V

SUMMER AND WAITING

Samarra was entered on April 23, the 21st and 8th Brigades going
through the 19th and 28th Brigades. These brigades followed during the
course of the day, and the ridge of Al-Ajik fell into our hands. From
Samarra northwards high bluffs run with the river, pushing out to it
from plateaus stretching across the heart of Jezireh and climbing again
beyond the river to the Jebel Hamrin. Below the bluffs are wide spaces
of dead ground, beds which the Tigris has forsaken. On the right bank,
before the dead ground begins and directly opposite Samarra town, is a
plain some ten or dozen miles in length, between the mounds of the
battle of April 22 and the crest of Al-Ajik; this plain may be three
miles broad. Al-Ajik covers and commands all approaches from the north,
and, with the central plateau, shuts the plain within a crescent. Here,
behind Al-Ajik, lay our camp for the next seven months.

North from Al-Ajik the plateau rolls away to Tekrit, and the same
rolling country lies to westward also, broken with nulla and
water-hole. To Tekrit, more than twenty miles beyond, the Turkish Army
fled.

Samarra is a dirty, sand-coloured town, with no touch of brightness
but what its famous dome gives it. This dome it was that shone over
against the sunset, the last earthly beauty for so many eyes, on that
evening of savage battle when the 7th Division flung out its leading
brigade and reached, all but held, the Turkish guns. The dome hides the
cavern into which the Twelfth Imam vanished, and from which he will
emerge, bringing righteousness to a faithless world. Just beyond the
dome rises the corkscrew tower, built in imitation of the Babylonian
_ziggurats_. To the north-east is 'Julian's Tomb,' a high pyramid in
the desert. It was near Samarra that he suffered defeat and died of
wounds. For twenty miles round, in Beit Khalifa, Eski Baghdad, and
elsewhere, is one confused huddle of ruins. It is hard to believe that
such tawdry magnificence as Harun's successors intermittently brought
to the town during the precarious times of Abbasid decay is responsible
for all these arches and caverns and tumbled bricks. Major Kenneth
Mason, already mentioned as having identified Xenophon's Sittake, has
collected good reasons for placing Opis, once the great mart of the
East, at Eski Baghdad, and not where the maps conjecturally place it,
twenty miles farther down Tigris. In summer, green is none save in
patches by