On 1 November 1915 Townshend led the 6th (Poona) Division from Kut-al-Amara and marched up the course of the River Tigris. Ctesiphon, some south of Baghdad was reached on 20 November 1915. Here they met an Ottoman force of more than twenty thousand 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 (Poona) Division, sited within well-prepared defensive trench fortifications. General Nurreddin Pasha had the command of four divisions, namely the 35th, the 38th, the 45th and 51st which he had dug in at trenches built over the ruins of Ctesiphon. At Ctesiphon, Townshend was obsessed with the Arch of Ctesiphon. Strachan stated:"The centre of the battlefield of Ctesiphon is the Arch, and it figures in all of the photographs of the Army when they reached this high point of the advance. And its immensely powerful for Townshend, the student of military history, because this marks the extremity of the Roman Empire, this marks the point where Belisarius, the famous Roman commander, had got to, coming in the other direction, of course. But for those with a classical education, as of course just about every British officer had received before the First World War, then this is a very powerful image indeed". Townshend had divided his division into four columns. To Column A, he assigned the Dorset Regiment, the 104th Rifles and the Thirtieth Composite Brigade to which he attached two Gurkha companies. To Column B, Townshend assigned the Norfolk regiment, the 7th Rajputs and the 110th Mahrattas. To Column C went the Oxfordshire Light Infantry, the Twenty-second Punjabi regiment, the 103rd Mahrattas and 119th Infantry and finally to Column D went the 7th Lancers, the Sixteenth Cavalry, the Thirty-third Cavalry and S battery of the Royal Horse Artillery.