In Mesopotamia during the War

Abstract

CONSIDERING the never-ending spate of books dealing with the multitudinous aspects of the Great War, world-wide as it was, with a story in every continent, it is curious to reflect that the struggle in Mesopotamia has had until now no competent historian. Sir Arnold Wilson, who lived and moved and had his being in those epic years in the Middle East, is peculiarly fitted to describe the moving pageant of the War in that theatre, since he, above all others, had the responsibility of making effective the civil administration that step by step followed in the wake of the military arm. By training a soldier—and a distinguished one—by race and instinct an administrator of insight and vision, he is admirably qualified to make clear “a tale of great deeds by land and river, sea and air, of suffering and endurance, and faithfulness unto death on both sides, in pursuit of objects dimly seen, and of aims but darkly understood”.

Loyalties: Mesopotamia 1914–1917; a Personal and Historical Record.

Sir Arnold T. Wilson. Pp. xxxvi + 340 + 28 plates. (London: Oxford University Press, 1930.) 25s. net.