e Press, a
connected account of their campaigning since Maude's offensive began.
After various people, well qualified to do the work, had refused, it
was devolved on me, on the simple grounds that a padre, as is well
known, has only one day of work a week. The notion fell through. The
authorities declined flatly to allow any reference to units by name,
and no one took any more interest in a task so useless and soulless.
But I had collected so much information from different units that I
determined some day to try to put the story together. I have now
selected two campaigns, those for railhead and for Tekrit, and made a
straightforward narrative. From a multitude of such narratives the
historian will build up his work hereafter.

An article by General Wauchope appeared in _Blackwood's_, 'The Battle
that won Samarrah.' This article not only stressed the fact that the
Black Watch were first in Baghdad and Samarra--an accident; they were
the freshest unit on each occasion, while other units were exhausted
from fighting just finished--but dismissed the second day of 'the
battle that won Samarra' with one long paragraph, from which the reader
could get no other meaning except the one that this day also was won by
the same units as did the fighting of the 21st. This was a handling of
fact which appealed neither to the Black Watch, whose achievements need
no aid of embellishment from imagination, nor to the Leicestershires,
who were made to appear spectators through the savage fighting of two
days. If the reader turns to the chapter in this book entitled 'The
Battle for Samarra,' he will learn what actually happened on April 22,
1917. The only other reference in print, that I know of, to the
fighting for Samarra is the chapter in Mr. Candler's book. This, he
tells us, was largely taken over by him from a journalist who visited
our battlefields during the lull of summer. He showed the account to
officers of my division, myself among them, and they added a few notes.
But the chapter remained bare and comparatively uninteresting beside
the accounts of actions which Mr. Candler had witnessed.

For this book, then, my materials have been: First, my own experience
of events _quorum ego pars minima_. Next, my own note-books, carefully
kept over a long period in Mesopotamia and Palestine, a period from
which these two campaigns of Samarra and Tekrit have been selected.
Thirdly, I saw regimental war-diaries and talked with brigade and