One young officer of the Regiment, 2nd Lieutenant Payne, speaks as if the work had been hard, and not free from fighting, even after Lajj. He had passed some years in Canada, and had perhaps learnt there to be more outspoken than the very reserved British officer generally is. “Since that date” (3rd March), he writes on the 13th, “we have been fighting day and night without any rest or sleep, till men and horses dropped with exhaustion, and had Baghdad not fallen the day before yesterday there would have been few of the Thirteenth left to tell the tale.” His letter goes on to describe various incidents of the past week. The following are extracts:-- “Next morning, 4 A.M.,[48] the Division had to move on, and our squadron was left as escort to the transport, which didn’t leave till the afternoon, so we took our men back to the awful battlefield to see if we could pick up any men alive, and to bury the dead. We buried sixteen men and three officers in the same grave, but got nothing in personal effects, as they had been stripped, some of them naked. All the time we were working we had to keep a Hotchkiss gun going to keep off the Arabs, who were coming in fast to pick up loot, of which there was tons in the way of arms and saddlery.[49]... “That same night we passed through another strong point at Ctesiphon that they had not stopped to defend, and in the moonlight I rode over to see the great arch of Ctesiphon that is supposed to have been built in the time of Nebuchadnezzar or one of those birds. It has a great façade of about 200 feet high that opens into a courtyard, and alongside is this wonderful arched roof that looks as though it had been a banqueting-hall.” The writer is a little out in his dates, but the majority of his countrymen knew not much more about the matter than he did. “The enemy had gone back to their last and strongest position above Diala, where there is a fork in the river. We weren’t successful in smashing that place, so our Division and half the Infantry crossed the river with the intention of striking the railway north of the city, and we were out three days and nights without any rest, trying to force a way round, and the farther we went the farther we had to come for water, as it was death for men and horses to be cut off from the river. In forcing our way down to water on the morning of the 12th[50] we lost an officer and man, being sniped from the other side of the river. We were all done up, no sleep, little food, and the horses dropping under us after three weeks’ fierce fighting, and slowly making our way to carry on the attack on the flank of the Infantry, which always necessitated the enemy widening his front and weakening his strength, when news came that the Black Watch entered Baghdad at 5.30 A.M.