of the 6th Division. Up to and including Ctesiphon, no Mahratta battalion was given a position to attack which it did not take, and in the retirement on Kut-el-Amarah their steadiness was well proved. It is a record which is shared with other regiments; but this chapter is concerned with the Mahratta alone. They were in nearly every fight, and for a long time they made up a fourth part of the whole force. It was the 117th who, with the Dorsets, took the wood, and cleared the Turks out of their trenches at Saihan. It was the 110th, with the Norfolks, who led the attack on Mazeera village on the 4th December, clearing the left bank of the river; and a double company of the regiment captured the north face of the Qurnah position four days afterwards. Two battalions of the Mahrattas were in the front line again at Shaiba when the Turks were routed in one of the hardest fought and most critical battles of the campaign. They were at Nasiriyeh and Amara, and they were a tower of strength in the action at Sinn which gave us Kut-el-Amarah. Here all three battalions--the 103rd, 110th, and 117th--were engaged. They went without water and fought three consecutive engagements in forty-eight hours. The 117th, with the Dorsets, and the 22nd company of Sappers and Miners, were the first troops to enter the enemy's trenches. They broke through the wire and rushed the big redoubt, led by a subadar-major when all their British officers had fallen. At Ctesiphon again they covered themselves with glory. The British regiment brigaded with them speak well of these hard-bitten men, and many a villager of Dorset, Norfolk, or Oxford will remember the Mahratta, and think of him as a person one can trust. "What was the Indian regiment on your right?" I heard a Norfolk man ask another, in discussing some obscure action on the Tigris of a year ago. "The ---- Mahrattas." The Bungay man nodded. "Ah, they wouldn't leave you up a tree." "Not likely." And being familiar with the speech of Norfolk men, who are sparing of tribute, or admiration, or surprise, I knew that the "Mahratta" had received a better "chit" than even the Sapper had given him. It was in the trenches, and I had been getting the Norfolks to tell me about the thrust up the river in the winter of 1914.