By contrast, Townshend and his officers were well treated. Only one of the officers who surrendered at Kut, the commander of a Gurkha company chose to go on the death march with his men while the rest of the officers accepted the Ottoman offer to be held separately from the other ranks. After reaching to 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. During his trip to Constantinople, Townshend saw at least once the battered, starving, thirsty and broken-down remnants of his division travelling north on the death march. Townshend raised the subject once with Enver (who already knew about the death march as he had the POWs marched past him during a victory parade he had attended in Baghdad) who assured him that he knew nothing about the death march, but he would look into it. This was the first and only time that Townshend ever expressed concern about how his men were being treated as POWs.