A short while after my arrival our aeroplanes brought in word that the Turks were massing at Daur, and General Cobbe decided that when they launched forth he would go and meet them. Accordingly, we all moved out one night, expecting to give "Abdul," as the Tommies called him, a surprise. Whether it was that we started too early and their aeroplanes saw us, or whether they were only making a feint, we never found out; but at all events the enemy fell back, and save for some advance-guard skirmishing and a few prisoners, we drew a blank. We were not prepared to attack the Daur position, and so returned to Samarra to await developments.
Meanwhile I busied myself searching for an Arab servant. Seven or eight years previous, when with my father in Africa, I had learned Swahili, and although I had forgotten a great deal of it, still I found it a help in taking up Arabic. Most of the officers had either British or Indian servants; in the former case they were known as batmen, and in the latter as bearers; but I decided to follow suit with the minority and get an Arab, and therefore learn Arabic instead of Hindustanee, for the former would be of vastly more general use. The towncommandant, Captain Grieve of the Black Watch, after many attempts at length produced a native who seemed, at any rate, more promising than the others that offered themselves. Yusuf was a sturdy, rather surly-looking youth of about eighteen. Evidently not a pure Arab, he claimed various admixtures as the fancy took him, the general preference being Kurd. I always felt that there was almost certainly a good percentage of Turk. His father had been a non-commissioned officer in the Turkish army, and at first I was loath to take him along on advances and attacks, for he would have been shown little mercy had he fallen into enemy hands. He was, however, insistent on asking to go with me, and I never saw him show any concern under fire. He spoke, in varying degrees of fluency, Kurdish, Persian, and Turkish, and was of great use to me for that reason. He became by degrees a very faithful and trustworthy follower, his great weakness being that he was a one-man's man, and although he would do anything for me, he was of little general use in an officers' mess.
I had two horses, one a black mare that I called Soda, which means black in Arabic, andthe other a hard-headed bay gelding that was game to go all day, totally unaffected by shell-fire, but exceedingly stubborn about choosing the direction in which he went. After numerous changes I came across an excellent syce to look after them. He was a wild, unkempt figure, with a long black beard—a dervish by profession, and certainly gave no one any reason to believe that he was more than half-witted. Indeed, almost all dervishes are in a greater or less degree insane; it is probably due to that that they have become dervishes, for the native regards the insane as under the protection of God. Dervishes go around practically naked, usually wearing only a few skins flung over the shoulder, and carrying a large begging-bowl. In addition they carry a long, sharp, iron bodkin, with a wooden ball at the end, having very much the appearance of a fool's bauble. They lead an easy life. When they take a fancy to a house, they settle down near the gate, and the owner has to support them as long as the whim takes them to stay there. To use force against a dervish would be looked upon as an exceedingly unpropitious affair to the true believer. Then, too, I have little doubt but that they arecapable of making good use of their steel bodkins. Why my dervish wished to give up his easy-going profession and take over the charge of my horses I never fully determined, but it must have been because he really loved horses and found that as a dervish pure and simple he had very little to do with them. When he arrived he was dressed in a very ancient gunny-sack, and it was not without much regret at the desecration that I provided him with an outfit of the regulation khaki.
My duties took me on long rides about the country. Here, and throughout Mesopotamia, the great antiquity of this "cradle of the world" kept ever impressing itself upon one, consciously or subconsciously. Everywhere were ruins; occasionally a wall still reared itself clear of the all-enveloping dust, but generally all that remained were great mounds, where the desert had crept in and claimed its own, covering palace, house, and market, temple, synagogue, mosque, or church with its everlasting mantle. Often the streets could still be traced, but oftener not. The weight of ages was ever present as one rode among the ruins of these once busy, prosperous cities, now long dead and buried, how longno one knew, for frequently their very names were forgotten. Babylon, Ur of the Chaldees, Istabulat, Nineveh, and many more great cities of history are now nothing but names given to desert mounds.
Close by Samarra stands a strange corkscrew tower, known by the natives as the Malwiyah. It is about a hundred and sixty feet high, built of brick, with a path of varying width winding up around the outside. No one knew its purpose, and estimates of its antiquity varied by several thousand years. One fairly well-substantiated story told that it had been the custom to kill prisoners by hurling them off its top. We found it exceedingly useful as an observation-post. In the same manner we used Julian's tomb, a great mound rising up in the desert some five or six miles up-stream of the town. The legend is that when the Roman Emperor died of his wounds his soldiers, impressing the natives, built this as a mausoleum; but there is no ground whatever for this belief, for it would have been physically impossible for a harassed or retreating army to have performed a task of such magnitude. The natives call it "The Granary," and claim that that was its original use. Before the warthe Germans had started in excavating, and discovered shafts leading deep down, and on top the foundations of a palace. Around its foot may be traced roadways and circular plots, and especially when seen from an aeroplane it looks as if there had at one time been an elaborate system of gardens.
We were continually getting false rumors about the movements of the Turks. We had believed that it would be impossible for them to execute a flank movement, at any rate in sufficient strength to be a serious menace, for from all the reports we could get, the wells were few and far between. Nevertheless, there was a great deal of excitement and some concern when one afternoon our aeroplanes came in with the report that they had seen a body of Turks that they estimated at from six to eight thousand marching round our right flank. The plane was sent straight back with instructions to verify most carefully the statement, and be sure that it was really men they had seen. They returned at dark with no alteration of their original report. As can well be imagined, that night was a crowded one for us, and the feeling ran high when next morning the enemy turned out to be several enormous herds of sheep.
As part consequence of this we were ordered to make a thorough water reconnaissance, with a view of ascertaining how large a force could be watered on a march around our flank. I went off in an armored car with Captain Marshall of the Intelligence Service. Marshall had spent many years in Mesopotamia shipping liquorice to the American Tobacco Company, and he was known and trusted by the Arabs all along the Tigris from Kurna to Mosul. He spoke the language most fluently, but with an accent that left no doubt of his Caledonian home. We had with us a couple of old sheiks, and it was their first ride in an automobile. It was easy to see that one of them was having difficulty in maintaining his dignity, but I was not quite sure of the reason until we stopped a moment and he fairly flew out of the car. It didn't seem possible that a man able to ride ninety miles at a stretch on a camel, could be made ill by the motion of an automobile. However, such was the case, and we had great difficulty in getting him back into the car. We discovered far more wells than we had been led to believe existed, but not enough to make a flank attack a very serious menace.
The mirage played all sorts of tricks, and the balloon observers grew to be very cautiousin their assertions. In the early days of the campaign, at the battle of Shaiba Bund, a friendly mirage saved the British forces from what would have proved a very serious defeat. Suleiman Askari was commanding the Turkish forces, and things were faring badly with the British, when of a sudden to their amazement they found that the Turks were in full retreat. Their commanders had caught sight of the mirage of what was merely an ambulance and supply train, but it was so magnified that they believed it to be a very large body of reinforcements. The report ran that when Suleiman was told of his mistake, his chagrin was so great that he committed suicide.
It was at length decided to advance on the Turkish forces at Daur. General Brooking had just made a most successful attack on the Euphrates front, capturing the town of Ramadie, with almost five thousand prisoners. It was believed to be the intention of the army commander to try to relieve the pressure against General Allenby's forces in Palestine by attacking the enemy on all three of their Mesopotamian fronts. Accordingly, we were ordered to march out after sunset one night, prepared to attack the enemy position at daybreak. During a short halt by the last rays of the setting sun I caught sight of a number of Mohammedan soldiers prostrating themselves toward Mecca in their evening prayers, while their Christian or pagan comrades looked stolidly on. It was late October, and although the days were still very hot and oppressive, the nights were almost bitterly cold. A night-march is always a disagreeable business. The head of the column checks and halts, and those in the rear have no idea whether it is an involuntary stop for a few minutes, or whether they are to halt for an hour or more, owing to some complication of orders. So we stood shivering, and longed for a smoke, but of course that was strictly forbidden, for the cigarettes of an army would form a very good indication of its whereabouts on a dark night. All night we marched and halted, and started on again; the dust choked us, and the hours seemed interminable, until at last at two in the morning word was passed along that we could have an hour's sleep. The greater part of the year in Mesopotamia the regulation army dress consisted of a tunic and "shorts." These are long trousers cut off just above the knee, and the wearer may either use wrap puttees, or leatherleggings, or golf stockings. They are a great help in the heat, as may easily be understood, and they allow, of course, much freer knee action, particularly when your clothes are wet. The reverse side of the medal reads that when you try to sleep without a blanket on a cold night, you find that your knees are uncomfortably exposed. Still we were, most of us, so drunk with sleep that it would have taken more than that to keep us awake. At three we resumed our march, and attacked just at dawn. The enemy had abandoned the first-line positions, and we met with but little resistance in the second. Our cavalry, which was concentrated at several points in nullahs (dry river-beds), suffered at the hands of the hostile aircraft. The Turk had evidently determined to fall back to Tekrit without putting up a serious defense. They certainly could have given us a much worse time than they did, for they had dug in well and scientifically. Among the prisoners we took there were some that proved to be very worth while. These Turkish officers were, as a whole a good lot—well dressed and well educated. Many spoke French. There is an excellent gunnery school at Constantinople, and one of the officerswe captured had been a senior instructor there for many years. We had with us among our intelligence officers a Captain Bettelheim, born in Constantinople of Belgian parentage. He had served with the Turks against the Italians and with the British against the Boers. This gunnery officer turned out to be an old comrade of his in the Italian War. Many of the officers we got knew him, for he had been chief of police in Constantinople. Apparently none of them bore him the slightest ill-will when they found him serving against them.
Among the supplies we captured at Daur were a lot of our own rifles and ammunition that the Arabs had stolen and sold to the Turks. It was impossible to entirely stop this, guard our dumps as best we could. On dark nights they would creep right into camp, and it was never safe to have the hospital barges tie up to the banks for the night on their way down the river. On many occasions the Arabs crawled aboard and finished off the wounded. There was only one thing to be said for the Arab, and that was that he played no favorite, but attacked, as a rule, whichever side came handier. We were told, and I believe it to be true, that during the fighting at Sunnaiyatthe Turks sent over to know if we would agree to a three days' truce, during which time we should join forces against the Arabs, who were watching on the flank to pick off stragglers or ration convoys.
That night we bivouacked at Daur, and were unmolested except for the enemy aircraft that came over and "laid eggs." Next morning we advanced on Tekrit. Our orders were to make a feint, and if we found that the Turk meant to stay and fight it out seriously, we were to fall back. Some gazelles got into the no man's land between us and the Turk, and in the midst of the firing ran gracefully up the line, stopping every now and then to stare about in amazement. Later on in the Argonne forest in France we had the same thing happen with some wild boars. The enemy seemed in no way inclined to evacuate Tekrit, so in accordance with instructions we returned to our previous night's encampment at Daur. On the way back we passed an old "arabana," a Turkish coupé, standing abandoned in the desert, with a couple of dead horses by it. It may have been used by some Turkish general in the retreat of two days before. It was the sort of coupé one associates entirely with well-kept parks and crowded city streets, and the incongruity of its lonely isolation amid the sand-dunes caused an amused ripple of comment.
Our instructions were to march back to Samarra early next morning, but shortly before midnight orders came through from General Maude for us to advance again upon Tekrit and take it. Next day we halted and took stock in view of the new orders. The cavalry again suffered at the hands of the Turkish aircraft. I went to corps headquarters in the afternoon, and a crowd of "red tabs," as the staff-officers were called, were seated around a little table having the inevitable tea. A number of the generals had come in to discuss the plan of attack for the following day. Suddenly a Turk aeroplane made its appearance, flying quite low, and dropping bombs at regular intervals. It dropped two, and then a third on a little hill in a straight line from the staff conclave. It looked as if the next would be a direct hit, and the staff did the only wise thing, and took cover as flat on the ground as nature would allow; but the Hun's spacing was bad, and the next bomb fell some little way beyond. I rememberour glee at what we regarded as a capital joke on the staff. The line-officer's humor becomes a trifle robust where the "gilded staff" is concerned, notwithstanding the fact that most staff-officers have seen active and distinguished service in the line.
Our anti-aircraft guns—"Archies" we called them—were mounted on trucks, and on account of their weight had some difficulty getting up. I shall not soon forget our delight when they lumbered into view, for although I never happened personally to see an aeroplane brought down by an "Archie," there was no doubt about it but that they did not bomb us with the same equanimity when our anti-aircrafts were at hand.
Captured Turkish camel corps
Captured Turkish camel corps
That night we marched out on Tekrit, and as dawn was breaking were ready to attack. As the mist cleared, an alarming but ludicrous sight met our eyes. On the extreme right some caterpillar tractors hauling our "heavies" were advancing straight on Tekrit, as if they had taken themselves for tanks. They were not long in discovering their mistake, and amid a mixed salvo they clumsily turned and made off at their best pace, which was not more than three miles an hour. Luckily, theysoon got under some excellent defilade, but not until they had suffered heavily.
Our artillery did some good work, but while we were waiting to attack we suffered rather heavily. We had to advance over a wide stretch of open country to reach the Turkish first lines. By nightfall the second line of trenches was practically all in our hands. Meanwhile the cavalry had circled way around the flank up-stream of Tekrit to cut the enemy off if he attempted to retreat. The town is on the right bank of the Tigris, and we had a small force that had come up from Samarra on the left bank, for we had no means of ferrying troops across. Our casualties during the day had amounted to about two thousand. The Seaforths had suffered heavily, but no more so than some of the native regiments. In Mesopotamia there were many changes in the standing of the Indian battalions. The Maharattas, for instance, had never previously been regarded as anything at all unusual, but they have now a very distinguished record to take pride in. The general feeling was that the Gurkhas did not quite live up to their reputation. But the Indian troops as a whole did so exceedingly well that there is littlepurpose in making comparisons amongst them. At this time, so I was informed, the Expeditionary Force, counting all branches, totalled about a million, and a very large percentage of this came from India. We drew our supplies from India and Australia, and it is interesting to note that we preferred the Australian canned beef and mutton (bully beef and bully mutton, as it was called) to the American.
At dusk the fighting died down, and we were told to hold on and go over at daybreak. As I was making my way back to headquarters a general pounced upon me and told me to get quickly into a car and go as rapidly as possible to Daur to bring up a motor ration-convoy with fodder for the cavalry horses and food for the riders. A Ford car happened to pass by, and he stopped it and shoved me in, with some last hurried injunction. It was quite fifteen miles back, and the country was so cut up by nullahs or ravines that in most places it was inadvisable to leave the road, which was, of course, jammed with a double stream of transport of every description. When we were three or four miles from Daur a tire blew out. The driver had used his last spare, so there was nothing to do but keepgoing on the rim. The car was of the delivery-wagon type—"pill-boxes" were what they were known as—and while we were stopped taking stock I happened to catch sight of a good-sized bedding-roll behind. "Some one's out of luck," said I to the driver; "whose roll is it?" "The corps commander's, sir," was his reply. After exhausting my limited vocabulary, I realized that it was far too late to stop another motor and send this one back, so I just kept going. Across the bed of one more ravine, the sand up to the hubs, and we were in the Daur camp. I managed to rank some one out of a spare tire and started back again. My driver proved unable to drive at night, at all events at a pace that would put us anywhere before dawn, so I was forced to take the wheel. By the time I had the convoy properly located I was rather despondent of the corps commander's temper, even should I eventually reach him that night, which seemed a remote chance, for the best any one could do was give me the rough location on a map. Still, taking my luminous compass, I set out to steer a cross-country course. I ran into five or six small groups of ambulances filled with wounded, trying to find their way to Daur,and completely lost. Most had given up—some were unknowingly headed back for Tekrit. I could do no more than give them the right direction, which I knew they had no chance of holding. Of course I could have no headlights, and the ditches were many, but in some miraculous way, more through good luck than good management, I did find corps headquarters, and what was better still, the general's reprimand took the form of bread and ham and a stiff peg of whiskey—the first food I had had since before daylight.
During the night the Turks evacuated the town. Their forces were certainly mobile. They could cover the most surprising distances, and live on almost nothing. We marched in and occupied. White flags were flying from all the houses, which were not nearly so much damaged from the bombardment as one would have supposed. This was invariably the case; indeed, it is surprising to see how much shelling a town can undergo without noticeable effect. It takes a long time to level a town in the way it has been done in northern France. In this region the banks of the river average about one hundred and fifty feet in height, and Tekrit is built at the junction of two ravines. No twostreets are on the same level; sometimes the roofs of the houses on a lower level serve as the streets for the houses above. Many of the booths in the bazaar were open and transacting business when we arrived, an excellent proof of how firmly the Arabs believed in British fair dealing. Our men bought cigarettes, matches, and vegetables. Yusuf had lived here three or four years, so I despatched him to get chickens and eggs for the mess. I ran into Marshall, who was on his way to dine with the mayor, who had turned out to be an old friend of his. He asked me to join him, and we climbed up to a very comfortable house, built around a large courtyard. It was the best meal we had either of us had in days—great pilaus of rice, excellent chicken, and fresh unleavened bread. This bread looks like a very large and thin griddle-cake. The Arab uses it as a plate. Eating with your hands is at first rather difficult. Before falling to, a ewer is brought around to you, and you are supplied with soap—a servant pours water from the ewer over your hands, and then gives you a towel. After eating, the same process is gone through with. There are certain formalities that must be regarded—one of them beingthat you must not eat or drink with your left hand.
In Tekrit we did not find as much in the way of supplies and ammunition as we had hoped. The Turk had destroyed the greater part of his store. We did find great quantities of wood, and in that barren, treeless country it was worth a lot. Most of the inhabitants of Tekrit are raftsmen by profession. Their rafts have been made in the same manner since before the days of Xerxes and Darius. Inflated goatskins are used as a basis for a platform of poles, cut in the up-stream forests. On these, starting from Diarbekr or Mosul, they float down all their goods. When they reach Tekrit they leave the poles there, and start up-stream on foot, carrying their deflated goatskins. The Turks used this method a great deal bringing down their supplies. In pre-war days the rafts, keleks as they are called, would often come straight through to Baghdad, but many were always broken up at Tekrit, for there is a desert route running across to Hit on the Euphrates, and the supplies from up-river were taken across this in camel caravans.
The aerodrome lay six or seven miles abovethe town, and I was anxious to see it and the comfortable billets the Germans had built themselves. I found a friend whose duties required motor transportation, and we set off in his car. A dust-storm was raging, and we had some difficulty in finding our way through the network of trenches. Once outside, the storm became worse, and we could only see a few yards in front of us. We got completely lost, and after nearly running over the edge of the bluff, gave up the attempt, and slowly worked our way back.
When we started off on the advance I was reading Xenophon'sAnabasis. On the day when we were ordered to march on Tekrit a captain of the Royal Flying Corps, an ex-master at Eton, was in the mess, and when I told him that I was nearly out of reading matter, he said that next time he came over he would drop me Plutarch'sLives. I asked him to drop it at corps headquarters, and that a friend of mine there would see that I got it. The next day in the heat of the fighting a plane came over low, signalling that it was dropping a message. As the streamer fell close by, there was a rush to pick it up and learn how the attack was progressing. Fortunately, I was far away when the packet was opened and found to contain the book that the pilot had promised to drop for me.
After we had been occupying the town for a few days, orders came through to prepare to fall back on Samarra. The line of communication was so long that it was impossible to maintain us, except at too great a cost to the transportation facilities possessed by the Expeditionary Forces. Eight or ten months later, when we had more rails in hand, a line was laid to Tekrit, which had been abandoned by the Turks under the threat of our advance to Kirkuk, in the Persian hills. It was difficult to explain to the men, particularly to the Indians, the necessity for falling back. All they could understand was that we had taken the town at no small cost, and now we were about to give it up.
For several days I was busy helping to prepare rafts to take down the timber and such other captured supplies as were worth removing. The river was low, leaving a broad stretch of beach below the town, and to this we brought down the poles. Several camels had died near the water, probably from the results of our shelling, and the hot weather soon made themvery unpleasant companions. The first day was bad enough; the second was worse. The natives were not in the least affected. They brought their washing and worked among them—they came down and drew their drinking-water from the river, either beside the camels or down-stream of them, with complete indifference. It is true this water percolates drop by drop through large, porous clay pots before it is drunk, but even so, it would have seemed that they would have preferred its coming from up-stream of the derelict "ships of the desert." On the third day, to their mild surprise, we managed with infinite difficulty to tow the camels out through the shallow water into the main stream.
We finally got our rafts built, over eighty in number, and arranged for enough Arab pilots to take care of half of them. On the remainder we put Indian sepoys. They made quite a fleet when we finally got them all started down-stream. Two were broken up in the rapids near Daur, the rest reached Samarra in safety on the second day.
We had a pleasant camp on the bluffs below Tekrit—high-enough above the plain to be free of the ordinary dust-storms, and theprospect of returning to Samarra was scarcely more pleasant to us than to the men. Five days after we had taken the town, we turned our backs on it and marched slowly back to rail-head.
We returned to find Samarra buried in dust and more desolate than ever. A few days later came the first rain-storm. After a night's downpour the air was radiantly clear, and it was joy to ride off on the rounds, no longer like Zeus, enveloped in a cloud.
It was a relief to see the heat-stroke camps broken up. During the summer months our ranks were fearfully thinned through the sun. Although it was the British troops that suffered most, the Indians were by no means immune. Before the camps were properly organized the percentage of mortality was exceedingly large, for the only effective treatment necessitates the use of much ice. The patient runs a temperature which it was impossible to control until the ice-making machines were installed. The camps were situated in the coolest and most comfortable places, but in spite of everything, death was a frequent result, and recoveries were apt to be only partial. Men who hadhad a bad stroke were rarely of any further use in the country.
Another sickness of the hot season which now began to claim less victims was sand-fly fever. This fever, which, as its name indicates, was contracted from the bites of sand-flies, varied widely in virulence. Sometimes it was so severe that the victim had to be evacuated to India; as a rule he went no farther than a base hospital at Baghdad or Amara.
One of the things about which the Tommy felt most keenly in the Mesopotamian campaign was that there was no such thing as a "Cushy Blighty." To take you to "Blighty" a wound must mean permanent disablement, otherwise you either convalesced in the country or, at best, were sent to India. In the same manner there were no short leaves, for there was nowhere to go. At the most rapid rate of travelling it took two weeks to get to India, and once there, although the people did everything possible in the way of entertaining, the enlisted man found little to make him less homesick than he had been in Mesopotamia. Transportation was so difficult and the trip so long that only under very exceptional circumstances was leave to England given. One spring it was announced that officers wishing to get either married or divorced could apply for leave with good hopes of success. Many applied, but a number returned without having fulfilled either condition, so that the following year no leaves were given upon those grounds. The army commander put all divorce cases into the hands of an officer whose civil occupation had been the law, and who arranged them without the necessity of granting home leave.
A week after our return to Samarra a rumor started that General Maude was down with cholera. For some time past there had been sporadic cases, though not enough to be counted an epidemic. The sepoys had suffered chiefly, but not exclusively, for the British ranks also supplied a quota of victims. An officer on the staff of the military governor of Baghdad had recently died. We heard that the army commander had the virulent form, and knew there could be no chance of his recovery. The announcement of his death was a heavy blow to all, and many were the gloomy forebodings. The whole army had implicit confidence in their leader, and deeply mourned his loss. The usual rumors of foul play and poison went therounds, but I soon after heard Colonel Wilcox—in pre-war days an able and renowned practitioner of Harley Street—say that it was an undoubted case of cholera. The colonel had attended General Maude throughout the illness. The general had never taken the cholera prophylactic, although Colonel Wilcox had on many occasions urged him to do so, the last time being only a few days before the disease developed.
Towing an armored car across a river
Towing an armored car across a river
Reconnaissance
Reconnaissance
General Marshall, who had commanded General Maude's old division, the Thirteenth, took over. The Seventeenth lost General Gillman, who thereupon became chief of staff. This was a great loss to his division, for he was the idol of the men, but the interest of the Expeditionary Force was naturally and justly given precedence.
In due course my transfer to the Motor Machine-Gun Corps came through approved, and I was assigned to the Fourteenth battery of light-armored motor-cars, commanded by Captain Nigel Somerset, whose grandfather, Lord Raglan, had died, nursed by Florence Nightingale, while in command of the British forces in the Crimean War. Somerset himself was in the infantry at the outbreak of the warand had been twice wounded in France. He was an excellent leader, possessing as he did dash, judgment, and personal magnetism. A battery was composed of eight armored cars, subdivided into four sections. There was a continually varying number of tenders and workshop lorries. The fighting cars were Rolls-Royces, the others Napiers and Fords.
At that time there were only four batteries in the country. We were army troops—that is to say, we were not attached to any individual brigade, or division, or corps, but were temporarily assigned first here and then there, as the need arose.
In attacks we worked in co-operation with the cavalry. Although on occasions they tried to use us as tanks, it was not successful, for our armor-plate was too light. We were also employed in raiding, and in quelling Arab uprisings. This latter use threw us into close touch with the political officers. These were a most interesting lot of men. They were recruited in part from the army, but largely from civil life. They took over the civil administration of the conquered territory and judiciously upheld native justice. Many remarkable characters were numbered among them—menwho had devoted a lifetime to the study of the intricacies of Oriental diplomacy. They were distinguished by the white tabs on the collars of their regulation uniforms; but white was by no means invariably the sign of peace, for many of the political officers were killed, and more than once in isolated towns in unsettled districts they sustained sieges that lasted for several days. We often took a political officer out with us on a raid or reconnaissance, finding his knowledge of the language and customs of great assistance. Sir Percy Cox was at the head, with the title "Chief Political Officer" and the rank of general. His career in the Persian Gulf has been as distinguished as it is long, and his handling of the very delicate situations arising in Mesopotamia has called forth the unstinted praise of soldier and civilian alike.
Ably assisting him, and head of the Arab bureau, was Miss Gertrude Bell, the only woman, other than the nursing sisters, officially connected with the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Forces. Miss Bell speaks Arabic fluently and correctly. She first became interested in the East when visiting her uncle at Teheran, where he was British minister. She has made noteworthy expeditions in Syria and Mesopotamia, and has written a number of admirable books, among which areArmurath to ArmurathandThe Desert and the Sown. The undeniable position which she holds must appear doubly remarkable when the Mohammedan official attitude toward women is borne in mind. Miss Bell has worked steadily and without a leave in this trying climate, and her tact and judgment have contributed to the British success to a degree that can scarcely be overestimated.
The headquarters of the various batteries were in Baghdad. There we had our permanent billets, and stores. We would often be ordered out in sections to be away varying lengths of time, though rarely more than a couple of months. The workshops' officer stayed in permanent charge and had the difficult task of keeping all the cars in repair. The supply of spare parts was so uncertain that much skill and ingenuity were called for, and possessed to a full degree by Lieutenant Linnell of the Fourteenth.
A few days after I joined I set off with Somerset and one of the battery officers, Lieutenant Smith, formerly of the Black Watch. We were ordered to do some patrolling near the ruins of Babylon. Kerbela and Nejef, in the qualityof great Shiah shrines, had never been particularly friendly to the Turks, who were Sunnis—but the desert tribes are almost invariably Sunnis, and this coupled with their natural instinct for raiding and plundering made them eager to take advantage of any interregnum of authority. We organized a sort of native mounted police, but they were more picturesque than effective. They were armed with weapons of varying age and origin—not one was more recent than the middle of the last century. Now the Budus, the wild desert folk, were frequently equipped with rifles they had stolen from us, so in a contest the odds were anything but even.
We took up our quarters at Museyib, a small town on the banks of the Euphrates, six or eight miles above the Hindiyah Barrage, a dam finished a few years before, and designed to irrigate a large tract of potentially rich country. We patrolled out to Mohamediyah, a village on the caravan desert route to Baghdad, and thence down to Hilleh, around which stand the ruins of ancient Babylon. The rainy season was just beginning, and it was obvious that the patrolling could not be continuous, for a twelve-hour rain would make the countryimpassable to our heavy cars for two or three days. We were fortunate in having pleasant company in the officers of a Punjabi infantry battalion and an Indian cavalry regiment. Having commandeered an ancient caravan-serai for garage and billets, we set to work to clean it out and make it as waterproof as circumstances would permit. An oil-drum with a length of iron telegraph-pole stuck in its top provided a serviceable stove, and when it rained we played bridge or read.
I was ever ready to reduce my kit to any extent in order to have space for some books, and Voltaire'sCharles XIIwas the first called upon to carry me to another part of the world from that in which I at the moment found myself. I always kept a volume of some sort in my pocket, and during halts I would read in the shade cast by the turret of my car. The two volumes of Layard'sEarly Adventuresproved a great success. The writer, the great Assyriologist, is better known as the author ofNineveh and Babylon. The book I was reading had been written when he was in his early twenties, but published for the first time forty years later. Layard started life as a solicitor's clerk in London, but upon being offered a postin India he had accepted and proceeded thither overland. On reaching Baghdad he made a side-trip into Kurdistan, and became so enamored of the life of the tribesmen that he lived there with them on and off for two years—years filled with adventure of the most thrilling sort.
I had finished a translation of Xenophon shortly before and found it a very different book than when I was plodding drearily through it in the original at school. Here it was all vivid and real before my eyes, with the scene of the great battle of Cunaxa only a few miles from Museyib. Babylon was in sight of the valiant Greeks, but all through the loss of a leader it was never to be theirs. On the ground itself one could appreciate how great a masterpiece the retreat really was, and the hardiness of the soldiers which caused Xenophon to regard as a "snow sickness" the starvation and utter weariness which made the numbed men lie down and die in the snow of the Anatolian highlands. He remarks naïvely that if you could build a fire and give them something hot to eat, the sickness was dispelled!
The rain continued to fall and the mud became deeper and deeper. It was all the Arabscould do to get their produce into market. The bazaar was not large, but was always thronged. I used to sit in one of the coffee-houses and drink coffee or tea and smoke the long-stemmed water-pipe, the narghile. My Arabic was now sufficiently fluent for ordinary conversation, and in these clubs of the Arab I could hear all the gossip. Bazaar rumors always told of our advances long before they were officially given out. Once in Baghdad I heard of an attack we had launched. On going around to G.H.Q. I mentioned the rumor, and found that it was not yet known there, but shortly after was confirmed. I had already in Africa met with the "native wireless," and it will be remembered how in the Civil War the plantation negroes were often the first to get news of the battles. It is something that I have never heard satisfactorily explained.
In the coffee-houses, besides smoking and gossiping, we also played games, either chess or backgammon or munkula. This last is an exceedingly primitive and ancient game—it must date almost as far back as jackstones or knucklebones. I have seen the natives in Central Africa and the Indians in the far interior of Brazil playing it in almost identicalform. In Mesopotamia the board was a log of wood sliced in two and hinged together. In either half five or six holes were scooped out, and the game consisted in dropping cowrie shells or pebbles into the holes. When the number in a particular hollow came to a certain amount with the addition of the one dropped in, you won the contents.
In most places the coffee was served in Arab fashion, not Turkish. In the latter case it is sweet and thick and the tiny cup is half full of grounds; in the former the coffee is clear and bitter and of unsurpassable flavor. The diminutive cup is filled several times, but each time there is only a mouthful poured in. Tea is served in small glasses, without milk, but with lots of sugar. The spoons in the glasses are pierced with holes like tea-strainers so that the tea may be stirred without spilling it.
There was in particular one booth I could never tire watching. The old man who owned it was a vender of pickles. In rows before him were bottles and jars and bowls containing pickles of all colors—red, yellow, green, purple, white, and even blue. Above his head were festoons of gayly painted peppers. He had a long gray beard, wore a green turban and aflowing robe with a gold-braided waistcoat. In the half-lights of the crowded, covered bazaar his was a setting in which Dulac would have revelled.
At Museyib we led a peaceful, uneventful existence—completely shut in by the mud. We had several bazaar rumors about proposed attacks upon the engineers who were surveying for a railroad that was to be built to Hilleh for the purpose of transporting the grain-crop to the capital. Nothing materialized, however. The conditions were too poor to induce even the easily encouraged Arabs to raid. One morning when I was wandering around the gardens on the outskirts of the town I came across some jackals and shot one with my Webley revolver. It was running and I fired a number of times, and got back to town to find that my shooting had started all sorts of excitement and reports of uprisings.
Christmas came and the different officers' messes organized celebrations. The mess we had joined was largely Scotch, so we decided we must make a haggis, that "chieftain of the pudden race." The ingredients, save for the whiskey, were scarcely orthodox, but if it was not a success, at least no one admitted it.
As soon as the weather cleared we made a run to Kerbela—a lovely town, with miles of gardens surrounding it and two great mosques. The bazaar was particularly attractive—plentifully supplied with everything. We got quantities of the deliciously flavored pistachio-nuts which were difficult to obtain elsewhere, as well as all sorts of fruit and vegetables. There were no troops stationed in the vicinity, so the prices were lower than usual. The orders were that we should go about in armed bands, but I never saw any marked indication of hostility. The British, true to the remarkable tact and tolerance that contributes so largely to their success in dealing with native races, posted Mohammedan sepoys as guards on the mosques, and no one but Moslems could even go into the courtyards. If this had not been done, there would have been many disturbances and uprisings, for the Arabs and Persians felt so strongly on the question that they regarded with marked hostility those who even gazed into the mosque courtyards. Why it is so different in Constantinople I do not know, but there was certainly no hostility shown us in Santa Sophia nor in the mosque of Omar in Jerusalem. Be that as it may, forbidden fruitis always sweet, and the Tommies were inclined to force an entrance. During a change of guard a Tommy who had his curiosity and initiative stimulated through recourse to arrick, the fiery liquor distilled from dates, stole into the most holy mosque in Kerbela. By a miracle he was got out unharmed, but for a few hours a general uprising with an attendant massacre of unbelievers was feared.
The great mosque lost much of its dignity through an atrocious clock-tower standing in the courtyard in front of it. It had evidently been found too expensive to cover this tower with a golden scale to shine in the sun, so some ingenious architect hit upon the plan of papering it with flattened kerosene-tins. It must have glinted gloriously at first, but weather and rain had rusted the cans and they presented but a sorry spectacle. From the thousand and one uses to which these oil-cans have been put by the native, one is inclined to think that the greatest benefit that has been conferred on the natives by modern civilization is from the hands of the Standard Oil Company.
There were a fair number of Indians living in Kerbela before the war, for devout Shiahs are anxious to be buried near the martyred sons ofAli, and when they are unable to move to Kerbela in their lifetime they frequently make provisions that their remains may be transported thither. The British found it a convenient abode for native rulers whom they were forced to depose but still continued to pension.
The Lion of Babylon
The Lion of Babylon
A dragon on the palace wall
A dragon on the palace wall
Hilleh, which stands near the ruins of ancient Babylon, is a modern town very much like Museyib. I never had a chance to study the ruins at any length. Several times we went over the part that had been excavated by the Germans immediately before the war. I understand that this is believed to be the great palace where Belshazzar saw the handwriting on the wall. It is built of bricks, each one of which is stamped in cuneiform characters. There are very fine bas-reliefs of animals, both mythical and real. In the centre is the great stone lion, massively impressive, standing over the prostrate form of a man. The lion has suffered from fire and man; there have even been chips made in it recently by Arab rifles, probably not wantonly, but in some skirmish. Standing alone in its majesty in the midst of ruin and desolation amid the black tents of a people totally unable to construct or evenappreciate anything of a like nature, it gave one much to think over and moralize about. The ruins of Babylon have been excavated only in very small part; there are great isolated mounds which have never been touched, and you can still pick up in the sand bits of statuary, and the cylinders that were used as seal-rings. The great city of Seleucia on the Tigris was built largely with bricks and masonry brought by barge from the ruins of Babylon through the canal that joined the two rivers.
The prophecy of Isaiah has fallen true: