On 10 December 1915, General Nureddin Pasha ordered his men to storm Kut. Townshend repelled the Ottoman assaulting force with heavy losses, though the Ottomans seized enough ground to build another line closer to the walls of Kut. On Christmas Day 1915 the Ottomans attacked again, breaking through at one point and seizing part of the old fort there before fierce British counter-attacks drove them out. Afterwards, 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. Germany supplied the Ottomans with 30 of the latest Krupp artillery guns, whose devastating fire destroyed much of Kut. Townshend complained in his memoirs: "The fire from our guns went from the centre to the circumference and so was divergent and disseminated, while that of the enemy was directed from the circumference to the centre and his converged and concentrated". To escape the bombardments Townshend and his men dug in beneath the ruins of Kut, leading a largely subterranean existence thereafter. 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". Fleas were also abundant, "and if not fleas, then mosquitoes, failing mosquitoes, or in addition to, the sand fly is provided". In the absence of these small parasites, Major Barber remarked, "there is always the snake, the centipede or the scorpion to fall back upon".