The Leicestershires Beyond Baghdad

While the Western Front consumed Europe's attention, a different war unfolded in the deserts of Mesopotamia. Edward John Thompson, who served as a missionary in India before joining the British Army, documents the 2nd Leicestershire Regiment's journey through this overlooked campaign: the grueling marches through marsh and sand, the sieges of Kut al-Amara, and the desperate push to retake Baghdad in 1917. Thompson writes not with martial pomp, but with careful attention to the ordinary soldiers beside him: their fear, their black humor, their sudden deaths. This is military history from the ground up, concerned less with strategy than with the texture of survival in a forgotten corner of the war. The Leicestershires fought for a city most Britons couldn't locate on a map, against an enemy they rarely understood, in conditions that killed as surely as German shells. Thompson's account stands as a quiet monument to men whose names mostly vanished from memory.