are, at
frequent intervals, low flat mounds composed of old sunbaked bricks
the sites of ancient cities; so numerous are these that they seem to
justify the Chaldean proverb, boasting of the prosperity of the
people, that a cock may spring from house to house without lighting on
the ground from Babylon to the sea. The other are the walls of the
canals that served to irrigate the country between the two rivers.
These canals have for centuries past been dry and useless, but their
walls, twenty or thirty feet high, and many miles in length, remain as
the most conspicuous monument of the fallen greatness of Mesopotamia.
That they will again be put to their original purpose was the
confident assertion of Sir William Willcocks, and with Turkish misrule
finally banished from the land, a few years may see these canals again
filled with water, bringing wealth and plenty to a happier generation.
But to-day they seem to have but the one use of acting as tactical
features on the battlefield, as was indeed the case in this fight near
Istabulat.

For some days before the 31st April, the British had been collecting
behind the Median Wall, facing the Turkish position which lay some
three miles to the north of the Wall, and some twelve miles south of
Samarrah.

A very well selected position it proved, and a very difficult one to
attack. The Turkish left rested securely on a re-entrant bend of the
Tigris. Thence the line ran east and west across the Dujail River, and
continued for a mile along a dry canal, until it met the railway a
little to the north of Istabulat station. Both the Railway and the
Dujail run roughly north-west to south-east, but the Tigris towards
Samarrah bends due west. Consequently the Turks by refusing their
right were able to rest that flank on the ruins of the ancient city of
Istabulat. These ruins consisted of some low mounds and the high walls
of an old canal that had run from the Tigris across the present line
of the Railway four miles to the north of the station. The whole
country was absolutely flat and bare, except for the broken and uneven
walls of the Dujail River and Istabulat Canal.

The so-called Dujail River is a canal that takes off from the right
bank of the Tigris some four miles north of the Median Wall. It has
been dug and re-dug, till it now flows below the level of the
surrounding country, but its walls are fully twenty feet high, and so
form the one dominant tactical feature of the level T