The Gates of Kut #229760

Night, like a dark and bloated buzzard, was winging its way slowly and uneasily over Mesopotamia.<br><br>In Kut-el-Amara, in that grim, tongue-shaped loop of the Tigris, the broken jumble of mud huts began to merge into strange, distorted shapes. The scraggy tamarinds and liquorice trees made a fretful murmuring. The stifled moans of the sick and the dying rose for a little space, faltered, and fell away again into silence.<br><br>Thin, skeleton fingers plucked aimlessly at the sand, and voices murmured and muttered deliriously of the white cliffs of Dover, of England and home, of London - gay, laughing, lamp-jewelled London, dancing down the roads of the world.<br><br>Towards the great marshes, stern and sinister in the growing darkness, isolated flares of light betokened the Turkish lines of investment and the redoubts of the enemy.<br><br>North, south, east and west they were merging into a circle, slowly narrowing, ever creeping closer.