he following article by Brigadier-General A. G. Wauchope, C.M.G.,
D.S.O., is here republished with permission:

There stretches, some sixty miles north of Baghdad, from the Tigris to
the Euphrates, a famous fortified line known to the Greeks as the
Median Wall. It is skilfully constructed in tiers of mud bricks to a
height fully thirty feet above the level of the plain, the whole has
been covered over by a thick layer of earth protecting the bricks
these many centuries from wind and weather, for the Median Wall is, so
some say, the oldest building in all the world. It formed certainly
the outer line of the defences of the Kingdom of Babylon under
Nebuchadnezzar II, when it ran from Opis on the Tigris to Hit on the
Euphrates and this line in far earlier times marked the boundary
between the two ancient peoples of Akkad and Sumer, and was probably
even then a fortification of first importance.

However that may be, it stands to-day the most prominent landmark in
all this district of the Tigris valley; though broken, tumbledown
mounds represent the great wall towards the Euphrates, for many miles
near the Tigris it stands without a break, with strong projecting
bastions to give flank defence every forty or fifty yards, and at
wider intervals the wall rises so as to form some sort of keep or
watch tower.

[Illustration: Date Palm Scenes Below Basrah.]

[Illustration: T. HENDERSON. M.C. G. V. STEWART. C. RYRIE.]

[Illustration: At Arab Village.]

[Illustration: Undepressed.]

Whoever built the great wall built it for the purposes of war, and no
building, I venture to say, has ever had so many battles fought within
its neighbourhood. Every race through every age, Aryan and Turanian,
Babylonian and Assyrian, Median and Persian, armies from Greece and
armies from Rome, have, during the past thousands of years,
slaughtered each other with extraordinary thoroughness below these mud
bastions; and more recently, but with the same seeming futility, Turk
has murdered Arab and Arab Turk, the destruction of villages, mosques
and canals marking, as of old, the soldiers sacrifice to the God of
War.

Standing this morning on these ancient ramparts, I watch the sun rise
over this land which, once so rich and fertile, now shows hardly a
sign of human habitation, this country where not a tree nor a house
has been allowed for many years to stand, over which the blight of
misrule has lain as a curse for centuries and I see yet one