Major General Sir Charles Vere Ferrers Townshend, KCB, DSO (21 February 1861 – 18 May 1924) was a British soldier who during the World War I led an overreaching military campaign in Mesopotamia.

[6] Townshend was a well-known "playboy" officer in his youth, famous for his womanizing, drinking, for playing the banjo while singing very bawdy songs and for spending an excessive amount of his time in the music halls.

[15] Townshend made his name in England as a British Imperial hero with the assistance of London's Fleet Street's coverage of his conduct as the besieged garrison commander during the Siege of Chitral Fort on the North West Frontier in 1895, for which he was invested as a Companion of the Order of the Bath (CB).

[6] The British never fully controlled the North-West Frontier, and from 2 March – 20 April 1895 an Indian force under the command of Captain Townshend sent to maintain a friendly ruler in remote Chitral was besieged instead by the local tribesmen.

[16] After being defeated by the tribesmen following an attempt to storm the village, despite being outnumbered, Townshend ordered a retreat into the fort, writing: We had a long way to go; and from all the hamlets as we approached Chitral we were fired into from orchards and houses right and left, front and rear!

[11] Upon his return to London, Townshend had dinner at Buckingham Palace with Queen Victoria, who publicly thanked him as a hero of the recent campaign, an experience that helped to increase the size of his already ample ego.

[16] Townshend's attitude towards non-white soldiers has been noted as "puzzling", as "like most officers of the day he assumed a natural British superiority over other races, but in Hunza, the Sudan, Burma, India, and later in Mesopotamia he was proud of his men and took good care of them, yet when the opportunity for advancement presented itself he abandoned them without a second thought".

[20] Thoughts of Cahen d'Anvers only took up part of his time as Townshend often found engaged in fierce fighting with the Ansar as he wrote about the Battle of Atbara on 8 April 1898 that: Alternately firing and rushing forward, I rapidly approached the Dervish position.

I now began to think that it would not do to wait until this mass got much closer, so I sang out for sights to be put at 600 yards, and then opened with heavy independent fire, and in a short while our line was all smoke and a ceaseless rattle of Martini rifles.

The Second Boer War began in October 1899, and Townshend left England to go to South Africa, which was a violation of the rules, as he held a commission in the Indian Army at the time and should have returned to India.

[1][6] On 4 May 1911 during a visit to Paris, Townshend met Ferdinand Foch, who was quite critical of British policy towards Europe, warning that Germany was out to dominate the world and was Britain prepared to take a stand or not?

Townshend wrote in his diary: General Foch asked me if I knew how many army corps the Germans will put into line....Did England contemplate the annexation of Belgium and the sea-board with equanimity?

[20] In April 1915, Townshend was appointed to the command of the 6th (Poona) Division[1] in Mesopotamia, tasked with protecting the British Empire's oil production assets in Persia from Ottoman Imperial attack.

[36] Whatever the excellence of its troops, Force D possessed no heavy guns and was deficient in supplies, including clean drinking water, wire-cutters, telephones, lights, tents, signal rockets, mosquito nets, telescopic sights, flares, helmets, hand grenades, periscopes and blankets.

There was an occasion early on in the siege where he does a snap inspection twenty-four hours earlier than was expected and discovers the officer in command of the particular redoubt desperately trying to change into something a little bit more formal with no clothes on.

[35] After taking Amarah, he, like his many of his men, fell ill after drinking dirty water, and suffering from severe diarrhoea and vomiting, he left his command for a modern hospital in Bombay to recover.

[40] The intense heat (the average daily temperature ranged from 100 to 123 Fahrenheit) imposed immense strain on his men, who were always very thirsty and drank from the river Tigris despite warnings that the water was unsafe to drink, causing them to contract dysentery.

[8] At this point, Townshend suggested halting at Kut-al-Amara to gather strength in men and material before attempting an advance upon the city of Baghdad, but General Nixon was convinced by this time that the Ottoman Army was of a sufficiently inferior quality that there was no need, and dash was what was required rather than a more cautious strategy.

[35] At the time, Townshend reported meeting some stiff resistance from the Ottomans, but predicted that his men would advance rapidly once they had broken into the open country, which he stated would happen soon, further adding that a KCB was the greatest military honour that would please both himself and his family.

Here they met an Ottoman force of more than 20,000 troops that had issued from Baghdad to oppose their approach to the city, giving them a numerical advantage of 2 to 1 over the 6th Division,[33] sited within well-prepared defensive trench fortifications.

One of Nureddin Pasha's staff officers, Muhammad Amin, later wrote that it was amazing that this "brave and determined little force" had stopped an entire Ottoman division and finally pushed them back to their second line of defence.

[49] The British historian Russell Braddon wrote “After Ctesiphon, in his telegrams, communiques, diaries and autobiography, he [Townshend] reveals himself as a man whose mind was governed almost entirely by wishful thinking".

The siege of Kut-al-Amara was a drawn out affair for the British Empire, and a bitter one for the men of the 6th Division, surrounded for five months under fire from all sides, and having to fight off several attempts to storm the town by the Ottomans, with dwindling resources in conditions of increasing desperation and deprivation.

[60] Afterwards, Prussian Field Marshal Colmar von der Goltz arrived and forbade any more attempts to storm Kut, preferring to keep the town under regular artillery bombardment while waiting for Townshend's men to be starved into surrender.

[61] Major Charles Barber, the chief medical officer at Kut recalled how the Anglo-Indian soldiers were tortured by "myriads" of lice, stating "Our wretched patients would sit for hours picking them off their blankets and shirts".

The dire reports fed the London press's portrayal of Townshend as a hero surrounded by Oriental hordes and in desperate circumstances, as he had been during the Siege of Chitral 21 years before; they also induced the British government to hastily dispatch a military relief force from Basra, under the command of Sir Fenton Aylmer.

Aylmer found Kut surrounded by unexpectedly strong Ottoman defences under the direction of the newly arrived Goltz,[33] and badly stretched supply lines left the British with a shortage of artillery shells.

[35] Subsequent increasingly desperate relief expeditions dispatched from Basra to attempt to rescue the 6th Division fared equally badly against the defences erected against their passage by Goltz (who would not himself see the military victory of the siege, dying of typhoid in Baghdad before its end).

[64] Townshend grew increasingly desperate as the siege went on, at one time sending off a message claiming that if Kut fell, it would be a worse defeat than Yorktown, maintaining that the entire Islamic world would rally for the Ottomans if he had to surrender and this would be the beginning of the end of the British Empire.

After reaching Baghdad, where he was given a guided tour of various cultural sites, Townshend was taken to the capital of Constantinople, where he was greeted with a formal guard of honour at the railroad station led by the Ottoman Minister of War, General Enver Pasha.