A Kut Prisoner

In 1915, the British Empire's campaign in Mesopotamia collapsed in a series of catastrophic defeats. Harry Coghill Watson Bishop, a young subaltern in the Indian Army Reserve, found himself marching toward Ctesiphon with reinforcements, unaware he was walking into one of WWI's bloodiest debacles. After the battle's devastation, he retreated to Kut, where General Townshend's exhausted forces endured a grueling siege before surrendering to the Turks. What follows is Bishop's unflinching account of captivity: the forced marches, the squalid POW camps, the constant humiliation. And then, remarkably, his escape. This is not a polished war memoir but something rarer: an unfiltered dispatch from the edge of empire, written while the dust still settled on the battlefield. Bishop captures the chaos of a forgotten campaign, the strange bonds forged in extremity, and the quiet defiance that allowed men to survive what should have killed them.