Townshend claimed that his men were exhausted and could not march anymore, hence his decision to stop at Kut. General William Delamian, one of Townshend's subordinates was to later write that this claim was a lie and after a day's rest at Kut, the men of the 6th Division could have easily continued to march if only Townshend had given the order. Perry wrote: "The fact is, Townshend "wanted" to endure a siege at Kut". Townshend (who had been part of the relief expedition to save Charles Gordon at Khartoum) had been greatly influenced by how the British press had lionized Gordon, and wished to be lionized by Fleet Street in the same way. However, Perry noted the difference between "Chinese Gordon" and Townshend as: "Needless to say, Townshend had no death wish, simply an obsessive ambition to be promoted and to be recognized as the great warrior he thought himself to be. What he wanted, and no seems to have thought about this, was to be a live Gordon-to endure a heroic siege, be rescued by Nixon (or somebody else), and go home to England in triumph". Townshend arrived in Kut on 3 December 1915 and it was not until 9 December 1915 that the Ottomans finally surrounded Kut, in the interim Townshend had blown up the bridges over the Tigris that could have allowed his men to continue to march south. Townshend claimed that Kut was strategic because it was at the intersection of the Tigris and Hai rivers, but in fact the "Hai river" was only a flood effluent of the Tigris. Galbraith wrote that "Kut's great importance was not strategic, but political". Townshend in his diary: "I mean to defend Kut as I did Chitral". As many of the boats and ships that used the Tigris had been sunk or captured by the British during their advance up the river, the Ottomans did not depend upon river transport to the extent that the British did, and the location of Kut on a peninsula in the Tigris meant the Ottomans easily by-passed the town.