A Machine Gunner in Mesopotamia

The Mesopotamia Campaign is one of the least known theatres of the First World War and involved one of the worst humiliations ever for the British Army. My grandfather Robert. T. Donald kept a secret diary of his time there as a Machine Gunner in 1917. He had fought earlier in 1916 in the trenches at Ypres, and later in the Third Afghan War in 1919, another little known episode of British military history. He kept diaries for these events too. All three of his diaries, are presented in this book, along with excerpts from the from the official military histories, and annotations and maps by the author.
History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme. The fighting in Mesopotamia – modern-day Iraq - and Afghanistan was echoed less than a century later in the two Gulf Wars . British troops, moving up the Tigris from Basra, would pass memorials on the banks of the river to the earlier conflicts in World War One as they followed in the footsteps of their forebears. These diaries tell that earlier story.