THE WAR IN THE CRADLE
OF THE WORLD


PENNSTATE
Harrisburg

18 5 5
Heindel Library
Middletown, Pennsylvania












Photo, Maull & Fox, Ltd.
Lieutenant-General Sir Stanley Maude,
the Man of Mesopotamia."


THE WAR IN THE
CRADLE OF THE WORLD
MESOPOTAMIA
BY
ELEANOR FRANKLIN EGAN
ILLUSTRATED
22-1848
HODDER AND STOUGHTON
PUBLISHERS : LONDON





Best
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
PAGE
THE LONGEST WAY ROUND
1
CHAPTER II
THE SHORTEST WAY THERE
6
CHAPTER III
THE BOMBAY SIDE OF THE PUNKA
22
CHAPTER IV
AN INTERESTING BUT ANXIOUS INTERVAL
39
CHAPTER V
TO THE REMOTEST ZONE
54
1
CHAPTER VI
WHAT THE BRITISH FOUND
75
CHAPTER VII
NOT THROUGH A PORT-HOLE
85
CHAPTER VIII
STRENGTHENING THE FOOTHOLD
104
CHAPTER IX
INTRODUCING THE
POLITICALS'
109
iii


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
CHAPTER X
PAGE
122
HOSPITALS AND THE NURSING SERVICE
CHAPTER XI
GENERAL TOWNSHEND'S ADVANCE
134
CHAPTER XII
LINES OF COMMUNICATION
.
141
CHAPTER XIII
UP THE RIVER TIGRIS .
155
CHAPTER XIV
ON UP THE TIGRIS
169
CHAPTER XV
FROM AMARA TO KUT-EL-AMARA
193
CHAPTER XVI
A NEW KUT
201
CHAPTER XVII
THE SCENE OF THE TERRIBLE SIEGE
214
CHAPTER XVIII
WITH GENERAL MAUDE IN COMMAND
223
.
CHAPTER XIX
IN THE SHADOW OF AN ANCIENT RUIN
229
CHAPTER XX
239
THE MAN OF MESOPOTAMIA
iv


CONTENTS
CHAPTER XXI
PAGE
ROUND ABOUT TOWN
246
CHAPTER XXII
WHENCE HARUN-AL-RASHID STROLLED
259
CHAPTER XXIII
ACROSS AN AMAZING RIVER
267
CHAPTER XXIV
RIGHTEOUS MEN AND SONS OF INIQUITY
273
CHAPTER XXV
AN UNIQUE ENTERTAINMENT
281
CHAPTER XXVI
A DAY'S END
288
CHAPTER XXVII
THE LAST POST
292
CHAPTER XXVIII
AND THEN
298
V


LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Lieutenant-General Sir Stanley Maude, 'The Man of
Mesopotamia'.
Frontispiece
PAGE
Headquarters Staff. Lines of Communication. Major-
General Sir George MacMunn. The I.G.C. seated
in centre, the Deputy Brigadier-General Sullivan
on his right
81
Major-General Sir George MacMunn, K.C.B., D.S.O.,
Inspector-General of Communications of the Meso-
potamia Expeditionary Force
96
Camp of War Prisoners at Basra
Labour-camp at Basra
Mule depot under the palms at Basra
113
The ancient Fortress at Zobier Gate, Basra
Scene in Ashar Creek of the Shatt-el-Arab, at Basra
:}
128
A Visit to one of the Monitors
A British river gunboat on the Karun River at Muham-
merah
161
.
Battle-field of Sunnaiyat. The General at the left, the
A.D.C. at the right of an old trench
On the Battle-field of Sunnaiyat: an Arab ghoul
176
The scene of the great Siege, Kut-el-Amara
The lone Minaret of Kut-el-Amara which miraculously
escaped destruction
193
Deliberate destruction in Baghdad
208
.
vii


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
PAGE
The British Residency, now General Headquarters,
Baghdad
New Street, Baghdad
225
Through the North Gate.—Victorious British entering
Baghdad, famous city of the Kaliphs
240
The British Guns captured by the Turks at Ctesiphon
and Kut; found here in the Citadel when General
Maude took Baghdad
257
A Military Convoy in a Mesopotamian roadway through
the typical date gardens, Baghdad
Pontoon Bridge across the Dijala. Where General
Marshall was Corps Commander before the death
of General Maude
272
The desolate Graveyard where General Maude is buried.
General Maude's grave on the left. Taken the
day after his funeral
289
General Sir W. R. Marshall
296
The Grave of General Maude
304
viii


CHAPTER I
THE LONGEST WAY ROUND
The only thrill to be enjoyed on a voyage across
the Pacific in these perilous days is provided by
the stormy petrel. When that extraordinary bird
stretches its black neck up in preparation for a
swift skimming flight across the surface of the sea,
it looks enough like a periscope to produce a slight
quiver in the fear-centre of even the traveller who
has learned in real sea danger zones to be steady-
nerved and casual.
Rumours of submarines and raiders in the Pacific
are practically continuous, but one pays very little
attention to them. An encounter with a raider is
not to be so greatly dreaded in any case, and my
own placid sense of safety all the way over was
due largely to my belief that no submarine would
dare to venture into the zone through which we
chose to travel, even though it might be able to
get past the naval watch of many nations.
Midsummer though it happened to be, there
were days when our northern horizon was saw-
toothed with Arctic ice mountains, and all the
time we sat huddled in rugs and furs in sheltered
corners of the deck, or sought comfort in the snug
library away from marrow-chilling winds.
When the winds were still, cold fogs would rise
and the great horn would begin to bellow. It was
not pleasant, but it was to be preferred to the taut
suspense one suffers on the seas where the U-boat
is known to bear one company. Yet I must hasten
to record that this route was not chosen for any
reason except that it is the shortest one between
А
I


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
the Pacific coast of North America and the shores
of Japan.
When we started down the western curve of the
great half-circle that we cut across the ocean there
were days when we had no horizon at all, so com-
pletely enveloping the fog was. And it seemed to
me as though, wrapped in mist, we were steaming
farther and farther away from the war and all
that the war means to the world that is suffering
its consequences.
And so we were. At any rate, one got an instant
and inescapable impression that Japan is farther
from the war than any other great country in-
volved, and that she has realised it least of all.
That is, she has suffered little. But her observable
extraordinary gains and material developments are
sufficient to fill a returning lover of her beauties
and charm with a definite sense of loss.
The last time I sailed out of Yokohama harbour
Fujiyama came down to the sea.' So I knew
that sooner or later I should return.
Ordinarily that justly famed mountain stands
afar off, a white-crested glory seen across miles of
grey roofs, of glistening rice-fields and soft, low
hills. And too often it is hidden away for weeks
on end in banks of cloud. But on very clear days,
and especially in winter, it seems sometimes to
come very close and to hover in the foreground of
one's vision in compelling and almost overwhelming
majesty. Truly, it is not an overrated mountain.
Lucky for you, if you like Japan, that you leave
Japan on such a day. Because if Fuji does not
lift her head out of the clouds long enough at
least to speed you on your way you will never
return. Which is a thing to be believed.
And I believed it. I have believed it for many
years. Time and again I have sailed away from
Yokohama, and always, without fail, shining Fuji
has shone for me. And always I have said :
22


THE LONGEST WAY ROUND
* Yes, of course, I shall return!'
For the thirteenth time I landed within the far-
flung circle of Fuji's radiance. It was my thirteenth
time in Japan ; it was thirteen years almost to
the day since I landed the first time; Japan was
the thirteenth Allied country I had visited since
the war began; and it was the thirteenth day of
the month !
Yet I was on my way with a fixed intention of
doing a thing I knew could not be done.
I was going to Baghdad !
I had mentioned to nobody the fact that I was
going to Baghdad, because I dreaded the necessity
for having afterward to explain why I didn't do
it. I said I was going out East, and I intimated
that I might go to India. But even about that
there was some doubt, since India also was closed
to visitors on account of certain war-time dangers
that a too lax hospitality might serve to increase.
In order, however, that there may be no mystery
with regard to my methods of procedure, I beg to
acknowledge now my debt of gratitude to the late
Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, then British Ambassador at
Washington, a friend who believed I was to be
trusted within war-restricted areas.
His Excellency provided me with a special
British
passport, and, in
my behalf, sent letters or
cablegrams to most of His Majesty's ambassadors
and colonial governors from Tokio to Bombay.
And, needless to say, all His Majesty's representa-
tives—Sir Conyingham Greene, Ambassador to
Tokio; Sir Henry May, Governor of Hong-Kong;
Sir Arthur Young, Governor of Singapore ; and
Lord Willingdon, Governor of Bombay-treated me
with the distinguished courtesy and consideration
that one accepts from British gentlemen as one
accepts any other wholly natural manifestation of
the nature of things. It is due that at the outset
I record the fact of my absolute reliance upon their
3


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
kindness and confidence and my profound grati-
tude to them.
After a ten days' interval of almost iniquitous
ease on a great Japanese liner I landed at Manila,
and there I transhipped for Hong-Kong to an
Australian freighter which was misleadingly adver-
tised as providing passenger accommodations.'
But it was quite all right. The dear old tub
crossed the unmannerly China Sea in the wake of
the worst typhoon of the season at the dizzying
pace of at least six knots an hour, and she was not
more than two days late when she came up in the
lee of that islanded wonder-world off the Chinese
coast-Hong-Kong—the terminal port in the Far
East for all transpacific shipping.
I remember a time when one could
go
to Hong-
Kong without troubling to look up ship schedules
and be perfectly certain of getting away in almost
any direction within a day or two at most.
Did one want to go to the United States ? Very
well, there was a possibility of connecting two or
three times a week with some big eighteen- or
twenty-thousand-ton ship for San Francisco, Seattle,
or Vancouver. To India, or to Europe via the Suez
Canal ? One had a choice which made earnest
competition for one's patronage necessary to a
dozen companies. There were British ships and
American ships and French ships and Italian ships
and Spanish ships and Dutch ships and Japanese
ships, to say nothing of the Austrian Lloyd ships
to Trieste. There were even Norwegians and Danes.
But above all there were Germans, the Nord-
deutscher Lloyd and the Hamburg-Amerika com-
panies owning some of the best ships that sailed
the Eastern seas and enjoying a patronage that no
German of any generation now living will ever see
re-established.
But what a difference now! The elimination of
the German and Austrian ships alone would have
4.


THE LONGEST WAY ROUND
been enough, but most of the British and French
ships, too, have been withdrawn for service else-
where. There are no longer any Italians or Danes
or Norwegians, while the Dutch, being restricted on
the Suez Canal route and dreading the perils of the
Mediterranean and the Atlantic, are sending their
ships across the Pacific. It is difficult to believe
that the Eastern seas could be so emptied.
According to the original sailing directions which
I issued to myself, I was to have left Hong-Kong on
a French liner of considerable tonnage and luxury
of equipment. But the Germans sank her in the
Mediterranean on her way out to the East, so I had
to change my plans. This involved angling in the
still waters of official reticence for information as to
further possibilities, and it took time.
The information that there would be a Britisher
along in about two weeks was given to me in great
confidence, and I was expected to pretend in a
general kind of way that I had no idea when or how
I was ever to get out of Hong-Kong in the direction
I wished to go. The British ship would go to
Singapore, they told me, and from there to Colombo
and Bombay. Which was quite satisfactory, as
far as I was concerned. And I could have a cabin
to Bombay for the small price of a suite de luxe on
a gold-plated Aquitania. All right. I wanted to
get to Bombay more than I wanted to do anything
else in the world at the moment, and I did not
object to going all the way by sea instead of par-
boiling myself on an Indian train from Madras or
Calcutta at the height of India's hot season.
5


CHAPTER II
THE SHORTEST WAY THERE
OUR ship was a curious old relic of somebody's
marine scrapheap, and I climbed her gangway with
all my natural fondness for luxurious surroundings
carefully stowed away in the depths of my inner
consciousness. But she was the best Britisher left
on the run down the coast of Asia, so I was not just
being conversationally agreeable when I told the
captain the first day out that I was glad to be
aboard. I really was; and, though I knew that
only a short time before a ship had been sunk in the
Bay of Bengal, I felt a sense of perfect security.
Subsequent life-belt drills, the sight of out-swing-
ing life-boats, loosened rafts, and rope ladders
suspended from the deck rails may have given
me a few inward qualms, but good ship manners
forbid even a reference to a feeling of nervousness
these days. We laughed at the intricacies of our
life-preservers and made a kind of bugaboo play
out of all the grim preparations for an emergency.
The old battle-grey merchantman was not steering
a straight course for the port I wanted to make,
but she was headed in the right general direction,
and when it comes to sea-voyaging the character
of Hun war has made that about as much as any
one has reason to expect.
The evening before we reached Singapore an
Australian who 'travelled for a patent sun-deflect-
ing roof material '-in his own briefly explanatory
language—and who filled all the intervals of his
daily existence with picturesque invective against
6


THE SHORTEST WAY THERE
a pack of unfit officials who had refused to accept
him in any capacity for service at the front, held
forth to a group of passengers, who had nothing
better to do than to listen to him, about 'some of
the purtiest islands in the world' which lie north
from Singapore, and through which a ship must
thread its way ' into the harbour. He was going
to be up early next morning for a view of them,
because nobody could see them too often.
And,' thought I to myself, ‘I, too, will do that
highly commendable thing.'
It is my opinion that a lazy attitude toward such
things results for a traveller in the kind of fatigue
that no traveller should ever feel. In the wide
round of the world's wonders to be bored is to
reveal one's own shameful limitations.
So at the bewitching hour of about half-past five
I shook myself out of a sound sleep that I might
see the rose light of an equatorial sunrise bathing
palm islands afloat on the surface of a silver sea !
I learned afterward that the Australian had
never been there before, and that all the time he
was quoting a lot of fine writing' he had found in
a Singapore 'boost-book filled with advertise-
ments of real estate and rubber-plantations. As
for 'threading,' there was never an island less than
a mile away, and when one showed itself at all it
was nothing but an indistinct mass in a white
equatorial haze. Incidentally, when the rose light
of sunrise began to get in its morning's work it
melted the caulking in the seams of the decks.
It was late in the day before the southern hori-
zon-a long, flat, purple line-began to approach
us ; then we knew we were getting into Singapore.
Ordinarily, it is about a four days' run from Hong-
Kong, and, it being only our eighth day out, we
thought we were doing very well indeed.
I asked the captain all kinds of questions. One
is not supposed to do this, but one does. In any
7


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
case, thinking up reasonable answers keeps a cap-
tain's mind active; and in trying not to show how
annoyed he is he gets exercise in self-control.
I wanted to know all about the uprising in Singa-
pore -how many were involved in it; how many
were killed ; how many were subsequently shot or
hanged; what influence brought it about; how
much German money it cost; whether Washington
was headquarters and Bernstorff head paymaster;
and whether any German agents had been caught
in connection with it. But nobody knows any of
these things. Least of all, sea-captains.
There was an insurrection. Everybody knows
that, murderous gun-shots having a way of rever-
berating round the world even in war-time. The
British troops of the Singapore garrison had been
withdrawn for service in France or Gallipoli or
Mesopotamia or East Africa, and only native
troops—in whom the Britons had the fullest confi-
dence—were left to guard the colony. It was
along late in the afternoon and nearly everybody
was at the Country Club. People were playing
golf or tennis, or were sitting round in white flannels
and frilly frocks, having tea, when suddenly the
finely armed and fully equipped native soldiers
broke from their barracks, or from wherever they
were, and started in to murder
every
white man,
woman, and child in the community. That seems
to have been the programme.
Just how it was stopped I do not know; as all
such things are stopped, I suppose—by quick action
guided by superior intelligence. There was after-
ward another kind of shooting, with human targets
in squads of so many,
And that we know. And
we know we feel great pity for the poor misguided
offenders. But if one is told the number of those
who paid the penalty for armed treason—which
proposed to express itself in wholesale murder-one
is told also that this is no time to write detailed and
definite history. So let nobody in future regard
8


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
Singapore has been British for a very long time.
As a matter of fact, they will have to do something
about it’ at once. On the 29th of January, 1919,
it will be just one hundred years old. On that
date, in 1819, Sir Stamford Raffles, who had been
sent on a voyage of discovery looking to the
acquirement of a British port somewhere in this
vicinity, landed on the then practically uninhabited
island and hoisted the British flag.
The principal thing he discovered-aside from the
magnificence of the harbour-was that the Dutch
had not nabbed it, which was then, and is now, a
thing to wonder at. Though it seems they were
under an impression that they had. The island
was among the useless and wholly neglected terri-
tories of the Sultan of Johore, one Abdul Rahman,
and the Sultan of Johore was a mere figurehead
upholder of the supremacy of the Dutch, and was
supported by them in a way that would have made
any defection on his part fatal to his own interests.
And at once they said to him :
“Of course our treaties with Your Highness cover
the island of Singapura ? '
And His Highness replied, Why, certainly they
do!'
But there was a Datto of Johore-a lesser high-
ness—whose name was Temenggong, and Temeng-
gong hated the Dutch. Some persons might write
that he liked and admired the English, and that,
therefore — But he didn't. He merely hated the
Dutch. So he came to Raffles and told him that
Abdul Rahman was a usurper; that he was a
younger brother and had no right to the throne;
and that the elder brother and rightful heir, whose
name was Tunku Hussein, was over in Riau and
powerless to assert his rights.
Is that so?' said Raffles.
Well, you go
right along over and get him ! We're friends
of his.'
And Temenggong did it. Whereupon Tunku
6
Ιο


THE SHORTEST WAY THERE
Hussein was duly and solemnly proclaimed Sultan
of Johore—without reference to the opposition
camp—and a treaty was immediately negotiated
which gave the Englishmen rights of residence on
the island. That was all. Raffles may have had
visions of eventual British sovereignty in Singapore
-then a city of dreams in nobody's mind but his
own-but at the moment he was asking for nothing
but the privilege of establishing a trading station
and a kind of half-way port between India and the
Chinese coast.
The definite occupation of the island by the
British did not occur until 1824, and by that time
it was a growing concern, wholly British in char-
acter, with a dozen or more European business
firms solidly established, and with a population of
more than ten thousand. There were as many as
eight thousand Chinese on the island as early as
1826, and they have since continued to maintain
their majority, attracted, no doubt, by the oppor-
tunities offered for trade and all kinds of enter-
prises within the security of British law. The city
now has a population of about three hundred and
twenty-five thousand.
In Singapore one is impressed by the fact that a
very large number of the men who look like leading
citizens are Chinese. There are more handsome
and high-class Chinese in evidence than anywhere
else I know of except Peking. In Singapore they
are seen riding about in fine motor-cars, attending
to business in splendidly equipped offices ; running
banks, factories, large shipping concerns, import
and export houses, and every other kind of enter-
prise that would help to make up the sum of a city's
commerce and trade. Moreover, they are the
owners of a majority of the big rubber-plantations
and tin-mines throughout British Malaya. They
are represented on the colonial councils, have a
large share in all municipal governments, and are
regarded by the British as citizens of the highest
II


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
value. They are altogether an interesting evidence
of what the Chinese are capable of being under
decent and honest government.
The British have made Singapore a fine and
rather beautiful city. There are splendid govern-
ment buildings, educational institutions, churches,
business houses, clubs, and hotels; the parks and
open green spaces are many and magnificent; the
streets and tree-bordered drives are well metalled
and well kept; there are sea-walls and breakwaters
and piers, and everything else, in fact, that is
Occidental, and therefore an evidence of unsparing
energy and far-sighted ambition.
The English colonials, and many of the Chinese
also, live in handsome residences and picturesque
bungalows set in large gardens which line broad
avenues running in sweeping curves far out into the
country, where they join perfect highways, over
which one drives to see the hills—hills rolling into
hills and stretching away for miles on miles to meet
the wonderful blue arch of the sea; hills planted
in neatly set rows of rubber-trees which run down
through the valleys and up over the crests, down
into the valleys again, and still up and on as far
as one's eye can reach, that being one of the most
extraordinary sights on earth! And one wonders
what this part of the world would be like to-day if
it had not been for pioneering, energetic, nonchal-
ant, sporting, indifferent, high-minded, more or less
altruistic and altogether wonderful little England !
When I returned to the ship the second afternoon
they were just getting ready to take on what the
captain called 'queer cargo.
It was lying along-
side in a number of great flat barges and consisted
of cranes and engines of immense size and extraor-
dinary awkwardness. The native cargo-coolies did
not know how to handle it, and, for that matter,
neither did the captain. The coolies sat in rows
on the barge rails and regarded it with woebegone
12


THE SHORTEST WAY THERE
expressions, while the captain leaned against the
ship’s rail and muttered maledictions.
And I'm already a day late !' he said.
Is that all ? 'I innocently inquired.
Well, this is not the Mauretania.'
'No, I'd noticed that.'
' All right, chaff if you feel like it, but if I have
to take that stuff on we 'll be here a week. And
then I've got to go off to a bally island and take
on a cargo of oil.'
That was serious, and the fact that I only then
learned about it goes to show how secret and well-
guarded sailing directions are. By that time the
only women passengers left aboard were my unim-
portant self and the always smartly garmented,
ſanguid, and careful-of-herself wife of an army
officer who was bound for Bombay with a fixed
intention of breaking through all the barbed red-
tape entanglements that lay between her and her
husband's station at Muskat.
' And where is the bally island ? 'I asked.
Oh, off sou’east. It isn't even on our course.'
'How long will it take to get the oil aboard ?'
About twelve to fourteen hours.'
Well, don't mind me. I knew when I came
aboard that I was not starting on a pleasure trip.
Are there any more delaying surprises ?
There are. When we leave the oil island we go
to Penang.'
'Oh, we do, do we ? And
And at such a rate, when
are we likely to get to Bombay ?
About three weeks hence—if we ’re lucky.'
'Well, come on,' said I, let's get this cargo
aboard. What are we standing round like this for?'
But it was no use. The question was where to
put the unwieldy articles even after an apparatus
had been rigged up to handle them. I offered to
let him put one of the cranes in my cabin with the
long end of it sticking out through the port-hole,
but he only growled at me. Anyhow, the port-hole
13


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
was probably not large enough. It was a very
dinky ship as ships go. But I will say for it that
before it started on the final perilous lap through
the Mediterranean and on round to London it had
a cargo aboard to the value of more than a million
pounds sterling.
I could write a volume about the way we loaded
up, but perhaps I had better not. We managed it,
at any rate, and I assume a pronominal share in it
because before we were through I was so interested
that I felt as though I carried the whole tremendous
responsibility on my own shoulders.
We finally weighed anchor and plodded off to the
oil island. Our course lay through a close-set little
archipelago which brought to mind all the dreams
one ever dreamed about owning an island oneself.
I should like to own an island. And I should want
it to have long, shining white beaches, a mysterious-
seeming mangrove swamp at one end, and fringes
of tall, wind-bent palm-trees. But I think I should
want it to rise up out of the sea for me somewhere
in the vicinity of New York Harbour.
The oil island was a scar on the dream canvas,
except that down on a long point to the westward
there was a thick grove of cocoanut-palms with all
the trees at the water's edge leaning toward the
sunset. Otherwise it was a collection of unsightly
tanks set in gashes cut in the hillsides.
We groaned our way up against an expensive
and up-to-date-looking concrete dock, and they
carried a four-inch hose through a hatch and at-
tached it to a tank in our hold. Then they began
to pump. The last thing I remember was a curious
rhythmic sound-a combination of chug-chug and
gurgle-gurgle—which went on far into the night.
I know, because far into the night I wandered round
the ship, trying to find a spot where the tempera-
ture felt like something less than one hundred and
ten. I fell asleep in a deck chair as I was wonder-
ing what it would be like in my cabin.
14


THE SHORTEST WAY THERE
brown eggs.
I think I shall have to pass Penang without com-
ment. Though, come to think of it, I cannot. It
was at Penang that I gave up ten dollars for a
pagoda. It would be better to pass Colombo. At
Colombo I got my only excitement out of an insect.
It is called the leaf-insect, and until it starts to
crawl it is quite impossible to tell where the leaf
leaves off and it begins. It comes in all sizes, from
three inches long to the length of a little-finger
nail. And it is not a leaf come to life, though that
is what it looks like. It hatches out of tiny, square,
What would be the leaf stem is its
backbone, and the point where the leaf attaches
to the twig is its head. Its legs look like bits of
decayed and ragged leaf, and no two of them are
identical in length, size, or shape. Its wings are
irregular and veiny and have small discolorations
on them, as though they had been touched by early
frost. You could not tell the creature from the
leaf it was sitting on to save your eyes. Most
extraordinary thing I ever saw! It gave me the
creeps and made me think of horror stories I have
read about vampire orchids and boa-constrictor
vines that yearn for human blood.
If I could have taken my eyes off the thing I
might have seen more in Colombo, but we were
there only long enough to take on a few barge-loads
of tea, and the only other thing I did was to drive
out to a hotel on a rocky point overlooking a storm-
swept bay where hundreds of catamarans go fish-
ing and scud home before the wind, with one huge
brown sail on each bellying as though it would burst.
You sit and watch them with a thrill in your blood
as they fly before the darkening clouds and ride
the high breakers to the long curving beach. And
there they are pulled up under the bending cocoa-
nut-palms, to be secured for the night. You sit and
watch them and drink Ceylon tea, while, by way of
variety of entertainment, dozens of head-nodding,
soft-spoken crows crowd close about you to watch
15


THE SHORTEST WAY THERE
>
have grown worldly beyond belief, and they almost
never come to the temple to pray. So we intend to
erect a magnificent pagoda, a thing of beauty and
inspiration that they cannot escape. Whenever
their
eyes
rest
upon it their thoughts will turn in
spite of themselves to the gods. It will be only
through the gracious benevolence of our friends and
visitors that we shall be able to do this.'
And that was where he passed me the book. I
looked through it and saw all the big figures. There
were pages of them, and I am sure he had collected
thousands upon thousands of dollars. I hesitated
a moment, but I finally said :
Oh, well And as I put down the figure ten
and made a dollar mark I murmured to myself,
There goes a neutraliser for every mission-Sunday
penny of my entire wasted Christian childhood !
It was in the monks' refectory attached to one of
the largest and finest Buddhist temples in the world.
To see it I had climbed a mountain-side, up hun-
dreds of moss-grown steps under the interlacing
boughs of giant deodars. I had paused at the pool
of the sacred turtles and had bought fresh, cool,
green weeds at a little booth on its edge to feed
the monstrous, slow-moving creatures. Then I had
climbed more steps to come to the brink of the
basin of the sacred carp. There I bought small
sweet cakes and crumbled them on the scummy
surface for the sake of seeing fins flash and fish tails
whisked in the air. More steps and more
the templed mountain-side ; past rich, red, up-
tilted roof-lines among the tree-tops ; through red-
lacquered and tinsel-hung interiors sheltering great
Buddhas asleep and great Buddhas awake and
innumerable small Buddhas passing through the
agonising stages of life unto life unto-nothingness !
And then the monk got me.
whom hung long, white, softly falling robes. He
was a Chinese who spoke almost faultless English,
who was handsome in an altogether Western sense,
on up
A monk upon
B
17


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
and who had the manners of a chamberlain of the
Court of St. James's.
' It will be only through the gracious benevolence
of our friends and visitors that we shall be able
to do this,' he said.
To build a pagoda! To turn the thoughts of
Buddhist youth back to the gods! And down in
the town, as I was driving along toward the jetty,
I passed a fine modern building which had chiselled
in the stone above its wide entrance :
YOUNG MEN'S BUDDHIST ASSOCIATION
Flattery in its sincerest form!
Penang is an island on one side of a narrow strait,
and a concession of about two hundred and eighty
square miles on the other. It is the oldest British
settlement in the Straits of Malacca, pre-dating
Singapore by twenty-three years, and it was
founded by Francis Light, father of William Light
who founded Adelaide, Australia, and whose por-
trait hangs in the National Gallery in London.
There is a reproduction of the portrait in a stupid
big boost-book 'I found in the ship's little library ;
and a wild-eyed, rumple-haired man son William
was! His mother was Malayan.
Penang has a population of about twelve hundred
Europeans-British, mostly—and more than one
hundred and eighty thousand Asiatics, a very large
percentage of the Asiatic population being Chinese.
The Chinese are the rich men. They own prac-
tically all the great cocoanut plantations through
which one must drive to reach any point on the
island or on the mainland opposite, and, while
England maintains law and order, it is they who
export much of the tin, rubber, coffee, spices,
tapioca, copra, sago, and other products which con-
stitute the wealth of the Settlement.
It was between Penang and Colombo that Bar-
18


THE SHORTEST WAY THERE
6
retto first began to worry about my life-preserver.
He came into my cabin one day and took it down
out of its rack over my berth, and, carefully placing
it where it would take up the most room and be
most in the way, said, solemnly, “I think more
better you keep close by now.' And after that he
would have followed me around with it if I had
encouraged him.
Barretto was my cabin-steward. He was what is
known in this part of the world as a 'Goa boy.
That is, he was a mixture of Indian and Portuguese
and came from the little Portuguese colony of Goa,
which supplies nearly all ship and hotel servants,
for the reason that, being neither fish, flesh, fowl,
nor good red herring-or, in other words, having no
caste to lose—they are able to handle any kind of
food or do any kind of work without polluting
themselves. They are supposed to be Christians.
Barretto had adopted me after the manner of the
dog that adopted a man.' He was for ever at my
heels, offering lip solicitude and trying to square
himself. This all came about through my having
casually remarked to the chief steward that
wished the creature would condescend to sweep my
cabin at least once a week, give me an occasional
drop of water for face-washing purposes, and not
act as though he expected me to wear out a bath-
towel before I could get a fresh one. The chief
must have had him up on the mat,' because he
came into my cabin one day when I was busy
writ-
ing and dropped on his knees before me.
never more surprised in my life. He put his little
brown hands together in a now I lay me' fashion
and began an incoherent recital in which I caught
such phrases as “Wife and chil'ren,' 'L'ilson-
so high,' 'One baby dead,' 'Earn l'il' money,'
‘Li'l boy-so high-0 memsahib!'
'Rise, little black-and-tan friend,' said I, 'and
make your apologies on your two feet.'
He would not understand such English, of course;
I was
19


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
otherwise I should not have used it. But he saw
that I did not laugh, and he must have thought my
smile was one of benign sympathy. In any case, he
adopted me, and after that he was always leaving
brooms and dust-cloths around where I could see
for myself that he had been using them. And
bath-towels! From Hong-Kong to Singapore I had
only one ; from Singapore to Bombay I had a stack
of them in my cabin all the time, and always osten-
tatiously displayed in some spot from which I had
to hurl them in order to get at something else.
It was a danger zone into Colombo, but it was a
far more dangerous zone into Bombay. Many mines
had been swept up within a certain area round the
port, so it was necessary that every ship should enter
through a defined and carefully guarded channel.
It was about ten o'clock in the morning when we
came up to the point indicated in our sailing direc-
tions as the foot of the lane of safety for us, and
there we joined an interesting company of ships.
One of them was on fire--a big freighter down
from the Persian Gulf. A ghastly sight she was !
Everything above her hull had been burned away
except her funnels, and she was belching great
clouds of smoke and occasional long licks of flame.
Her crew and some passengers, I learned afterward,
had taken to the life-boats and had been picked up
by the big ocean-going tugs that had come in re-
sponse to her wireless call. These tugs now had her
in tow and the intention was to beach her, but she
had a fearful list and looked as though she might
capsize at any moment. Some of us stood by the
deck rail and watched her intently for an hour or
more, thinking we were going to see her sink. She
looked as though she could hardly be worth beach
room even on an empty beach.
Then there was a troopship from East Africa
lying off our port bow, filled with happy men in
khaki who crowded the rails and shouted across at
20


THE SHORTEST WAY THERE
us; and a short distance away lay a big hospital
ship from Mesopotamia. A half-dozen small cargo-
carriers and a full oil-tanker, all low in the water,
were up ahead, while beyond, a little way, another
tanker, outward bound and evidently empty, was
speeding along in defiance of mines and kicking
her propellers in the air as though she were having
the time of her young life. The hospital ship was
painted in the white and red of the Cross of Mercy,
the trooper was grotesquely camouflaged, and
everything else was battle grey. The tropic sun
was beating eye-searing sparks from a shimmering
sea, and all round hovered a wonderful silence.
The scene was a study in unbelievable colour.
Then down came the little black mine-sweepers.
They were very efficient-looking and just a bit
cocky about themselves.
• Here, you chaps, stand about now, will you !'
they seemed to say. 'Let the hospital ship go
first. Look alive there, little tanker! What d'ye
think you are-royalty ? Move over to starboard
and make way. That's right! Troops next !
And now you dilapidated old merchantman ’-this
to us—move along. No need to tell you to keep
your speed down. You couldn't make more than
six knots to save your bloomin' old hull! Be off
with you, all of you! You've got a clear way up
to the docks now, thanks to us as risks our lives
for you! If it wasn't for us you 'd all be down
with Davy Jones !'
And the old merchantman, weighed down with
cargo worth more than a million pounds sterling,
puffed a humble response from her big bass horn
and churned slowly away in the wake of the trooper
--the old merchantman that would go on from
Bombay, through Suez, across the Mediterranean,
and round through the dangers of the Atlantic to
London !
And it was just twenty-seven days since we left
Hong-Kong !
21


CHAPTER III
THE BOMBAY SIDE OF THE PUNKA
It should have been cool in Bombay. It was not
cool. I have set at the head of this chapter a
phrase which is supposed to mean 'cool, but it
is a phrase which must have been invented by some
one in a moment of derisive delirium induced by
hot atmospheric pressure. It refers to the side of
the punka opposite the ropes where the strongest
and coolest breeze is to be enjoyed, but, so far as
my experience goes, it suggests an absolutely false
idea of the Bombay climate.
It is said that the cool season is due in Bombay
along in October. And this may be true. But I
can testify that it makes its way in very cautiously
and that in its earliest efforts it likes best to catch
the stranger unawares along about three o'clock in
the morning. In daytime it may haunt a few
shady corners, but it is wholly imperceptible in any
spot the sun touches.
One's attention is sometimes called to curiously
convincing evidence that the war has actually
changed the climate in the hitherto temperate
regions of the earth, but India is too far from the
guns to get the benefit of any atmospheric dis-
turbance they may create.
However, while the physical discomfort of the
white man in the brown man's land is not dimin-
ished, he thinks less about it than he formerly did.
Toil and worry and sustained serious-mindedness
have taken the place of leisure and fascinating
frivolity, and non-essentials have faded for most
persons into the unregarded background of life.
22


THE BOMBAY SIDE OF THE PUNKA
This is true in some degree all over India; it is
especially true in Bombay, which rose at the begin-
ning of the war to pre-eminent importance as the
chief base of the war zones of the East.
The port of Bombay is the front door of India.
Following the long coast-line round the tremendous
peninsula, one discovers no side doors of special
consequence; and Madras and Calcutta open upon
Asia and the realms of the Pacific. That is why
Bombay, destined to become the first city of India,
developed into one of the busiest centres of activity
on earth when India turned to face a European
world at war and to throw her weight into the
struggle for the Empire's existence.
On the way round from Colombo I reread some
of Mark Twain's impressions of Bombay in More
Tramps Abroad. A friend in Japan gave me this
old treasure, with which I thought I was entirely
familiar, and I had a delightful browse in its for-
ever-green pages. It was a great mistake.
Mark Twain had what he himself called ' an un-
regulated imagination. In an instant he saw Bom-
bay as 'a bewitching place, a bewildering place,
an enchanting place—the Arabian Nights come
again!' And in an instant he saw all the colour
and dash and heard all the wild sounds and the
weird music of Oriental life which others must
search for, and, having found, perhaps may never
recognise. As a preliminary guide he serves princi-
pally to make one regret one's own sobriety of soul.
However, after we had crept for hours up through
the buoyed channel with nothing at all to see except
a dim, far-away coast-line, I did get a vision of
Bombay. Not. a view ; a vision. It had been a
long, weary, slow-passing day. By that time it was
late afternoon and a white mist that was lying on
the sea floated up round the base of the city like a
filmy veil. No buildings at all could be seen, but
rising above the mist were many gilded domes,
23


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
shining white minarets, and uneven red roof-lines,
all bathed in the glow from a great flame-coloured
sun that hung low in the west. It was rather
wonderful and alluring.
Then we steamed up and dropped anchor in a
harbour crowded with ships : hospital ships-I
never saw so many hospital ships in one port !-
battle-grey freighters and fighters ; camouflaged
troopers ; tankers and tubs ; tugs, scows, barges,
common rowboats, and many swift-scurrying
launches. Whereupon the doctors and passport
officials came aboard and the stewards began to
pile the luggage on the decks preparatory to putting
it ashore. The remainder of the day was taken up
with the usual inspections of various kinds.
When we got up to the dock it was black dark
and pouring rain, but, having been on the ship
twenty-seven days, I was glad to go ashore under
any circumstances. So I gathered my small be-
longings, gave a grand-looking Indian baggage-
agent instructions with regard to the rest, passed
through the customs-house, signed my declaration
of nothing to declare, and made my way out through
the puddles and the downpour to a rickety gharri.
• A bewitching place, an enchanting place—the
Arabian Nights come again '? No, nothing like
that! That for peace-times, maybe, and for the
fortunate few. For me miles of low, black freight-
sheds peered at in the gloom over a dripping, leak-
ing, clammy rain-apron; for me splattering mud
and slush and steaming, intolerable heat; for me a
rattle and rumble and jolt and the crack of a
wicked whip over the flank of a plodding horse ;
for me disillusion and vague depression and an
eventual whirl up under the grand porte-cochère of
a wildly ornate hotel, the outer offices of which were
crowded with important-looking Indians in gor-
geous raiment and marvellous turbans and English-
men of the war services-the Englishmen all in
uniform. It was difficult to get accommodation,
24


THE BOMBAY SIDE OF THE PUNKA
but eventually they took me in; and I found lights
and laughter and gaiety and a feverish kind of rush
that could not fail to lift one's spirits. I knew I
was on the threshold at least of Mesopotamia !
Later I stood at a window of my room and looked
down into a deep court. The rain was falling in
gusts and flurries, washing the wonderful leaves of
giant palms that swayed and rustled in the wind.
I looked out across bands of light that were falling
from a thousand windows and balconies; I heard
the far-away clatter of horses' feet and the honk of
the horns of many motors; I felt considerably like
a stray cat in a strange wet alley, and I wanted to
make lonesome-sounding stray-cat noises, but I
thought to myself :
Well, never mind to-day. To-morrow we shall
see.'
6
And to-morrow brought a telegram which said
Their Excellencies would be pleased to have me
spend the week-end with them. Just that and
nothing more. It was indefinite with the indefinite-
ness which assumes that one knows all that needs
be known. And of course one should know certain
kinds of things, but one doesn't always. And I
didn't know in the least where Their Excellencies
were to be found. The telegraphed invitation did
not say. The telephone-book and Murray's Guide
both had Government House located on Malabar
Hill, Malabar Hill being the smart residential dis-
trict of Bombay. But my physical discomfort
assured me that no Excellencies worthy of being
Excellencies would stay in Bombay in such weather.
I thought perhaps my telegram of acceptance---
which had to be addressed to a set of initials and
sent out into space—would be answered by some
aide-de-camp or other who would know that a
perfect stranger should be told how and where to
proceed. But, no, nothing like that.
If I did all my roaming “ 'mid pleasures and
25


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
palaces' and Excellencies and governmental gran-
deurs my homing instinct might have guided me,
but I don't mind acknowledging that I had to ask.
I waited until Friday morning, and I was due some
time Friday afternoon to present myself before
Their Excellencies. It was time for me to do some-
thing about it, and to save myself the embarrass-
ment of displaying my disgraceful ignorance to an
Englishman I went to my own American consul, a
fine, upstanding, clean-cut, business-like, and alto-
gether satisfactory gentleman.
'I'm in trouble,' I began.
With a look of patient resignation he made a
typically consular gesture which said as plainly as
words : All Americans are when they are away
from home. At least that's the only kind a consul
ever meets !'
And I didn't clear up the atmosphere any too
hastily, because I rather enjoyed it; but after a not
much more than merely appreciable pause I eased
his mind by revealing the nature of my difficulties.
After which I was a citizen in good standing.
* You go to Cook's or somewhere and get a ticket
to Poona,' he said. • Your train leaves at a quarter
to three, and it gets you there about half-past
seven. You can depend on Government House to
do the rest.'
It was then half-past twelve, and it was a Moham-
medan holiday.
I would emphasise the fact that when a Moham-
medan or a Hindu takes a holiday he takes it. No
half-holidays or anything like that for him. And
all his holidays, that are really holy days, are sacred
to him as no day was ever sacred to a Christian.
The Mohammedans in Bombay have a monopoly
of the chauffeur and gharri-driving businesses, and
there was not a vehicle of any kind to be found
within a radius of five miles. I had been compelled
to walk to the consulate and I would jolly well have
to walk back to the hotel-a matter of at least two
26


THE BOMBAY SIDE OF THE PUNKA
miles. I had not yet had time to acquire a sun-
helmet, though one is told at once that it is practi-
cally certain death to go out without one, and my
sunshade was a blue-and-white-striped charmeuse
frivolity that anybody could see was far more orna-
mental than useful. However, dying is a process
one is never called upon to repeat. I walked.
And, having nervous qualms about the difficulties
I was going to encounter in getting something to
take me and my belongings to the two-forty-five
train, I walked fast.
In the meantime I had acquired a servant.
When you are travelling in India you simply have
to have a servant. Otherwise you go unserved.
You do, anyhow.
My servant was a Mohammedan and an elderly
kind of gentleman. You do not have women ser-
vants. Only about one and a half per cent. of the
women of India—in a population of three hundred
and twenty million plus—are literate in any degree,
and the minds of the other ninety-eight and a half
per cent., having become eyeless through aons of
benightedness, are not worth much for anything,
the universal testimony being that for general pur-
poses the average Indian ayah is utterly useless.
My servant's name was Vilayat. An Arabian
Nights kind of person he was, and I think he was
named for one of the forty thieves. He was six
feet three inches tall in his bare black feet, and he
wore a tall white turban on top of the rest of his
tallness. He had a grey beard and great dignity,
and he proved to be an expert at getting other
people to do his work for baksheesh, which he freely
and grandly distributed
from the expense allowance
I gave him. Having procured my tickets on the
way from the consulate, I handed them to him
and said :
'We take the two-forty-five train to Poona.'
Whereupon I did my own packing, while he went
off to make himself fit to associate with the govern-
27


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
mentally employed. He returned in fine flowing
raiment and a fresh turban marvellously wound
just in time to boss the coolies I had called to
carry my bags down to the motor-car I had myself,
with infinite difficulty, secured. Incidentally, he
solemnly explained that he had been compelled to
go to a mosque and offer a special prayer in order
to be cleansed of the sin of what he called ' working'
on a holy day.
Just the same, everybody has to have one of him.
Life would not be worth living without him-what-
ever may be said of life with him. He got forty-
five rupees, or about fifteen dollars, a month. And
all the Anglo-Indians-Anglo-Indians being people
who really belong to India and are not just tem-
porary residents complain bitterly about the way
servants' wages have gone up. And justly, too.
One good English servant is equal to at least three
Indians, and in order to get his work done at all
the Englishman in India must have so many of
them that in the end his bill for service often
amounts to more than it would at home.
Five dollars a month used to be excellent wages
for a bearer. Which reminds me that Vilayat was
a' bearer,' not a servant. I'm sure I don't know
why. It is merely a local name and has no mean-
ing at all, so far as I can discover. I never saw
Vilayat bearing anything heavier than a parasol
or a railway ticket, unless my presence in the offing
might be counted as a burden. Though, come to
think of it, all these servants apply for positions
armed with packets of letters of excessive recom-
mendation ; many of them aged and frayed. And
these letters invariably begin, 'The bearer,' So-and-
That must be the way they came by their
curious designation.
SO.
Poona lies south-east of Bombay about one hun-
dred and twenty miles, and to get to it the railway
crosses the great Bore Ghaut, a ghaut being a moun-
28


THE BOMBAY SIDE OF THE PUNKA
tain pass or a range of mountains or a flight of
steps leading down to a river where Hindus burn
their dead and go for holy ablutions, and a number
of other things, for all I know. It is a little con-
fusing at first, but one learns to know the difference
between a mountain range and a stairway, even
though they are called by the same name.
When I am climbing a mountain into cool alti-
tudes I always feel that I am going north. One
goes up north' and 'down south,' and it is
humanly instinctive to feel that everything in a
southerly direction should be down-hill. An indi-
vidual mental quirk, I suppose. The climb down
south up to Poona is a steep and winding climb for
which they have to use powerful engines that puff
and struggle and have brakes that grind and groan.
There are twenty-six tunnels and eight dizzy
viaducts in the course of sixteen miles over the
Bore Ghaut, and during the rains one can count as
many as fifty waterfalls pouring out of the gaunt
black rock of the almost perpendicular hills. A
specially magnificent one, up at the head of a vast
panoramic valley, has a sheer drop of more than
three hundred feet.
In the immediate vicinity of this there are a
number of gigantic pipe-lines winding down the
mountain-side, and long converging lines of tall
steel towers carrying wire up over the far-away
crests and off into a world beyond. One wants to
know the why and the wherefore of these, and one
learns that they are the harness of the waterfalls.
An enterprising company has built a great reservoir ;
the water is stored in the heights, and when the
rains are over and the falls dry
up it is let down as
it is required, and the year round enough power is
generated to light Bombay, run its electric railways,
and turn every wheel in the whole presidency, if
need be.
It is rather a wonderful little journey to Poona,
as journeys go. At Bombay station Vilayat had
29


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
watched me secure for myself a seat in a first-class
compartment, had directed his coolie where to put
my dressing-bag, and had then betaken himself to
some other part of the train. And that was the
last I saw of him.
There was an English army officer sitting oppo-
site me, and I finally succeeded in making him
realise that he might talk to me without outraging
any very sacred conventions. He was quite con-
servative about it at first and I missed no scenery
on his account, but when he once got going he was
as entertaining as need be. He had been badly
wounded in Mesopotamia, had spent several weeks
in hospital at Bombay, and had just returned from
a month's leave, which he spent in Kashmir on a
mountain lake in a house-boat moored in the wide-
branched shade of a drooping chenar-tree. Cannot
say that I was all wrought up with pity for him.
When we stopped at Kirkee he was telling me all
about how he hunted big game in the Kashmir
mountains in the daytime and carved wood treas-
ures in the bazaars of the towns in the evenings.
Kirkee is three and a half miles from Poona and
about a mile and a half from Government House,
which is called Ganeshkhind. And Kirkee is the
station for Ganeshkhind. I did not know that.
How should I? You address mail and telegrams to
• Government House, Poona.' That was what the
upstanding, clean-cut, business-like, and altogether
satisfactory American consul told me. But he did
not tell me that when you are a visitor you get off
at Kirkee and go from there to Ganeshkhind.
I was busy listening to my army officer and wish-
ing I owned some of his carved-wood treasures. In
fact, it all sounded so wonderful that I was just
about making up my mind to forget Baghdad and
to go on up to Kashmir. Then I happened to
glance out of the window.
It was about half-past seven o'clock, dark as mid-
night, and the usual evening rain of the rainy
30


THE BOMBAY SIDE OF THE PUNKA
season was coming down in torrents. In the gleam
of the station lights I saw a white uniform with red
trimmings and a sort of red flannel breastplate
effect fastened on with brass buttons. It was
unmistakable.
Isn't that a Government House uniform ?' I
asked.
The officer peered out into the gloom and an-
swered, “Yes, that's a Government House chauf-
feur.'
I had not told him where I was going, else he prob-
ably would have told me where to get off. And
just then a worried-looking young man came rush-
ing along the platform looking in at the windows.
He had lost something. That something was my-
self. I knew him at once for a secretary. Though
he was not. He was an aide-de-camp out of
uniform. But aides and secretaries are usually of
the same breed of attractive and irresponsible
youth. It was he who had not troubled to tell me
where to go and how to get there. I was glad he
had lost me. He caught my eye.
for Government House ?' he shouted.
With a variety of gesticulation I said, Yes, I was.
The train had begun to move, and was gaining
speed every instant, so he paid no further attention
to me.
He just gathered himself into an energetic
little knot and yelled : Ya-a-r! Ya-r-r! Stop!
Stop!' And they threw on the brakes.
Somebody dug Vilayat out, and he emerged from
somewhere with my blue-and-white-striped char-
meuse parasol, but my week-end trunk with all the
essentials in it was in the goods-van-otherwise the
baggage-coach ahead. They had not troubled to
back the train up to the station, and the goods-van
was just where a lot of roaring little rivulets were
sweeping down the track-sides. The trunk simply
had to go on to Poona, because by that time the
conductor was visibly annoyed and the passengers
were all gathering on the platforms or thrusting
Are you
31


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
their heads out of windows into the rain and asking
sarcastic questions.
Vilayat was ordered to go on to Poona with the
trunk, and one of the motor cars was sent after
him to fetch him and it back to Ganeshkhind with
all haste. It was then nearly eight o'clock, and at
eight-thirty there was to be a grand dinner-party
with forty guests. This is as good a place as any,
I suppose, to say that I knew absolutely nothing
about Indian Government House procedures. Let
nobody imagine that they are like any other pro-
cedures anywhere else on earth.
All this time, standing under umbrellas in the rain
--with lips set, no doubt, in patient resignation-
were a colonel and his lady ; an archdeacon, no less !
and a couple of other guests. We all had to crowd
into one automobile, the other one having gone to
Poona for my trunk, and I think they were dis-
pleased with me. I really think they were. But
as soon as I told them I was a stray cat in a strange
alley and all about how I had to go to the American
consul to find out where the Governor of the great
Bombay Presidency lived, they began to feel better
about it. They were very nice, as a matter of fact,
and when we whirled up under the porte-cochère of
Government House we were all laughing so much
like ordinary humans that the three aides who
came out to meet us, in gold rope, yellow lapels, and
clicking spurs, had to assume a little extra dignity
in order to bring us down to the level of decorum
requisite to the environment.
And I don't mind saying I was just a little awe-
stricken. I had never seen anything quite like it
before. I have met here and there, in my meander-
ings round the earth, a few notable occupants of
notable palaces. But everything in India is dif-
ferent. I learned that at once. And I learned
why, too. I shall come to that presently.
There were two very tall Indians standing beside
the steps which led up under the porte-cochère to
32


THE BOMBAY SIDE OF THE PUNKA
the entrance. They were all dressed up in red,
with splendid high turbans, and very gracefully and
statelily they held ten-foot lances with gilded axes
crossing spears at their tips.
My thoughts flew back to the
years
I once upon
a time spent in Manila, and I made a few swift,
entertaining comparisons. The Philippines have
about ten million inhabitants, and the Governor-
Generalship of the Philippines is the biggest execu-
tive job that the American President has to offer
any man.
Malacañan Palace, where the Governor-General
lives in Manila, is a rather beautiful and dignified
old Spanish residence, and the gardens round about
have been made very fine by a succession of Ameri-
can governors. But as for pageant and parade and
the 'pomp of power,' there has never been any-
thing like that under American so-called sover-
eignty. Instead of gorgeously uniformed sentinels
guarding the grand entrance, there is an Irish
policeman.
* And pwhat are ye afther wantin' now?' says
he.
'Is the Governor in ? 'says you.
And you never by any chance say 'His Excel-
lency. You might very decidedly approve of
ceremoniousness yourself, but you would know
better than to try it on an Irish policeman.
Well, shure, he may be, an' ag’in he may not
bé,' says he. It all depinds. Have ye got an
engagement with 'im now?'
You have, of course. Even an American would
hardly have the temerity to walk in on a governor
without letting him know. Though, come to think
of it, I believe they have been known to do so. And
I don't know about Malacañan Palace now, either.
The Irish policeman was of the old Taft and Roose-
veltian days. It was democracy carried to its
logical conclusion, but I am not sure that many
persons were entirely satisfied with it.
Our Jacksonian simplicity is probably all a mis-
с
33


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
take anyhow, and especially in our outlands. The
brown peoples love show and regard it as an evidence
of strength. They respect a combination of bright
red and shining brass, while the clank of panoply
and the clink of ornamentation are music to their
ears. And, for that matter, white peoples are not
wholly immune to the influence of ostentation and
magnificence. The tall red-and-brass-clad Indians
with the long lances certainly impressed me. They
made me feel as though I ought to be trailing price-
less brocades up the imposing steps, carelessly
dropping pearls on the way.
One of these days I intend to write a detailed
account of a number of things, but just now I must
hurry on because this really is not a visit to India.
It is the splendid ceremony of Indian official life
that I wish to emphasise. The Viceroy and the
governors of presidencies and provinces are the
direct representatives of the King-Emperor, and it
is definitely a part of their official business to main-
tain the dignity of Empire as it is represented in
courtly ceremony and show. It is not every man
and woman, however highly they may have been
born and however used they may always have been
to the scenic effects of court life, who can make a
success of it in a colonial environment. England
trains a majority of her colonial administrators in
colonial administration, and once they get into it
and make a success of it it is a life sentence.
My things turned
up
in the nick of time, and I was
able to descend to the grand drawing-room in a
leisurely manner. I was glad of that, because if
there is anything I do not approve of it is descend-
ing to a drawing-room in an unleisurely manner.
I found when I entered that a majority of the
other thirty-seven guests had already assembled,
and the first person my eyes fell upon was a tall,
stately lady in white satin with a rope of pearls and
a tiara. This was rather disconcerting and made
me conscious of the wrinkles in my gold-brocaded
34


THE BOMBAY SIDE OF THE PUNKA
chiffon over champagne colour. Gold-brocaded
chiffon over champagne colour sounds rather nice as
a description, but there are things which no descrip-
tion can possibly describe, and that gown is among
them. I suppose one would hardly be expected to
travel round with one's tiara-especially in war-
time—but one might have had along one's new
cloth of silver with silver lace and blue net draperies,
if it had not been for the stupidity of a ship's
baggage-master. I forgot to say that my innova-
tion-and-too-big-for-any-cabin trunk which con-
tained all
my
best garments was put off the ship by
mistake at Singapore, and that I might not get it
for a month-if ever !
But to me this tragedy was a mere detail. I did
not know that I was about to encounter a case of
if-you-have-clothes-prepare-to-wear-them-now. I
was used to war-time simplicity, and had come
happily to a point in my spiritual development
where packing for a week-end was the least vi my
worries, whether I had anything special to pack
or not. However, the tiara lady had fewer com-
panions in her haughtiness than I had in my
humbleness, so I managed not to mind.
The numerous aides went through some adroit
social manoeuvres which resulted in the precise but
careless-like circular line-up of the guests round
the room, then the band in the patio—I do not
know what else to call a great flag-paved and
beautifully furnished, half-indoors and half-out-
doors space-began to play, and Their Excellencies
entered.
At which point I intend to stop being frivolous.
I am not meaning to be disrespectful in any case.
I was surprised, that was all; and so much so that
I took one of my dinner partners into my confidence
and told him so, saying that it was the first time
since the war began that I had seen anything so
completely normal in the way of social form and
formalities. It was the first time in three years,
35


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
for instance, that I had seen a company of women
wearing white gloves, and I had spent a good deal
of time in London, in Paris, and in Rome.
But this is India,' said he. We wanted to
stop all the seeming extravagances here too, but
if we should let down an inch or give up a single
item of our usual processes, it would be taken at
once by the Indians as a sign of weakness.'
And that was the explanation. India is proud
of the strength of Great Britain. India loves the
vast confederation of power represented by the
King-Emperor. It has been characteristic of the
Indian peoples throughout their history to desert
a banner that begins to trail, and England's banner
as it is borne aloft in India to-day is the only
sign by which the teeming millions are capable of
gauging the might of England. It is necessary to
maintain the immediate and outer semblances of
normality.
I was to learn next morning whence came all the
flowers. There are broad acres, hundreds of them,
within the domain of Ganeshkhind, and the park
surrounding the house, with its stretches of velvety
lawn, its banks of shrubbery, its ancient trees, its
winding, shady walks, its lakes and lily-ponds, and
its unlimited flower gardens, is riotously beautiful.
The long table was ablaze with yellow cosmos
under very high candles, the rays from which shot
upward into the ten thousand reflecting facets of a
row of magnificent old crystal chandeliers. It was
a beautiful scene, and could have made one forget
the war for a moment had it not been that every
man at the table except His Excellency was in
uniform.
And it was a noble room. With a great fireplace
at one end, its vast wall spaces were panelled from
floor to beamed ceiling in splendid oak. Within
the panels hung portraits of British sovereigns.
Her Excellency sat facing the Queen on one side,
while His Excellency faced the King on the other.
36


THE BOMBAY SIDE OF THE PUNKA
war.
Not that it makes much difference, perhaps, but I
faced King William-which shows how far removed
I was from the seat on His Excellency's right. I
was separated from that honour by the beneficent
reigns of both Queen Victoria and King Edward, to
say nothing of Queen Victoria as a girl.
I had an army officer on either side of me, and
the one of lesser rank, at least, gave an excellent
imitation of a man who knows how to knit
up
the
threads of conversation even though their other
ends were held by a perfect stranger, and she an
impossible American. He of the higher rank and
greater rotundity had a mistaken idea which he
spent some time during dinner in misadroitly
exposing. This idea was that to make himself
popular with me all he had to do was to talk about
how long it took the United States to get into the
Some Englishmen are like that. But not
many, Heaven be thanked !
At a certain point at any formal party in India
the host rises to his feet; his guests do likewise ;
they raise their glasses and he says, very quietly,
The King-Emperor!' Then if there is a band
everybody stands perfectly still through the first
three lines of ‘God Save the King.'
Americans used to loll around under the glorious
strains of The Star-Spangled Banner.' Then
came a time when the national consciousness began
to stir and most of us got so we were able to struggle
to our feet-along about the twilight's last gleam-
ing. After which a quickening of the national
heart under a threat of national danger and a sudden
realisation that the cue upon which promptly to
assume an attitude of reverence is, “Oh, say!
And that is where we now all stand up. But
to know what your national anthem really means
you must hear its strains in an alien land over
which your flag flies as an emblem of authority.
Your flag stands for the liberties which it confers
and for the power by which it maintains them, and
>
37


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
if you have seen an unregenerate and chaotic people
rising to regeneracy and order under its clean and
masterful might, you get a new and a different
feeling for it.
When we rose to The King-Emperor' at that
table, I noticed in particular the long line of
gorgeously attired Indian house-service men who
stood rigidly at attention behind the guests they had
served, and my mind flashed beyond them and out
across the boundless expanse of India with her
three hundred and twenty-plus millions of people
for whom the British flag is a symbol of such security
and internal peace as they never knew under any
other, and it was reverently that I echoed His
Excellency's toast :
* The King-Emperor !'
38


CHAPTER IV
AN INTERESTING BUT ANXIOUS INTERVAL
6
In the meantime it must not be forgotten that I am
on my way to Baghdad !
It was in the drawing-room after dinner the first
evening at Ganeshkhind that His Excellency said
to me :
Well, now that we have you here, what specially
may we have the pleasure of doing for you?
'I want to go to Baghdad !'I announced-just
like that. And I confess that such a desire im-
pressed even me as being slightly unreasonable.
Lord Willingdon laughed in a way that should have
discouraged me utterly, and assured me that he
knew few persons in India who did not want to go
to Baghdad.
' But it is impossible ! ' he said. General Maude
never would consent to it, and without his consent
nobody can get into Mesopotamia at all. And
a lady! Oh no! He wouldn't have a lady
within a thousand miles of Baghdad if he could
6
help it.
But I'm not a lady,' I said. He looked a bit
startled for an instant, but he soon got what to the
average working woman is an old-time joke, and
he seemed to like it.
'We might ask him,' I suggested.
And it may be that was the least His Excellency
could have done, but I came in time to realise that
it was a very great deal. He was one of General
Maude's very close friends, but the etiquette of the
situation demanded that he convey my request
through the Viceroy and the chief of the General
39


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
Staff at Simla. I began at once to feel very small
and insignificant, and I had an uncomfortable
impression that to make such a request through
such a channel entitled me to social ostracism.
However, the request was made, and I sat down
to await the issue.
No, I did not sit down. I explored Bombay.
The British did not take Bombay away from its
original owners—whoever they may have been.
The Portuguese did that a whole century before the
little island colony came to the crown of Britain,
and it came to the crown of Britain as part of the
dowry of Catherine of Braganza when she married
Charles II. That is the picturesque small item of
history which gives Bombay a unique place in the
British Empire. Just a little
group
of practically
uninhabited islands lying close in against the main-
land of India, they were transferred to England the
same year New York became an incorporated city
-in 1665.
Just a little group of islands lying close in
against the mainland of India, they were separated
by shallow channels which have since been filled in
or spanned by gigantic causeways, so that now the
island of Bombay, twenty-two and a half square
miles in area, looks as though God and not enter-
prising Englishmen had made it.
Why the Portuguese should have so greatly
under-estimated the value of the place would be
difficult to figure out. Those things interest me,
and I want to drag the ancient mistaken ones back
and say to them, Well, here now, don't you see?'
-thus and so. But the Portuguese seem always to
have been bad judges of ports. And always they
have given things up, not reluctantly and with duly
filed protests, but with a kind of confident assur-
ance that they were getting the better of the bar-
gain. In the early nineteenth century they clung
jealously to the shallow and useless harbour of
40


AN INTERESTING BUT ANXIOUS INTERVAL
Macao on the Pacific coast of Asia, while they per-
mitted the British to acquire the inestimably
valuable near-by island of Hong-Kong, along with
the wide and deep waterways surrounding it. And
in the seventeenth century they preferred the un-
important port of Goa south of Bombay on the
mainland coast-which they still possess—to the
advantages of the finest harbour in the East, which
the British instantly recognised.
At least the British traders did. In those days
the British traders-sailing the seas in their picture
ships of untold and untellable romance—were out
for themselves. They were neither altruistic nor
imperialistic. They thought little of benefiting the
peoples of the rich Eastern lands into which they
thrust themselves, and as little of aggrandisement
for the throne of their sovereign. It was an age
of adventure and gain, and adventure and gain
were the twin fascinations the old traders pursued,
along with their contemporaries of nearly every
nationality.
King Charles II. on his throne, waging his unin-
telligent battle for ' divine right against the then
well-developed spirit of democracy among his
Anglo-Saxon people—what could he know about
the values of the great outer world then breathing
its first breath of unbelievable life? Four years
after the islands of Bombay came to him in the
dowry of Catherine of Braganza he transferred them
to the East India Company for an annual rental of
fifty dollars! And not so very long before that the
Indians sold the island of Manhattan for something
plus a string of beads !
Bombay now has nearly one million inhabitants.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century it
already had two hundred thousand, and early in
the twentieth century the census-takers counted
959,537 souls. Nearly seven hundred thousand of
these are Hindus, and one hundred and fifty
thousand are Mohammedans, while less than six-
41


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
teen thousand, counting both mixed and pure
European blood, are Christians.
There are about sixty thousand Parsees, and the
Parsees are perhaps the most interesting and im-
portant element in the community. It is to British
initiative and example and to Parsee appreciation,
intelligence, and generosity that Bombay owes the
fact of her present existence as one of the most
beautiful cities in the world. Though I do not
mean to imply that there have not been many
generous, intelligent, and appreciative Hindu and
Mohammedan citizens. It is just that the Parsees
have been peculiarly conspicuous for these char-
acteristics.
Yet they still maintain the unthinkable Towers of
Silence in the heart and centre of Bombay's most
fashionable residential district t; the Towers of
Silence, where the Parsee dead are disposed of by
the for ever hovering, horrible flocks of vultures
that, on occasion, grow gorged and careless and
drop human flesh and little bones in the flowering,
fragrant gardens of the great on Malabar Hill.
But what would you ? The Towers of Silence are
unthinkable only to the Christian mind. To the
mind of the Parsee all other methods of disposing
of his dead are unthinkable.
The Parsees are Zoroastrians-worshippers of the
sun and fire as the truest manifestations of the
Almighty-and they came down from Persia into
India about the middle of the seventh century when
they began to be grossly persecuted by the Moham-
medan conquerors of the Sassanide Empire. And
they were persecuted always by the Mohammedan
conquerors of India and by the Hindus, until the
happy day arrived for all religions when British
power began to be predominant in India. But
Bombay was purely British long before the rest of
India was anything but a happy hunting-ground
for English merchants, and the Parsees-along
with other mistreated elements in the population-
42


AN INTERESTING BUT ANXIOUS INTERVAL
flocked to the sure shelter of the British flag.
There are only about one hundred and one thousand
Parsees in all India to-day, and ninety thousand of
them belong to the Bombay Presidency, while at
least sixty thousand of them live in the city of
Bombay.
Many of them are gentlemen of the finest type,
and they are distinguishable by their long black
coats and the curious, stiff, black, mitre-like hats
they wear. Their homes are among the most pre-
tentious in the city, and they control a tremendous
percentage of its commerce and trade.
But they are remarkable principally for their
unusual generosity.
The old-time Britishers in the East India Com-
pany set the example of civic ambition by building
the great Town Hall, and since then millions of
pounds sterling have been spent by public-spirited
citizens for the erection of all kinds of fine buildings
and institutions such as most municipalities have
to worry along without unless they can be munici-
pally provided.
One of the most interesting things about Bombay
is the fact that it cannot be governed. It has to
be coaxed and cajoled and at times benevolently
deceived. It can be governed in so far as control
by the police and the courts over individual action
is concerned, but government may not arbitrarily
undertake anything in the way of development and
improvement without precipitating a variety of
riots.
There is a great, teeming, native city lying round
the beautiful modern quarter-with its parks and
playgrounds, its deep-shaded avenues, its magni-
ficent asphalted, palace-lined drives, its clubs and
its churches, and its uproariously ornamental public
buildings—and in this native city there are large
bodies of representatives of each one of India's
numerous clashing religions. And one might men-
tion first the admirable Parsees.
43


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
Does a pitiful small minority of squeamish Eng-
lishmen desire the removal of the fearful Towers
of Silence to some point outside the heart and
centre of its domestic life and social activities?
To be sure it does. But a united community of
Parsees stands ready to tell the squeamish English-
men to move themselves if they are not satisfied.
The park within which these stand is forbidden
ground. The idea of British oppression and des-
potism in India is a curious kind of joke.
Does it seem to the best interest of all concerned
that a series of wide streets should be cut through
the native city and that large modern tenement and
apartment houses should be built to relieve conges-
tion and to improve deplorable sanitary conditions ?
Yes, but in carrying out such projects certain time-
honoured citizens' rights might have to be invaded.
In cutting a street, for instance, a Mohammedan
mosque might be threatened, and if Government
wants more trouble on its hands than it can con-
veniently manage, all it has to do is to invade by so
much as an inch the sacred premises of a Moham-
medan mosque.
Then there are the Jains and various castes of
the Hindu faith whose prejudices are deep-rooted
and far more important in their view than life
itself. And these people are dirty. Their city
reeks with filth even to-day, though a battle royal
has been waged for years against their habits and
customs. For example, since 1896 plague has been
constantly prevalent in Bombay, and it breaks out
every once in so often in epidemic form. The port
has been quarantined time and again and com-
merce has suffered inestimable loss, while hundreds
of thousands of lives have been sacrificed. Bom-
bay would doubtless lead the whole East to-day in
population if it had not been for epidemic plague.
The leading men of the community decided a few
years ago that something would have to be done
to ameliorate impossible conditions. So the Bom-
44


AN INTERESTING BUT ANXIOUS INTERVAL
bay City Improvement Trust came into being, an
organisation entrusted principally with the com-
plicated and nearly impossible business of getting
the property owners and the population in general
to listen to reason. It has in its membership emin-
ent and respected representatives of every com-
munity and every sect in the city, who serve without
pay, and who, for a good many years, have been
going on with the job as diligently and faithfully as
though they were making large private fortunes out
of it. Behind them a Public Works Department
and a body of their own builders and engineers
stand ready to drive a wedge of actual performance
into
every
breach they make in the compact pre-
judices of the people. And if that is not a curious
way for a Government to get along with the
governed, there is nothing curious in this world.
But it succeeds by degrees. And it happens that
within the past five years splendid avenues actually
have been cut through the native city-not straight,
because wherever a Mohammedan mosque lay in
the way a detour had to be made; streets have
been widened; the drainage system has been
tremendously improved; congested areas have
been thinned out; fine tenement houses have been
built here and there, and such projects undertaken
and carried to completion as could not have been
suggested a few years ago.
There is a Port Trust also, and it, too, is a trust
in the sense that it is a guardian of public interests.
It is an older institution than the City Improvement
Trust and has more to show for its activities. It
has so much, in fact, that I shall not attempt to
write about it. Its members are able to deluge
any visitor who will hold still long enough with
a flood of statistical narrative that will sweep him
off his feet. They like to point with pride, and
will defy you to name any city on earth that has
finer docks, more magnificent warehouses, a better
system of railway communication with the shipping
45


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
services, or that has reclaimed from the sea greater
areas of land.
Oh, all right, you say. You give up. Bombay is
in many ways altogether amazing, has more civic
pride to the square inch than any place you know
anything about, and will be a wonderful city when
it is finished. But ambition always keeps a few laps
ahead of performance, and the war caught Bombay
looking like anything but a finished product.
And, as I have said, the port is the front door of
India. It was without a day's warning really that
that door was thrown open to the greatest influx
and egress of materials and men that the country
had ever known. But the result was that every-
thing went ahead and got itself completed and in
operation in about half the time that ordinarily
would be considered reasonable.
In India's terrific population there were before the
war only about one hundred and twenty-five thou-
sand Britishers all told, and of these more than
three-fifths were soldiers. There were some eighty
thousand English troops and one hundred and fifty
thousand native troops in the regular Indian army.
The native reserve forces amounted to only thirty-
six thousand men; there were eighteen thousand
Imperial Service troops furnished by the princes of
the native states, and, in addition, there was a
home-guard, trained by regular officers, of thirty-six
thousand European and Anglo-Indian volunteers.
This was the sum total of the Indian military
establishment which kept India's millions quiescent
under the 'galling yoke' of England, and I am
told that when war was declared the whole force
precipitated itself upon the unready city of Bombay
with an evident intention of getting out and into
the thick of the fray without an instant's delay.
An exaggeration, of course. But that was the
way it seemed to the city's suddenly harassed in-
habitants. And it means that Bombay was in-
vaded almost overnight by an unprecedented crowd
46


AN INTERESTING BUT ANXIOUS INTERVAL
of army officers engaged on the never-before-under-
taken-on-such-a-scale task of mobilisation and
preparation for transport, while more troops than
the city had ever seen were moved in from canton-
ments all over India in anticipation of immediate
embarkation.
Everything everywhere was more or less muddled
in those days, and there must have been fearful
confusion in India. But Bombay could have been
nothing but thrillingly interesting. In private
letters and journals of the time I get a constantly
recurring note of furious impatience with the men
in command, and it is not difficult to imagine the
heatedness and the excitement of luncheon- and
dinner-table conversations.
Nobody knew where he was going, but everybody
wanted to go to France-Indians and Englishmen
alike. Then rumours began to float around that a
force was to be sent to the Persian Gulf!
To the Persian Gulf ? In the name of all that
was unreasonable—why? What good would
force do off on a side-track like that when every
available man was needed to check the German
advance in the west !
Men who ought to have known better railed
openly at the authorities for not being able to
realise that India was not, as they expressed it, at
that moment the Hub of the Universe. What
danger could India be in from the north ? None
whatever! And whatever England required of
Turkey or Persia could be obtained by peaceful
negotiation after Germany was destroyed. And
Germany probably would be destroyed, lock, stock,
and barrel, within three or four months !
What a delusion! And how convincingly it
proves the innocent ignorance on the part of Eng-
Iishmen with regard to Germany's power and in-
tention! Little we dreamed in those days of what
was ahead of us! And little those men knew what
a long, bitter struggle they were to have to preserve
a
47


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
India and the Empire from the danger they were
not able then to recognise !
One day, along about mid-October, 1914, a great
fleet sailed out of Bombay Harbour. It was the
largest of its kind that anybody up to that time
had ever seen.
It consisted of forty-six transports
and three battle-ships--or gunboats of sorts-and
it carried India's first contribution to the war.
Forty-two of the forty-six troopers carried two
separate forces; one consisting of cavalry, royal
artillery, and infantry for France, and the other
infantry, artillery, and Imperial Service troops for
East Africa. The other four, escorted by one gun-
boat, were bound for the Persian Gulf-carrying
the vanguard of the army that has held the Meso-
potamian zone.
An officer who was in command of one of the
Indian regiments bound for the Persian Gulf-him-
self in a fit of depression at the time because he
could not go to France-has sketched for me the
scene of the sailing of this armada in colourful remi-
niscence. H.M.S. Swiftsure, a unit in the con-
voy, ran up a signal for all transports to be ready
to heave anchor, and, in quiet, impressive obedience,
each division moved slowly out to position in the
grand fleet. The formation was completed just
beyond the wide, beautiful outer harbour, and it
was in the orange light of a tropical sunset that the
ships steamed majestically away. They were to
part company when night had fallen, to go their
separate mysterious directions.
One can imagine that Bombay, after weeks of the
excitement and rush of preparation, waked
up next
morning with the feeling which has grown familiar
to so many persons in the world—the feeling of
being very much left behind.
But there was work to do. England and Turkey
were not yet at war; there was no Gallipoli and no
Mesopotamia ; but there were the German troops
48


AN INTERESTING BUT ANXIOUS INTERVAL
in East Africa on the borders of British East Africa
to be accounted for, and Bombay would have to be
both the base of supplies and the port for casualties
in connection with operations in that direction.
And since England and Turkey declared war
within two weeks it was not long before Bombay
became the pivotal point of the widest-flung war
area of them all. Instantly, unanimously, and with
the strong support of the central Government, the
British in India determined to discharge without
assistance every obligation that could be imposed
by the necessities of this area. And the actual
performance has exceeded everybody's original
conception of the possibilities.
As I am confining myself to a consideration of
Bombay as a great British city and centre of war
activity in India, I shall have to expose myself to a
charge of partiality and of neglect of the fine work
done and the sacrifices made in other cities and
provinces of the Empire. But I think no reason-
able person would expect any one to cover such a
subject in less than several volumes.
Through the port of Bombay the armies in Meso-
potamia and East Africa had to be provided with
food, equipment, munitions, and all the parapher-
nalia of war, to say nothing of reinforcements
mobilised in India or coming from various directions
for transhipment at Bombay. But the first thing
the city had to face was the necessity for making
provision for the wounded and for meeting demands
for different kinds of relief. They were fairly well
off for peace-time hospitals—thanks to the gene-
rosity of public-spirited men-but a few hundred
casualties would have taxed their capacity, and
before the war organisers had time to finish their
preliminary discussions they began to get appeals
for help from Mesopotamia, from Gallipoli, and
even from Europe.
I cannot imagine how it was accomplished, but
D
49


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
the city now has five or six of the finest military
hospitals in the world, with a capacity of something
like ten thousand beds. In addition to which,
when Alexandria and Cairo were being swamped by
the fearful backwash from Gallipoli, a full hospital
unit with complete equipment was organised and
sent to Egypt.
There is a Bombay Presidency War and Relief
Fund which undertakes anything from establishing
hospitals to boosting great popular loans, and the
Women's Branch is the Women's Branch. To the
casual onlooker and stranger in the land it looks very
much like the tail that wags the dog. Which means
that a great part of every kind of war work seems
to be done by the women.
The Women's Branch was organised by Lady
Willingdon, and Lady Willingdon is a business
woman. She went all over the great Presidency,
which has something like twenty million inhabi-
tants, and organised the whole population of
women, Indians and English together. Then she
instituted a system of not too friendly rivalry be-
tween communities, which has resulted in a perfect
deluge of successful output.
The organisation has made good with a minimum
of friction, overlapping, and delay, and this has been
due not so much to unusual devotion, perhaps, as to
the fact that everything has been done on a business
basis. I wonder if any one will ever compile statis-
tics with regard to the number of pyjamas, bandages,
bed jackets, fracture pillows, lounging-robes, slippers,
underwear, sweaters, socks, and various other neces-
sities that have been turned out by the women of
the world in volunteer service during the past four
years. And will any one ever try to estimate the
value of this work ? It is beyond calculation.
The Women's Branch also accumulates and dis-
tributes both in Mesopotamia and East Africa all
kinds of toilet articles and small things of con-
venience and comfort that soldiers like and need
50


AN INTERESTING BUT ANXIOUS INTERVAL
and that are not included in their regular equip-
ment. And there is a department devoted to the
accumulation and distribution of periodicals and
libraries. Altogether a most admirable institution.
Another thing which has been undertaken with
great earnestness and with promise of justifying
success is the training of disabled Indian soldiers in
profitable trades. The pension of the disabled
soldier is very liberal considering the average earn-
ing capacity of the average Indian, so he is fairly
well off to begin with. But it is the idleness of the
incapacitated man that is to be dreaded more than
the possibility of his ever being in actual need. So
the Queen Mary's Technical School for Indian
Soldiers was established, and now has enrolled a
large and
very interesting company
of men; men
who are blind, armless, legless, and maimed in
every imaginable way, and who are learning to do
things that will keep them employed if they wish,
and add considerably to their resources.
Some are learning to operate looms of one kind
or another; some make artificial flowers ;
raise chickens; some who have both arms but are
legless, go in for work on different kinds of electrical
apparatus; and a large number are learning to
use hose-knitting machines. It is only within
recent years that millions of Indians have begun
to wear socks, but they wear them now-with
garments which bear no resemblance to trousers,
and which do not cover their calf-clasping garters--
and the business of knitting socks can be very
profitable. Each disabled soldier who cares to go
in for knitting socks is given a machine which
becomes his personal property.
Eventually I began to fear that I was quite right
when I assured myself that it was not even remotely
possible that I would be permitted to go to Baghdad.
Why should General Maude make of me a con-
spicuous exception to his unalterable rule ? During
51


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
the first two weeks of waiting I had an unwavering
faith that eventually he would, but I was practically
alone in my optimism.
Then the third week began to drag along, and not
a word of any kind had come out of Mesopotamia.
Many of my new-found friends began to look
pleased, and to give expression to their sympathies
with a confident finality of tone which drove me
to looking up routes to Kashmir. Also I had an
official invitation to visit the capital of the Mahara-
jah of Mysore, and that sounded almost sufficiently
alluring to relieve in some degree my pangs of dis-
appointment. Had it not been for the old adage
about no news being good news, I should have given
up hope long before I did.
Though I did have one friend who shared my
faith to some extent. Brigadier-General Stukely
St. John, the port commandant, was convinced that
there was no reason on earth why I should not be
permitted to go, and that, therefore — I regarded
him as a most unusually intelligent and broad-
minded man.
He gave me the freedom of his wonderful docks,
and I spent many profitable hours in the midst of
the interesting operations which he directs. I saw
troops off to Mesopotamia and troops returning ;
I watched on several occasions the orderly and
noiseless disembarkation of ship-loads of sick and
wounded men; I went through acres of freight-sheds
packed to capacity with materials of war and
examined innumerable card indexes and files of
various kinds in an endeavour to learn something
about the scope of the supply and transport end of
the business of war. And everything I learned
served to strengthen my desire to follow the lines
on up to the far-away battle-front.
One morning I went down early to have break-
fast with the General and a fine old Australian skip-
per, who was taking on a load of cavalry horses.
They thought I would appreciate an opportunity to
52


CHAPTER V
TO THE REMOTEST ZONE
It was Thursday. General St. John told me that
a cabin would be reserved for me on a troopship
sailing Saturday at noon, and I spent the interven-
ing forty-eight hours unmaking all the other plans
I had made and in getting ready for what proved
to be an experience as extraordinary as could pos-
sibly be imagined.
My preliminary arrangements for making this
trip may be neither interesting nor important to any.
body but myself, but to me they were both of these
things, exceedingly. I was about to start, entirely
alone, for regions which even in Bombay seemed
rather dismally remote, and I had no definite idea
really where or in whose hands I should land.
Though what with all the importance that had
been attached to my going I felt-along with an
uncomfortable sense of unworthiness-a certain
assurance that I would be taken care of. About
the only advice I got from officer friends who had
served in Mesopotamia was :
Take everything you can think of that you are
in the least likely to need, because up there there is
literally nothing.'
In Bombay they call it Mesopot. Few persons
ever take time to say Mesopotamia. Which is not
to be wondered at, since the English have an in-
veterate habit of nicknaming everything. When
everything in Mesopotamia was confusion and
defeat, during the awful period when General
Townshend was besieged at Kut-el-Amara, Meso-
54


TO THE REMOTEST ZONE
pot was thought to be a curiously appropriate
contraction. It is spoken now, however, without
a shade of meaningful emphasis.
Getting ready to go involved the accumulation
of a number of things, including a field kit of bed
and bedding and such camp furniture as I was
likely to need-and a servant. Accumulating a
servant was rather difficult.
Vilayat refused to go. When I told him to pre-
pare himself for a journey up through the waters
where the deadly mine is strewn and on to the days-
and-days-away place whence come the men who
keep always full the ten thousand hospital beds in
Bombay, he first got rheumatism in his right knee
--oh, an awful pain !-and then remembered that he
was a 'family man.' No, he would not
three times as much as he was ever paid in his life.
It was pretty short notice. Even if I had had
nothing else to do, there was not time enough left
to sift the population in a search for another man.
But it had to be done. And I did not find it an
uninteresting game.
I learned, for one thing, that in India no 'family
man’ should ever be expected to take risks. Word
was sent to several employment agencies that I was
looking for a servant, and within an hour a flock
of applicants had gathered in the corridor outside
my door. There was a sample, I think, of every
kind of Indian the country produces. There were
Hindus, Mohammedans, Christians, and what not ;
high caste, and low caste, and wholly untouchable
clean and unclean ;l well-dressed and miserably
clad ; tall and short ; black, yellow, and brown;
and every one of them was armed with the usual
sheaf of letters which I was expected to read and
accept at their face value.
Some of the applicants were suitable enough, but
every one I looked upon with any degree of favour
turned out to be a 'family man. As soon as they
learned that I was going to Mesopotamia they sud-
;
55


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
denly remembered their wives and children, clutched
their precious letters out of my hands, and backed
away. Not one of them would go. Moreover, I
was assured by friends that it was a hopeless quest.
I was about to give up in despair when Ezekiel
came along. Ezekiel is a family man too, but he
comes from Pondicherry and boasts that his grand-
father was a Frenchman, so he regards the ways of
the mere Indian with considerable contempt. In
addition to which he was stamped with a certain
glory for having been to Mesopot before. He was
servant to an army officer during the first year of
the war, and in the first paragraph of his essay on
himself he always refers to 'my regiment. It
never bores him in the least to tell in detail about
how valorous he and it proved themselves to be.
And with me he never made capital out of his
domestic responsibilities except on the frequent
occasions when I threatened to discharge him for
being the worst servant who ever got paid for mak-
ing a general muddle of things. On such occasions
he was wont to drag out an old flat wallet in which
he carried a photograph of an interesting family
group. And there was one wee one-ver' white-
got French blood-curly hair-oh, lady sahib !-we
go back Bombay-I bring-you see ! That was
Ezekiel.
I should not regard it as a calamity if I had to do
all my travelling on British troopships. When you
wish to convey a general sum-up of the environment
of an Englishman who is provided with every com-
fort and convenience that any reasonable man could
reasonably require, you say :
“He does himself rather well.'
And the Englishman does himself exceedingly
well when he goes to war. Not that he is incapable
of going to war unprovided and exposed to all the
hardships there are-he has done that in Mesopo-
tamia—but he can be trusted by his worrying wife
56


TO THE REMOTEST ZONE
or mother to eliminate the hardships as rapidly as
possible, and he does not consider a fondness for
comfortable surroundings a sign of weakness.
The trooper I travelled on was built for the trade
routes in the Bay of Bengal, and used to ply be-
tween Calcutta and Singapore, with stops at Ran-
goon and Penang on the way. She is not very large.
But she is seaworthy, and has ample spaces between
decks. These spaces were once used for cargo, but
they have been made habitable now with rows upon
rows of bunks and berths. Many baths have been
built in, and there are large mess-rooms for British
troops.
Officers' quarters are amidships on the main deck
and are the self-same cabins that American tourists
probably complained about in years gone by when
only tourists were catered to, and when the armoured
cruiser variety of cockroach was thought in Eastern
seas to be among the necessary evils, along with un-
holy smells and the unrestricted disorderliness of
lower-deck passengers. There is nothing like that
now. No insects of any kind, no unnecessary odours,
and no confusion at all. The well-being of the
troops is the first consideration of the authorities,
and on a troopship one lives under military disci-
pline, and enjoys a consequent maximum of comfort.
After bestowing myself in the cabin reserved for
me, I climbed to the spotless upper deck to watch
the men come aboard. There were more than a
thousand of
of them—three hundred and fifty
Tommies, and the others Indian troops. And it
really seemed, as they came in unbroken line
up
the
sloping gangway, like going off to the war. Every-
thing was so methodical that there was not even a
sound above the ordinary hum of quiet talk, and
the embarkation proceedings were over and done
with before one realised that they had more than
begun. We had only to wait for final inspection
before casting off.
The embarkation officers in the port of Bombay
57


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
all wear big red or green silk pompoms on their
helmets, and are very smart in their get-up generally,
the embarkation service being among the things
to which the busy war-working population of the
city likes to point with pride.
Incidentally it is the hardest-worked service con-
nected in any way with military operations. Every
dock in the snug inner harbour-and they measure
thousands of feet-was crowded with supply-ships,
hospital ships, and transports, while in the wide
outer harbour lay many more at anchor, waiting for
vacated berths. But the men who are doing this
work have achieved an admirable orderliness, and
nobody ever seems to be in a hurry about anything.
It is just that the movement never stops.
A transport with a thousand troops aboard, as
well as army officers, ship's officers, medical officers,
coolie corps, and crew, is a haven of peace. One
would expect it to be a kind of bedlam. It is not.
Hour by hour I sat on deck reading, and hearing not
a sound but the throb of the engines and the back-
ward wash of the sea against the ship's sides. Yet
wherever I looked there were uniformed figures.
There were a great many junior officers—very junior
some of them—who behaved with a sedateness to
be expected perhaps of early youth burdened with
grave responsibilities. They stretched themselves
out in cool corners and slept the hours away, or
they sat in groups flat on the deck, playing cards.
A few senior officers more or less monopolised
the little library and whiled away the time at bridge.
Once in a while on the decks forward, where the
British boys were located, a number of fresh young
voices would be lifted in close harmony, or a shout
of infectious laughter
would float up to the regions
of the exalted where I dwelt, but not often.
The Indian troops were bestowed aft and between-
decks, and they gave the junior officers something
occasionally to do. There were so many of them
58


TO THE REMOTEST ZONE
that they could not all be on deck at the same time,
so they had to be exercised in squads. They did
not like it, the officers told me, and would have
preferred to lie in their bunks the week through,
but they boarded the ship in the pink of condition
and keeping them fit was a part of the day's work.
Our Indians belonged to what is known as a
mixed regiment, part Mohammedan and part
Hindu. And this kind of mixture complicates the
business of the quartermaster's department in an
extraordinary way. In order to avoid the defile-
ment which a man of one faith would inflict upon a
man of the other by touching his food they have to
have separate commissariat arrangements all the
way through from training-camp to battle-field.
they will train together and fight together, but that
is the extent of their association. So it happens
that they have to have separate galleys on the troop-
ships. Those on our ship were very interesting.
They were common kitchen ranges strung along
the rails of the well-deck aft, with ordinary stove-
pipe hung on wire and projecting rather grotesquely
out over the sides just under the canvas awning.
They imparted to the ship a kind of gipsy air wholly
out of keeping with her serious business.
To add a touch of completeness to the Sabbath-
like calm which prevailed on the ship I read the
Bible. Becoming intensely interested, I tried to
read it through in twenty-four hours. This cannot
be done. Incidentally, I had some difficulty in
finding one. It is a sign of the times, I am afraid,
that one never gets a Bible any more as a going-away
present when one starts off on a long journey.
Though I might better say, perhaps, that it was a
sign of unintelligence on my part that I did not
think to carry with me one of several that were
bestowed upon me in godlier days.
I was going to Baghdad, was I not ? When I
left New York I believed I was. I was on my way
59


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
to the Land of the Two Rivers; the land of the
Garden of Eden ; the Cradle of the World’! It
is the land not only of Adam and Eve and Cain and
Abel, but the land as well of Noah and Father
Abraham ; the land of Babylonia, where Daniel
dwelt in captivity with the Children of Israel and
was delivered from the den of lions because he
served his God continually; the land where Shad-
rach, Meshach, and Abednego were cast into the
furnace heated ‘one seven times more than it was
wont to be heated,' and were delivered without
hurt because they would ‘not serve nor worship
any god except their own God'; a land about
which no book has ever been written that does not
bristle with references to Genesis, to Ezra and the
Chronicles and the Kings, to Samuel and Daniel
and Jeremiah. So I might have known that a Bible
would be absolutely necessary to me if I expected
to look upon anything with eyes of intelligence.
Parenthetically, I should like to remark that
being chaplain to troops serving in Mesopotamia is
about the easiest billet a man could possibly have.
His sermons are all ready made for him. Talk
about sermons in stones, books in the running
brooks! There is a sermon in every glint of sun-
light on the Mesopotamian desert; in every mound
of sand that covers an ancient ruin; in every bend
and ripple of the rivers Tigris and Euphrates.
I found a Bible finally, hidden away with the
hymnals and the prayer-books in a wainscot cup-
board of the little library, and, while I intended
merely to get the stories of Babylon and of Ur of
the Chaldees, I became engrossed in the story of
the Children of Israel and followed it all the way
through. Then I had to read the Prophets, and,
having pondered over their prophecies, I was
tempted to re-examine the fulfilment of them. And
afterwards I was very glad I did. It refreshed my
memory of many things I had thought little about
since the days of my youth.
60


TO THE REMOTEST ZONE
In Mesopotamia you live the story of the Bible,
and you do not wonder in the least if it is true;
you know it is. You become as definitely ac-
quainted with Daniel and Ezra ; yes, and with
Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel, and Noah and
Abraham and Hagar and Ishmael-especially Hagar
and Ishmael-and a thousand others, as though
they were alive to-day. And in a way they are.
As they have come down to us through the ages in
tradition and picture they are exact prototypes of
the men who now inhabit that ancient land.
We came at last into the Gulf of Oman, with the
coasts of Sinde and Baluchistan on one side and
the Arabian peninsula on the other. And it was
like stealing silently through a great silence. The
glassy, glaring surface of the sea was disturbed by
nothing but an occasional flying-fish leaping out of
the ship's path and skimming away to safety. The
distant shores-rugged, precipitous, and forbidding
-were like imagined abodes of the dead. And even
the fishing-junks were lifeless. They lay becalmed
on every side, widely scattered over the sea ; high-
prowed, heavy-hulled-of another age than this-
with great brown sails hanging limp on slanting
masts.
Over to the westward on the Arabian side lay
Muskat. We could not see it, but we knew it was
there-a British naval station prickly with un-
pleasant memories. We knew all about the scorch-
ing, soul-withering dreadfulness of it and about the
gaunt, jagged cliffs that ring its harbour. On the
sheer outward wall of one of these is carved the
name of every British fighting-ship that ever sailed
or steamed this way.
Motionless we seemed to lie in the midst of a
world that had halted to the command: Peace!
Be still! But we were moving slowly onward, and
eventually rounded a sharp headland on the Arabian
coast and came into the Persian Gulf. They were
16


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD!
storied waters we were steaming through; waters
that have sent back crackling echoes to many a gun.
British ‘ occupation of lower Mesopotamia and
the country immediately round the Persian Gulf
antedates the war by several centuries, and the
story of it begins with the dislodgment of the Portu-
guese from the now deserted island of Hormuz. If
I ever knew, I have forgotten why the Portuguese
had to be dislodged. But those were the days of
uncharted seas and of merchant adventurers who
sailed them in search of adventure and who needed
little excuse for warlike demonstration.
The British East India Company had reached a
trade agreement with the Shah of Persia, and one
naturally supposes that the Portuguese sought to
interfere with the legitimate advance of British
interests. The only easily rememberable item in
connection with the first British engagement in the
gulf is that one of the two Englishmen who lost
their lives in it was William Baffin, the discoverer
of Baffin Bay.
Master Baffin went on shore with his
geometrical
instruments for the better levelling of his piece to
make his shot,' writes a contemporary correspondent,
' but as he was about the same he received a small
shot from the Castle into his belly, wherewith he
gave three leapes, by report, and died immediately:'
And so passed William Baffin. This dramatic
small incident could hardly be improved upon as a
beginning of England's dramatic record in this part
of the world, and it might interest Master Baffin
to know that the desolate coast of his last earthly
vision is now landmarked for Englishmen by many
tragic, mud-walled, small God's acres filled with
white crosses and shafts of marble brought from
over the seas he sailed. It is said that at many a
point on the shores of the Persian Gulf 'the dead
alone guard the colours that are being borne afresh
in Mesopotamia to-day.'
62


TO THE REMOTEST ZONE
For generations the favourite occupations of the
coast Arabs in these regions have been piracy, slave-
trading, and gun-running. And it must be taken
into consideration that Turkey's notoriety for ini-
quitous governmental methods is no new thing,
and that Turkish overlordship in the Arabian penin-
sula has never been a success. It has never been a
success up along the Tigris and Euphrates, either,
but in those regions there has been some semblance
of control. At Basra and at points above there
have always been Turkish pashas representing the
Sublime Porte as resident governors, and they have
been backed by military garrisons.
Below Basra there are two great divisions of the
Arab peoples. They are themselves divided into
many tribes and tribal groups, but are allied in
strong confederations-on the Mesopotamian side
of the gulf to resist Turkish aggression, and on the
Persian side to resist Persian interference with
ancient rights and liberties—and they have never
acknowledged any authority except that of their
own sheikhs.
The two most important of these Arab chieftains
are the Sheikh of Kuweit and the Sheikh of Muham-
merah, and if these two had not been lifelong friends
of Britain, upholding a traditional friendship of
their fathers before them, the occupation of Meso-
potamia by British troops would have been much
more difficult.
The principality of the Sheikh of Kuweit-
extending one hundred and sixty miles in one direc-
tion and one hundred and ninety miles in another-
lies on the Mesopotamian side of the upper gulf, and
has been ruled by the family of the patriarchal old
Jabir-ibn-Mubarak, who rules it now, since the
middle of the seventeenth century.
The territories of the Sheikh of Muhammerah
are in Persian Arabistan, just across on the other
side, and together these two picturesque rulers can
provide a force of fifty-odd thousand men armed
63


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
with good serviceable rifles. They have provided
no force to support the British, but they easily could
have provided such a force to oppose them had
they been persuaded to ally themselves with the
Turks.
But it is due almost entirely to England's friendly
assistance in the past that these sheikhs are what
they are, and that they are able to exercise even a
partial control over their numerous and turbulent
tribes.
It was to the interest of everybody economically
concerned in the regions round about, and especially
of the Sheikh of Kuweit, that piracy should be sup-
pressed in the Persian Gulf. Pearling is one of the
chief pursuits of the coast Arabs—there being the
two wonderful little islands of Bahrein and Mubarak
just south of Kuweit, the pearl fisheries of which
have netted their owners in a good year as much
as half a million pounds sterling-and in the pearling
season, particularly, the upper gulf has always been
a pirates' paradise.
Turkey could not patrol these waters, though,
considering her claim to sovereignty over them, it
was her business to do so. The Arab sheikhs had
no naval vessels of any kind, and Persia was help-
less. It therefore fell to the lot of England to police
the gulf, just as it has fallen to the lot of England
to police nearly all the otherwise unpoliced waters
of the earth.
From the beginning British influence rapidly in-
creased, this being due not so much to the greater
energy and enterprise of the English traders as to
the fact that England was willing to undertake the
establishment and maintenance of peaceful condi-
tions in the ports and the safeguarding of navigation
in the gulf. English influence with the Mesopo-
tamian peoples has been the result of nothing but
the honourable and generally satisfactory discharge
on England's part of tremendous responsibilities.
During the whole of the nineteenth century the
64


TO THE REMOTEST ZONE
British
army
and navy were used unsparingly in a
never-ending effort to suppress the notorious slave-
trade with the East Coast of Africa. But it is a
notable fact that before mere British supremacy of
influence gave way
in 1914 to absolute British con-
trol in the gulf, the iniquitous traffic in human
beings was by no means extinct. And to realise
the extent of slavery in all parts of Arabia, Mesopo-
tamia, and Persia one has only to observe the evi-
dence of African blood in vast numbers of the
people and the presence among the tribes of innumer-
able black human beasts of burden.
Mesopotamia is inhabited solely by Arab tribes,
and the Arabs are all Mohammedans. But the
Mohammedans of the world are divided into two
main sects by irreconcilable differences of religious
opinion ; sects which in Mesopotamia have indulged
in innumerable fearful contests for supremacy, all
of which have tended to sink the country further
and further into moral ruin and material exhaustion.
The two great Mohammedan sects are the Sunnis
and the Shiahs. The Sunnis acknowledge the
succession of the first four Khaliphs and the right
of the Sultan of Turkey to the spiritual and tem-
poral predominance bequeathed by the Prophet,
and the greatest tribe of Sunni Arabs in Mesopo-
tamia and eastern Arabia—the Muntafik-joined
the Turks at the beginning of the war, and have
succeeded, by frequent raids and constant guerrilla
warfare, in making things very unpleasant at times
for the British on the river Euphrates.
But the Shiahs deny the succession of the first
four Khaliphs and recognise as the true heir of the
Prophet the Imam Ali, who married Mohammed's
daughter Fatima. The sons of Fatima, Al-Hasan
and Al-Husein, rebelled against the Khaliphate
and, according to Shiah belief, were treacherously
slain. They became the martyrs of the Shiah sect,
and the anniversary of their death became the
E
65


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
principal Shiah Mohammedan holy day. It is cele-
brated throughout the Shiah world-which includes
a large part of Mohammedan India-with proces-
sions of mourning and, in some localities, with a
frenzied fanaticism which expresses itself in self-
flagellation and other forms of self-torture, and in
murderous attacks on men of other faiths. The
Shiahs, of course, do not acknowledge the Sultan of
Turkey. Rather they abhor what they regard as
his usurpation of a holy office. And a fact which
relieves the British situation of at least one com-
plication is that a majority of the Arabs behind the
British lines in Mesopotamia are Shiahs.
The holy cities of the Sunnis are Mecca and
Medina in western Arabia, while the chief places
of devout pilgrimage for the Shiahs are Kerbela
and Nejef, west of the Euphrates in Mesopotamia.
Kerbela contains the tomb of the martyr Husein,
while the sacred shrine of Ali is at Nejef. And these
two towns are now in the hands of the British, who
are adepts, from long practice, in the gentle art of
respecting other peoples' beliefs.
So much for the general situation. After which
the German intention. It is known that for twenty-
five years or more the Germans have been laying
foundations and developing schemes for the coloni-
sation and eventual control of Mesopotamia and
the lands round the Persian Gulf, and that these
schemes carried with them a direct threat against
British
supremacy
in the Indian Empire.
The Kaiser bought the concessions involved in
the Berlin-to-Baghdad Railroad project by condon-
ing Abdul Hamid's fiendish Bulgarian atrocities in
the Balkans. At that time every self-respecting
nation on the face of the earth was aghast with
horror at the unbelievable crimes of that monstrous
Turk, but we now know the Kaiser believes that
certain considerations justify the massacre of inno-
cents, and we know that by expressing this belief to
66


TO THE REMOTEST ZONE
the Sultan he was able then to enter into a brotherly
compact with him. And the first thing England
knew her influence in Constantinople and through-
out Turkey began to be systematically undermined,
while the results of successful German diplomacy
began to be increasingly evident.
It is in a bright white light revealing many things
that we view in these days the historic visit of the
Kaiser to the Turkish Empire and his brother, the
Sultan, when, in Damascus, he grandiloquently
proclaimed himself the ' Defender of Islam.' * All of
which was some time after definite German-Turkish
intrigues and conspiracies began to come to light,
and some time after it was realised that the Berlin-
to-Baghdad-and-beyond Railroad was to be Ger-
many's political highway to the Eastern seas.
The first conspiracy of any consequence was in
1903, when it was discovered that, simultaneously
with a German attempt to get a concession for a
railway terminus at Kuweit, the Turkish Govern-
ment was bringing pressure of all kinds to bear upon
the independent Sheikh to induce him to accept
Turkish nationality and title along with Turkish
sovereignty over his ancient hereditary domain.
This the Sheikh obstinately refused to do, refusing at
the same time the German demand. But in the face
of an eventual Turkish ultimatum he had to appeal to
his old-time British friends and declare his inability
to maintain his position without their support.
It was probably in no altruistic spirit whatever
that the British responded. A German invasion of
Kuweit, with the inevitable result of German con-
trol in the Persian Gulf, was not to be thought of.
And so it happened that they assured the Sheikh of
their unfailing support, and declared that they would
tolerate no attack upon him from any direction.
The British senior naval officer in the gulf fleet
drew up a scheme of defence and landed some guns
and marines to augment the forces of the Sheikh ;
then they sat down to await whatever might come
67


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
to pass. But the Turks, not being prepared for
anything so internationally serious, drew back, and
the incident was closed. It had no result except
that it strengthened the bond between Britain and
the Arab rulers. Though it did establish a kind
of recognised status for everybody concerned which
the British did everything humanly possible during
the ten years preceding the war to maintain.
One more item of special interest and importance :
In 1901 an Englishman, Mr. W. K. D'Arcy, obtained
from H.R.H. the Shah a concession for working
petroleum in all its forms in southern Persia. Mr.
D'Arcy was playing a lone hand.' He was a
courageous Englishman, and he spent large sums
of money in prospecting from one field to another,
but without success. It was just that he had un-
limited faith. He exhausted his original capital,
I believe, and was then able to interest other capital
in Burma and India as well as in England. He
went on prospecting, and eventually, in 1908, he
discovered the long-sought-for area and tapped
what proved to be an immense and practically in-
exhaustible oil-field. This field is in Arabistan,
within the territories over which the Sheikh of
Muhammerah exercises control.
The waters of the Tigris and Euphrates join
about one hundred miles above the head of the
Persian Gulf, and flow down to the sea in a mighty
stream called the Shatt-el-Arab. And in the mouth
of the Shatt-el-Arab lies an island called Abadan,
on which the Anglo-Persian Oil Company estab-
lished its tanks and refineries. Abadan is one
hundred and fifty miles from the oil-fields in Ara-
bistan, so a double pipe-line was laid to bring the
product down, and the newly created town of
Abadan, about midway of the island, rapidly de-
veloped into a great oil-shipping port. IỆ was one
of those curious swift developments of peace-times.
68


TO THE REMOTEST ZONE
It all took place after 1908, and by 1912 the pipe-
lines and refineries were in operation. It was an all-
British concern from the outset, the Persian end of
it representing nothing by way of capital, but enjoy-
ing a great deal eventually by way of royalty.
Then early in 1914 the British Admiralty bought
a controlling interest in the enterprise on the
strength of weighty considerations which had to do
with the increasing use of oil in His Majesty's Navy,
and the rather extraordinary trend of political
events in the immediate vicinity. The Admiralty
was roundly criticised at the time for this seemingly
unjustifiable extravagance, but it was about the
only bit of preparedness that England was guilty of,
and justification has since been overwhelmingly
abundant.
Fuel is one of the many things necessary to the
successful prosecution of a war which Mesopotamia
does not possess, and without the plentiful supply
of it close at hand which these Persian oil-fields
fortunately afford, the operations of the Mesopo-
tamian Expeditionary Force would have been much
more difficult than they have been, and they have
been difficult enough.
There is a bar at the mouth of the Shatt-el-Arab,
a great barrier of silt that has done more to try the
souls of the men responsible for the continuity of
supplies and communications in Mesopotamia than
any other one thing. On account of it all ships,
of whatever draught, must be timed with reference
to the tide, while the larger vessels of the supply
and transport fleet cannot cross it at all and must
stop outside while their cargoes are transferred to
river steamboats or barges. The volume of desert
sand washed down by the river is so great that
dredging and maintaining a deep channel is thought
to be an operation of too great magnitude to be
undertaken as anything but a permanent develop-
ment. So the British worry along.
69


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
f? Whether or not we should get up to the bar
on time' was a subject of great importance and of
much discussion. If we did not we should be held
up a whole day in the glare and heat of the upper
gulf. We were to cross the bar at midnight-the
sixth and the last night from Bombay-and the
skipper assured us that we would make it and have
a good hour to spare.
But in my little book of occasional notes which
always intends to be a diary, and never is, I find
two brief items to remind me that, small as our old
trooper was, we had some difficulty in getting over
the bar. In fact, we must have had a horrible night.
Says the note-book :
12.30 A.M.-We are just starting over the bar. The
engines have stopped ; the lead is being cast; a musical
young voice rings out in the silence, calling the depths.
We move slowly under our own headway. A final cast;
the distant clang of an engine-room signal; the engines
begin to throb again, and we are under way-very slowly,
very carefully.
It is a still, hot night, with not a fleck or ripple even in the
path of moonlight which lies across the sea. I am think-
ing that for many a young man aboard this ship it really is
crossing the bar,' so many of them are likely to find the
end of youth and of life in the cradle of the world.'
Somewhat later :
3 A.M.-Going over the bar was not so simple, after all.
We are still going over, and the old ship sounds as though
she would break into a thousand pieces at any moment. I
wonder! But they wouldn't do it if they didn't think
they could ! We 're flat in the mud, no doubt about that.
And the feel of it as we creep along inch by inch! Oh-h-h!
Why should a ship aground feel like that?
The engines pant and puff for a few moments; then
they are still as though they had paused for rest. There is
a powerful deep-sea-going tug on either side, and they seem
to be tearing their very hearts out. We'll never do it !
70


46
48
Kirmanshaho
SAMARRA
SAMARRA
Kill Robat
34
Mandal
Karkshak
20
AVA
BAGHDAD
Kuzhidimai
Diyala
bCteslphon
Badna
KUH
Aziziyeh
Sunnaiyat
Babylon
Hilleh
Hindiyeh
Kut ohAmara
Rivera
Heli-al-Gharbi
diztul
Ali-ash-Shargle
32 Nejeto
32
AMARA
Narrows
Ezra's Tombo
Ahwazo
Euphrates
Nasitiya
Ur-of-the-Chaidees
firi69
QURNAH
annel
Muhammarah
DESERT
SCALE OF MILES
0 10 20 30 40 50
BAŞRADO
Zobiera
Shaiba
Shatt
ABADAN
Anal
30
BUBIYANI.
1dulte
ERSIAN
KUWEIT
EGULF
46
48


1
1
1
1


TO THE REMOTEST ZONE
But of course we did. I do not know when or
how. I waked up in the midst of the utmost
placidity, and managed to get on deck just as we
were passing the town of Abadan.
Having heard so much about the Anglo-Persian
Oil Company, it was with considerable interest and
curiosity that I looked for the first time upon the
evidences of its greatness. A forest of smoke-stacks
and acres of enormous grey tanks could hardly be
regarded as ornamental in an otherwse alluring
landscape, nor would an ever-present and nicely
blended odour of oils in all the stages of refinement
and unrefinement be an attraction for the seeker
after a desirable place of residence. But when the
concomitant of such undesirable things is an assur-
ance, in these days of economic severities, of a
plentiful supply of fuel oil and gasolene at prices
within the easy reach,' and so forth, one is able
to look upon them with a certain degree of approval.
The company has built for the British martyrs
to the general good who have to live at Abadan
a row of very comfortable residences along the
upper
bank of the river. These houses are more or
less cheek by jowl with the works,' to be sure, but
they command a view to the north and the west-
ward of a wide sweep of palm-fringed river against a
background of grey and yellow desert, unmarred by
oil-tanks or any other evidence of human activity.
Forty miles farther
up about sixty miles from
the mouth of the Shatt-el-Arab—is Basra, the port
of the Mesopotamian zone.
And the Shatt-el-Arab
is bordered its full length on either side by a mile-
wide band of date plantations, the tall palms being
set in even rows, between which one gets glimpses
into deep, green, converging distances. In places
the groves thin down to mere river fringes, while
an occasional isolated giant lifts its plumes up to
the blue of the sky, or stately groups, unevenly
grown and wind bent, are etched in fascinating
lines against a desert that rolls away and away to
73


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
the ends of nowhere. I think to myself, “I'm
going to like all this !'
But then I remember a young British officer in
hospital at Bombay, who had just come down with
his nerves shredded from overwork and his vitality
all burned up with sand-fly fever. He said to me:
'Can't see why anybody should want to go to
Mesopot! Except, of course, that you are going on
up to Baghdad. That may be worth while, though
I doubt it. Never been to Baghdad myself. No
such luck! The army's no tourist party, you
know. I've had to stick to coolie
corps and mule-
depots at Basra. Still, I suppose somebody 's got
to.
An expression crossed his face which conveyed to
me whole volumes of unpleasant recollection, and
he added :
' Mesopot! I assure you that all you 'll want to
see you can see through a port-hole of your ship.
Then you 'll want to turn right round and come
back !
I laughed and ventured to predict that as soon
as he had recovered a little of his lost ginger he
would be longing to return himself, and in a whim-
sical kind of way he acknowledged that likely as
not he would.
' It 's probably the most unpleasant hole topside
o' Hades,' he said, “but there isn't any doubt that
it has a kind of fiendish fascination. Chaps get
so interested in what they are doing that they have
actually been known to refuse a month's leave when
it was offered to them! They stick it till they get
shoved out on a stretcher, same as me!'
I wondered. Steaming slowly on up the Shatt-
el-Arab, and into an area of war communications
that was crowded with a variety of commonplace
and anciently curious craft, I wondered. .
74


CHAPTER VI
WHAT THE BRITISH FOUND
ACCORDING to advice offered in a small book of
instructions to British officers with regard to equip-
ping themselves for service in Mesopotamia :
To spend a year in this delectable land you will
require three outfits of clothing-one suitable for
an English winter; one suitable for an English
summer; and an outfit suitable for Hades !
So perhaps the tired-out young officer was right
when he called it the most unpleasant hole top-
side o' Hades,' but one soon learns that it deserves
also his reluctant admission that it possesses a kind
of fiendish fascination.'
In Mesopotamia climate gets more attention
than any other one thing, and it is the first thing to
be taken into consideration in every move that is
made-that is, if such consideration is possible. It
is not that there are so many varieties of climate,
but that the few varieties there are exaggerate
themselves so outrageously.
Believe, if you can, that men are able to live and
work and fight in a temperature which, for months
on end, seldom drops below 110° F., and which
frequently climbs-especially under canvas-to
1300. It is not believable, is it? Yet, along in
March the Mesopotamian sun sets in to establish
such records as these, and through June, July,
August, and September, the records are held with a
pitiless persistence which tries the souls of men and
often enough wrecks the bodies of the strongest.
So it is that Mesopotamian Horror Number One
is the Mesopotamian sun. During the summer of
75


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
1917 five hundred and nineteen men of the Meso-
potamian Expeditionary Force died of heat and
sunstroke. Yet by 1917 almost faultless facilities
for combating these twin evils had been established
throughout the country. Ice is a first necessity,
and there are certain hydropathic processes which
reduce the fearful temperature of the body and
for which special hospital equipment is required.
In the beginning there were none of these things ;
the medical services were {practically empty-
handed; and the requisites were provided only
with the to-be-expected promptness which we
usually express with the word 'eventually.'
Now, however, where British troops are located
there are ice-plants, and there is not a hospital
anywhere, from the farthest evacuation outpost
behind the lines of action to the last convalescent
station on the Shatt-el-Arab, that is not equipped
with special and detached facilities for the instant
care of the man who gets 'knocked on the head by
the sun.'
When this happens there is no time to rig up
paraphernalia for treating the victim in an ordinary
ward, so in connection with all the hospitals there
is a sunstroke hut or tent-a place set aside and
kept constantly in readiness for the instant emer-
gency which sunstroke or heatstroke always presents.
One wonders how many men the sun killed dur-
ing the terrific campaign of 1915, before England
was prepared in any way to fight in Mesopotamia.
Throughout the hot season-and the hot season
always telescopes the cool season, beginning with
short periods in the earliest spring, and lingering
far into the autumn-the British soldier has to wear
the detested and detestable sun-helmet and spine-
pad, and it is a joy to him when, in the orders of
the day along late in November, he begins to get
permission to leave them off after stated hours.
The second, and hardly less to be dreaded, horror
is the pest of insect life. Practically every town on
4
1
1
76


WHAT THE BRITISH FOUND
the rivers is surrounded by groves of date-palms,
while, as I have said, the date plantations on the
banks of the Shatt-el-Arab extend to a depth of a
mile or more on either side. These groves-or
date-gardens, as they are called-are intersected
by numerous small creeks and irrigation ditches
which, while they are practically dry for months at
a time, always contain stagnant small pools here
and there that serve as breeding-places for all the
varieties there are of malarial and fever-carrying
mosquitoes.
But fighting mosquitoes is not such a difficult
thing. It has been done successfully otherwheres,
and it is being done most successfully in Mesopo-
tamia. Besides, a man can escape mosquitoes, at
least during the night, by being provided with a net.
The sand-fly, however, is a different creature
altogether, and is the worst enemy the Mesopo-
tamian Expeditionary Force has encountered. Next
to Germany it is Turkey's most venomous ally and
has incapacitated thousands of men. It is so small
as to be all but invisible, and it mobilises in the
great deserts in armies of quintillions. There are
times when every inch of air space seems to be filled
with sand-flies. No net was ever made that was
fine enough to keep them out, and it is said by
those who ought to know that they can get
through anything but armour plate.' When they
get a chance to settle on a man they proceed to
dig in and eat him up, producing a variety of tor-
ture that nothing else can equal. Then, in too
many instances, comes a slow, wasting, prostrating
fever which nearly always necessitates a trip on
a stretcher down the Persian Gulf to a hospital
somewhere in India.
The British army in Mesopot now meets the
sand-fly—and the mosquito—with all its exposed
surfaces carefully smeared with oily and pungent
lotions which are issued by the authorities as a part
of necessary soldier equipment. But I will say
1
+
77


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
that it took a long time to discover the right article,
and that there is great division of opinion on the
subject even yet, most officers, at least, having
each his own pet brand of unpleasant cream.
It would be overdrawing the picture, perhaps, to
mention scorpions and such crawling creatures of
the desert and the palm-groves. They infest the
land, it is true, but not in sufficient numbers
seriously to interfere with an army that wears
large boots. They are to be dreaded only because
they are such nightmarish things.
Along in October the climate begins to improve
a little, and by the beginning of November it has
been known to be, in some respects, positively
delightful. But by that time the country from
one end to the other is hub-deep in fine dust
which blows up in blinding, stinging clouds; seeps
into everything ; covers one's clothes and belong-
ings; grits in one's teeth; burns in one's eyes;
grinds into one's flesh, and irritates everlastingly.
Even so, the dusty autumn with its cool days and
restful nights is greatly to be preferred to the en-
suing short season when the penetrating chill of
a particularly disagreeable winter is accompanied
by deluge after deluge of wind-driven rain which
turns the dust into a sea of a peculiarly Mesopo-
tamian variety of glutinous mud that clings to
whatever it touches, and, by miring man, beast,
and vehicle, clogs the progress of every kind of
enterprise.
Not a pleasant country any way you consider
it, one might say. Yet, strangely enough, it is a
country of infinite variation, and its fiendish
fascination ’ is a subtle, alluring something beyond
one's power to describe. It inevitably 'gets' every
foreigner who comes in intimate contact with it.
Fortunately for the British troops, their first
operations in Mesopotamia were carried out during
the winter months. Had it been earlier in the
year
78


WHAT THE BRITISH FOUND
there probably would have been more deaths among
them from sunstroke and fever than from Turkish
lead. But as it was, they had only to contend
against such conditions as are brought about by
lack of shelter, inadequate supply transport, ad-
hesive mud or ankle-deep slush, and an almost
continuous downpour.
There are officers in Mesopotamia now who came
in with the first expedition, who have been through
the whole big show, and expect to see it through
to the end. And these men like to tell the story of
the first landing.
Of the great armada that sailed from Bombay
in the middle of October 1914, the four transports
and one gunboat that were bound for the Persian
Gulf steamed up and anchored on the 23rd of
October off the pearl island of Bahrein.
The general supposition was that this force had
been sent to guard the Anglo-Persian Oil Company's
properties at Abadan, but, as England was not yet
at war with Turkey, nobody knew definitely against
what or whom. The ships lay at Bahrein until the
1st of November, and without a line of news from
the outside world. At a time, too, when the world
was thrilling with the most important events in
all history. The officers passed the time expressing
to one another their disgust and exasperation,
going through unsatisfactory landing-drills, dealing
with discontent among the crews, and writing in
little note-books--some of which I have had the
privilege of reading --luridly vituperative accounts
of their various tribulations.
Eventually, however, on the 1st of November,
orders were received to move this force on up the
gulf towards Fao, a fortified town on the Mesopo-
tamian bank at the mouth of the Shatt-el-Arab,
which was of considerable international importance
and contained two telegraph offices, one Turkish
and the other British. And not even the com-
manding general himself knew then that England
79


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
and Turkey were at war, though a declared state of
war between them had existed for more than
twenty-four hours. Which goes to show what
communications were like in those days.
In fact, it was not until two o'clock in the after-
noon of the 2nd of November that this contingent
was informed by signal message that it had regular
work to do. The message read :
Please inform the troops that a state of war now exists
between England and Turkey. Ever since the beginning
of the war between England and Germany, England has
made every endeavour to maintain peace and uphold the
ancient friendship with Turkey, but, urged on by German
intrigue, Turkey has made successive acts of aggression,
and England is now compelled to declare war. This force
has been sent to the gulf to safeguard our interests and to
protect frierrdly Arabs from Turkish attack.
1
So far so good! The men now knew more or
less what to expect, and discontent among them
gave way to hope that there would be something
doing’ in the very immediate future.
There was. The immediate order was to occupy
Fao, and this order was executed on schedule time.
A landing was effected at Fao on the 6th of Novem-
ber, and the Turks, after a brief resistance, cleared
out and started on their long retreat to the north.
And that they fled from Fao rather precipitately
was proved by the character of the loot they left
behind them for the British to gather up. The
guns they abandoned were practically undamaged,
while those in the old fort were found loaded and
ready for firing.
· My!' said Master Tommy, those boys were
in a hurry!'
But friendly Arabs of the neighbourhood volun-
teered the information that the Basra garrison of
eight thousand men, strongly reinforced by troops
from Baghdad, was moving down to join the re-
treating force, and that the British were to be
80






Headquarters Staff. Lines of Communication. Major-General Sir George MacMunn, the I.G.C.,
seated in centre, the Deputy Brigadier-General Sullivan on his right.


WHAT THE BRITISH FOUND
attacked by vastly superior numbers and driven
back into the gulf.
The British, however, moved on without delay,
the object being to forestall an attack on Abadan.
And this important point they succeeded in placing
behind them within forty-eight hours. The Turks
are said to have dropped just one shell into Abadan,
but if it had dropped on the right spot it probably
would have been sufficient.
On the 14th of November reinforcements, both
naval and military, arrived from India, and the
British began offensive operations with the definite
object of taking Basra, an object which they
accomplished in just nine days.
As it is spoken of in a casual kind of way now-
adays, the British advance from Fao up to Basra
sounds as though it might have been an easy per-
formance. It was not.
It was not. It was the modern Briton's
first encounter with Mesopotamian difficulties,
and, knowing practically nothing about them, he
could only meet them pell-mell and take the
consequences.
The advance had to be made through closely set
date plantations hung for miles on end with en-
tangling grape-vines, and intersected by innumer-
able unbridged creeks and ditches. The whole
country was a morass, while down along the river-
bank were great salt mud-flats that are always
deeply flooded at high tide.
The Turks fought from ambush, behind the thick
boles of the palms, from under the banks of canals,
and from previously prepared and concealed dug-
outs, while the wounded-having been told by
their German officers to expect no quarter-
accounted for many an Englishman and Indian by
rolling over where they lay and shooting officers
and men at close range.
There are recorded
instances of men being killed as they were hurry-
ing to the assistance of a fallen enemy.
Though perhaps I should say at once that, so
F
81


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
ance.
far as I have heard, this is the only recorded in-
stance of Turkish disregard of the rules of fair
fighting in straight battle.
Our men were extremely humane,' writes one
British officer, and not only assisted wounded
Turks, but also gave them cigarettes and any food
they had, and the Turks were tremendously sur-
prised. They were told to sell their lives as dearly
as possible, because if they fell they surely would
have to die. What rotten lies ! Our Pathans
were almost too considerate, even halting in
important movements to help the wounded and
the dying.'
The Turks did not offer a long-continued resist-
They were in overwhelmingly superior
numbers, but, having retreated on Basra, they
immediately abandoned that important base and
rather bolted than retreated to previously prepared
positions to the northward on the rivers Tigris and
Euphrates. The final twenty-eight miles of the
British advance were undisputed, and this distance
was covered in a single day-a performance which
the self-communing officer of the frankest note-
book describes as a disgrace.
"No staff arrangements at all,' says he, and
men, both British and Indian, footsore and weary,
strung out all over the whole wretched country!
There is no doubt that our generals have just been
pushing on as rapidly as they could over the diffi-
cult route, and expecting more of the men than
men are capable of. Twenty-eight miles in one
day over ordinary muddy roads would be bad
enough, but such a march at a fast pace through
the kind of thick, slimy mud we have to encounter
here is simply preposterous and enough to render
the men useless for a week!'
That officer, being an old-timer of the regular
army, was annoyed. But Basra was occupied on
the 23rd of November, and the reckless advance
accounted - as it really was—a valuable
was
82


WHAT THE BRITISH FOUND
victory and a fine exhibition of British grit and
determination.
At Basra, considering the immediate necessities,
the British found literally nothing. The old town
has little to do with necessities now, but at that
time it was important. It is about two miles in-
land from the river, and to the westward of it lies
only a boundless expanse of sand. It was a typi-
cally Turkish-Arab town, filthy and unsanitary
beyond description, and left inhabited after the
Turkish evacuation chiefly by a mob of surly and
truculent Arabs, who, while they had found Turkish
misrule always intolerable, gave promise of finding
British law and order even more so.
But the British were interested in the river-banks
on which they would have to establish port facilities.
Every man and every animal and every ounce of
food for both, as well as munitions and equipment
and the necessary materials for developing and
maintaining a war zone, would have to be brought
from overseas, and it was a serious outlook.
There were two or three foreign consulates that
would serve well enough for departmental head-
quarters, and a new custom-house shed that would
come in handy for warehousing supplies. Also-
Basra having been chosen as the gulf terminal of
the Berlin-to-Baghdad-and-beyond Railroad—there
was one temporary German railway wharf, the
beginnings of some freight-sheds, and a few valuable
materials lying about. Otherwise, as a base from
which to supply and to direct the operations of an
army
destined to the kind of service into which this
first force was immediately thrust, the place was a
total blank.
Roads, lights, telephones, vehicles, housing facili-
ties, civilised conveniences of any kind-there were
none! In order to get any conception at all of
subsequent events and developments it is necessary
to realise this. After which it is necessary to get,
83


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
if possible, a sweeping kind of vision of a country
stretching away
and
away to the east and the west
in limitless desolation, and rolling northward in
waves and wastes of grey and yellow desert,
through which two shallow, slow-flowing rivers-
empty then of transport and at times all but un-
navigable-wind a tortuous way.
84


CHAPTER VII
NOT THROUGH A PORT-HOLE
It was early morning when I arrived at Basra, and
I stood for two hours or more at the deck-rail,
wondering vaguely why somebody did not come
to take me ashore, while I watched with intense
interest the disembarkation of the troops we had
brought, and a scene along the river-bank of toil-
some and bewilderingly multifarious industry. It
was war-twentieth century war–in the process of
destroying for all time the somnolent peace of a
world that has drowsed for ages in Eastern dreams.
The Arabs-children of the desert and inheritors
of noiseless ease and ancient methods—say, "The
British came with the smoke.' But it was the
other way round. The smoke came with the British,
and it rolls to-day-in black spirals of industrial
abomination-from workshops innumerable, from
electric power plants, from many steamboats, and
from tall chimneys and funnels of every kind all
round the horizon. And with the British came
also the loud murmur and the clatter and clank of
oil, the shrill shriek of the locomotive, and the
honk of the horn of the motor.
The Arabs say, also, 'Leisure is God-given and
haste is of the Evil One.' They never worked
before in all their lives, but they are working now,
and they are working with a rapidity and cheerful-
ness which denote much with regard to the reward
they get and the character of the discipline they
are under.
But the scene on the amazing river-bank looked
to me like the utmost in disorderliness and con-
85


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
fusion. Docks and wharves were lined with ships
and crowded with men and women-coolies—work-
ing ant-fashion, coming and going in endless lines,
carrying on heads and bent backs boxes and bales
of materials and materials and materials. Acres
of low sheds stretching away into the fringes of the
palm-groves; miles of closely-tented open space,
seen hazily through clouds of dust; pyramids of
hay and sacked grain under light-green canvas;
mule-wagons; motor-lorries; ammunition-carts ;
ambulances ; an artillery convoy.
getting under
way out across a baked grey waste in the distance ;
automobiles hurrying hither and thither; officers
on handsome horses moving slowly here and there ;
a long line of diminutive donkeys tricked out in
brightly ornamented pack-saddles, and with jing-
ling halters and strings of blue beads round their
necks; a longer line of ambling, munching, dis-
dainful-nosed camels on the way down to the ad-
joining dock, where they were being swung up one
by one, like so many bales of hay, and deposited
in the hold of a big grey ship; it was a scene to
hold the newcomer's attention and to make the
time pass swiftly.
And across on the eastern bank of the broad
riyer were peaceful-seeming, long, mud-thatched
and palm-shaded huts, that one knew for hospital
wards, because the Red Cross flag and the Union
Jack flew together from a tall flagstaff in the midst
of them. Beyond them stretched the desert,
bounded only by an orange-and-mauve-lit haze on
far horizons.
A smart young officer wearing the red collar-tabs
of staff service stepped up and-with a certainty
that I was the person he was looking for-said he
had come to fetch me. That was nice.
That was nice. I fully
expected, of course, to be fetched by somebody. I
was to be the guest in Basra, he said, of the
Inspector - General of Communications, and the
Inspector-General's launch was at the wharf steps
86


NOT THROUGH A PORT-HOLE
waiting to take me back down-river to head-
quarters. And back down-river in a launch meant
skimming a swift way at water-level through the
moving picture of interesting things afloat which I
had already looked down upon from the high deck
of the trooper as she steamed up the six miles of
river-front to a new pier at its farthest end.
About ten miles below Basra there are three
large ships sunk in what was at one time the channel
of the Shatt-el-Arab. The masts and funnels of
two of them and the prow of the other are high
out of water at low tide-inviting one to mental
picture-making of what lies beneath them sub-
merged—and form nowadays one of the sights'
to be seen.
They were sunk by the Turks during the earliest
operations, with an idea of closing the river to the
advancing British gunboats and troopships. But
the Shatt-el-Arab is not a dependable stream for
any such undertaking, and, being strong and deep,
would cut for itself a sufficient channel against any
imaginable obstacle. The British attached a cable
to the ship in mid-stream, and, assisted by the cur-
rent, pulled it round to one side. The river did the
rest. Almost overnight it washed a wide curve in
the eastern bank, and the new channel was
established.
From that point on up to Basra the river becomes
cumulatively interesting. An almost continuous
procession of ocean-going ships passes and repasses,
plying mostly to and from the port of Bombay :
hospital ships, cargo ships, and camouflaged
troopers, with now and then a too-busy-to-get-itself-
cleaned-up refrigerator ship from Australia, with
its dirty grey, rust-streaked hull covered all over
with great splotches of red paint, as red paint is
always laid on rust-eaten patches.
And ships nowadays have an almost human way
of looking more in earnest about the thing they are
up to than ships ever looked before.
87


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
The
young
officer who had come to fetch me was
A.D.C. to the I.G.C., and the launch lying at the
wharf steps was a long, slim, red-carpeted, and soft-
cushioned luxury that was proudly capable of
making twenty-five miles an hour. It was driven
exactly as an automobile is driven, and the man
behind the wheel looked like a soldier chauffeur
crouched to put a high-powered racer through the
enemy's lines. He seemed to be in a hurry. I was
not. But what with the noise of the engine and
the wash of the high-foaming wake behind us, there
was little chance of making myself heard, however
much I might have wished to ask questions. Five
miles or more we went, at top speed, and through
traffic so congested that we escaped a dozen
collisions only by what seemed to me to be as many
miracles.
There were six or eight ocean-going hospital ships
lying at wharves here and there, and many strange
fiat-bottomed, high-funnelled, and unshapely Red
Cross river-boats were banked in before the long
rows of hospital huts, their gangways thrown out
across the Bund. These boats bring the wounded
and the sick down the five hundred miles of river
from Baghdad, and transfer them to the hospitals
on shore, or to the ships for Karachi and Bombay.
Lying in mid-stream were a number of cruisers of
the Persian Gulf fleet, while, hugging them close, or
snugging up against either bank to make room in
the river, were a half-dozen monitors and some
tiny gunboats, all bristling with guns that looked
far too large for them. The monitors and gunboats
are painted the colour of the desert dust, against
which they are seen when they are on business bent
up the Tigris or Euphrates.
There were troopships and cargo ships, smoke-
belching dredgers, and many barges and tugs and
double-decked steamboats. But mostly, it seemed
to me, there were swift-scurrying launches-Red
Cross launches, officers' launches, shining and trim,
88


NOT THROUGH A PORT-HOLE
and common, grey-brown, and ill-kept workaday
launches-all darting noisily here and there, mak-
ing wide billowing wakes upon which slender,
fragile-seeming belums teetered perilously, to be
steadied by the strong paddle-strokes of deft Arab
boatmen. The Arab boatman sits flat on his heels,
high in the up-curving prow of his graceful small
craft, and is a picture man with kuffiyeh wrapped
under his usually shapely chin, and bound round
his head with twisted strands of camel's hair.
Along the banks rose a forest of slender slanting
masts on scores of mahaylas and dhows, that were
high and dry in the mud of low tide. These curious
vessels loom large in one's life in Mesopotamia, and
are as much a part of the general scheme of things
as are the palm-trees and the dust and the desert
sands.
The belum is the sampan, or the used-for-every-
thing canoe, of the country, while the mahayla and
the dhow are great, massive-timbered cargo-boats,
modelled on fantastic lines, that must have been
familiar to the people of the days of Abraham.
I found the I.G.C. and the lines-of-communica-
tion staff housed in a rather pretentious, much-
balconied, and many-windowed building on the
Bund, which used to be the German consulate.
When the British occupied Basra, the German
consul did not clear out with the Turks and make
tracks for home, as one would imagine he might
have done. He remained to be taken prisoner-
knowing, perhaps, that he would be transferred to
safe and comfortable quarters in India—and, as
the British were advancing up the Shatt-el-Arab, he
sent an appeal to them to make haste, that they
might be in time to save the Europeans !
The Arabs were on a rampage, looting the town,
and murdering the stragglers in the Turkish retreat
-as is their custom-and it is supposed the German
consul was frightened.
89


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
Among the Europeans to be
saved'
were two
British telegraph clerks from Fao, who had been in
charge of the British telegraph station there and
who were seized by the Turks the minute war was
declared. They were routed out of their beds in
the middle of the night, and marched straight away.
They were not allowed even to dress or to gather
up any of their belongings, and were forced to walk
the full sixty-odd miles to Basra in their pyjamas
and bedroom slippers, one of them even being with-
out a hat. On the way Arab horsemen pointed
rifles at them and threatened to kill them, while
men, women, and children were encouraged to spit
upon them as they passed through the villages and
along the desert trails.
When they reached Basra they were thrown into
the unspeakable Turkish jail, and for a week or
more were mistreated in every possible way, getting
nothing to eat but a few dates.
When the Turks started in full flight to the
north-evidently in a curious state of disorganisa-
tion for the moment—they were released for some
unexplained reason and were left in Basra. And
for this the German consul wanted credit !
Very well. The British good-naturedly gave it
to him and afforded him the most courteous assist-
ance in his preparations for departure to the com-
fortable quarters in India. Then it was learned
that he easily could have saved the young men
from the frightful indignities and hardships to which
they had been subjected, and that he was the
instigator and financial backer of practically all
the Arab outrages that were committed. In other
words, he was a German consul.
In his one-time consulate there are a good many
things which afford the present tenants considerable
amusement. The furniture is of a splendid German
heaviness and the decorations are of the new art'
variety in light greens and sickly pinks.
But he did have some good Persian carpets which
90


NOT THROUGH A PORT-HOLE
he had acquired during his residence in the Persian-
carpet belt, and about these he is to this day greatly
concerned. He could not take them with him to a
detention
camp in India, and as there was no place
to store them in a town newly occupied by a vic-
torious enemy, he had, perforce, to leave them on
the floors. He knew they would be safe enough in
the hands of British gentlemen, no doubt, but he
now has the astonishing effrontery to write occasion-
ally to the I.G.C. to express his anxiety about them
and to ask that they be regularly beaten and aired !
And the curious thing is that the I.G.C. is only
amused by the man's impudence and that he issues
orders every once in a while to have the carpets
attended to. In fact, he is so careful about them
that his less meticulous young staff can hardly
smoke in comfort in the mess-rooms.
Compare this with-a vision of German officers
engaged in their favourite pastime of denuding and
defiling the fine homes of Belgium and northern
France ! Rather gratifying to Anglo-Saxon pride
in Anglo-Saxon character, is it not?
In the communications mess, besides the I.G.C.
and his A.D.C. I found an assistant quartermaster-
general, a deputy assistant quartermaster-general,
and the Deputy with a capital ‘D.' The I.G.C.-
Major-General Sir George MacMunn—is a Knight
Commander of the Bath, and has enough orders
and decorations to fill three long ribbon bars on
his chest and to make it impossible for any one to
write his name with its full complement of alpha-
betical additaments on less than two lines.
The A.D.C. is a one-time prosperous barrister of
Calcutta, who gave up a lucrative practice at the
beginning of things and volunteered for any kind
of service the medical classifiers might find him
fitted for. They gave him the rank of first lieu-
tenant and put him in charge of a mule-depot, and
he got the attractive staff job as a reward for two
years' uncongenial service uncomplainingly ren-
5
91


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
dered. He has no ribbons at all, but he doesn't
mind telling you that he has a younger brother in
France with a Victoria Cross. The A.Q.M.G. is a
serious-minded colonel who went on the water-
wagon with King George for the unending 'dura-
tion and the D.A.Q.M.G. is a major of cavalry
in the Indian Army who has the French Cross of
War and a record of thirteen years' service, nearly
two of which have been spent without leave in
Mesopotamia.
The Deputy-never spoken of as anything else-
is D.I.G.C., understudy to the Inspector-General of
Communications, who holds down the job at head-
quarters when the I.G.C. is off on his frequent trips
of inspection up and down the lines of communica-
tion, which, starting from Basra, follow the courses
of the Tigris and Euphrates and spread fanwise
along dozens of avenues to the farthest outposts on
the battle-lines. The Deputy, a big, white-haired,
Irish brigadier-general, has brown eyes that smile
and a tongue that keeps the community's sense of
humour stirred up to bubbling-point.
And it was with the Deputy, off duty as an
understudy, that I first explored the great city of
war behind the palm belt and got a definite realisa-
tion of the fact that war can be waged construc-
tively rather than destructively if the wagers
thereof happen to belong to a nation with a modern
Christian soul and a gentlemanly conscience.
Desolation, utter and complete and inexpressibly
dreadful! That is bound to be one's first impres-
sion of almost any part of Mesopotamia, and its
curious charm does not impress itself upon one
except at the day's end when it is flooded with
seductive lights.
It was aflame with a fierce noonday glare when
the Deputy and I rolled out into it in a big grey
service motor car, though for a short time we rolled
along over a fine hard-surfaced roadway that was
92


NOT THROUGH A PORT-HOLE
black with oil. He had to tell me about that. It
was the first road that had been built in Mesopo-
tamia since the year before Adam. It is six miles
long, and it cost more than any six miles of road
ever cost before in the history of the world.
There is no stone in the country; not even a
pebble. In fact, there is no building material of
any kind except mud, so everything that went to
the construction of this road had to be brought up
from the interior of India, and at a time, too, when
sea transport was the most valuable thing in the
world. But difficulty and expense were not to be
considered, the road being an absolute necessity.
During the early months of the year the earth is
covered to an average depth of about seven inches
with the thick, viscid mud I have already men-
tioned, which puts automobile transport out of
business altogether and in which neither man nor
beast can get a secure foothold.
The Turks did not believe the British would build
roads. They never had themselves. And they
relied with the utmost confidence during the winter
of 1914-15 on the always hampering climatic con-
ditions, believing that the British would be unable
to establish an adequate base, to say nothing of
making an advance. But the Britisher is just as
good a fighter as the Turk, and happens to be a
vastly more industrious, resourceful, and determined
individual. He certainly did flounder round and
get himself in a fearful condition that winter, but his
first call was for labour reserves and crushed rock ;
and first thing you know there was the six-mile
road connecting all the points along the river where
cargo is unloaded. In the meantime the river-bank
was being rapidly lined with piers and warehouses.
This highway now connects everything else with
the terminal of a railroad that was picked up some-
where in India where it was not absolutely needed,
brought up the Persian Gulf, and laid down along
the west bank of the Euphrates to supplement that
93


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
.
uncertain river as a means of communication with
the far-away north-western battle-front.
Long since, however, a reasonably inexpensive
source of supply for road-surfacing material has
been located and developed, and now the six-mile
stretch is only a historic example to be talked about
in connection with the difficult days. Road-build-
ing is now going on apace in every direction, as one
is made to realise when one's automobile has to
skirt round steam-rollers time and again, or plunge
off into rutted side-tracks and run for miles on end
through dust hub-deep to avoid long stretches of
newly-laid crushed rock.
The Deputy, being more or less used to things
as they are, tried his best to be communicative and
friendly as we drove along through the immensities
and mysteries—mysteries to me, at least—but the
dust was so terrific that to open one's mouth was
at times to risk being choked to death. Every-
thing was covered with it, and to a thickness and
heaviness that I can best indicate perhaps by refer-
ence to a boy I saw at a Red Cross depot clearing
it off the sagging top of a big storage tent with a
shovel. It had seeped into everything to such an
extent that it was difficult, so far as colour was con-
cerned, to tell where the camps left off and the
desert began. Dust and tents ; dust and sheds ;
dust and pyramids of war supplies ; dust and men;
dust and mules ; everything seemed blended to-
gether in an interminable stretch of yellow and
tawny grey. It was desert camouflage.
Within the deep shade of the dust-powdered
palm-gardens there are labour camps, mule depots,
remount depots, veterinary hospitals, and accom-
modation for various native and auxiliary services.
But beyond a sharp line, the palm-gardens leave
off and the desert begins. And out in the desert
the British Tommy and his Indian comrades have
pitched their tents by the tens of thousands. Sub-
stantial huts of wood, with walls of reed mats and
94


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
It is a tremendous square area enclosed in barbed-
wire entanglements. The prisoners live in bell
tents set in even rows which, running away and
away in converging parallels, give one an impression
of great distances. Outside every sixth or eighth
tent I observed a group of men engaged in chopping
up sides of beef. They were distributing a ration.
It was fine, fresh Australian meat, and each man
was getting a generous share of it.
I was thinking that coming upon a supply of such
food must have been a welcome change for most of
them. And, besides a good and sufficient meat
ration, they get excellent white bread-exactly what
the British soldier gets—and plenty of vegetables.
They are well fed and well taken care of in every
way, the health of the camp being practically per-
fect; and there is nothing for them to complain
of, really, except the climate. The tents are
bleached white in the terrific sun, and throw back
the savage glare of the fine dust as though in a
kind of impotent rage; and that is rather awful !
But that kind of thing the British soldiers have
to put up with, too, and they are less used to it,
perhaps. Though, come to think of it, the Turks
are as much foreigners in Mesopotamia as the
British, and there are many of them from the hills
and the regions up around the Black Sea to whom
the desert is a torment and a torture. They are
always delighted when they come to be transferred
to camps in India, as all of them must be sooner or
later to make room for the fresh relays coming in.
After leaving the camps of the city of war we
struck straight out on the way to nowhere-toward
which no way leads. There are desert roadways,
to be sure, in one direction or another, but they
are nothing but wheel tracks in the dust and sand
and are not distinguishable very far ahead even at
their best. In a sand-storm they become wholly
obliterated in a few moments.
About five miles out in one direction there is a
96



Major-General Sir George MacMunn, K.C.B., D.S.O., Inspector-
General of Communications of the Mesopotamia
Expeditionary Force,





NOT THROUGH A PORT-HOLE
wide area of desert fenced in with barbed-wire
entanglements, heavily stockaded and filled to
capacity with munitions of war. It is a most com-
forting thing to look upon. It makes
you
double
up your fists and say the first thing that comes into
your mind which calls for an exclamation point by
way of punctuation. And a little farther on we
drove round a detached artillery encampment where
several hundred new guns were being prepared for
transportation on their own wheels to the far-away
front. There were gun crews drilling, and in the
vast silence one could hear the sharp commands of
officers from long distances away.
We went on toward nowhere, intending to make
a wide detour and come into old Basra by the
Zobier Gate in the south wall. There was no dust
out there ; only hard-packed sand, from which the
fierce, hammering sun struck a myriad glinting, eye-
searing sparks. But it was beautiful beyond words
to describe. We spun along at fifty miles an hour
with a cool, clean breeze in our faces.
Then, just over a slight rise in the sparkling plain,
I saw my first mirage. It was impossible to be-
lieve it was a mirage and not really the beautiful
lake that it seemed-a lake dotted with wooded
islands and fringed in places with deep green
forests. I have seen mirage in other deserts in
other lands, but I have never seen anything like
the Mesopotamian mirage. We drove straight on,
and it came so close that I was sure I could see a
ripple on its surface. Then suddenly it went away
off, and where it had been our skid-proof tyres
were humming on the hard-packed sand, and I
saw that the wooded islands had been created out
of nothing but patches of camel-thorn and that the
trees of the forest were tufts of dry grass not more
than six inches high.
Off on the far horizon a camel caravan was swing-
ing slowly along and the camels looked like some
kind of mammoth 'prehistoric beasts, while in
97


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
another direction what we took to be camels turned
out to be a string of diminutive donkeys under
pack-saddles laden with bales of the desert grass
roots which the Arabs use for fuel.
The mirage has played an interesting part in the
Mesopotamian campaigns. In some places it is
practically continuous the year round, and it adds
greatly to the difficulties of an army in action. It
is seldom mistaken for anything but what it is, but
it does curious things to distances and to objects
both animate and inanimate. Incidentally it
renders the accurate adjustment of gun ranges
almost, if not altogether, impossible.
One of the most curious incidents of the whole
war happened in connection with a mirage, and on
the very spot over which I drove that first day out
in the desert. But I shall come to that presently.
We swung round a circle across the trackless
waste and came up along the south wall of Basra
to an ancient gateway. Seen from the outside, it
is a picturesque old town with—what should one
say ?-the charm of Oriental unreality. It has flat
mud roofs, high ornamental copings, round, low
domes, and slender minarets. And the sun-yellows
and golden browns of it tone with the tawny desert
sands and are flecked here and there with glancing
shadows from tall palm-trees.
I wondered how we dared to drive into the place
in a big seven-passenger touring car, but the people
had evidently learned how to get out of the way of
automobiles, and they showed no resentment what-
ever when they had to flatten themselves for their
lives against walls that our mud-guards barely
cleared. In fact, they seemed to enjoy it, and they
laughed and waved their hands at us. Sometimes
there was not room for both them and the car in
the same street, and they would have to run on
ahead of us and seek safety in doorways or little
open shops. But never mind. It was all very
friendly.
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NOT THROUGH A PORT-HOLE
We drove into the narrow, dim bazaar, arched
overhead and lighted only by slender streaks of
sunlight which found a way into the darkness
through clefts and crannies in the vaulting. Every
town in Mesopotamia-and in Syria and Arabia
and Persia and Turkey-has its bazaar. And they
are all alike except that some are more dilapidated
and more oppressive with dank and evil odours
than others. A bazaar is always a street, or a net-
work of streets-if such lanelike passages can be
called streets-covered from the sun either with
stone vaulting-sometimes very fine and sometimes
not so fine-or with ragged reed mats or old bits of
canvas or any unsightly thing that happens to be
available. They are lined on either side with small
cubicles in each of which some merchant displays
his merchandise, while he sits on the floor, as a rule,
with his legs tucked under him, leisurely pulling at
the amber stem of the long tube of a hubble-bubble.
There is a certain fascination in the very word
bazaar, and one expects to catch glimpses of tempt-
ing things that will make one's last dollar seem
ripe for spending. But there are few places left
in the world where treasures do not have to be
diligently searched for. The world's collectors
have been everywhere, and the people of the re-
motest places who own curious things have learned
the Occidental value of them.
Not that one would ever expect to find anything
in a town like Basra; yet it is a town now largely
inhabited-on its outskirts, at least—by the kind
of foreigners who buy tempting things, and at
almost any kind of price. And a majority of the
merchants are Jews and Persians who are not cut
off from certain areas of supply.
A great many of the fine things that are sold in
the Near East come from Persia, and, the war not-
withstanding, there are no unusual restrictions on
travel or business in Persia.
Nevertheless, one gets an impression that the
99


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
whole Basra bazaar is draped in cheap ginghams
and gaudy calicoes, while the only 'objects of art
to be seen are hideously tawdry Japanese articles
that one knows were turned out in the same spirit
of commercial conquest which at one time caused
the “ Made in Germany 'trade-mark to stand in the
world's mind for all that is mediocre and offensive.
Outside of the bazaar Basra is a town of small
pictures and seems to be inhabited chiefly by a lot
of delightful persons who exist for nothing but to
pose round in attitudes of grace and subtle allure-
ment. There is a winding creek, walled with
masonry, spanned by arching footbridges and lined
on either side with houses that are built of golden-
yellow clay and have projecting balconies painted
green and pink and brilliant blue. And, driving
along the edge of this creek, one sees veiled women
with long-necked, beautiful, brown water-jars,
standing on moss-green steps under bending palms.
Or a long, slender belum may glide swiftly by, filled
with women wearing cerise and gold and bright
purple abahs. Also there are always black-robed
and ebony-faced slave women washing clothing at
the water's edge or playing with small companies
of laughing, half-naked, adorable children.
Then, through a narrow street and round a corner,
where a camel stands munching disdainfully in a
queer angle of a crumbling ancient wall, you come
into the city square, and up to the old caravanserai.
I was interested in that because I had read in the
private note-books a good many frankly blas-
phemous accounts of the early days when the serai
was the only shelter the young British officer had
in Mesopotamia.
The lawless Arabs had not then been cleared out
of the population, and the peacefully inclined had
not yet had demonstrated to them the advisability,
not to say the tremendous advantage, of settling
down under British law and order. There was
hardly an Arab who did not possess a gun, and
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NOT THROUGH A PORT-HOLE
many of them had well-stocked arsenals, as the
British discovered when they began a systematic
search for arms.
It is said that the average Arab's highest am-
bition in life is to become the owner of a good rifle
and one hundred rounds of ammunition. These
are his equivalent for our' vine and fig-tree,' or our
ten acres and a team of mules. With a good rifle
and one hundred rounds of ammunition he can go
raiding, have a wonderful time, and make that kind
of living for an indefinite period. Or he can join
the 'army' of some desert chieftain, be taken care
of, and have all the wild excitement his heart
desires.
When the British entered Basra the town was
being looted, and all the peaceful citizens were
either in hiding or had placed themselves on the
defensive. A proclamation was instantly posted,
calling upon the people to preserve order and to
observe certain rules laid down. It decreed that
all looting must stop, and said that certain crimes
-robbery under arms being among them-would
be punished by established and well-known military
methods.
But it happens that robbery under arms has been
one of the principal Arab industries for ages, so it
was not as easy as one might think to make a
decree against it effective. There was one case of
it after another; the troops were so busy elsewhere
that an adequate patrol could not be provided,
and conditions became intolerable. It was decided
that something would have to be done about it,
and this is what happened :
A robber was caught red-handed one night in
the act of holding up two Arab dancing-girls who
were on their way home with their earnings from a
party at which they had performed, and the general
officer commanding decided that instead of sending
him for a long period to the jail that was already
overcrowded, he would have him publicly flogged
IOI


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
in the open square. He would make an example of
him, and put the fear of the wrath of the British
in the hearts of his brethren.
The square is surrounded on three sides by many-
windowed buildings, and along the fourth stretches
the low wall of the caravanserai, outside of which
there is a coffee-house, or a trellis-covered open
space filled with benches and wooden divans where
the male population congregate every afternoon to
gossip, to smoke their hubble-bubbles, and to drink
innumerable small cups of coffee or innumerable
small glasses of some kind of syrupy mixture.
The population was advised that the terrible ex-
hibition was to take place, and the population
gathered at the appointed hour in full force. Even
the roofs were black with people, and the windows
and balconies were jammed. A cordon of troops
was drawn up round the flogging-board and
machine-guns were trained on the square from
roofs on either side-this to prevent any kind of
demonstration or disorder--and when everything
was in readiness the culprit was led forth and
strapped into place.
Everybody ought to have been horrified. The
British expected everybody to be horrified. But
not at all! The girls who had been the victims of
the robber, and on whose account he was about to
undergo this most ignominious of all punishments,
had brought a number of friends to see the show,
and had disposed themselves comfortably in a long
window which commanded a perfect view and in
which they were the observed of all observers.
They were all dressed up in their best abahs and
veils, and were perched on a bench of some sort,
giggling and having the time of their young lives.
And a broad smile of pleasant anticipation illumined
the countenance of everybody present.
The British major who had charge of the
proceedings told me about it, and said that he felt
all the time as though he were standing on a vol-
102


NOT THROUGH A PORT-HOLE
cano of mirth that was likely to explode at any
moment. However, he and his troops were solemn
enough. To them it was a ' horrible example,' and
they hated it.
He
gave
the command for the floggers to proceed,
the while, so he says, he gritted his teeth and cut
the palms of his hands with his finger-nails in the
intensity of his disgust with the thing he was com-
pelled to do. But at that moment the bench on
which the girls were squatting—that is what they
do, they squat-gave way, and they all fell back-
ward, some of them with their feet waving in the
air, and the crash was the signal for a roar of
laughter from all sides. The wretched creature
strapped to the flogging-board-and with a stripe
or two already laid across his back-raised his head
and joined in with the utmost heartiness, while the
floggers and the British soldiers, in their amusing
efforts to keep their faces straight, added to the
general fiasco.
After that what could serious-minded English-
men do who were determined to see established a
reign of law ?
After that they decreed that hanging should be
the punishment for robbery under arms, and the
next scene in the public square was not so merry.
There were two hangings, as a matter of fact, right
there in full view of the whole population. Then
robbery and thieving in the vicinity of Basra sud-
denly ceased. It was as though the Arab had said
to the Englishman :
‘Oh, well—if you are as serious as all that about
it!'
103


CHAPTER VIII
STRENGTHENING THE FOOTHOLD
IF the British had been able to settle down at
Basra and do nothing but guard from that mere
foothold in the land the approaches to the Persian
Gulf, the Mesopotamian story would have been
a vastly different one. If they had been able to
suspend military operations until some measure
of preparation had been made to continue them,
the Mesopotamian story would have been different.
In either case it is not unlikely that the men in
command of things would have been condemned
for inaction.
They were condemned, anyhow, and rightly,
perhaps. But it has to be admitted that up to a
certain point their whole course of action was de-
termined, not by any one's impetuosity or personal
ambition, but by the actual necessities of the
situation.
The Turkish army was divided into three sections,
and after the British occupation of Basra one of
these, under Subhi Bey—a former Wali, or military
governor of the Basra district-took up a strong
position at Qurnah, about forty-six miles to the
north, where a branch of the Euphrates flows into
the Tigris. Here Subhi Bey was in easy com-
munication with Baghdad, and could be rapidly
reinforced.
At the same time the main Turkish strength,
under Suleiman Askeri, was in process of concen-
tration and organisation on the Euphrates for a
massed descent via the old stronghold of Shaiba,
which lies about twelve miles north-west of Basra,
10.1


STRENGTHENING THE FOOTHOLD
and was held at that time by a mere handful of
British troops.
The third section, amounting to eight battalions
and some ten thousand well-armed Arabs, was
concentrated on the Karun River in Persia,
threatening the Anglo-Persian oil-fields from that
direction and seriously undermining the power of
the loyal Sheikh of Muhammerah by disaffecting
thousands of his tribesmen either through bribery
or by religious misrepresentation. This being
at a time when the Kaiser's “holy war '—which
puffed itself out with the foul breath of its
own unholiness—seemed to have a chance of
success.
So it happened that the Turks had something
to say with regard to what the British should do.
To establish security of position in the land the
British were compelled to resume offensive opera-
tions, and at once, the object being to drive the
enemy back on all sides to points as far removed as
possible from the borders and coasts along which
lay Britain's greatest danger. This necessitated a
division of the British troops, and they were so far
outnumbered by the enemy that the entire force
was needed really to attack even one of the Turkish
positions. However, no British fighting-men ever
yet hesitated to take the short end of an uneven
struggle.
The first thing to be done was to attend to Subhi
Bey, and this they did forthwith. Mud and mid-
winter miseries notwithstanding, it was exceedingly
rapid action. Basra was occupied on the 23rd of
November, and on the 9th of December Subhi Bey,
forty-six miles away, was attacked and forced to
surrender with four guns and more than one
thousand men.
This was a splendid small victory, but the greater
part of Subhi Bey's division retreated-or fled-
and, being strongly reinforced, took up a position
early in January about six miles north from Qurnah
105


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
on the now tragically historic east bank of the
Tigris. And there they were !
In the meantime the enemy on the Euphrates
came down and achieved a surprise attack on the
British at Shaiba, the ensuing battle being, up to
that time, the severest and hardest-fought engage-
ment in the Mesopotamian campaign. It was
distinguished by a number of unique features, and
culminated in the strange incident of the mirage to
which I referred in the last chapter.
There is a great area to the westward of Basra
that is enclosed with a flood-controlling embank-
ment, known as the Shaiba Bund. And this area
was then deeply flooded.
As I have said, the Turks delivered a surprise
attack, and the shortest way for British reinforce-
ments to reach the small company of men who were
holding the old fortress was across this basin.
Some of the troops marched across in water that in
places was up to their armpits, while others com-
mandeered all the belums there were in the vicinity
of Basra, and poled themselves across under heavy
fire, fighting as they went.
The main struggle, however, was in the dry,
open desert, and for a good many hours it was any-
body's battle. It was going very badly for the
British, and, though they were in overwhelmingly
superior numbers, it was going very badly for the
Turks as well. This the British officer commanding
did not realise, and he was just on the point of
giving an order for retirement—which probably
would have been fatal to the British in Mesopo-
tamia !-when, to his astonishment, he discovered
that the enemy was in full retreat.
The British had no reserves. They were all in.
But the Turkish commander, who really ought to
have been more familiar with local phenomena,
saw approaching from the south-east what looked
to him like heavy British reinforcements, and he
ordered an immediate retreat.
106


STRENGTHENING THE FOOTHOLD
Then his already unnerved troops stampeded,
while his demoralised rear-guard was hounded and
harassed all the way to Khamisseyeh, nearly ninety
miles away, by great bands of nomad Arabs that
had been hanging on the flanks of both armies,
waiting to take spoils of whichever side should be
vanquished.
The desert was shimmering with mirage, and
what the Turkish commander mistook for a fresh
British force was nothing but a supply and am-
bulance train that had made its way around the
flooded area, and, being magnified and multiplied
by the deceptive atmosphere, was coming up across
the desert in a low-rolling cloud of its own dust.
Suleiman Askeri learned the truth a few days later-
and the British were told that he committed suicide.
And while all this was going on a third British
force had to be despatched against the Turkish
position in Persia. This operation was also suc-
cessful, and by the end of May the enemy had been
cleared out of Persia altogether. They were thrust
back to the Tigris line, while General Townshend's
army-the famous army of the siege of Kut-at-
tacked the Turkish force on the east bank of the
river and drove them northward beyond Amara,
covering ninety miles in less than four days.
General Townshend occupied Amara—the prin-
cipal town on the Tigris between Basra and
Baghdad and one hundred and thirty miles by river
from Basra-on the 3rd of June, and he was joined
about two weeks later by the troops that had been
operating in Persia and that had made their way
across the difficult country—then under summer
floods—all the way from Ahwaz.
And so began and developed the for-ever-to-be-
remembered hot-season campaign of 1915, which
was to end in such fearful disaster. At which point
I shall leave for the time being the military opera-
tions, and in doing so I must take occasion to
disavow what may seem to be an intention on my
107


CHAPTER IX
INTRODUCING THE POLITICALS'
It may be that the presence of the Political Com-
missioners in the Mesopotamia war zone imparts
to the situation a certain air of mystery, but if so
it is only because 'making a mystery of things
is one of humanity's chief delights.
The Political Commissioners contribute a con-
siderable sum to the general scheme of things, and
there is one located at every important point in
the occupied territory.
But their title is an unfortunate one. It is not
improbable that to the English mind it conveys
exactly the right idea, but in the gradually de-
veloped American view the word 'political' has
come to suggest something rather unpleasantly
subtle--not to say underhanded and altogether
reprehensible.
These men in Mesopotamia should be called
Civil Commissioners, perhaps. They constitute a
kind of balancing-bar between normality of govern-
ment and actual military rule, and their duties are
to see that the life of the people goes on in the
usual way, to introduce necessary measures of
reform in matters directly affecting the civil popu-
lations, to keep open a friendly communication
between the Arab head men and the British military
authorities, to collect taxes and to maintain, in so
far as it is possible, the ordinary routine of govern-
mental procedure.
It is a very useful service, and when the war is
over and the troops are withdrawn it will have
prepared the way for the easy and peaceable estab-
Iog


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
lishment of civil government on a much higher
plane of civic morality than the peoples of Meso-
potamia have ever known anything about.
The men are all Deputy Political Commissioners
as a matter of fact; the one and only P.C. being
Sir Percy Cox, who directs the work from General
Headquarters at Baghdad. So throughout the land
they are known as D.P.C.'s. There are A.D.P.C.'s
also—even D.P.C.'s requiring assistants—and it was
an A.D.P.C. that the D.P.C. of the Basra district
took me one day to visit.
We invited to go with us a visiting Major-General
from the Euphrates front and a very useful young
gentleman to whom Arabic is all but a mother-
tongue and who was in Basra fitting out for an ex-
pedition into the depths of the Arabian wilderness.
The D.P.C. and the visiting General and I took
General MacMunn's somewhat rickety but always
reliable Ford, while the visiting general's A.D.C.
and the adventurer-into-waste-places took the
D.P.C.'s big service car, and at an early hour we
were on our way.
Basra or Zobier or both was or were the home
port or ports of Sindbad the Sailor. Each of them
claims this honour, but neither of them as it now
exists was the city the Sailor knew. Basra was the
great ancient city, and the ruins of it-a wide area
of curiously mounded sand-lie seven miles or so
to the south of the comparatively modern town of
Basra, while Zobier is about five miles farther on,
a walled town in the naked desert. It was to
Zobier that we were going.
We drove through the dingy bazaar and a dozen
winding, lanelike streets of Basra city and came
out at the Zobier Gate in the south wall.
Basra city, incidentally, has something like
thirty-three thousand inhabitants and is rich by
virtue of its date-plantations, there being more
than eleven million trees within the area it domi-
ΙΙΟ


INTRODUCING THE POLITICALS'
nates. In ordinary times its export of dates equals
its import of everything, and the plantations give
employment to thousands of men and women.
The Zobier Gate is flanked on either side by two
old round towers falling into ruin, while a short
distance away stands a mediæval-looking fort with
battlemented walls, high-arched portals, and square
watch-towers rising from the corners of it. There
are palm-trees behind it, and at its base is a deep
hollow, like a great drained basin, in which hun-
dreds of commissariat camels are quartered. With
the camels are many Bedouins in graceful long
abahs and with shaggy hair that falls from under
bright-checked kuffiyehs. A picture of the East
most Eastern !
Leading out across the desert from the gateway
there is a track in the deep sands to which the
Sheikh of Zobier likes to refer as one of his de-
velopments. It is marked chiefly by the carcasses
of dead camels and donkeys and by piles of bleach-
ing bones, but here and there one comes upon
evidences of scrapings and gutterings which indi-
cate an intention on the part of somebody to make
a road of it. And I was told that Sheikh Ibrahim,
seeing British roadways under process of construc-
tion in and out and all round the district, decided
that a proper highway between Basra and Zobier
would be a valuable contribution to the general
progress. Whereupon he got his tribesmen out one
day, and they began work.
In places they managed to loosen the sand to
such a depth that no automobile could possibly
get through it, so we found it necessary to make
frequent detours out across the unimproved plain.
The road leads directly through the mounded
ruins of ancient Basra, in which archæological ex-
cavators have made great gashes, and out of which
for a dozen centuries or more a large part of the
building material has been taken for all the towns
in the immediate vicinity.
III


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
Perhaps the most interesting thing about Zobier
is that it is built almost entirely of bricks from this
buried city of the early world, and it is to the im
perishableness of these bricks that it owes its ap-
pearance of excellent preservation and neatness.
Most Arab towns are built of sun-baked mud slabs,
and they soon fall into unsightly raggedness. But
these bricks of Basra were moulded and burned
when the world was so young that historical vision
gropes along its then paths as an aged man might
grope in his inner consciousness for glimpses of his
earliest infancy, and they are everlasting.
Mr. Howell, the D.P.C., had notified Mr.
McCullum, the A.D.P.C., that we were coming,
and if Mr. McCullum had thought it possible that
we might get lost in the labyrinthine puzzlement
of his old town he probably would have been at
the desert gate to meet us.
As it was, we drove boldly in. Then we stopped.
Mr. Howell had been there only once before, and
didn't know in the least how to find Mr. McCullum's
house. But, having a command of the Arabic
tongue, he could inquire. And any one would know
where to find Mr. McCullum because he is the only
white man in the place.
We stopped an ordinary, everyday, regular boy,
and asked if he would show us the way. Yes, he
would ; and, like any ordinary, everyday, regular
boy he jumped on our running-board and took
charge of the situation.
We learned afterwards that there was a perfectly
simple route which we might have taken, through
streets that are wide and straight. But the boy
wanted to show himself off where the crowds con-
gregate, so he guided us into the depths of the dim
bazaar, where, having got started, we could do
nothing but drive on with a hope that the way
would open up. It didn't.
It didn't. A terrified population
began to scatter before us, and we began to worry
about the big car behind us. If it tried to follow
II2





INTRODUCING THE POLITICALS'
us it would have to be pried out in parts and re-
assembled. Even our little Ford was soon wedged
in between two shops where its mud-guards had
scraped vegetables off the display stands on one
side, and piece goods off a street-side counter on
the other. The boy was scraped off the running-
board, and fell all the way through the green-
grocer's shop into his back garden. Which is a
bit of an exaggeration to indicate the extreme
shallowness of the shop and the narrowness of
everything-including the boy's escape.
I wondered why the Arabs didn't get annoyed
and unpleasant about it. But, no. They only
moved themselves and their merchandise out of our
devastating way and laughed with huge enjoyment.
It was no use trying to go on unless we were
prepared to cut a way through by taking the fronts
off all the buildings, and even a Ford would be
hardly up to that. So we decided to walk, leaving
the chauffeur to get himself out of his difficulties
as best he could.
Incidentally, it was a mistake to worry about
the big car.
The Adventurer knew the way. He
knew nearly everything.
As for the boy, he had greatly distinguished him-
self, and was for making the most of the memor-
able moment. Also, he was still seriously bent on
showing us the way. He did it somewhat after
the manner of a playful puppy.
We had come to the entrance to an arcaded
footway, which wound round fascinating corners
and seemed to be intending to get nowhere in par-
ticular, and naturally we could not rush through
such a place, especially as it was insufferably hot
in the sun, while under the high ancient-brick
vaulting it was cool, with a soothing, shaded
coolness.
But the boy thought we were in a hurry, I sup-
pose. Most white people always are. He would
run on ahead a short distance, turn round and look
H
113


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
As we
at us with a reproachful air, then hurry back to
rejoin us. With considerable gesticulative indi-
cation of direction he would say something in
clattering Arabic to the D.P.C., then rush on, only
to repeat the process every time we stopped.
When we came out of the arcade we found our-
selves in a wide, open plaza, where a sale of camels
was in progress. There were hundreds of the odorif-
erous and extraordinary beasts lolling about in
every conceivable camel attitude, while many Arabs
in rich abahs and aristocratic-looking kuffiyehs
went about among them, feeling their humps and
examining their points with judicious solemnity.
And there were groups of African slave women
here and there, sitting in the glare of the sun under
the almost grim heaviness of the all-enveloping
black robes they nearly always wear.
passed by they covered their faces with their hands,
palms out, to ward off the evil spell we were sup-
posed to be able to cast upon them.
The A.D.P.C. is a young man who specialised
in Arabic at Dublin University for no reason
except that he was fascinated by Eastern lore. He
had no thought of turning his specialty to uses
that would be of value to his country-until the
war began. Now he lives all alone at Zobier-
sometimes not seeing a white man for weeks on
end-and he makes use of his accomplishment in
language and his love of Arabian life and institu-
tions to the end that Sheikh Ibrahim and his
numerous retainers maintain an active and friendly
association with the British authorities.
When we reached Mr. McCullum's house we
had plodded a long way in the hot glare through
a street that was ankle-deep in fine sand and lined
on either side by high walls that were utterly blank
save for a narrow doorway here and there. But,
once inside his courtyard, one could forget all that.
One stepped into a scene of truly Eastern comfort.
The court was sanded and bare, but skirting
I14


INTRODUCING THE POLITICALS'
one side of it was a deep verandah upheld by noble
Moorish arches. There were splendid Persian
carpets on the brick floor, while a small table under
potted palms, surrounded by deep wicker chairs
and bearing cool liquid refreshments, gave just
the touch of West imposed upon East which the
Westerner always manages to achieve in an Eastern
environment.
Sheikh Ibrahim was there with our host to wel-
come us, and the first horrible thing we learned
was that in our honour he had prepared at his
palace a great feast. It was only ten o'clock in
the morning. We had all breakfasted at the usual
hour, and we were not ready for a feast. But it
is part of the job of the Political Commissioners to
keep the Arabs pleased with themselves, and I was
assured that there is nothing an Arab likes better
to do than to dispense lavish hospitality. And
when it comes to eating, the time o' day means
nothing to him.
Of course we would have to go, and we would
have to eat any number of curiously prepared
things, and do it with a pretence at least of whole-
hearted enjoyment. Otherwise the noble Sheikh
would be grieved, if not actually offended. We
discussed the matter quite freely in his presence,
while the A.D.P.C. translated the discussion for
his benefit into something which seemed to please
him, and at which he bowed and made deprecatory
gestures. I gathered that he considered himself
unworthy of our enthusiastic appreciation.
Sheikh Ibrahim is all that any one could wish a
noble Arab to be. He is not a great chieftain like
the Sheikhs of Kuweit and Muhammerah, but he
is important. Moreover, he is an Arab of the
desert, and not of the coast or the banks of the
rivers, and he has the kind of fine, aristocratic face
that distinguishes the people of the camel.'
I observed at once that his beard grew in the
115


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
was
right division of tufts, and noted in detail his
splendid gold-embroidered raiment. He
charmingly and completely Arab, and as he placed
us with consummate dignity in the position of
honoured guests I was humbled for a moment by
the thought that in his environment it was we and
not he who were 'different.' In which connection
such men as he are blessed with a benevolent toler-
ance about which we know nothing at all.
He is a very rich man, having great date plan-
tations, many herds of camels, and the right to
levy tribute from a numerous tribe. He has always
been friendly toward the British, but at the begin-
ning of operations in Mesopotamia he had to trim'
very carefully between them and the Turks, because
he knew well enough that if he displayed any pro-
British sentiment, and the Turks happened, even
temporarily, to win, he would pay with his old neck,
while his tribesmen would pay in other ways with
their numerous lives.
His palace is just over the way from Mr.
McCullum's house, and has but one opening on the
street, a low-arched but rather beautiful doorway,
which leads into a courtyard, and as I passed
through that doorway I felt as though I were step-
ping out of the world that I know and into a
region of such unrealities as fantastic dreams are
made of.
On two sides of the court there were deep veran-
dahs furnished with long divans thinly upholstered
and covered with Persian carpets. And tied to
short pegs driven in the sand were a dozen
or more beautiful falcons wearing funny little
brown hoods over their heads and eyes. They
are blindfolded thus for some purpose connected
with their training, but I don't know what it is.
I was so busy seeing things that I forgot to ask.
We were promised a hawking expedition in the
desert after the feast, but we lingered too long, so
I missed that.
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THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
it was.
served in ordinary soup-plates, and was a thick,
sweetish paste... It was exceedingly like Hawaiian
poi, but Hawaiian poi always makes me think of
paper-hangers, bill-posters, and cockroaches.
There were many varieties of vegetables, but
they were all done up in little individual packages,
wrapped in boiled cabbage leaves and dipped in
oil. And it was not olive-oil. I don't know what
In any case, I didn't like it, and I was
afraid to force myself to eat it because it would
have been too disgraceful to-disgrace myself !
There was plenty of plain boiled chicken and a
little nest of hard-boiled eggs-peeled and dirty-
at each plate. I repeeled hard-boiled eggs and
ate them diligently for an hour or more, thereby
making a great show of enjoyment, and—I hope
satisfying my host. But it was an awful struggle.
There were no knives or forks or spoons or any-
thing of that kind. Everybody ate everything
including the paste and the boiled rice_with his
fingers, and the first thing I learned was that to
eat with the left hand is very bad manners. Only
the low-bred and uncultivated person ever touches
food with the left hand. You eat with the fingers
of the right hand only, and afterward the servants
-or slaves—bring round brass basins and graceful
ewers and pour water for you while you clean up.
It amused me to find a piece of toilet soap
of
American manufacture on the edge of each of the
basins, but goodness knows we needed it.
The British in their dealings with the brown
peoples of the earth always conform to the customs
of the brown peoples, so I was not surprised to
find that our Politicals' were able to dispose of
Arab food in Arab fashion, and with a deftness
that no Arab could surpass. Moreover, they made
no wry faces over it.
There was a Bedouin boy sitting opposite me
who, I think, was the most beautiful human being
I ever saw. He had long, lustrous, heavy black
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INTRODUCING THE POLITICALS'
hair that hung in four braids down his shoulders
from under a splendid kuffiyeh, that was bound
round his head with ropes of silver brocade
threaded with red. He was very tall, very slender,
and his long black abah fell in billowing folds from
his shoulders and trailed along the floor with a
lordly grace.
His features were all but faultless—as clean-cut
as a cameo-and his wonderful, long-lashed eyes
were golden brown. He was as beautiful as a
superb woman, yet he fairly radiated masculinity.
He was a rich retainer or henchman of the
Sheikh, and he had come in from the far desert for
a conference, and to deliver some desired infor-
mation about conditions among the desert tribes.
When we had done as much justice as we could
to the amazing banquet, we went out into the front
courtyard to see the riflemen dance. They were a
wicked-looking lot, and I could not help thinking
how easy it would be for them to destroy us.
If
they had wished to do so it would have taken them
about seven seconds. But they were friends of ours.
Their captain drew them up in a double column
and barked some kind of command. Then to the
accompaniment of a low-toned staccato chant he
began a slow, flat-footed dance. They took up
the weird song, and fell into the rhythmic motion.
The chant grew gradually in volume and rapidity,
as though gathering momentum for a mighty out-
burst, while the movement grew faster and faster.
Then the outburst came !
It was the wildest thing I ever saw or heard,
and within a few moments the men were whirling
round the court like mad dervishes, waving their
rifles over their heads and brandishing their knives
like furies making for bitterly hated prey. It was
a bit too thrilling to be altogether pleasant, but I
was assured that on my account it was rather a tame
performance. The men, for instance, were told
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THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
not to fire their rifles, though the end of such a
demonstration is always a fusillade in the air for
the sake of the noise. I was quite satisfied.
The Sheikh is a real ruler of his people and is
autocratic, being his own lawmaker, judge, and
jury. Though, to be sure, he has a council and
the laws of the tribes to interpret that are older
than civilisation. Moreover, if he did not rule to
the satisfaction of the ruled there would soon be
an end of his power, but he enforces such regula-
tions as are applicable to an unregulated people
with admirable strictness, and he has no fear. He
is a type. There are many like him.
A part of his palace is a prison. And such a
prison! It consists of a few windowless, brick-
walled rooms, the heavy doors of which open on to
an inner court, and are not even barred for the
sake of light and air. He knows nothing about
prison reform, that is certain.
He turned a great key in one of the locks and
threw back the door, disclosing two malefactors
sitting together, flat on the floor, in stocks ! A
most astonishing sight ! The eyes of the poor
creatures blinked at the light too suddenly let in
upon them, and they looked very uncomfortable
and rather foolish.
And the mediæval implements of torture! They
served to strengthen the impression I had that I
had been permitted to step for a time away-way
out of the twentieth century and back into another
age.
All of which is merely by way of a brief journey
off on a by-path for the sake of acquaintance with
peoples and with certain unique and interesting
features of British occupation of the ancient land.
On the way back to Basra we struck straight out
across the desert towards the old fortress of Shaiba.
We came up to the wide-curving trench-lines of the
memorable battle of the Bund, and in the white
heat of mid-afternoon we got out and tramped over
I20


INTRODUCING THE POLITICALS'
.
the whole historic field. We went into the battered
stronghold, now dismantled and empty, and re-
viewed the story of the great fight with much grim
evidence of its fearfulness before us. A battle
does not have to be fought by millions of men, you
know, in order that it may have all the elements
that
go to make battles great historic events. The
battle of Shaiba-known severally as the battle of
the Bund and the battle of the Belums—fought
away out on the Mesopotamian plain, was a great
historic event.
Then we went to the cemetery, as sad a spot, I
think, as there is on earth. It is so far away, so
lonely, and so desolate. Yet there are a few
feathery tamarisk-trees hanging over the graves,
and it is ground in which, some day, grass can be
made to grow.
I looked at the long rows of bare, dry mounds,
and read many names of officers and men that are
painted on the rough wooden crosses. And I
thought less then of the sadness than of the splen-
did heroism of the deaths they all had died. The
officers I was with knew most of the officers who
fell at Shaiba, and to them the visit to the cemetery
was something of a reverent pilgrimage. They
stood beside the graves and talked reminiscently
about first one and then another.
We were very quiet on the road home.
I21


CHAPTER X
HOSPITALS AND THE NURSING SERVICE
In the beginning, when conditions were such that
the Mesopotamian campaign got itself listed among
the always freely aired British 'blunders,' what
probably outraged the sensibilities of the British
public more than anything else—and rightly !-
was the inadequacy of the hospital services.
The first expedition was undertaken with the
idea, apparently, that there were to be no casualties
anywhere except in the ranks of the enemy. Then
events transpired with unexpected and unexampled
rapidity, and the hospital services, being the last,
it seems, to receive due consideration from the
authorities at the sources of supply, did not keep
pace in expansion with the constantly expanding
scope of the operations. Therefore the hospital
services got a black mark which almost tearful
medicos will now assure you they never did
deserve.
In any case, as soon as their inadequacy became
a sufficient disgrace they began to get the occa-
sional undivided attention of the authorities, with
the consequence that they have developed to a
point of excellence beyond which it would be
difficult to go.
The first great tented hospital I saw was con-
nected with the army camps in the extraordinary
desert city of war behind Basra. But it must be
remembered that I am writing after a rather long
and varied experience in Mesopotamia, in the course
of which everything has come to be connected in
my mind with everything else, so I am able now to
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HOSPITALS AND THE NURSING SERVICE
follow in memory a long series of such hospitals
marking distances all the way up the avenues of
communication to casualty clearing-stations behind
the battle lines.
From the casualty clearing-stations the wounded
are transferred by hospital boats or ambulance
trains to stationary hospitals that are located at
Baghdad and at points all the way down the river
Tigris.
The ambulance trains are a new thing in Meso-
potamia—the railways being new-and are among
the things to be regarded as extraordinary. The
Mesopotamian services have so few facilities and so
few materials of construction at hand that when
they achieve anything in the way of successful de-
velopment it means more than the same kind of
thing could possibly mean anywhere else.
Housed in the finest and largest buildings in all
the towns there are stationary hospitals of tremen-
dous capacity for British and Indian soldiers ;
officers' hospitals that in general attractiveness and
completeness of equipment could hardly be im-
proved upon; isolation hospitals and convalescent
depots; and everything everywhere that could be
regarded as requisite to the best possible care of
the sick and the wounded. There are between
forty and fifty thousand beds in the country now,
and hospital expansion is kept constantly a few
paces
ahead of immediate demand.
An Assistant Director of Medical Service came
to dinner one evening and invited me to go with
him next morning down-river to Beit Na'amah, a
particularly fine officers' hospital of which the local
medicos-and this A.D.M.S. especially-are very
proud. And with reason.
I had heard much about Baiten Amah'-as I
spelled it in my own mind and I wondered how it
happened that I had missed seeing it on my way
up-river. Though I know, of course.
I miss any
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THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
number of things as I go along, and all through an
unfortunate habit I have of losing myself in con-
templation of fascinating non-essentials. When
we passed Beit Na’amah I very likely was leaning
against the starboard rail gazing at the opposite
bank of the river, and wondering at the fringy
featheriness of the palm-trees and at the silvery
shine of their broad dust-powdered leaves in the
morning sunlight.
The word "Beit' means house, and Na'amah
is the name of the family that owns the great
mansion which was turned by war's demand into
a hospital, and which has since become famous
throughout this part of the world.
Whether or not the Na’amah brothers were cele-
brated before the war I cannot say. They prob-
ably were on the Shatt-el-Arab, but if their name
had ever gone overseas it was linked, no doubt,
with shipments of dates, and not with any such
association as it now bears in so many minds.
There are four Na’amah brothers, and, as they
are very rich, their house is very fine. It was built
to accommodate the entire family and all the
family retainers, and it has an ample wing in which
a harem of more than fifty women was maintained.
The place was taken' by the British on their ad-
vance from Fao, because it was necessary then to
sweep a clean path up to Basra. But, needless to
say, the harem was not disturbed by the British
soldiers, and this fact may account for the sub-
sequent friendliness of the family.
It was recognised at once that the building was
admirably adapted for hospital purposes, but it
was four miles down-river from Basra, and very
much farther by road across the desert and through
the date gardens. And among the many things
the British Army did not possess in those days
was transportation. So during the first two years
nothing was done with the place.
But came a time when General Maude was
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HOSPITALS AND THE NURSING SERVICE
concentrating his forces in the north for the great
drive which carried him to Baghdad and beyond,
and since the situation had by that time developed
to the ‘something ought to be done about it'
stage, things began to move. Without warning the
Director of Medical Services suddenly issued a per-
emptory order that Beit Na'amah should be made
ready within two weeks for occupation as an officers'
hospital. The A.D.M.S. who invited me to go
with him on a trip of inspection happened to be
the officer to whom this order was given, and as
we slipped down the river that morning in the
I.G.C.'s trim little launch-slowly, at my request
he was able to tell me in entertaining detail all
about how he had obeyed it.
The building had no sanitary arrangements of
any kind, and the only water available was in the
river, whence it had to be brought by carriers.
The only lights were oil-lamps, while the windows,
being too small in any case to admit sufficient light
and air, were all heavily barred. It was not only
the house of the family of Na’amah, it was the
stronghold as well, designed to keep out raiding
Arabs and to keep a too numerous company of
women under proper restraint.
Operations were complicated by the fact that the
fifty-odd women of the harem obstinately refused
to move out, so the work of establishing a hospital
in one wing of the building had to proceed while
they presumably looked on through the barred and
heavily curtained windows of another.
There was considerable hospital equipment in
Basra by that time, but it had been brought up
by the ships and dumped on the banks of the river
along with a thousand and one other things. No
adequate system for handling materials had yet
been established, everybody's attention being con-
centrated upon the pressing and always increasing
demands of the armies in action.
All of which, in a way, was to the advantage of
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THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
the major medico in carrying out his impossible
orders. Constituted authority being very much
engaged elsewhere, he was able to eliminate red
tape and to do as he liked.
He commandeered both labour and materials
without asking leave of anybody. At once he put
a small army of men to work cutting out windows,
whitewashing walls, digging sewers, building a
water-tank, laying pipe-lines, and putting in plumb-
ing, installing engines, building and equipping an
operating theatre, wiring the building for electricity,
and putting in a dynamo-doing, in short, the
thousand and one things needful, and doing them,
literally, all at once.
He went to the supply dumps without detailed
authority, and, finding what he wanted, took pos-
session of it. He appropriated everything he re-
quired, from hypodermic needles to power-pumps
and dynamos, and at the end of the allotted time
he had provision made for one hundred sick or
wounded British officers.
No wonder he is proud of the place. It really is
very beautiful now, and since officers like it better
than any other hospital in Mesopotamia, it has
been crowded to capacity from the beginning, its
capacity having been extended by this time to in-
clude the entire building. It is a long Arabian
structure, with the usual flat roof and ornamental
coping, and in front of it on the river-bank there is
a narrow, quaint garden set with long, even rows of
low orange-trees. That is one's first impression.
But extending to the rear are three wings surround-
ing two great courts that are flag-paved and have
railed balconies, and in the walls of which there are
beautifully arched windows framing grilles of deli-
cately carved wood.
In the harem wing the finest wards eventually
were established, but it took a long time to get the
women to move out. In fact, a bit of dastardly
strategy was resorted to in the end, which, while it
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HOSPITALS AND THE NURSING SERVICE
may have been shameful, had the desired effect of
inducing their men to spirit them away.
The truth is that they were not supposed to be
there at all. How should anybody know they were
there? They were never seen.
And since there
were no nursing sisters in the hospital-only or-
derlies--the men felt privileged, perhaps, to relax
somewhat their usually strict rules of propriety.
Besides, they wanted that wing of the building,
So a swimmin'-hole' was staked off in the river,
and a spring-board put in place directly under the
front windows of the harem drawing-room. After
which, at certain hours each day, a number of men
were detailed to parade out in their birthday
clothes and dive off for a swim. The women might
have been able to endure this atrocity indefinitely,
but it was known quite well that their men would
not. And they didn't. There were rustling noises
and much muffled talk at that end of the building
one night, and next morning the harem wing stood
empty. Whereupon the immediate and rapid
establishment of the fine new hospital wards.
It is now a model institution, with everything
looking much as though the place had been built
for a hospital, and had been in existence as such
for many years. True, there are a few Orientally
gorgeous and gaudy walls left to remind one of
what all the walls once looked like, and there are
still worn mud-brick floors in some of the wards.
Moreover, the fanciful ornamentation over the
windows and the wide-arched passages leading
from court to court, is of the East Eastern, while
the dust-harbouring but beautiful carved-wood
grilles are most unhospital-like. But scientific
exactness and immaculateness are combined in the
place with an Old World grace and allurement in a
way which easily explains why officers all make
bids to be sent there when they are ill or wounded.
Aching feet muscles are not among the things
127


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
one is expected to mention when one has been
permitted to enter a busy and forbidden zone of
war, so I said nothing about mine when the I.G.C.
invited me that afternoon to accompany him on
a tour of inspection through the hospitals of Basra.
' Oh, very well,' said I to myself, I'll just make
a hospital day of it,' and, thinking I might be
needing one very soon, I was glad they had such
good ones.
The hospitals are a part of the responsibility of
the Inspector-General of Communications. I'm
sure I don't know why. Except that lines of
communication'
seems to be an all-embracing
title, and that everybody proceeds on the basis,
when in doubt-the I.G.C.
I think I have forgotten to say that few of the
• finest and largest buildings ' in Mesopotamia have
been found adequate for war hospital purposes,
and that in connection with nearly all hospitals for
troops there are acres of hut wards, the huts '-
each with a capacity of from fifty to one hundred
beds—being long, narrow structures of imported
uprights and crossbeams hung with reed-mat walls
and topped with double roofs of heavy mud thatch
designed to turn the fearful rays of the sun.
At Basra there was one dingy old building on the
river-bank which used to be the up-river occasional
residence of the Sheikh of Muhammerah. It was
not very large, and in every way it was most un-
suitable, but the Sheikh donated it as a nucleus
for hospitals. At least that is what it became,
and in a wholly made-over state it is now the
administration building of British General Hospital
No. 3.
There are between eight and ten thousand beds
in Basra, so, in view of the fact that this old resi-
dence was the only available building, I need no
powers of description to present a picture of the
hospital area. Just as the camps of the soldiers
128



The ancient fortress at Zobier gate, Basra.

Scene in Ashar Creek of the Shatt-el-Arab at Basra.





HOSPITALS AND THE NURSING SERVICE
make a tented city in the desert, so the hospitals
make a unique city of huts on the river-bank.
Attached to British General Hospital No. 3 there
are a number of hut wards for prisoners, and these
interested me particularly. They are identical with
the wards for British soldiers except that they are
guarded and enclosed in barbed-wire entangle-
ments. Their capacity is seven hundred beds, and
they have been full a number of times, the occasion
being very infrequent when there are less than two
or three hundred enemy patients to be taken
care of.
The sick or wounded Turk gets exactly the same
treatment the British soldier gets, and I am told
that usually he is quite pathetically grateful and
seldom hesitates to say that he is much better
provided for than he could hope to be behind his
own lines.
When the General and I finished our long tour
of inspection we were joined by the D.A.Q.M.G.-
otherwise the major-and we all went for tea to the
Nurses' Club.
We were received by the supervisor-general of
the nursing service, and if I were a nursing sister
I suppose I should regard her as the most important
person in all Mesopotamia. I think perhaps I do,
anyhow. Her very dignified Christian name is
Beatrice. Nobody would ever think of calling her
Beatrice, of course. It would be an unimaginable
liberty. But behind her back the sisters call her
* Trixie,' and talk with a whimsical kind of dis-
respect about her almost superhuman efficiency.
She makes all the rules and is not at all timid
about exercising her rule-making prerogative.
With the result, I would say, that in no war zone
in the world is a girl in the uniform of a nursing
sister more secure than she is in Mesopotamia.
Not to be able to accept an invitation to dinner
at an officers' mess to which a number of girls are
I
129


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
invited, and over which a high ranking officer is to
preside? That 's rather severe ! Not to be able
to so much as stroll with an officer down a dusty
street in the open glare of noonday ? That's
wholly unreasonable ! Or is it ?
I was only a smiling onlooker, and I loved them
all-girls and men. I wondered, and I wonder.
There were those who talked to me about rules that
hurt the pride of full-grown women and make them
feel as though they were in boarding-school or still
in ‘leading-strings.' But there is a good deal of
peevish nonsense about that. They know that the
strong and the staunch have to submit in all walks
of life to regulations intended solely for the safe-
guarding of the-possibly weak.
And what interest would there be in the mere
routine of life, anyhow, if there were no rules to
break? The wise supervisor-general decrees that
two or more sisters together may do more or less
as they please during their hours off duty. Then
she expresses great surprise that so many of them
get engaged and married ! In Mesopotamia !
It is all rather wonderful-and very nice. Rather
a delicate subject, though ? Yes, but I don't
mind touching upon it,just lightly.
The Nurses' Club was instituted and endowed
by Lady Willingdon, and is in a quaint old baked-
mud building on the Strand. There is a Piccadilly,
too, as well as a Bond Street and a Pall Mall. The
Britisher loves home so much that he takes home
with him wherever he goes.
The Strand skirts Ashar Creek, the principal one
of many small streams that flow into or out of the
Shatt-el-Arab, and is a street I wish I were able to
describe. Mostly I have driven along it with my
eyes tight shut because of the blinding clouds of
dust, but if only once I had seen its blank walls,
its flat roofs, its raggedness, and its occasional pro-
jecting balconies and latticed windows, I sbould
remember it in its entirety always.
I30


HOSPITALS AND THE NURSING SERVICE
The Nurses' Club is done up in pretty curtains
and cretonne-covered furniture, and it has quiet
corners where sisters may read or write in secluded
comfort; and so far so good. But the general
idea of supervisors and such directing persons is
that it is a place where the young women will be
able to combine their forces for the endurance of
the sometimes unavoidable presence of gentlemen,
and where they can receive such undesirable
persons in a sedate and proper manner. But it is
not anticipated by those who are in a position to
speak with authority on this point that the Club
will ever serve this purpose to any alarming
extent.
There are many palm-canopied creeks, you see,
where orioles and kingfishers play from curtain to
curtain of hanging vines in the sun-flecks of late
afternoon. And these creeks are filled with belums
that are poled or paddled by picturesque Arab
boatmen-children of the fascinating land who are
unable to understand a single word of an English
conversation.
In a cretonne-upholstered corner of a stuffy club
one might perhaps talk interestingly enough about
Corporal Carmichael's wounds, or the best the
Women's Branch of Bombay can do in the way of
new books for its gift libraries. But in the mauve-
lit silence of a placid, high-banked creek .
But why be light-minded, altogether? Only
because I met them light-mindedly after I had met
them—so many of them on their endless rounds
of splendid duty in the wards of the hospitals.
One wants to relax with them and for them.
They really are an amazing sisterhood. In the
beginning it was thought there could be no nursing
sisters in Mesopotamia because the conditions were
such as no Englishman would ever ask a woman to
endure. But the women had something to say
about that, and eventually they began to arrive,
small units now and then. And at once they
131


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
began to demonstrate their astonishing powers of
physical and spiritual resistance.
Men by the hundreds get bowled over by the sun,
or die of heat-stroke; the nursing sister miracu-
lously escapes this greatest of all the dangers. Men
by the hundreds are incapacitated by sand-fly
fever and other maladies peculiar to the climate
and environment; the nursing sister seldom gives
up to anything. Men, suffering in a temperature
of one hundred and ten, twenty, thirty degrees,
tortured by insect pests, overworked, unable to
sleep, get low in their minds—hopelessly dejected ;
the nursing sister is always cheerful, and manages
in some mysterious way to keep fit and to look fit
under any and all circumstances.
Yet she works just as hard as any man and
has had no special provision made for her general
comfort and well-being. Work? Well, there are
between forty and fifty thousand beds in Mesopo-
tamia, and less than six hundred nursing sisters
all told. It makes a nice little problem in calcu-
lation, even though you do count the nursing sister
out of all the evacuation hospitals.
The General and the Major and I said our good-
byes all round, made our variously halting and
interrupted ways among the sisters and down the
steep, ancient, mud-brick stairway, and climbed
into our big motor car with sighs of relief and
contentment.
The General gave the soldier chauffeur some
orders—I did not notice what they were—and soon
we were spinning out over the hard-packed sand
of the desert in the orange light of a marvellous
sunset.
Gods of the ancient peoples ! No wonder they
were gods of the sun-of vivid and appealing but
ungraspable things ! One's heart lifts and sings
its song of the open world !
We swung round the big circle marked by wheel
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HOSPITALS AND THE NURSING SERVICE
tracks, and came up past the old fort where the
camels are, and thence to the Zobier Gate, flanked
by the crumbling towers that stand like aged sen-
tinels at the desert's edge. We thought it would
be a good idea to stop there and climb to the top
of one of them, where there is an old cannon lying
deep in the dust, like a crouching blind war dog
with its muzzle nosing the rampart. The General
wanted to show me the arms and monogram of
King George III. of England that are engraved
upon it!
6
Very likely,' said he, it has been in Boston
Harbour in its day.'
He was never able to forget that I was an
American, and was always endeavouring to be polite
about it.
But how did a British cannon of American
Revolutionary days ever get on that old Meso-
potamian tower ? It reminded the General of the
well-worn story about the Englishman who was
showing an American girl through St. George's
Chapel-or some such place—and who pointed out
a certain tattered battle-flag with the remark:
'We took that away from Bunker Hill.'
"Oh, is that so ?' said the girl. “But I
sup-
pose you haven't forgotten that we still have the
hill ?
The General liked that story, and he chuckled
about it quietly-rather musingly–while the Major
sat away out on the muzzle of the old gun and-
with his thoughts far away, no doubt-hummed a
Honolulu melody to the slowly dying lights in the
desert.
133


CHAPTER XI
GENERAL TOWNSHEND'S ADVANCE
LIEUTENANT-GENERAL SIR STANLEY MAUDE, com-
mander-in-chief of the Mesopotamian Expedi-
tionary Force, had been occupying a position of
first importance in my personal scheme of things
for a good many weeks, and while I knew I never
could have landed in Mesopotamia at all without
his consent, it had been so thoroughly impressed
upon my mind that he was rigidly opposed to ad-
mitting to the zone of his military operations any
one not directly connected with the services of war,
that I had some doubts with regard to the quality
of the welcome he might be expected to extend to
me.
But the day I arrived at Basra he greeted me
with a telegram which served to dispel all my mis-
givings, and by the first boat down from Baghdad
he sent me a letter.
I need not hesitate to say that I stood in awe of
him, and that there was very little doubt in my
mind that he had consented to my visit, in the
first place, with considerable reluctance. But I
was to learn afterwards that he never did anything
reluctantly. Indecision and half-way measures
were impossible to him, and he never could have
sanctioned anything in a spirit of compromise.
He wrote to me :
I am afraid you will find things a little bit rough out here,
but I have asked General MacMunn to make you as com-
fortable as possible. You will find him a perfect host, and
I am sure he will do everything for you that is reasonably
possible under existing conditions. He will be able to
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GENERAL TOWNSHEND'S ADVANCE
advise you as to your tour in Mesopotamia, as he knows
the ins and outs of things perfectly. So will you just say
what you want to see, and he will be able to suggest the
best way for giving effect to your wishes.
I shall be very glad to see you whenever it is convenient
for you to come, and to put you in the way of seeing what
there is to be seen. I hope, too, that you will come and
stay with me at Baghdad. You will not, I am sure, expect
too much, and all I can say is that we will make you as
comfortable as we can. I hope your visit will be one of
great interest, for this is indeed a wonderful campaign, and,
with its peculiarities and difficulties, a much bigger thing
than most people imagine.
now.
A much bigger thing than most people imagine !
I began to realise that immediately!
'When Maude went north’ is a phrase they use
It runs like a thread of something different
through the usual grey fabric of local conversation
about events of former days, and it lifts the hearts
of the men who have been through it all; the men
--so many of them still in the Mesopotamian zone
—who went through the first onrushing advance;
through the ill-advised original attempt upon
Baghdad; through the subsequent retreat and
the long siege of Kut-el-Amara; through the hell
and the slaughter of the repeated endeavours to
relieve General Townshend's beleaguered army ;
through the humiliation and heartbreak of defeat
and surrender; through the test and the trial and
the torture. How different it all became when
Maude went north’!
The operations having landed General Town-
shend in Amara, one hundred and thirty-two miles
by river from Basra, the Turks proceeded to take
up a strong position at Kut-el-Amara, one hundred
and fifty miles farther on, where they commanded
the easiest and most direct routes into Persia.
And it was recognised at once that in order to fore-
stall a possible movement of the enemy back into
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THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
Persian territory Kut-el-Amara would have to be
taken.
Amara was occupied on the 3rd of June 1915—
I must repeat dates occasionally, if you don't mind
-and there General Townshend halted long enough
to enable such communication services as then
existed to establish a base of operations. This
involved bringing reserve supplies of food, forage,
and munitions up-river, and getting ready to meet
an inevitable demand for rather extensive hospital
facilities.
I am writing about General Townshend as
though he were in command of the operations. He
was not. But to follow the comings and goings of
a succession of commanders-in-chief would be to
complicate a story which I wish to make Iquite
simple and direct. Sir John Nixon was in supreme
command when the advance on Kut was made. He
was succeeded by Sir Percy Lake, who in his turn
was succeeded by Sir Stanley Maude.
And while General Townshend—a division com-
mander only-was reorganising his forces at Amara,
the Commander-in-Chief was directing operations on
the Euphrates, where a second British army was
pushing north in the fearfulness of midsummer
heat, through midsummer floods, and against a
more stubborn and sustained resistance on the part
of the enemy than any Turkish force had previ-
ously displayed.
The peculiarities and difficulties of the Meso-
potamian campaigns have been indeed unique, and
one wonders now that men have overcome them.
In retrospect it is too glaringly apparent that
tremendous and inexplicable mistakes were made
in calculating material requirements, but, as I have
said, necessity urged, and the only instance in those
days when unwise counsel prevailed was when it
was decided to drive on to a spectacular finish an
already splendid victory-before adequate pre-
paration had been made for a farther advance.
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THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
September 29th-while the main British force
pursued the fleeing Turks to the northward.
From Kut to Baghdad it is two hundred and
twelve miles by river, and only one hundred and
twelve miles by the land route. This fact is a suffi-
cient commentary on the extreme crookedness of
the Tigris, and I might add that above Kut some
of the worst shallows are encountered. There are
stretches here and there that are all but unnavi-
gable when the water is low, and the water is at its
lowest just before the rains begin in late November
or early December. And be it remembered that
the river was the only avenue of communication
with his bases of supply and hospital services that
General Townshend had.
In cold official statements it is recorded that
General Townshend
pursued the routed Turks
with the utmost vigour, but he was a fightin'-man
and, considering the fact that ‘an army travels
on its belly,' one is justified perhaps in surmising
that he was carried forward by the impetus of
victory farther than he intended to go. Or was
Aziziyeh the first possible place where a halt could
be called ? It is such a terrible desert land !
In any case no stop was made until the army
reached Aziziyeh, sixty-one miles by the land route
from Kut, and one hundred and two miles by river.
Half-way from Kut to Baghdad !
The Turks meanwhile continued their retreat to
a previously prepared position at Ctesiphon, forty-
two miles farther on.
Then came the fatal decision. General Town-
shend is on record as having been opposed to an
immediate advance with Baghdad as the objective.
He recognised the inadequacy of his communica-
tions, but having halted at Aziziyeh for six weeks
while newly captured Kut was provisioned and
equipped as a base of operations, he moved on-in
obedience to the order of the army commander !
The operations were being directed as a matter of
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GENERAL TOWNSHEND'S ADVANCE
fact by a General Staff located on the Olympian and
luxuriously comfortable heights of Simla. But the
confidence of the General Staff was in a measure
justified. The British in Mesopotamia had been so
consistently successful that nothing seemed im-
possible for them to do. They themselves were in
exuberant spirits, thrilling to the blare of their own
trumpets of victory, and treating with magnificent
disregard every suggestion of caution.
General Townshend proceeded to carry out the
orders he had received, and on the 22nd of Novem-
ber he attacked the enemy position at Ctesiphon.
What does not seem to be very generally known is
that he achieved a brilliant victory.
He captured the first Turkish line almost at once,
taking thirteen hundred prisoners and eight guns ;
then he stormed the second line and thrust the
Turks back to their last defence. The action is
described as having been magnificent, and he
could have driven straight through if he had had
behind him anything at all in the way of reserves
or communications. He had nothing, and there
was no way on earth for him to make victory finally
victorious.
On the 23rd-the first anniversary of the occupa-
tion of Basra—the enemy was reinforced from
Baghdad and the north in tremendous numbers,
and the tide was turned.
But even against overwhelming odds the British
fought on with the utmost valour and tenacity, and
it was not until he discovered that the enemy was
executing a wide flank movement, with every pro-
spect of cutting him off, that General Townshend
decided to retire on Kut.
Then the fearful retreat began-on the 25th of
November. It is difficult even on the spot to
visualise the horrors of such a retreat in such a
land. Eight days it took, with a rear-guard ham-
mered and harassed every foot of the way by an
enemy that had suffered long-drawn-out defeat,
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CHAPTER XII
LINES OF COMMUNICATION
ONE Colonel Chesney, a great-uncle of the In-
spector-General of Communications, led the ex-
pedition which placed the first steamboat on the
river Tigris.
He started in 1835. From first to last it took
him a good many weary months—two years, in
fact-and the record of his historic achievement
reads like the fevered kind of fiction that is written
not to convince, but only to thrill and to convey
one in dreams to far-away and unimaginable
regions.
The expedition started from England with two
boats, which, being landed near Antioch on the
Orontes, were transported in parts across the
desert to the upper waters of the Euphrates, where
they were set up and launched. Only one of them
succeeded in finishing the trip down to the Persian
Gulf, after which it started up the Tigris toward
Baghdad.
No Arab of those days had ever seen any kind of
steam-run miracle of machinery, and to many of
them the new craft was a thing to fear and some-
times to propitiate with prayers and offerings.
But, even so, they were not so very far behind
the times. This first modern navigator of the Tigris
was born along about the time the steamboat was
invented ; and one remembers that on the occasion
of the Clermont's first trip up the Hudson the wholly
Christian crews of other Hudson River boats in
.some instances sank beneath the decks from the
terrible sight, or left their vessels to go ashore,
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LINES OF COMMUNICATION
Euphrates. There were large shipments of native
products—dates, liquorice, a few grains, Persian
treasures in carpets and fanciful things-to be
brought down-river at certain seasons for the
ocean-going ships at Basra ; a few modern things
had to be taken in to the populations along the
river-banks, and there was an occasional traveller
to be carried up or down. But there was never
anything to necessitate the establishment of a
river service that was other than leisurely and inter-
mittent. So before the war the only steam-craft
on the river Tigris were the old boats of this com-
pany that for years had been plying in a stolid
kind of way between Basra and Baghdad.
I really don't know how many there were—two
or three, perhaps—but naturally anything that
could be of use to the Turks on their hurried retreat
was commandeered, and the British found the con-
quered waterways empty of everything save
a few
snail-paced dhows and mayhalas, and a sufficient
number of the canoe-like belums which are owned
by individual Arabs for the most part, and are not
of much use, anyhow. Though they have played
their interesting and sometimes spectacular part
in the Mesopotamian battles.
From the gulf up to about twenty miles north of
Basra the Shatt-el-Arab is deep enough to admit
ocean-going steamships, but above that point the
shallows begin, and the Tigris is navigable for
nothing that draws more than three or four feet
of water.
What, then, was to be done for river-boats when
the Expeditionary Force, pursuing the Turks to the
northward, got so many miles away? The opera-
tions, which carried the army on and on, proceeded
with a rapidity which could do no less than greatly
strain even a fairly adequate transport service.
What it did to a transport service that was prac-
tically nil is better left to individual conjecture.
It was only ten months after the first landing
143


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
was made by British troops that General Town-
shend occupied Kut-el-Amara, two hundred and
eighty-five miles from Basra, and by that time-
thanks to the contributions of a few near-by ports
and river towns—the available river shipping
amounted to something like six steamboats of sorts,
a few barges, and an established chain of mahaylas
and dhows. And when, some six weeks later,
General Townshend began his fatal advance toward
Baghdad, the inadequacy of his communications,
in comparison with present conditions, was all but
criminal and wholly unbelievable. For instance,
he was provided with hospital transport for not
more than five hundred wounded ; at Ctesiphon he
was one hundred and eighty-two miles by river
from his hospital base at Kut, and in two days'
fighting he had four thousand five hundred
casualties.
Moreover, at that time, with every ounce of
material of every kind being brought in from over-
seas and unloaded at Basra, where the building of
piers and warehouses was only just beginning, the
supply and transport service was taking care not
only of General Townshend's army, but of the force
as well that had advanced one hundred and forty
miles up the Euphrates.
Those were difficult days, but I think I must pass
them by; pass by all the worry and the toil of
them, and, incidentally, the disgrace which even-
tually overwhelmed the men who were held respon-
sible for the terrible tragedy of them, and come
to the time when General Maude went north. By
that time the British had paid in full for pressing
their luck and for under-estimating the strength of
their enemy, and had settled down to the grim
business of exacting payment in return.
It was a little more than seven months after
General Townshend surrendered at Kut when
General Maude launched the victorious campaign
which landed him in Baghdad, and when he started
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LINES OF COMMUNICATION
he had behind him lines of communication fully
organised, with more than one thousand steam-
vessels and power-boats of various kinds plying
up and down the river Tigris. What a difference!
And what an achievement!
There are more than sixteen hundred bottoms
now, and naturally the first question the interested
visitor' asks is :
'How on earth did you do it?'
I was standing on an upper balcony of the
Lines of Communication headquarters, talking with
General MacMunn, when I asked him this, and he
ran his eyes up and down the rushing, bustling six-
mile length of Basra's now well-built river front,
and smiled a twisted smile that had in it whole
volumes of unpleasant reminiscence.
We did it!' he answered grimly.
Then he
pointed out a Thames penny steamer bearing
proudly down the middle aisle of the crowded
stream with two big barges lashed to her sides.
• We did it!'he repeated.
' But the Thames penny steamer! How did she
get into the Shatt-el-Arab ?’I exclaimed.
• Under her own steam !'he answered. And that
is the whole unimaginable story.
Remember there were no railways and no roads;
only a trackless waste rolling away to the north
that was deep in dust in the dry seasons, and
during the rains was in great stretches a hideous
and dangerous quagmire.
River-boats were an absolute, a primary neces-
sity. They could not be built in Mesopotamia,
nor anywhere else in time to relieve the desperate
situation. They could not be materialised by the
wave of any magician's wand. Well, what then ?
Then they would have to come out of other rivers
otherwheres and make their various ways somehow
-no matter how !-across the seas and up through
the Persian Gulf! They were requisitioned from
the Ganges and the Indus and the Irawadi, from
K
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THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
the Nile and the rivers of Africa ; from everywhere
they have come. It has been one of the bravest
and strangest achievements of the war, and one
hears with a feeling of specially chill regret that
more than eighty of them have failed! A few from
everywhere have gone-along with the high hopes
of British sailors, and usually with the sailors, too
-to the bottom of the seas they were never meant
to venture on.
But the Thames penny steamers ? Where is it
you go on the Thames penny steamers ? To Rich-
mond ? To Putney ? To Henley ? To queer little
landings here and there round London where crowds
of people gather on gala days, and where happy
summer memories are made? Yes, to places like
that. There is a holiday sound in the very name
--Thames penny steamer. They may be used for
purely workaday purposes; I do not know; I
only know I went to Richmond once on a Thames
penny steamer.
But the Thames penny steamers, too, were needed
on the Tigris.
So bravely they set out. Eleven of them started,
but only five of them achieved the impossible.
Five of them got to the Tigris, and are now listed
by number in the great fleet under a class initial.
As I watched the curious, flat-bottomed, high-
funnelled, double-decked, paddle-wheeled
little
craft churning briskly down-stream with her two
clumsy barges in tow, I was seeing visions of the
kind of heroism that makes one prayerful.
I saw first the matter-of-fact, nonchalant British
sailors on her frail decks preparing for such a voyage
as was never before undertaken. Then I saw her,
her sides boarded up and her one-time spick-and-
spanness begrimed with the coal that had to be
stowed in every possible space, moving out of the
snug security of the busy, bustling, city-bounded
Thames into the open, high-rolling Atlantic. I
followed her course across the perilous Bay of
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LINES OF COMMUNICATION
Biscay and saw her creep down the long coasts of
Portugal and Spain and through the straits past
Gibraltar.
After Gibraltar would come a hopeful, careful,
long, long crawl across the mine-strewn and sub-
marine-infested Mediterranean. Port Said in safety!
Then the Suez Canal-contributing a brief period
of relaxation-the Red Sea, the Arabian Sea, the
Persian Gulf, and finally-with what a sigh of relief!
-the broad current of the Shatt-el-Arab and the
almost rippleless serenity of the blessed Tigris !
I don't know what happened to the six that
failed, but one hears that their backs were broken
by the high seas. That was the chief danger they
all had to face; they and the hundreds of others
from other far-away rivers, too. More than eighty
of the others went down, and six of the Thames
boats ! They should be honourably counted among
England's honourable losses at sea, and they never
have been. Nobody has ever paid any attention
really to the wonderful Mesopotamian story.
Then there are the barges. There are a good
many more barges than steamboats on the Meso-
potamian waterways. They represent the spirit
of economy in the transport service, and every-
thing under its own steam, or under power of any
kind—including dozens of the grimiest tugs that
ever spilled oil on clean waters and filled the atmo-
sphere with unpleasing odours-has one or more of
them in tow. Latterly a good many of them have
been brought from overseas in parts and set up in
the new dockyard on the river-bank at Basra-
which might have been a German dockyard turning
out U-boats for the Eastern seas but for one fine
victory that is England's—but in the beginning
numbers of them made their own way across the
wide waters, or were towed over by some of the
same tugboats that are towing them now round
about in the placidity of unruffled rivers. I declare
it is a story one cannot believe! It is just that
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LINES OF COMMUNICATION
the land. About 10.30 P.m. our towing-gear came away
and we drifted clear.
May 29.—Sighted land again to leeward. Hove up,
slipped our towing-gear and hoisted sail, but could not get
the barge to fall away. Bent 3-inch manila to stern anchor
and dropped it, and when the sail filled and the barge swung
I cut the hawser and got clear. The wind was W.S.W.,
and the land ran out to the eastward. We just managed
to round the point and went away to the N.E.
It was north-east that Corporal Harte wished to
go, and it seems to have been his intention to sail
that unwieldy barge all on its own across the
Arabian Sea and on up the Persian Gulf. He went
ahead for forty-eight hours with nothing happen-
ing, evidently, that was of sufficient importance, in
his opinion, to set down in the log. Though it
seems to me that if I had been in his place I should
have spent all my spare time writing an account of
my own emotions and of how the other men were
bearing up under their unpleasant prospects. But
nothing like that for an all-in-the-day’s-work
Britisher.
On the 31st of May the wind shifted, then died
down, and they began to drift in toward land. In
the mere human nature of things land should have
looked to them quite inviting enough to make
them glad they were drifting toward it, but that
was not what they wanted at all. They wanted to
get on with their job. When they got in seven
fathoms of water they dropped their anchor, and
there, hopefully, they clung for three days.
On the 4th of June the wind came up from west
by south, so they weighed anchor and headed again
for the north-east. But luck was against them.
They were becalmed again on the 6th, and began
once more to drift in toward shore. Their doom
was not sealed, however, until the following even-
ing when the wind came on to blow from the north-
east and blew hard all night.' The next entry in
the log, which the corporal managed to save and
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THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
in which he continued to record his adventures,
reads :
June 8.–At about 4 A.M. the wind shifted more to the
eastward, and we began to drag our anchors. By noon we
were close inshore. The cliffs were crowded with armed
Arabs. About 1.30 P.M. our rudder struck the sand, and I
hove in on the anchors in the hope that one of them might
catch a rock. But nothing came of it, and at 2 P.M. we
were well aground and the Arabs swarmed aboard. By
3 P.M. all the crew were ashore, the Arabs having taken
everything away from them except what they wore.
find a
When the corporal saw the Arabs coming aboard
he ran aft to his room, with an intention of getting
his rifle and defending himself. But they were
there before him. One already had his rifle and
another his kit-bag, while he was just in time to
third turning out the contents of his
locker.
I snatched my bag away from the Arab who had it and
threw it on the bunk. Then I tried to take
my
rifle
away
from the other. He would not let go, and struck me in
the face with his fist. There was a boatswain's fid lying
on my bunk, and I picked it up and knocked him down
with it. Directly I did I got a heavy blow on the head, and
the next thing I knew I was being dragged up the beach.
The other men made no resistance, and were not ill-treated.
The Arabs who helped me up the beach were taking no part
in the looting and seemed to be friendly enough. They
asked me by signs if there was any money on board, and I
made them understand there was not. Then they made
signs that when the barge was stripped the looters would
come and cut our throats.
I should like to tell this whole story in the man's
own language, but it is too long. He managed to
convey to the friendly seeming Arabs that if they
would guide him and his men to Muskat and take
care of them on the way they would be liberally
rewarded by the authorities. And this the Arabs
finally agreed to do. But it was difficult to escape
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LINES OF COMMUNICATION
from the unfriendly tribe; and afterward came a
weary, terrible march of thirteen days.
The first night they lay hidden in a cave in the
side of a hill, and just before daybreak—his interest
in his barge getting the better of his fear of the
Arabs—the
corporal
stole back down the beach for
a final inspection. She was lying broadside on
the beach,' he says, ' so I went back and we started
off.'
The way lay over hills, across desert wastes, and
along the cliffs of the seashore, and a good part of
the time the men had neither food nor drink.
Moreover, it was June, and the heat was the heat
of June in that hottest of all lands. They had one
box of biscuits with them, and at Arab encamp-
ments on the way they got goats' milk and water.
But the water in the wells they came across on the
long daily marches was nearly always brackish and
they suffered terribly from thirst. Many of the
Arab encampments they had to avoid because they
belonged to tribes unfriendly to the tribe of the
men who were guiding them, and they were afraid
of being held for ransom.
The corporal continues :
June 10.—The Arabs kept urging us on. They seemed to
be afraid the looters would come after us. After we crossed
the hills it was flat, sandy plain, and the heat was terrible.
We kept going until after sunset. Then we stopped. One
of the Arabs went away, and after a while returned with
water. It was very bad water, but we were glad to get it.
After a drink and a biscuit we went to sleep.
June 12.-Started at dawn and kept on going until 4 P.M.
when we reached another encampment. At that encamp-
ment they tried to induce our guides to get me to write to
Muskat for money, and to keep us there until the money
arrived. Our guides would not agree to that.
June 14.-We did not start until about 9 A.M.
Then we
marched till it was almost dark, when we reached a well.
The well was empty. By that time we had finished our
biscuits, so we lay down and tried to sleep.
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THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
It was not until three o'clock in the afternoon of
the following day that they got either food or
water, and by that time they were so exhausted
that they had to lose a day in order to rest. After
which it is a story of a race with starvation. One
day they accidentally discovered a large nest of
turtle eggs, a life-saving incident on which the
corporal makes naïvely gleeful comment; and at
the last encampment they came across they were
able to get a few dates to carry along with them.
Then comes a final pathetic brief entry in the
record :
June 21.-Finished the dates.
Two days after they finished the dates they
reached their destination-just thirty-three days
from the day they left Aden. They were bathed
and fed, looked over by a doctor, and put to sleep.
But Corporal Harte did not seem to be interested
in being invalided. He set to work at once, and
two days after he landed in Muskat he had gathered
together the necessary paraphernalia and, accom-
panied by all the men of his crew who were fit for
service, was off on a naval vessel to rescue his
barge. In concluding his unemotional statement
he says:
men.
I would like to add that from the time we got adrift until
we reached Muskat, I never had any trouble with any of the
In the desert when we were hungry and thirsty and
had no tobacco they neither groused nor whimpered, but
took everything as a matter of course.
And it is of such men that the Inland Water
Transport of Mesopotamia is made up. If it were
not so there could not be an adequate inland water
transport, because the difficulties have been such as
only heroic and determined men could overcome.
Brigadier-General R. H. W. Hughes, C.M.G.,
D.S.O., the director of inland water transport-and
known in Mesopotamia as the D.I.W.T.-sets the
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LINES OF COMMUNICATION
course.
example of imperturbability, and seems to regard
the whole amazing performance as a matter of
I tried to get him excited about it so h
would tell me stories, but he was interested chiefly
in a great dry-dock they were building at Basra.
He could get enthusiastic about that. The river
Tigris with its shallows and narrows is hard on
steamboats, and they get out of repair with irri-
tating frequency. The custom has been to beach
them on a low bank of the Shatt-el-Arab at Basra
and make the repairs at low tide, but this was far
from satisfactory, so everybody has a high regard
for the new dry-dock that was so difficult to come
by in such a land.
The shipping in the Tigris is now divided into
classes, and everything afloat, of whatever variety
of craft, carries in large letters, either on its funnel
or on its bow, a number and the initials of its class.
The P-boats and the S-boats are the paddle-
wheelers and stern-wheelers, and when you see
‘P-76' or 'S-81' steaming up-river you realise
that these classes are fairly large.
Then there are the S-T's-steam-tugs by the
hundreds ; P-T's-paddle-tugs;
P-L's-power-
launches; F-B's—flat-barges; S-B's-steam-barges;
and so on. And there is a new variety of passenger
steamboat, designed to carry troops, and built or
building in India, which are paddle-wheeled, but
with the wheels astern instead of amidships. They
are just beginning to come into the river, and they
are principally distinguished in my mind, not
because they are queer-looking structures, but
because they meet with 'Yukon's' intense dis-
approval.
Yukon does not believe in paddle-boats for the
Tigris, anyhow. They draw too much water, in the
first place, and, says he, once a paddle-boat gets
stuck in the mud, there she sticks until a tug comes
along and yanks her off!'
He is for ever dealing in doleful reminiscence
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THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
about the excellence, as he has tested it, of the
Yukon River traffic and the superior advantages
of the Mississippi River steamboats.
* Them Mississippi boats !' says he. “Gosh!
They carry a thousand ton a clip, with plenty o'
space to spare, an' draw about two foot o' water !
Say! These Britishers don't know nothin' 'bout
rivers, nohow. When they want a model for a
steamboat why don't they consult some one with
river sense ? Look at them new paddle-wheelers
now! Wide enough at the stern to scrape the sides
out o' the Narrers and push everything else out o’
the river! An' say !_down at the head four feet
at least, with nothin' in 'em! We 'll have a pile
of 'em stacked up in the mud along above Qurnah
one o' these days, an’ we'll have to use dynamite
to get 'em out o' the way!'
But perhaps Yukon should be introduced in a
less casual way.
154


CHAPTER XIII
UP THE RIVER TIGRIS
THEY had told him that I was an American, and
that if I could not speak his language I would at
least be able to understand it--which was more
than they could do. So he was what he called
lookin' forrard to meetin'
me. They had also
told me about him, describing him as a character,'
and while I, too, was lookin' forrard' I really
expected to encounter in him a kind of British
imitation of what they said he was a woolly
Westerner. I was all wrong. I found he was the
genuine article; not so very wild, but certainly
woolly.
'Ye-e-ep,' he said, 'been livin' in the great
North-west since I was knee-high. An' say, if
this ol war ever lets up an' I live to get back !
Well, they won't have to tie me to no post! I 'll
stan' without hitchin', all right, all right!'
Ever been to Vancouver ?' he suddenly ex-
claimed.
I smiled and nodded.
* You have ! Well, now, then I ask you ! Ain't
that one o' the grandest towns on earth ? Say,
I've got six corner lots in that town, an' I wouldn't
take less ’n a hundred thousand dollars for 'em !
They only cost me a hundred dollars apiece, but I
got in on the ground floor. These British army
officers don't know nothin'. I been tellin' 'em
about that country out there till I 'm black in the
face. But they think I'm prejudiced. They
won't pay no attention to me. Now you tell
'em !
A
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THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
name.
I doubt if many persons ever heard his real
He is known as Yukon' from one end of
Mesopotamia to the other, because, once having
run a steamboat on the Yukon River, he is given
to comparing that stream with the river Tigris on
every possible occasion, and invariably to the great
disadvantage of the Tigris. Moreover, he has a
Yukonese cast of ruddy countenance, a Yukonese
muscularity and freedom of movement and manner,
and a Yukonese picturesqueness of diction and ex-
pletive that would make him a marked man
anywhere.
I am afraid that as a kindred spirit I disap-
pointed him from the outset. I could most
enthusiastically back his opinion of His British
Majesty's great North-West, but my language has
been thinned and clarified by a too long association
with the less fortunate inhabitants of the effete
American East, and I could see that he began at
once to regard me as most unrepresentative of the
country he calls ‘God's own.' And when he says
'God's own' he means the good old U.S.A.,' for
which he has an ardent affection.
I did not meet him until he came to the mess one
evening to tell us that the S-1 was all right as to
engine repairs and coal, and would be ready to
get away up-river next morning at any hour the
General might wish to start. But after that I saw
him, as he would say, some frequent an' con-
siderable.'
The S-1-otherwise Stern-wheeler Number One
-is the boat on which the Inspector-General of
Communications travels up and down the Tigris;
and Yukon is her captain. She began life as an
open-decked passenger-craft on a far-away river
somewhere, but since she made her own courageous
way into the Tigris fleet she has undergone a
number of disfiguring but amplifying improvements
and has had a most thrilling career.
We were to leave Basra at eight in the morning,
6
156


UP THE RIVER TIGRIS
the General having telegraphed ahead for a con-
ference with his officers at Qurnah at half-past
eleven. I was aboard betimes, followed by Ezekiel
-that servant of mine-who managed, with char-
acteristic nonchalance and the assistance of about
six coolies, to stow my kit-bed and bedding, camp
table, chair, boxes, and bags-in passageways and
deck spaces where it would do the most good as an
obstruction and a nuisance.
Among Ezekiel's other objectionable habits, he
wears European clothes instead of the graceful
draperies of the usual Indian, and he came aboard
the S-1 arrayed in a suit of black-and-white-checked
flannel which caused a commotion even among the
animals on the lower deck. The General's and
the Major's riding-horses pawed their stalls and
nickered inquiringly, while the plaintive bleats of
two pet Persian lambs were as a kind of 'cello
obbligato to the cackling and squawking of the
fowls in their coops. Yukon remarked :
Well, I won't have to use no horn or whistle
this trip !!
It was the intention of my host and his staff that
I should realise none of my expectations with re-
gard to hardships and discomfort. I had come
aboard prepared to furnish a bare little cabin with
my own kit and to make the best of next to nothing.
I knew that was what the Major and the A.D.C.
would have to do, because in Mesopot officers get
along with a minimum of personal impedimenta,
and they make that minimum serve on all occasions.
Each has his own camp bed, his own blankets and
linen, and everything strictly necessary, and wher-
ever he goes he takes his kit along and makes
arrangements for his own comfort, or lives in dis-
comfort for which he has nobody but himself to
blame.
Nothing like that for their 'lady visitor. They
had a surprise in store for me, and they proudly
ushered me into a cabin which put me in a class by
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THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
myself. It was amusing and wonderful ! Persian
rugs and rose-bordered yellow draperies were the
chief items of decoration-goodness knows where
they got them !-and against one wall there was a
writing-table on which they had placed a large
square of spotless blotting-paper and a green-
shaded reading-lamp. What more could any one
wish for on the river Tigris ? My camp bed was
covered with a gay travelling-rug and an electric
fan was humming in a corner.
The General's cabin and office is a large room up
forward under the bridge, in which he has some
shelves of reference books, many maps, and a big,
busy-looking desk, while the other accommodations
are a half-dozen tiny rooms down either side of the
deck, which, before the servants got the camp beds
and tables and things in their places, were as bare
as though they had never been lived in.
The mess-room is amidships alongside the tele-
graph office and the stenographers' quarters, while
down at the end of the deck, just over the great,
churning-wheel, are two well-furnished bathrooms
- fitted up,' said the General, with porcelain
looted from an over-supply of hospital equipment
at a time when the authorities seemed to have been
struck with a sudden idea that the way to win the
war was to send bath-tubs to Mesopotamia.' For
a long time Mesopotamia had practically no bath-
tubs at all.
All these living quarters constitute what I have
referred to as disfiguring but amplifying improve-
ments. They are all built of canvas nailed to plain,
unpainted uprights and cross-timbers, and since the
curious old boat draws only between three and four
feet of water, and has a wide-open lower deck,
they make her look top-heavy. But makeshift and
quaint as she is, she is very comfortable.
On the lower deck, besides the horses, the lambs,
the chickens, and the General's automobile, we had
a small host of servants, the Indian crew, and a
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UP THE RIVER TIGRIS
Punjabi guard—the guard being necessary in case
of attack by Arabs.
Yukon gave me the freedom of the bridge, which
is very high, and to which I had to climb by a
steep ladder, and I spent most of my time in a
comfortable chair in one corner of it, gazing in
utter enthralment at a vast panoramic world that
was new to me.
There is no river anywhere on earth like the
Tigris. Even the Euphrates, its sister stream,
which runs through similar country, is wholly
different.
The main current of the Euphrates used to join
the Tigris at Qurnah, but in order to reclaim areas
that were rapidly drying up into a desert waste for
want of irrigation, a British company completed in
1914 a great barrage at Hindiyeh-north of Babylon
-which had the effect of turning the principal
stream into a formerly thin and silted-up channel
to the southward. So the Euphrates now flows
grandly into the Shatt-el-Arab about ten miles
above Basra, while the branch running across to
Qurnah has dwindled to very meagre proportions.
Between Basra and Qurnah the banks of the
Shatt-el-Arab are lined with date-gardens, and in
its gentle placidity the broad river reflects every-
thing very deeply. Its edges gleam silvery green
with the dust-silvered green of the palms, while
here and there a tawny stretch lies under a shelving
bank of clay, on which, perhaps, may stand a row
of ancient brick-kilns which look like castle ruins or
mediæval watch-towers. It really is very beautiful.
We arrived at Qurnah at the appointed hour, and
while the General and the Major went off for their
conference, the A.D.C. and I wandered in deep
dust through the lanelike streets and out into the
surrounding palm-groves where the army camps
are located.
Qurnah is regarded by the men of the Meso-
potamian Expeditionary Force as the least attrac-
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THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
tive place in all Mesopotamia, and that is saying
nothing whatever for the rest of Mesopotamia.
But to be sent to Qurnah for service is to be pun-
ished for your sins. I have referred to the fact
that the summer temperature of Mesopot ranges
between 110° and 130º. At Qurnah, where there
is more humidity than at any other point on the
river, this is accompanied by a heavy, saturating
mugginess that is fairly prostrating.
In the spring of 1916, when the force was trying
to relieve General Townshend at Kut, a poor
Tommy who was dying of heatstroke called it
• the hill station for hell, but as the summer wore
on this was improved upon by other Tommies,
who liked to refer to hell as the hill station for
Qurnah,' and to pretend that a month's leave in
hell would do them a world of good.
Yet hoary tradition--the legends of the ages-
has made the site of Qurnah the Garden of Eden.
It answers so many of the descriptions in Genesis
that for a long time it was generally accepted as
the probable scene of that event in human history
known to us as The Creation.
It has its rivals, but not in the mind of any
British soldier who has lived and worked and
fought in Mesopotamia. All such unfortunate
boys are quite satisfied that Qurnah is the Garden
of Eden, and being permitted to fight in the Garden
of Eden has been one of their compensations for
having to fight at all in such an ungodly land.
They have given all the principal streets in
Qurnah new names, and in order to make them
more or less permanent-since troops come and go
in such a place—they have painted them on neat
signboards and have set these up at the corners.
Many of the streets run out from a small plaza,
which is as blank and bare and unsightly as any-
thing well could be, and this they have named
Temptation Square.
Ібо


حجم


UP THE RIVER TIGRIS
Then there are Eve's Walk, Serpent's Crescent,
Adam's Lane, Fatal Bite Avenue, Apple Alley, and
a number of others that I am not able to remember.
And even the Arabs in a measure have adopted
these names and are tremendously pleased by any
reference to the anciently historic importance of
their most un-Eden-like town.
Back aboard the S-1, I went up to the high bridge,
from which I could see the whole community and
all that lay huddled round its edges. The army
camps and the corrals and the remount depots
under the palm-trees I could not see, but down the
river-bank were signs of war industry in the form
of pyramids of grain and hay and rough mat-shed
warehouses overflowing with supplies waiting to
be transported up-river, or being reserved here for
possible emergency. Gangs of labourers were at
work laying more sidings and building freight-
sheds for the new railway which now connects
Basra with Baghdad-and therefore with the battle-
lines beyond.
The town of Qurnah is a kind of baked-mud
horror, with no architectural ornamentation that I
could see to relieve its flat-roofed and almost win-
dowless monotony. It has about three thousand
Arab inhabitants, and I think a majority of them
-the men, at least-spend most of their time on
the river-front watching the army shipping going
up and down. And truly it is a wonderful sight!
A short way up the Bund a number of them were
sitting, with legs tucked under them, on high
benches in front of a coffee-house, sipping some
kind of liquid from small glasses, smoking their
water-pipes and talking, no doubt, about the un-
supportable strenuousness and orderliness of life
with Mesopotamia under British control.
Then the Political Commissioner—the local
D.P.C.--came aboard to call on me and to offer
me anything he might have in his possession in
the way of information.
L
I6I


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
6
6
I invited him up on the bridge, and the first
thing he told me was that we were tied up in the
shade of the Tree itself. That is, we would have
been in its shade if it had been casting any. It
was high noon, the burning sun was straight over-
head, and the gnarled and knotted branches of the
Tree seemed to be dropping wearily beneath it.
It was very interesting; though it gave me a
momentary feeling that would be difficult to de-
scribe to be told that there was the Tree of Know-
ledge of Good and Evil-right there! It didn't
sound quite reasonable.
Is it a very old tree ? 'I asked.
Well-uh-rather ! It's the Adam and Eve
tree.'
“Yes, but
you
know what I mean.'
Of course! And as a matter of fact it is an old
tree. It 's older than the oldest inhabitant, and
he's over a hundred. And he says it was old when
his great-grandfather was born. But you see it
doesn't claim to be the original Tree. It's only a
descendant of the original Tree, though it does stand
on the original spot.
Oh, does it ? But the Bible says in the midst
of the garden," and this tree is on the river-bank.'
Oh, well, the river may have been miles away
from here at that time! In fact, you can't tell
even nowadays where the Tigris is going to be from
one year's end to another.'
This was slandering the Tigris, but it has an
awful reputation for wandering round at loose ends,
so I had nothing to offer in its defence.
' Do the Arabs really believe in this tree ?' I
asked.
'No, not unreservedly. At least it is not re-
garded as particularly sacred. But there is a tree
over there—the feathery one hanging over the
dome of the mosque—that they do believe in. In
fact, they are tremendously superstitious about it.
It was planted by Noah.'
162


UP THE RIVER TIGRIS
All of which may sound like kidding, but it
was not at all. We were quite serious. We were
not even smiling. I assure you that in this ex-
traordinary country, where one sees Noahs and
Father Abrahams in real life on every hand, and
where the days of the Flood seem far less remote
than the Middle Ages of Europe, one makes and
accepts such statements quite matter-of-factly and
without realising in the least their absurdity.
Incidentally, nobody who has ever lived through
a spring and early summer in Mesopotamia doubts
the story of the Flood. It is accepted by every-
body with the utmost simplicity of belief, except
that it is understood that the world the Lord
destroyed was only Noah's world.
The rain does descend upon the earth in sheets
and layers for forty days and forty nights-which
is not such a long rainy season, after all. But it is
not the rains which cause the rivers to spread
themselves out over the whole visible area, it is
the melting of the snows up in the Armenian hills
where the rivers rise.
What really happened was that a couple of
floodless seasons passed during which it was
abnormally cold up around the Black Sea, and Mr.
Noah, being a wise old patriarch, said to himself:
We ’re going to have a ripping-hot spring along
about next year and the accumulated snows in the
mountains are going to melt and the waters are
going to pour down into the Land of the Two
Rivers in the worst flood we've had in centuries.
I shall build me an ark and get ready for it.'
Which he did. He was at that time about six
hundred years old, you know, so his memory-
enriched, too, by the teachings and traditions of
his fathers-covered a considerable period.
Everything happened as he prognosticated, and
it came to pass that because he could get nobody
else to believe in preparedness he was the only
inhabitant who had a refuge ready and stocked
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THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
with enough provisions to tide him and his family
over the drowning-out period.
As for Ararat-the whole country is covered with
mounds which are the ruins of ancient mud villages
-or even of great cities-and in the language of the
people these mounds are called 'ararats. There
never has been any building material except mud-
sometimes baked into imperishable bricks—and
mud structures fall into ruin very quickly. There is
no reason to believe that before Noah's time there
were no such mounds in Mesopotamia. And there
is no reason to think that the ararat of to-day was
not an ararat eight or ten thousand years ago.
I myself have picked out of the walls of excavated
ruins bricks that had been right where I found
them for something like five thousand years. And
still embedded in the bitumen which held them in
their places was perfectly good straw-coloured straw
which might have been produced with last year's
crop of oats.
What are a few thousand years more
or less—in Mesopotamia ?
Noah's Ark grounded on an ararat, and he was
hung up high and dry. He probably tried to get her
off into deep water, but, failing in this, was com-
pelled to stay where he was until the flood receded
and the ground got into fit condition to be cultivated.
This ararat theory is really the General's, but it
impresses me as being so entirely reasonable that I
cannot resist the temptation to pass it on.
The men who took part in the first operations
north from Qurnah, and in the subsequent opera-
tions for the relief of Kut, knew all about the Flood.
For them the waters prevailed upon the earth'
during months on end, and the flood was accom-
panied by an intolerable heat against which they
had no kind of protection; also by a plague of
poisonous insects.
It is the consensus of opinion in Mesopotamia
that Noah exceeded his instructions with regard
to pestiferous insects, and especially with regard to
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UP THE RIVER TIGRIS
sand-flies and certain breeds of mosquitoes. There
is one variety of mosquito that is extraordinarily
numerous and particularly detested. It has little
striped legs and is a very pretty insect, but it is
absolutely without sporting instinct-the meanest
thing alive. It has no buzz; it utters no warning
sound of any kind; and it seems even to be at
pains not to tickle the spot on which it lights. Like
thistle-down it floats in the air and like thistle-down
it settles on any exposed point of human skin and
proceeds to attend to its immediate business with a
vigour and viciousness that nothing else could equal.
And it leaves a frightfully inflamed mark which
frequently develops into a shocking sore that takes
weeks to heal and is likely to disfigure one for life.
Since more often than not it finds the face of its
victim the most easily get-atable foraging area, it is
a creature to be feared.
But we must get on up the Tigris. Above
Qurnah the palm-gardens along the river-banks
leave off and the limitless, mirage-filled desert
begins; then for a week one sees only limitless,
mirage-filled desert. To be sure, there are occa-
sional river-bank oases, and there are mud- and
reed-hut villages, towns, tombs, and mosques,
Bedouin encampments, herds and hosts, army bases
and marching-posts, and the endless moving picture
of busy war life on the river. Also there are
flaming dawns and thrilling sunsets.
One day I was reading a book which a certain
Anglican bishop wrote about his connection with
the operations in Mesopotamia, and I noticed that
he liked too well a phrase that he was constantly
making use of in quotation marks. Men marched
off ‘into the blue'; he gazed into the blue';
he sent messages which might or might not be
delivered into the blue.' And there isn't any
blue in the country. At least, not enough to
make one think blue.
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THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
There is a steely kind of sky overhead most of
the time, and the distances into which men march
and into which one gazes are mauve and amber,
dove grey and olive green, with slashes and banks
of burning orange on the horizon at sunset-the
effect, they say, of dust in the air.
And the Tigris, lying higher in most places than
the country on either side of it, is a still stream into
which the colours melt in a curious, indescribable
way. But when I speak of the desert as what one
mostly sees I am thinking of the lure of wide-flung
space and of how inevitably one's eyes lift and seek,
above and beyond the immediateness of things,
the far horizons. That is
That is Mesopotamia.
I thought, as we went along, what a silent, lone-
some river it must have been in peace-times; how
sleepy the villages; how noiseless the towns; how
somnolent the Arab encampments in the patches
of camel-thorn.
Throughout the river's length one sees at irregular
intervals ancient water-drawing stations. They
call them wells, but they are only cuts in the banks
over which a framework is built to carry goatskin
buckets that are raised and lowered on a windlass.
Attached to one end of the rope is usually a bullock
or a donkey, and as he ambles down the slope of
the embankment and the dripping brown water-
bags rise drearily from the river, the windlass
creaks with a slow, mournful, drowsing sound that
is like no other sound I ever heard. That and
the far-away lost-soul shrieks of many jackals are
the only sounds one hears in the orange-mellow
twilights.
How dark it must have been, too, yet how perfect
the moon and the starshine; and how undisturbed
the river's current when it was cut by the prow of
no swifter-moving thing than a mahayla or a dhow
or a slender belum gliding along under the clean,
quiet paddle-strokes of Arab boatmen.
About thirty miles up-river from Qurnah we come
166


UP THE RIVER TIGRIS
to Ezra's tomb. It is an ancient and curious monu-
ment, and from my standpoint it was a very desir-
able thing that we should get to it before nightfall;
but we had lingered too long, and the sun was
rapidly sinking in a flood of its own wonderful light
before we saw, across a dozen all but circular curves,
the grove of palms on the river-bank in which it
nestles. It would be all but dark before we could
wind our slow way up to it, though as the crow
flies we could have reached it in twenty minutes.
However, Ezra's tomb with deep evening shadows
of palm-trees lying in its darkening courtyard and
its perfect blue-enamelled dome lifted up in the last
light of day, offers more to one's imagination than
such an impossible thing as an Ezra's tomb might,
perhaps, in the glare of a midday sun.
It was beside these waters that the children of
the Babylonian captivity sat down and wept.'
And when the Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus
king of Persia''to build Him an house at Jerusalem,'
it was up and down these waters and the waters
of the Euphrates, and across the then fertile plains
now desert wastes, that the King's emissaries came
and went, gathering together treasure for the Jews
and seeking the vessels of the house of the Lord
which Nebuchadnezzar had brought forth out of
Jerusalem.'
' And after these things, in the reign of Arta-
xerxes king of Persia, Ezra went up from Babylon.'
'I make a decree,' said the King, “that all they
of the people of Israel, and of his priests and
Levites, in my realm, which are minded of their
own free will to go up to Jerusalem, go with thee.'
In addition to which more gold and silver and
more precious things were poured into the hands
of the departing children of Israel, and favours were
heaped upon Ezra until he was moved to exclaim :
* Blessed be the Lord God of our fathers, which
hath put such a thing as this in the king's heart.
And hath extended mercy unto me before
167...


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
the king and his counsellors, and before all the king's
mighty princes.'
One wants to ask, “And is he really buried
here?
But it is a foolish question. The beautiful
mosquelike tomb which bears his name is one of
the oldest monuments on earth; not in its present
form, perhaps, because it has been built and rebuilt,
modelled and remodelled, and has at present a
decidedly Mohammedan aspect. But even in its
present form it is very old, and its perfect state of
preservation is probably due to the fact that, while
it is a shrine to which the Jews of the ages have
made pilgrimages, it is venerated no less by peoples
of all other faiths.
When the British were pursuing the Turks up
the river, it was by mutual but unexpressed under-
standing that a wide detour was made by both
armies in order to avoid the possibility of damaging
the sacred structure. There has been some skir-
mishing in its immediate vicinity, but, thanks to
the precaution of the contending forces, there is
only one little bullet-snick in the blue enamel of
its dome to prove that it has witnessed some of the
action in the greatest of all wars.
Nowadays it is carefully guarded by British
soldiers who live in a small stockade at the edge of
the palm-grove. They were drawn up within their
sand-bagged and wire-entanglemented shelter to
salute the Inspector-General as we passed on up
the river.
2
168


CHAPTER XIV
ON UP THE TIGRIS
THE Tigris is a mighty river mightily needed-a
river essential to the successful prosecution of
the war, yet a river devoid of almost every admir-
able attribute. It apparently conforms to no law.
of nature; it is a profligate, abandoned and de-
praved ; a winder and a wanderer in devious ways;
a waster and a slacker.
One gets personal with regard to the Tigris,
It cannot be helped. Even the matter-of-fact
British engineers, steamboat captains, and pilots
who have to deal with its idiosyncrasies maintain
toward it a curiously un-matter-of-fact and personal
attitude. It is as though they thought of it as
possessing a kind of human intelligence along with
à disposition to go wrong on the slightest provoca-
tion. Wherefore a tacit understanding that it is
not to be provoked. Any briefest interruption of
its career of present usefulness would be an un-
imaginable calamity, so they take no chances by
assuming toward it a too great degree of authority.
They coax and cajole it; they go to the greatest
pains to humour its innumerable moods; and it is
only with the utmost precaution that they under-
take any measure of interference with its wayward-
ness, or, as they would rather say, its 'general
cussedness.'
It is the most extraordinary river on earth.' Of
course it is very old in the service of mankind, and
its habits have been fastened upon through ages
of human neglect and abuse, so one really loves it
rather and feels inclined to apologise for it. But
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THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
the problem of its reformation is yet to be solved in
the minds of the engineers.
It is navigable for steam-craft a full four hundred
and fifty miles or from a point a short distance
above Baghdad to its junction with the Shatt-el-
Arab at Qurnah-yet its narrowest and at the same
time its shallowest stretch is within thirty miles
of its mouth. This is against all natural law; but,
as I say, it conforms to no natural law, and in The
Narrows is written the full story of it; in The
Narrows is revealed the true character of the unique
and anciently historic stream in all its abandoned
abnormality.
The explanation lies in the fact that in its navi-
gable length it has but one tributary, the Diyala,
which joins it about nineteen miles below Baghdad ;
while it has innumerable distributaries-streams
large and small which flow out of it, emptying it of
its waters without let or hindrance, with an utter
disregard of the consequences to its navigability,
and, since they are uncontrolled, to no purpose
but to create great swamps in the desert. These
swamps have been a fearful menace always to the
armies in operation, and have habits of undepend-
ableness and instability no less extraordinary than
the habits of the river that creates them.
The principal distributary is the Shatt-el-Hai,
supposed to be the ancient Tigris itself, which
flows out just below Kut-el-Amara, and, stretching
across the great interland between the two rivers,
joins the Euphrates at Nasriyeh, an important
point which was occupied by the British Army of
the Euphrates in the summer of 1915, when General
Townshend was advancing up the Tigris to Kut-
el-Amara. Most of the distributaries are man-
made; water-cuts and canals that were at one time
a part of a great system of irrigation; but the
Shatt-el-Hai evidently is not, and it is thought also
that the Tigris cut for itself the worst water thief
of them all, the Jahalah, which branches off
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ON UP THE TIGRIS
directly above Amara, and, with a bed of six feet
below the bed of the Tigris, carries a tremendous
volume of water out across the desert to the east-
ward, and deposits it in a spreading, bubbling, fever-
breeding marsh.
After which the river, being tapped at intervals
all the way down, begins to decrease in volume
until it runs spindling into The Narrows ; a once
splendid stream reduced to less than two hundred
feet in width, and with a depth at its normal best
of not more than six feet. Below The Narrows it
begins to come home from the marshes ' in many
small trickling creeks, and in a curious seepage
which makes miles upon miles of the country along
the east bank exceedingly dangerous if not quite
impassable except in the driest of seasons.
In addition to all of which the bottom of the
river is formed of shifting sands that are played
upon and tumbled about by the current, with the
result that no steamboat's prow is ever sure of an
unobstructed course. Yet for nearly three years
the main division of the Mesopotamian Expedi-
tionary Force had to depend exclusively on the
river Tigris for communications and supplies.
There is a railroad a great part of the way from
Baghdad to Basra, and the attitude of strained
anxiety and respectful cajolery on the part of the
engineers and pilots could be relaxed if it had not
become a habit. But it is a habit, and, besides, the
river is still of sufficient importance to occupy first
place in the general scheme of things.
At Amara, where the Jahalah rolls out in such a
recklessly destructive volume, it was decided that
some kind of gently suggestive obstacle across the
distributary channel would be necessary if the river
below was to be kept continuously navigable for
the kind of boats the supply and transport service
had to use.
So the river engineers sank an old
steamboat in such a position that it would serve
to deflect the current by the merest fraction. That
171


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
was as much as they dared to do. It added some-
thing to the volume of the Tigris without disturb-
ing its usual habit and causing it to seek an outlet
somewhere else, as it invariably threatens to do if
it is even harshly spoken to.
Then a river patrol was established and entrusted
with the task of keeping up with the changes in the
main channel and keeping that channel buoyed for
the benefit of traffic, while a small barrage here and
there was constructed for the purpose of coaxing
the more active sand-bars to shift themselves out
of the way:
But perhaps I am managing to suggest that the
current is swift. It is not. Baghdad, five hundred
and sixty-five miles by river from the Persian Gulf,
is only one hundred and twelve feet above sea-level,
while Qurnah, one hundred and twelve miles from
the gulf, is only ten and a half feet above sea level.
So one always thinks of the Tigris as a still river,
and it is because it is so still that it has such a
strangely tranquillising charm.
In The Narrows practically everything afloat in
the Tigris has at one time or another been 'stuck
in the mud' or jammed tight in between the banks
of one of the many sharp bends. There is one bend
known as the Devil's Elbow, and it did not come
by its name through anybody's misconception of
its character. It is an acute angle round which
only the most expert of pilots can get a steamboat
without the assistance of anchors and winches, and
it is every pilot's dread.
When the British were advancing up the Tigris
with more speed than they were really prepared to
make, The Narrows witnessed many a scene that
was equivalent to two trains attempting to pass
each other on the same track. But eventually a
block-signal control was established, and, since the
business of supply and transport goes on night and
day, an electric power-plant was built and the
172


ON UP THE TIGRIS
banks were lined on either side with high arc-
lights.
These banks are now as smooth as though they
had been planed and polished-the result of their
almost constant contact with the sides of barges
as these are squeezed through, lashed to tugs or
other small steam-craft.
All of this has to do with the Tigris at low water
or at normal depth, and is only half the story.
Along in March the snows up-country begin to
melt and the floods begin to pour down the two
rivers. At Baghdad the Tigris has a rise and fall
of more than twenty feet, and has frequently been
known to rise as much as three feet in one
night.
If some of the river's astonishing sinuosities
could be eliminated by means of dams and canals
its length between Basra and Baghdad could be
shortened by at least two hundred miles; but
when I innocently asked one of the engineers why
this should not be done he answered me with
arched eyebrows and an air that I could not fail to
recognise as indicating a politely patient tolerance
of my stupidity.
During the floods all trace of the banks along the
middle reaches of the river and down below Amara
as well—disappears, and at the beginning of things
it was not at all unusual for a steamboat loaded
with troops or supplies to miss a bend altogether.
keep straight ahead on an overland course, and go
hard aground out somewhere in the middle of a
plain. Grounded on an ararat, all same Noah !
Something had to be done, of course, to decrease
the possibility of such calamities, so eventually
the bends were all marked with channel-indicators
-tall poles set at each river angle toward which a
boat's prow should point. And these poles are
usually topped with spreading basket-like arrange-
ments in which the storks—the most numerous
birds in Mesopotamia-build their great, shaggy
173


ON UP THE TIGRIS
on
were destroying the birds and rapidly bringing
about a situation that would call for rigid game
laws, he never came back aboard without a fairly
good bag with which to supplement a none too
varied war ration.
On one of these early mornings, when everybody
was ashore and a silence reigned on the old boat
that made me positively nervous, I joined Yukon
on the bridge and found him leaning against the
rail, muttering to himself bitter-seeming complaints.
We could see the shooting-party in the distance
tramping homeward across a desolate stretch of
dust and camel-thorn-all there was by way of a
feast of scenery-and Yukon had already given
orders for the engine-room crew to stand by. We
would be off the instant the men got aboard.
Two high-turbaned Indian sentries stood
either side of the narrow gangway, facing the
desert, and a barefoot, white-clad Arab cabin-boy
was running up and down the clay bank, with a
pet Persian lamb baaing foolishly at his heels.
What's the trouble, Captain ?' I asked.
'Aw, nothin',' he growled, 'only I do wish the
General 'd make a plan an' stick to it. But he
won't, so what's the use ! Say, when it 's a hurry
call from up-river you c'n bet it 's a case of push
straight through an never mind eatin' or sleepin'
or nothin'. An' I don't mind that. I don't mind
bein' rushed. But when they ain't nothin' urgent
I never know where I'm at. It's a case o' stand
by an' wait for orders. An' like as not the orders
when I do get 'em 'll be onreasonable. Now he's
asked me to make Amara by eleven o'clock this
morning. Huh! Swell chance !'. He paused and
a gleam of humour began to twinkle in his eye.
Then he laughed.
Suppose he thinks I won't be
able to do it, now he's wasted an hour an' a half
here. Well,' he chuckled, you just watch my
smoke!' And he beamed affectionately upon the
returning sportsmen.
175


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
The last act on these occasions before the gang-
plank was drawn in was always the ceremonious
relief of the sentries on the bank. We might be
in the exact and wholly uninhabited geographical
centre of nowhere—which is what much of the
country looks like at times—but the Indian officer
of the guard never relaxed discipline for a single
instant. I thought to myself, why can't the sen-
tries just shoulder their rifles and come on aboard ?
Why all this R’m-umph ! Sho-rumph ! Mar-r-umph!
stuff under such circumstances ? It interested me,
and I spoke to one of the British officers about it.
Well, naturally, he said, “discipline is never
relaxed. *Besides, the guard is not for ornamental
purposes, you know.
You can't tell by a glance
at an empty desert how many Arabs might rise
up out of it, and an Arab raid at any moment is
not the least-to-be-expected thing anywhere along
the river.'
We were well under way before the excitement
incident to the morning's sport subsided ; then we
got through a leisurely breakfast, and the day's
work began. The General retired to his desk in
the big room up forward under the bridge; the
Major and the A.D.C. began, as usual, to labour
over code messages at the mess-room table, while
Richard, the butler, cleaned up and bossed the
other boys around in the process of getting every-
thing ship-shape. The sergeant-major-stenogra-
pher and wireless operator—with his glengarry cap
on the side of his head, a pencil behind his ear,
and a sheaf of papers always in his hand, passed
back and forth between his office and the General's
cabin, while orderlies stood about, waiting for
orders.
The sounds to be heard were as grace notes punc-
tuating a great monotone of silence. The steady
tranquil wash of the wheel astern was a part of the
silence itself; but not so the whinny and stamp of
the riding-horses in their stalls on the deck below,
176



Battlefield of Sunnaiyat. The General at the left, the A.D.C. at
at the right of an old trench.

On the battlefield of Sunnaiyat. An Arab ghoul.


,
|
|
1


ON UP THE TIGRIS
and not so the occasional plaintive bleat of a pet
Persian lamb or the squawk of a chicken in the coop
-one of several that surely would have been killed
for our dinner if the shooting-party had come back
empty-handed.
It was nearly eleven when I suddenly remembered
that I must go up on the bridge and make inquiries
about our prospects. Yukon had intimated that
he would get to Amara by eleven in spite of the
utter impossibility of such a thing, and I was in-
terested. I climbed the steep ladder up alongside
the funnel, which I had learned by that time to
negotiate with considerable agility, and as I thrust
my head through the trap-door I called out cheerily:
Hello, Captain ! Going to make it?'
'Goin' to make what ?' he growled. As though
.
he didn't know what I meant !
‘Amara by eleven,' I humoured him.
He turned from the wheel and regarded me
solemnly for a moment, then his face crinkled up
in a funny smile.
‘Amara,' he said, 'is just round the next bend.
An' say, I bet the General thinks we're 'bout
an hour an' a half late and hasn't even looked out
of 'is winda to see where we ’re at. Not that he'd
know, even if ’e did look. The scenery along this
so-called river ain't got many distinguishin' features,
an' I wouldn't know where I was at myself half
the time if it wasn't for the chart. Thought I was
bluffin' 'bout gettin' to Amara by eleven, didn't
you?'
From his air of boyish triumph one would have
thought he had been pounding the engines out of
the old craft and making unprecedented speed.
But six or seven miles an hour was about her limit,
and especially when the water in the river was
low, or what he called 'terrible thin. Only the
evening before he had remarked :
It's just so durn thin that the paddle can't get
no holt at all !'
M
177


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
And I had remembered. He had not been making
up any time. That was certain.
' How 'd you do it, Captain ?' I asked.
'Well, I'll just tell you, he replied, “but you
mustn't tell nobody else. I knowed the General
wanted to be at Amara by eleven, an' I knowed
mighty well he'd want to go shootin' in that patch
o' camel-thorn back yonder, so I just slipped a
couple o' hours up my sleeve.'
Which meant that he had run farther than he
ordinarily would before anchoring for the night,
and that he had started with the first streak
of dawn when everybody else was asleep.
It was on the stroke of eleven that we pulled in
against the high west bank opposite the town of
Amara, and the boys were just throwing out the
gangway when the General stepped out of his cabin,
all belted and spurred, drawing on his gloves. He
cast an appreciative smile upon Yukon and said :
Good work, skipper ! Didn't think you could
do it by half !'
And the funny part of it was that each knew that
the other knew all about the boyish little game they
were playing. But they were quite serious about
it, and Yukon, who had come down from the bridge
for just that little tribute and nothing else, turned
redder under the red of his sunburnt skin and
began to shout angry-sounding orders to the men
who were securing the gangway. I was leaning
against the rail, watching the performance, and
for further relief he turned to me and said :
Say, I might just as well be killed in this war,
'cause I'm goin' to get hung, anyhow! I'm goin
to murder seven Airbs in cold blood 'fore I'm
through 'th this show !'
I laughed in hearty appreciation of his laudable
intention, and groaned a suitable comment as I
counted just seven waterside coolies awkwardly
engaged in the single simple act of attaching a rope
to a peg in the ground. The peculiarities of coolie
178


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
a
A row of fine two-storied houses with projecting
latticed windows, forms the river-front, while*
single tall and slender minaret lifts itself above the
flat expanse of mud roofs. Extending eastward
through the heart of the city is the most pretentious
bazaar in all Mesopotamia. This was built by
Abdul-Hamid, who is supposed to have paid out of
his own private purse for its lofty and splendidly
constructed brick vaulting. All of which is re-
markable only because in all the land there is no
other example of Turkish enterprise and right-
minded ambition.
Amara has been in British hands since it was
occupied by General Townshend on 3rd June 1915,
and has always been the principal base between
the battle-lines and Basra.
Having had its baptism of British blood, it has
become regenerate. Its cleanness is as the clean-
ness of the new pin-this, perhaps, being due to the
fact that it is one vast hospital. Nearly all the fine
river-front buildings are hospitals these days, and
there are acres of hutted and tented hospitals lying
out around the city's edges. There are between
fifteen and twenty thousand beds in Amara, and
medical officers and nursing sisters like it better
than any other place in Mesopotamia because its
climate, for some reason, is just a degree or so less
intolerable than the same climate elsewhere.
And
what with its railroad and repair shops and its new
smokestacked industries of various kinds, one
would be inclined to think that its age-old somno-
lence had departed from it for all time.
And it is a fact, surprising under the circum-
stances, perhaps, that few things the British have
built in Mesopotamia, few of the improvements they
have made, have the appearance of being for tem-
porary use. Surprising under the circumstances ?
No, that is not true. Anything else would be sur-
prising, the British being incapable of building
180


ON UP THE TIGRIS
6
Then you
anything flimsily when it can be well built with the
same expenditure of time, labour, and money.
A recently captured and impudent Turkish officer,
in conversation one day with the British officer who
had him in charge, grew confidentially exultant over
the developments that are going on in the country.
• You British,' he said, are doing for us in
Mesopotamia all the things we want to have done,
but probably never would have been able to do
for ourselves. At Basra you have built hard-
surfaced highways, acres of warehouses, and enough
piers and dry-docks to make it one of the best
equipped minor ports in the world.
have filled in all the lowlands, stamped out malaria,
and provided any number of fine hospital buildings
that will make excellent barracks one day and
serve many other useful purposes.
You are constructing this end of the Berlin-to-
the-Persian-Gulf Railroad and are even building
good permanent stations and freight depots all
along the line, in which you are graciously pleased
to conform to the architectural style of the country.
Moreover, you
have built branch roads here and
there which tap big areas of production, and your
bridges can meet with nothing but our heartiest
approval. Having to import all the materials for
them must have cost you something. It was more
than we could ever afford.
* Then there are your great power-plants and the
whole country lighted up with electricity-to say
nothing of telegraph and telephone lines on good
steel poles running in every possible direction.
"You have mastered the intricacies and idiosyn-
crasies of the river Tigris and have filled it with
barges and boats of the latest type and pattern;
and now I am told you intend to undertake a great
irrigation development for the purpose of putting
large areas of desert under cultivation !
It is marvellous ! You have done more in two
years
than we have done in all the centuries of our
181


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
sovereignty and more than we probably ever would
have done. It 's perfectly splendid, really, and the
longer it takes Germany to win the war the better
off we will be in the end.
* If we had been fighting on your side, poor old
Mesopotamia would probably have gone on without
any improvements to speak of for perhaps another
century. I wouldn't have you driven out for the
world. Not yet. Give you another year or two,
and you will succeed in restoring all the country's
old-time progressiveness and prosperity. Then it
will be worth something to the Turkish Empire.
Queer kind of Turk he was. And he said a lot
more than this ; but the officer to whom he was so
freely expressing himself, and who repeated the
conversation to me, quoted him only in a general
way. I wanted to talk with him myself, because
the question always in my mind was, What do
the people think of it all ?' The Arabs, they say,
think the British are all quite mad, but the Turks
know better than that. They know they are
merely industrious and given to doing things in a
substantial, methodical, and honest way.
The A.D.C. and I swung round the big circle of
war interest in and on the outskirts of Amara, and
drew up finally at the entrance to the bazaar. The
terrific glare of the midday sun had half-blinded
me, so that walking into the dim arcade was at
first like 'walking into utter darkness; and in the
shadowy depths of the bazaar, where the sun never
shines, the air was penetratingly chill.
in the furious, unendurable heat of midsummer
that the invading white tribe-natural sun-lovers
-is able fully to understand why the Arabs and
their kind choose to live like moles.
In winter they sit in their tiny open cubicles in
the bazaars, wrapped in coats and furs, and look-
ing anything but comfortable. In this particular
bazaar Abdul-Hamid's vaulting is very high, like
the vaulting of a vast cathedral aisle, while in the
It is only
182


ON UP THE TIGRIS
commonplace little booths which line it on either
side, one observes a neatness which is evidence
enough that the Arab and the Persian can be
orderly if they are compelled to be.
Towelling and trinkets; calicoes and cloths; boots
and shoes of supposedly Occidental style, and fes-
toons of colourful native footgear; Persian lamb-
skins and lambskin garments ; hats and helmets,
woolly caps and the tasselled tarboush; cheap hand-
kerchiefs and mufflers; Kashmir shawls and bright
silken things; all these to begin with. Then comes
the vegetable section where piles of green things,
plentifully sprinkled to keep them fresh, fill the air
with musty earth odours. After which the meats.
The British have had the meat section screened,
and under their constant supervision it is kept
spotlessly clean. And the Arab butchers, too, are
clean, while they handle the meats with an un-
natural nicety that must be a source of endless
wonder to the native consumers.
In narrow passages running off at right angles
from the main street are the familiar little filthy
dens, five feet by six, perhaps, or even smaller,
blackened by the soot of tiny forges and littered
with nondescript rubbish, where the artists and
artisans sit on their heels and ply their various
handicrafts.
And not so various, either. There are just three
conspicuous occupations. One of them is twisting
and ornamenting with silver or silken threads the
curious ropes of goats' wool or camels' hair called
agal, that are used to bind the kuffiyeh round the
shaggy and shapely heads of Arabs. The second
is hammering out the tin and copper utensils of
everyday use in Arab households. There are cir-
cular deep pans and deeper pots and many small
things, but chiefly there are the long-necked, single-
handled water-jars which the women-walking
majestically, with graceful and evenly measured
stride-carry on their shapely shoulders down to
183


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
the wells at the river's brink. These articles are
common in Mesopotamia, and probably have been
for a millennium or so, but to see them made is to
list them in one's mind among things akin to works
of art; and many a British soldier boy has carried
home with him an old water-jar to be proudly
placed, when he gets it there, among the ornaments
on the mantelpiece.
The third industry belongs exclusively to the
town of Amara. It is the production by a few in-
dividuals of articles of silver inlaid with a black
enamel of some kind. It is said that the secret of
the art has been handed down to the tribe to which
it belongs from the days of the Babylonian Empire,
and by way of proof it is pointed out that the
articles produced are almost identical in workman-
ship with articles discovered in the excavation of
some of the ancient ruins-notably Babylon. I
was told that I really must get a piece of Amara
silver as the only unique thing in the way of a
souvenir to be found in the country, and I said to
myself, “Well, I 'll just do that.
But I didn't. I found the workers at their little
black forges turning out nothing but cuff-links and
napkin-rings of the most commonplace pattern.
Also an occasional bad cigarette-case or a wabbly
stemmed egg-cup. They were catering to the
British Tommy, and they were doing it with all
their dishonest might. They were bent not on
delicate artistic endeavour or on keeping up their
Babylonish reputation, but solely on robbing the
financially reckless white stranger of every penny
they could get out of him. And at that they can
get all he has without half trying.
Tommy is not a hoarder of the fabulous stipend
his country bestows upon him, nor yet of other
sums he acquires from other sources. But often
enough he is a model of thrift in comparison with
his superiors. For a man who knows nothing
about the value of a shilling, and cares less, com-
--
184


ON UP THE TIGRIS
mend me the average bachelor British army officer,
and especially those of the old regular army. When
he is on active service the officer has very little
opportunity to spend money after his small mess
bills are disposed of, so his pay accumulates. And
first thing you know he is out looking for some one
who will consent to relieve him of it. If he is on
a two days' leave in London he is likely to engage
the most expensive suite in the finest hotel in town,
treat himself to all the millionaire luxuries he can
think of, and buy himself fancy raiment.
' And why not?' says he. He may not live to
enjoy another two days' leave.
This for the officer fighting in France, of course.
In Mesopotamia there is no such thing, alas ! as
two days' leave in London. But in Mesopotamia
there are odds and ends of curious things to buy-
mostly Persian—and a goodly store of very medi-
ocre Persian rugs that the collectors have passed by,
and the native merchants know that, after a little
cheerful haggling for the fun of it, the average
British officer will buy these things, and at almost
any kind of fantastic price. Why don't they do as
the Germans do and just take them, if they want
them? Is it not extraordinary that men can be so
naïvely, so naturally honourable !
The Arabs in the Amara district are a thieving
lot, anyhow, and are distinguished by a good many
other low-down characteristics. They are for the
most part of the notorious Bani Lam tribe that
joined the Turks against the British at the begin-
ning of the war and deserted to the British side as
soon as the Turks began to lose. An Englishman,
in consequence, would trust one of them about as
far as he could throw him. They are cultivators
of rice-fields in the marshes a part of the time, but
generally they are nomads, living in tents or reed-
hut villages, and roaming the desert with small
herds of camels, flocks of sheep, and a few horses,
donkeys, and buffaloes!
185


ON UP THE TIGRIS
on a chair beside his pillow. Next morning the
chair was empty, and he was minus everything he
owned except the pyjamas he was wearing, the
launch having been stripped of everything, includ-
ing kit-bags and all its rifles and ammunition. The
Arabs, with matchless stealth, had slipped out to
the launch in belums, and had got away with the
job without making a sound.
The officer was exceedingly thankful that he had
not waked up, because, being all alone, if he had
made a move of any kind he very likely would have
felt the swift slash of a murderous knife across his
throat. He didn't mind faring forth in his pyjamas
to look for something to wear, but he says he did
feel horribly unclothed without his teeth, and, since
they don't keep such things in assorted sizes in the
general stores, he had to go without them a long
time. He felt very strongly that the thieves had
not a gentlemanly instinct with which to bless
themselves.
There is always a lot of shipping in the river at
Amara these days, it being the principal base of
supply between Basra and Baghdad, and usually
there are one or two monitors lying in against the
bank and a 'fly-boat' or two scudding up and
down. The “fly-boats '—so called because each
one is named for some kind of stinging insect-
are very tiny craft mounting very large guns and
seem to afford everybody a vast deal of amusement.
It is supposed that there is nothing they can't or
won't do.
I think I must record briefly the story of a visit
I made to one of the monitors. I had been all
over her and had expressed a requisite amount of
pleased surprise at her compactness and shining
ship-shapeliness, and was talking with a couple of
young gunners while I waited for the Commander,
who was going with me back to the S-1.
The time was late in the afternoon of a swelter-
ingly hot November Sunday, and I was sitting in a
187


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
canvas chair, leaning against the metal coolness of
a desert-yellow gun-turret. At my invitation the
gunners had seated themselves-sailor fashion,
hugging their knees-on a strip of coir matting on
the immaculate deck, the deck being within three
feet of the surface of the river, which slipped by
rippleless, reflecting in long, slanting, oily streaks
the orange-shot lights of a seemingly belated sun
that was hurrying down the western sky. The
only sounds were the muffled throb of a quiescent
engine somewhere, and the squeaks of two pet
monkeys that were playing perilously, as it seemed
to me, along the low deck-rail forward.
We had been discussing the war in a general
kind of way, and had talked in a particular way
about how the monitors and 'fly-boats' had
helped to chase the Turks up the Tigris when
General Maude took Baghdad. Their own boat
had a few honourable battle scars, of which they
were gloriously proud, and there was a story of how,
during a hot running fight, the man at the wheel
was killed by a bullet that happened to snick
through his observation aperture at exactly the
right angle to strike him square in the temple.
She was running full speed, head on for a curve
in the bank, and was saved from going smash by
the captain, who recognised at once by the feel
of the deck under his feet that something was
wrong, and rushed to the wheel.
After this story there was a thoughtful pause,
then :
“I've just been thinking,' said one of the boys,
that if it hadn't been for Nebuchadnezzar and his
wickedness there wouldn't have been any war, and
I'd be cruisin' somewhere round old Blighty this
very minute.'
Balmy! Balmy!' murmured the other one.
A pause for apparently deep cogitation. I was
waiting. Then :
I say, swing round about forty-five degrees and
188


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
No, he didn't. I just figured that out for
myself.'
Oh, you did ! Well, of course you ’re wastin'
your time on a gunboat—but I'm afraid I don't
quite get you.'
You don't seem to know what this war's about.'
'I do, too! It's “to make the world safe for
democracy." And he glinted mischievously up
at me.
'Well, with all due respect to the great American
President, that may be what it 's gettin' to be, but
that ain't what it was started for. It was started
by the Kaiser so he could grab Mesopotamia. And
if he had grabbed Mesopotamia he could have gone
ahead and grabbed Egypt and India and the whole
bally world. We were figurin' it out with a map
the other day, and one of the fellows had a book
about the Baghdad Railroad. Best thing I ever
read on the subject. U-huh! It's easy enough
to see that we fellows down here are doin' our bit
where it needs doin'.'
Yes, that 's all right, but where does Nebuchad-
nezzar come in ?'
Oh, that ?' He had nearly lost sight of that.
That's just a sort of fancy I got. You see, the
industrial and commercial possibilities of this
country are unlimited. That's what the padre
said. It don't look it, but they can prove it by
tellin' you what it used to be like and by sayin' it's
a mistake to call it a desert. It's a vast alluvial
plain!'
· Yes ? And Nebuchadnezzar ?'
*You 're a man without much intelligence, but
I 'll try to be patient with you. Don't you see that
if the country hadn't been neglected, if it had been
kept up in what the padre called “ all its old-time
wealth and prosperity,” it would be thickly in-
habited now by the kind of people who 'd know how
to hold it? If that had been the case the Kaiser
wouldn't ’av tried to grab it, India and the rest
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THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
way, and the
him, and there wouldn't 'av' been much said about
it if they hadn't happened to belong to the leading
family round here those days.'
Just then the Commander came up through the
little round opening at the head of the companion-
gunners sprang
to their feet. They
controlled their merriment instantly, and were as
solemn as owls when they saluted the officer. But
I was still laughing as he helped me down into the
waiting launch, and I waved a laughing good-bye,
at which the gunners grinned and saluted as we
started off up-river.
• What were they telling you ?'
telling you ?' asked the
Commander.
Oh, a number of things. We were discussing
the war, and I got some absolutely new ideas.
And I recounted briefly the theory of Nebuchad-
nezzar's responsibility.
They certainly are getting to be a lot of unique
Bible students,' he laughed. And the men of the
army are just like them. The padres nearly always
hang their sermons on the history of this country,
and they make it all so simple and familiar that the
boys get interested. They sit around for hours
with a Bible and a map and reference-books and
work out some of the craziest explanations of things
you ever heard. Funny thing is they get all out
of focus. They talk about the Flood and things
that happened to Abraham and the Prophets as
though they were the events of year before last,
so, where history is concerned, when they try to
focus on anything close up they get cross-eyed. It
is most amusing.
Amusing, yes, but thoroughly comprehensible
from my standpoint, because in Mesopotamia I got
that way myself.
6
192






The scene of the great siege. Kut-el-Amara.

The lone minaret of Kut-el-Amara which miraculously
escaped destruction.


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
'Five-a-fate-a-a !’ the man on the port might
call out, to be answered from starboard by a doleful
warning.
• Two-a-fate!'
Then Yukon-always on the bridge for the
ticklish bits 'would jerk the engine-room signal
to the half-speed indicator and frantically whirl the
big wheel to point the boat's prow to port. But as
often as not we were just an instant too late and
zhr-r-o-og! we would go into it. It's a horrible
sensation, grounding on a sand-bar!
Yukon had a very amusing trick which required
quick action and considerable skill. If he wasn't
in too Dutch,' as he expressed it, he would reverse
the paddle, churn up a big forward wave, and glide
over on it, and his grin of triumph when he suc-
ceeded in doing this was worth living to see. We
had to struggle a number of times, but we never
had to call for a patrol tug, and in consequence we
were able to pass a few less fortunate or less skil-
fully handled boats with an air of lofty disdain.
All of which is mere brief illustration of some of the
daily and commonplace difficulties.
The serene hours were those we spent on broad
and sufficiently deep reaches of the river, when the
boys with the plumbing-poles sat and chanted back
and forth a never varying call in their own lan-
guage.
Ba’hut pani,' is what they said, and it means
literally plenty of water.' They never began to
sing ' Ba’hut pani' until they could no longer touch
bottom, but the suddenness with which we struck
shallows or sand-drifts proved the tremendous
treachery of the river and the necessity for ceaseless
vigilance. Among my memories of the Tigris I shall
always retain the melody of that low chant,
• Ba-a-'hut pa-nee-e-e!' ending in a long, sweet,
lingering note and being answered by, 'Ba-a-'hut
pa-nee!' in a lower but no less musical key; the
mingled sounds banking in against the high shelv-
194


FROM AMARA TO KUT-EL-AMARA
ing ledges of current-cut clay on either side and
spreading out over the surfaces of the slow, still
river in ever-receding, ever-renewed waves of lone-
some-sounding music.
Just before we reached Kut-el-Amara we came to
the battle-field of Sunnaiyat, one of the ghastliest
of all the historic fields of Mesopotamia. For my
benefit we banked in and went ashore. I had heard
the fearful tales, and I wanted to see the fearful
setting of them. I climbed the camel-thorny slope
of the high Bund, and stood for a moment gazing
across the far-flung network of crumbling, shell-
riven trenches. That is all Sunnaiyat now is. All
-except that the trenches are filled with dead
men's bones. Sunnaiyat–the name of a waste
place where men have suffered as men have suffered
on few other spots on earth-even in this war.
Within hearing distance of Kut, the men be-
sieged at Kut listened to the thunder of the guns of
Sunnaiyat for weeks on end-and with what prayer-
ful hope who has the power to imagine ? And it
was at Sunnaiyat that the Turks made their last
desperate stand against General Maude's victorious
army in February 1917, the three days' battle that
raged then over the already blood-drenched and
historic ground being one of the fiercest and costliest
fights of the whole campaign.
This was the fourth battle of Sunnaiyat, the first
three having been fought in April 1916, during the
course of the last tremendous effort the British
made to relieve General Townshend.
It was high noon when we landed, and the sun,
searching through thick sweaters and coats, burnt
one's skin with a dry, prickly burning, while the
wind blew penetratingly chill across the mournful
waste. And I was glad of the healthy discomfort
because my flesh crept with the horror of the things
I saw and the things my mind was forced to
visualise. The Arabs have always searched and
195


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
looted the battle-fields—and they do not rebury
the dead !
I have been on many battle-fields before-in
France, in Serbia, in Belgium. But they were
battle-fields eloquent of living love; clothed for
the most part with green things and having white
crosses hung with immortelles to mark the graves
of the fallen who were buried where they fell. They
seemed, those battle-fields, as thresholds between
suffering faith and triumphant realisation, and I
remembered thinking in the scarred but sweet
green fields of French Lorraine, that I might lie
down with my ear against the wholesome earth and
hear God's heart beat.
But Sunnaiyat, in Mesopotamia-land of ancient
battles and Cradle of the World-Sunnaiyat is
gashed and ghastly, naked and piteously ashamed.
To have marked the resting-places of the dead on
this or on any other remote field of heroism in this
unholy land would have been only to invite an
even more hideous outrage. So trenches were
filled and great levels were made, and one can only
thank God that the British graves are left prac-
tically undisturbed.
Yet, one wants to cover the bones of the Turkish
dead, too. One wants to say to them : 'Rest in
Peace! Boys of a people at war with invincible
human right, you fought for the triumph of your
own beliefs, or as you were commanded to fight;
as it was given to you to win your badges of hero-
ism, you have won. Rest in Peace!'
Out on the edge of the intrenchments there were
creeping figures bent over in eager search of the
sacred ground. Arab ghouls ! Not yet satisfied
after so many months ? No, not yet satisfied.
They would pick up something and gather in an
eager group to examine it in the sunlight. Nothing.
They would toss it aside and go on creeping-
creeping.
I wonder how many of them had tossed aside the
196


FROM AMARA TO KUT-EL-AMARA
precious thing I found. It was lying near the
entrance of a British trench-an old leather bayonet-
scabbard all burned and blackened at the end, as
though some one had been poking a fire with it.
And of course some one had. Some blessed Tommy,
perhaps coaxing the coals under his supper while
shells whistled over his head. He had either died
or he had thrown it aside in a rush to meet the
enemy hand to hand. So much of this fighting was
hand to hand.
I stood and pondered over the old scabbard,
looking at it and then at the fearful scene around us.
And in my mind I saw two boys; one-still in the
ranks fighting the great fight; the other—his head
held high in the shining column of the Forever
Beloved host. Which of them threw the scabbard
away ?
The British held this position from the first
disastrous attempt to relieve General Townshend
until near the end of the campaign which cul-
minated in the capture of Baghdad, and for sheer
horror and unmitigated hardship nothing could
possibly surpass the thing they lived through.
The men engaged, already worn with battle, were
compelled to hold on week after week without hope
of respite or relief. And there was not so much as
a blade of grass for them to rest their eyes upon ;
only the terrible desert under a pitiless burning
sun. They were hemmed in by the river on one
side, and on the other by a vast marsh which, when
the wind was right, had a mystifying habit of
moving in on the position and flooding everything,
that being one of the peculiar habits of the marshes
that I have spoken of. They literally do blow
about the desert, spreading with terrifying rapidity
even before a light wind if it is steady enough. So
a company might be intrenched in comparative
comfort one hour in a position where it would be
in danger of drowning the next, and with never a
drop of rain to clear the air of the blinding, choking,
197


FROM AMARA TO KUT-EL-AMARA
the depth-measurers filled the evening with the
monotonous sweet melody of' Ba’hut pani !?
And perhaps I should not try to write about a
sunset. But when all is said it is nothing but the
divine intoxication of the Mesopotamian evening
lights that gets into one's blood and creates in one's
inner consciousness an impression that, after all,
Mesopotamia is a land to love.
The desert is horizon-wide ; it is dotted here and
there with the black goatskin tents of Bedouin
encampments, and is filled with slanting sun-rays
that turn all the hollows into lakes of mauve, and
all the knolls and high places into points of flame-
shot amber. The sky and the broad reflecting
ribbon of the Tigris are all wonderful orange,
deepened by low-hanging clouds that are blue with
the blue of the sapphire, and are outlined with
narrow fringes of glinting, gold. The light of a
pallid young moon makes its way into the swiftly
gathering shadows, to lie presently down the length
of the moveless coppery river in a band of palest
yellow.
Colours ! I never saw such colours ! And in
the path of moonlight, with the sunset lights still
glowing on the edges of the darkening plain, a great
high-hulled and tall-masted mahayla swings round
a bend, its broad brown sail softly bellied by the
almost imperceptible breeze.
Then : “Ba-a-Phut pa-nee-e-e! Ba-a-'hut pa-nee!'
Creeping sweet echoes—and the far-away, heart-
chilling shrieks of a thousand jackals greeting the
night wherein they range the boundless reaches of
fearful desolation.
In the last light of that amazingly finished day
we saw for the first time the-th Regiment of
Cavalry that left Basra on the long trail to the
front two days before we started. And it was a
thrilling thing to see. In a final burst of energy
after the day's weary march they swept up to the
marching-post on the river-bank in a wide-curving
199


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
column of fours which stretched away into the dis-
tance in a low bank of fine desert dust that floated
off like a mist cloud in the moonlight. And behind
them lay a last streak of orange against the desert's
edge, the sky above them a pearly grey in which
one great star shone. What a picture !
We watched them from the bridge until we
rounded a wide bend in the river and could see them
no longer; then the cheerful sounds they made in
their methodical preparations for the night followed
us a long way in the wonderful silence.
200


CHAPTER XVI
A NEW KUT
THE Mesopotamian war zone is far away from the
great centres of war and intense world-interest,
and subsequent tremendous events elsewhere have
made the days of Townshend and his unyielding
small army seem remote."
But on the river Tigris—its bed metalled with
shot and shell and strewn with the debris of war-
one remembers those days with compelling vivid-
ness and attaches to them their just measure of
importance.
Mesopotamia is a sacred land. It is sacred to
some of the strongest nations and the greatest
religious sects on earth. It is a land wherein the
voices of the deities of many peoples have been
heard. It is filled with shrines and sacred cities.
It is a land of devout pilgrimage.
And Kut-el-Amara, I think, will always be
sacred to the British. At Kut their pride was
crucified, and at Kut their pride was eventually
redeemed and rose triumphant, a shining thing
which shines in Mesopotamia to-day in the finest
demonstration of high morality and right purpose
that I have ever seen.
The first thing one observes on approaching Kut
from the south is a tall obelisk. It stands out in
the general scene, rising in the centre of things on
the peninsula that is formed by a great bend in the
river and on which the town of Kut is built. The
obelisk was raised by the Turks to commemorate
the surrender of General Townshend and their vic-
tory over the British forces that had tried so long
201


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
s
and so heroically to relieve him. When I saw it
from far down the river I asked :
What is the monument ?'
They told me. And it became at once to me
as an exclamation point to punctuate my own
astonishment !
Was ever anything quite so premature ? It
makes one realise as nothing else could how con-
fident the Turks and the Germans were that they
had the British in Mesopotamia permanently de-
feated.
Defeated! It is incredible that any one could
have imagined it! In the face of things as they
have become that obelisk seems to me to express
a kind of whimpering entreaty, as though it felt
itself strangely inappropriate and would get away
if it could to follow its builders on the long trail of
retreat to the north. It is a monument to monu-
mental misconjecture, the ironic humour of it being
unique and a thing in which Englishmen may now
rejoice.
KUT-EL-AMARA !
But first comes new Kut, and we stop there. It
is another busy base of supply and transport ac-
tivities, a main junction in the vast veinage of com-
munication with the front and, to my mind, at
least, the most interesting of them all.
When we arrived at Kut we drew in against the
bank and made of ourselves an instantly interesting
addition to the conglomerate scene along the river-
front. Interesting we always were, of course ; it
being in the nature of things that the arrival of the
Inspector-General of Communications should be
regarded as somewhat of an event. Having just
returned from a trip to India, it was six weeks or
more since he had been up the river, and there was
much to make long conferences a necessity. The
202


A NEW KUT
base commandant and a number of other officers
came down to the river-bank to greet us, and the
General, accompanied by the Major, was soon off
to base headquarters for the inevitable consultation.
By that time, having come all the way up the
Tigris at the rate of about six miles an hour,
travelling most of the way by daylight and stop-
ping everywhere, the work of war as it is carried on
behind an army on active service had ceased to
bewilder and astound me. It had not become
commonplace and uninteresting by any means.
Quite the contrary; it continued to enthrall me
absolutely.
But it was as though there never had been and
never could be any other kind of work in the world,
and I had come to a point where I could witness its
immensities without expressing the emotions that
arose in me altogether in terms of exclamation.
They told me that Qurnah was the worst place
on the river, and Amara the best, and the spirit
of local jealousy and pride with which such claims
are made and maintained is a most amusing thing.
The British soldier stationed at Qurnah boastfully
enumerates its horrors—and the wonders he per-
forms in their midst; while men of Amara dwell
at length upon the superior advantages of their
post-advantages that could never get themselves
so listed if there were no such horrors as Qurnah's
in the near vicinity with which to compare them.
Whatever Qurnah and Amara may be, I decided
for myself that Kut-new Kut, that is exceeded
them both in dust and dreariness, and in its in-
cessant rumble and rush of toilsome industry.
Kut is the last base behind the advanced base,
which is located far up the river, and is connected
by branch railways with the outposts of supply
behind the wide-curving line of defence round
Baghdad.
It surely would surprise Khalil Pasha and his
Turkish legions if they could see this place now.
203


A NEW KUT
for the general good. They are bent on showing
him such fleshpots of Egypt as will tempt him to
sustained industrial effort, and at the same time
they are training him in righteous governmental
methods. When the profits and losses of the war
shall come to be added up and apportioned to the
various countries involved it will be found that
Mesopotamia, regardless of what her eventual fate
may be, will have benefited immeasurably. And
so much for British occupation !
The electric power-house at Kut is as yet only a
corrugated tin shed, but out of that shed run many
wires which branch off and spread out all over the
great area, carrying current to hundreds of high
arc-lights which sputter and spurt, collect clouds
of insects—which might otherwise be more pestifer-.
ously engaged-and turn darkness into something
very much better than the noonday glare. And
at Kut, as at Basra and Amara and other important
points along the river, the working-day-in some
branches, at least, of the multiple enterprise of war
is twenty-four hours long.
We had pulled in alongside a wide cut in the
steep bank through which automobiles and other
vehicles are landed from boats when the river is low,
and the A.D.C. and I, climbing up the long incline
into the glare and the mysterious shadows of the
night, went wandering.
The dust was literally ankle-deep, but one
learns to pay no attention to that sort of thing. It
is one of the principal duties of every personal
servant in Mesopot to keep a plentiful supply of
cleaned boots on hand for his employer and to be
always ready to take advantage of any oppor-
tunity that may present itself to clean said em-
ployer up a little with brushes and polishing-cloths.
The wily and soft-spoken Ezekiel always made a
great to-do over brushing me, and invariably tried
to manoeuvre me out into a bright white light some-
205


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
where so that everybody would be able to observe
his excellence and humble devotion. Lilwa, the
Major's boy, was for ever sitting in some con-
spicuous spot on the deck, brooding over a row of
high military boots-polishing them with loving
care until he could see his own smileless face in
them; while the General's gentle slave simply
followed him around.
One of the usual sights to be seen on the S-1
was the great, gruff Major-General standing in
deep consultation with a group of other officers-
on matters of serious moment, no doubt--while his
boy sprawled at his feet, plying oily flannels and
whisk broom on dusty boots and breeches. The
General would walk off, apparently unconscious of
the boy's existence, but the boy always ran after
him for a final whisk or vigorous rub, then lounged
lazily back to other work, muttering to himself.
About the uselessness of his affectionate care ?
Probably. He always knew the General sahib
would be back in a short time, dustier than ever.
Everybody was always dusty, and, as I have said,
nobody ever paid any attention to it.
The A.D.C. and I had just time to make a
round of the works before changing for dinner.
We walked round a dozen young pyramids of hay
and sacked grain, out to the railway sheds and
sidings, where hundreds of labourers were filling
cars with supplies for advanced base and the front,
and where a fine new hospital train was just having
its precious load transferred to stretchers and motor
ambulances; through the engine-houses and work-
shops; past long rows of hospital tents, against the
canvas sides of which soft lights gleamed palely ;
to the railway station farther up the line, where
we glimpsed through the windows khaki-clad boys
bending over telegraph instruments; out round
remount and mule depots and the veterinary hos-
pital; to the river-bank, where lines of coolies
laden with sacks and boxes were coming and going
206


A NEW KUT
in unbroken procession, loading barges for up-river
and transferring the cargo of other barges to the
big orderly supply-dumps over by the railway
sidings ; up to the power-house, where the dynamos
were humming and the garish green lights were
shining; and so to the high Bund by our own river
landing, where we stood for a while to watch an
artillery convoy getting under way for the front.
There were many screaming mules, whinnying
horses, and men barking low-toned orders and
moving with the precision of inspection drill. The
wide dusty field was packed close with orderly
rows of guns, munitions- and kit-wagons, ambu-
lances, and all the paraphernalia of an artillery
regiment on the march.
And with what an inspiring rattle and clank the
swift, methodical business was accomplished! Four
mules to a caisson, they were brought up in their
jingling harnesses, snapped into their places, their
riders were in the saddles, and they were trotting
off to join the long column trailing out through the
dust-laden electric glare and on into the dim moon-
lit desert gloom beyond before one had time more
than to glance at them.
We hurried back aboard then, to get ready for a
dinner-party. And this reminds me that there
was just one thing I wanted in Mesopotamia that
I did not have sufficient assurance to ask for-I
wanted a temporary suspension of the regulation
that forbids nursing sisters to dine out.
At the various base headquarters, at naval head-
quarters, on gunboats, at interesting officers' messes
-everywhere that hospitality could possibly be
dispensed—I dined as the guest of the most alto-
gether delightful hosts I ever encountered any-
where. And though I made considerable progress
in the gentle art of acting as though being the only
woman in a world inhabited solely by men was
what I had been brought up from my youth to
regard as the only desirable fate for me, I did wish
207


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
sometimes for at least one other representative
of my kind-even if she had to be a rule-making
supervisor. But, no !
The rule which forbids nursing sisters to dine
with officers can be broken in only one way. Once
in a great while an officer invites some sisters to
dinner and calls it High Tea-with capital letters.
On such an occasion sisters have been known to
linger in an officers' mess as late as nine o'clock.
But no man with less rank than a Major-General
would dare make himself responsible for such an
unseemly irregularity, and base commandants are
only colonels, sometimes even majors. So at Kut
it was not High Tea and there were no nursing
sisters. Aside from the sisters, you understand, I
was the only woman in existence on the River
Tigris.
My dinner-parties were all memorable events, but
the one at Kut was, I think, especially memorable.
The commandant's mess is in a building which is
like a hospital hut about two-thirds buried. That
is, it is built on the general plan of a hospital hut,
but is sunk about eight feet in the ground. This
style of temporary structure is cooler in the summer
than any other, but the early dinner conversation
was largely about how scorpions and other poison-
ous creeping creatures—found it such an easy house
to get into that they made it a kind of rendezvous.
My chair had no rungs for me to hook my heels on,
so I just had to sit and suffer. Scorpions are much
too numerous in the desert wastes. And they creep
round regardless, you know, having no respect at
all for human beings. They have no intelligence.
It was rather awful !
The dust, too, rolled in without encountering any
obstacles. It came down the sloping cuts in the
earth to the open windows in rills and runnels and
swirling clouds, as though it had just discovered a
hole in the ground which it must make haste to fill
208



Deliberate destruction in Baghdad.





A NEW KUT
6
up, and with it would have come clouds of little
stinging sand-flies if it had been the sand-fly season.
Can't you find a better place than this to build
a town?" I asked.
A better place ? No! It was an ideal spot !
A wonderful country lay all round about !
Wonderful ? Why, it was the bleakest, loneliest,
most dismal stretch of desert that ever seared
human eyesight. It had been making my soul
ache the whole afternoon-ever since I had looked
out across it in the brazen glare of midday from the
naked trenches of the battle-field of Sunnaiyat.
It is a land accursed—the land of Babylonia.
Because of the wrath of the Lord it shall not be
inhabited, but it shall be wholly desolate.' Thus
saith the Lord of hosts.
But where the blood of the Briton is poured out
there the earth brings forth rich harvests. Behold
you any spot under the sun where the blood of the
Briton has been shed, and deny that!
Besides, there is such a thing as modern irriga-
tion. Whether or not it has anything on ancient
irrigation is very doubtful, but it is the thing we
know. The ancients knew the art of conveying
water to the land, and the land of Mesopotamia is
seamed to-day with ditches that were made when
the world was young. Mesopotamia was once the
granary of the world. It can be made again the
granary of the world ; and Kut, the sacred city of
the longest and bitterest siege of the greatest and
the cruelest war, lies on the direct highway of the
world's future development. From Kut the ways
run out-caravan routes now, but to be tremendous
railroads in your time and mine—to tap Persia and
the splendid treasure world of Central Asia beyond.
Mind you, this is not my talk; it is the talk of the
dinner-table.
Then there are the Arabs, children of Ishmael ;
it is time the curse of the Lord were lifted from
them; time that Abraham, from wherever he keeps
209


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
a
at a map of my country. I asked him what he
thought the D.C. stood for, but he had never
thought of that. When I explained it to him he
said he thought it was deuced clever of our old boys
to fix it that way.
Just stands off by itself and belongs as much to
one state as to another, eh ? Long heads those
British fathers of your country had.'
'Yes, hadn't they ! What state is Kansas City
in ??
'Kansas, of course. I say, I know something
about the United States!'
Yes, I see you do. What state is St. Louis in ?'
Well, I don't know everything.' Then he
switched the cut. • Which is the smallest county
in England ? 'he asked.
Good Heavens! Has England smallest
county ? How dreadful !'
I have sent them all a zigzag course across the
United States. I have regretted the necessity for
cutting out the great North-West, but there is a
supreme thrill in the Grand Cañon of the Colorado,
so I have sent them that way, via southern Cali-
fornia, then up to Denver, and on to Omaha,
Kansas City, St. Louis, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Buffalo,
Niagara Falls, Albany, and down the Hudson to
New York. Then I have recommended side trips
to Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, and the
Virginia of their romances and most accurate
knowledge.
Going still farther, I have advised a return via
the United States-instead of wasting time through
the Mediterranean and the familiar Suez-and a
cut out through the North-West to Seattle, or a trip
down through the sweet South to New Orleans
and on across the great state of Texas. It bewilders
them utterly. And they usually ask if our rail-
roads give tickets away to nice, penniless British
army
officers who are anxious to learn. One thinks
they might.
212


A NEW KUT
The padre walked with me back to our boat-
landing, and he gave me some bullets that the
Turks shot into Kut during the siege. They are a
rare kind of souvenir, but I will say for them that
they look more or less like—just bullets. And
considering what the siege was, there must be
millions of them somewhere.
He told me it was against the regulations to give
such things away to be carried out of the country-he
didn't know why-but I suppose a sufficiently popular
padre can break almost any kind of regulation.
One of the base commandants gave me a beau-
tiful brass shell-case that was shot across the Shatt-
el-Hai when General Maude was hammering his way
to Baghdad. And now that I have gone and told
about it, I suppose he will get hanged, poor man!
If he does I shall be very sorry, because he was just
about the nicest and genialest old colonel I ever met.
He knew he was committing a crime, but I did all
I could to convince him that it was justifiable.
There was a nearly full moon high overhead in a
fleckless sky; the bluish arc-lights sputtered and
flashed on their tall steel poles, and the scene was
shadowed and alive with the figures of men moving
in long lines, laden or free, to and from the river-
bank, where numbers of steamboats and mahaylas
lay. In the wonderful night silence an occasional
murmur floated to one's ears, and from afar off
came the wild call of the desert jackals.
We met two nursing sisters coming out of their
hut quarters, and stopped to talk with them. They
began at first to rail at Trixie,' the incomparable
general supervisor, but thought better of it, and,
after the usual gamut of unthrilling pleasantries,
ended by wishing to goodness they could get the
fearful dust out of their hair. They were on the
way to night duty in the great hospital of tents
that lay off at the edge of the encampment.
A queer world to live in the war-time Mesopo-
tamian world!
213


THE SCENE OF THE TERRIBLE SIEGE
the Turks kept a gibbet there for the benefit of
doubtful Arabs, and after General Townshend's
capitulation their initial act in the establishment
of their control was the erection of a new one, on
which they summarily hanged a number of Arabs
who had made the terrible mistake of believing
that the British force would be relieved.
Our launch pilot led the way for us into the town
and through an intricate maze of narrow streets
to the house of the resident commandant, an
officer whose administrative function is purely
civil, nothing of a military character being per-
mitted now to touch old Kut at any point.
His name is Captain Wilson, and he belonged to
General Townshend's army. His regiment went
through the siege and into captivity, but he was
among the casualties of the battle of Ctesiphon and
happened to be in one of the boat-loads of wounded
that got away down-river while the retreat was in
progress.
He speaks Arabic and seems to be eminently
fitted for his job, which is to restore Kut, to receive
and resettle in their homes the returning inhabit-
ants, and to administer their numerous and tre-
mendously disturbed affairs. It is not an easy
billet, but, thanks to the young man's industry
and capacity for organisation, coupled with the
support of the generally benevolent British in-
tention, it is getting easier all the time.
The town, of course, was literally shot to pieces,
there being large areas that were nothing but piles
of broken brick and dusty rubbish. A house here
and there may have come through in fairly good
condition, but I saw none that bore no marks of
shot and shell.
We found Captain Wilson at headquarters—the
same house General Townshend used as head-
quarters during the siege. And I really ought to
write that in such a way that I could use an ex-
clamation point by way of emphasis. There is an
}
215


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
exclamation point in my mind, and there was when
I walked up to that historic door. I stopped a
moment outside it, while in a flash of visions I saw
-many things! I am not given so particularly to
thrills, but the living white man or woman who
could enter that doorway without a lift of the
heart is carrying round for a heart a lump of some-
thing wholly without vibrant quality.
It is the usual four-square Arab house with the
second-floor rooms opening on to a narrow balcony
that hangs over a brick-paved inner court. The
first thing the commandant did was to apologise
smilingly for the general dilapidation. The whole
court was a wreck. The walls were nicked and
chipped, the balcony rails were broken, and there
was not a piece of glass left intact that was as
large as the palm of one's hand.
'We have not yet begun to bring in window-
glass,' he said. “It is not a necessity, you see, and
we are not yet dealing in anything but necessities.'
Not a necessity ? I was not so sure about that.
There is a short but rather bitter winter in Mesopo-
tamia, and it was coming on apace. It was cold
enough even then. The captain, at work in the
underground room that had been General Town-
shend's office, sat at his desk with an overcoat on,
while out in the court a crowd of Arabs shivered
and hugged themselves for warmth, with their
hands thrust up the wide sleeves of their thin
burnouses.
They were waiting to interview their British wali,
or governor ; their father, friend, boss-everything.
That is what the commandant has to be. And each
of them would prayerfully present a claim or peti-
tion of some kind, which it might or might not be
possible for him to meet or grant. He would do
his best. A friendly and satisfied Arab is a better
citizen than an Arab with a grievance.
As we came out into the court he quickly ex-
plained my presence, saying that he intended to
216


THE SCENE OF THE TERRIBLE SIEGE
but one.
escort me round the town and out to the battle-
lines. They must either wait for him a while longer
or go away and come back again next morning.
They looked at me with grave curiosity and
seemed quite cheerful about being put off. All
He followed us out and down the long,
narrow street, coming up beside the captain and
talking to him rapidly in a low, insistent tone.
I was surprised at the patience with which the
captain listened, and when he answered the man
threw his shoulders back with a smile of satisfac-
tion, then, with a low salaam, turned and rejoined
his companions.
* What is his particular variety of trouble ?'
asked the A.D.C.
Oh, a dispute about one of the old gates. I
fancy it belongs to him all right. He's only been
back a few days.'
What old gates ?' I asked.
'Some our chaps saved. There were a number
of fine ancient doors and gates-carved and nail-
studded and copper-bound and that sort of thing-
and they didn't like to see them destroyed. So
they took them down and put them in a safe place.
Some of the men who were exchanged knew where
they were—in a hole in the ground-and we are
putting them back now.'
Quite matter-of-factly he offered this small con-
tribution to history. I laughed with a kind of
heartaching joy.
'But I thought there was a fuel famine, among
other things, and that they burned everything fire
would consume !' I answered.
' Oh yes, so there was and so they did. But they
couldn't burn that kind of thing, could they ?'
A great many Englishmen would have added,
'We're not Huns or Vandals, you know !' But
he didn't.
I saw one of the old doors a few moments later.
It was dignifying the patched-up ruins of a mud-
217


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
and-reed-mat house; a fine thing in a curious set-
ting. Likely as not it dated from the days of the
Kaliphs of Baghdad.
But imagine, if you can, such sentiment in the
minds of men besieged. They burned their own
hospital huts and all their vehicles. A packing-
box or ammunition-crate was the most precious
thing in the world, and when a house was brought
down by a bomb or shell its few timbers and laths
were regarded as a godsend. Fuel was exhausted
long before food began to run short; they were
besieged through the winter months—from the 7th
of December until the end of April—but nobody
thought of requiring physical comfort. They
needed fuel for their mess fires.
They began eventually to eat their mules and
horses, and the raw flesh. They had practi-
cally no fuel at all, and C. B., a medical officer who
went through the siege and who has written such
an illuminating and inestimably valuable account
of it from a medical officer's standpoint, tells about
how they found one day some old Turkish bread
which, being unfit for human consumption, was
yet priceless, because it would burn. They burned
it, and were very sorry afterwards when they began
to realise that the phrase "unfit for human con-
sumption ’ is unlimitedly comparative.
.
The bazaar and the serais of old Kut skirt the
plaza which lies along the river-front, and they
were riddled by shot and shell. Because the life
of an Arab town is centred in its bazaars, the first
important thing to be undertaken was the rebuild-
ing of the long arcade and the restoration of the
vaulted streets, which are lined with small booths
for the accommodation of the merchants. This is
finished now, or nearly so, and life has begun to
resume its normal course—with the big city of war
an easy walk down the river-bank to contribute to
its intensity and interest.
218


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
When we came in from the tragic lines of defence,
dominated now by the Turkish obelisk of victory,
we turned into the cemetery which lies at the edge
of the town, with the wide waste of the desert
stretching out to the eastward beyond it.
And what a cemetery! It is surrounded by a
new mud wall that the commandant has built, and
there are a few drooping, tired-looking, transplanted
palm-trees hanging over the graves. But I looked
across it and wondered what it was that I missed.
The dreadful nakedness of it hurt me, yet I did not
grasp at the moment what it was that gave me an
impression of dreadful nakedness. Then I realised.
The graves are not marked !' I said.
'No' answered the commandant.
There was a long pause then, during which the
three of us—the A.D.C., the commandant, and I
stood by the mud wall looking out across the deso-
late stretch of six-foot mounds, thinking each his
own thoughts.
They were all marked as they were made, of
course, the commandant finally said.
And the
only explanation we can think of is that the Turks
had German officers. The Turks have a good deal
of respect for anybody's dead, and, so far as we
have known, they don't do that kind of thing. But
they took away all the crosses, and now it's im-
possible to tell where any man is buried. And
there 's a major-general in here, and a number of
other officers
The hospital at Kut is a civil institution estab-
lished for the benefit of the native population. It
is in the partially patched-up ruin of one of the
larger buildings which stands near the one mosque
of the town, the single slender minaret of which
miraculously escaped destruction.
The doctor, a Scotchman with a delightful bur in
his tongue, was in his dispensary, putting up medi-
cines for a line of waiting Arabs. He apologised
220


THE SCENE OF THE TERRIBLE SIEGE
at once for the unhospital-like dilapidation and
disorder of the place and was not sure that he
would consent to show it to me. It was a trial
to his medical officer's conscience, and as soon as
he had, by degrees, taught the natives not to be
afraid of him and his works, he was going to make
the commandant provide him a suitable building:
But for the time being his rows of bottles, cases of
instruments, and the medical smells which envelop
him are, to the native mind, evidence enough of his
wizardry; and anything in the nature of spotless
and light, airy wards filled with rows of stiff little
white beds would simply frighten them away.
Most of his patients he treats and sends back to
their homes at once, but a few cases which require
special attention he keeps in some dark, dismal
rooms upstairs, which are all he has at his disposal.
A majority of these are eye cases.
Among the Arabs there is an appalling amount
of blindness. Much of it is caused, perhaps, by
the glare and the dust of the desert, but a larger
part of it is attributable to the fact that mothers
know nothing about the care of the eyes of infants.
It seems to me I have seen literally hundreds of
blind children from five to ten or twelve years of
age, and most of them utterly hopeless. There are
a great many cases of simple cataract, and these
the big Scotch medical officer can handle with
what the Arabs regard as miraculous success. He
has performed dozens of operations and has sent
a number of men and women who had been blind
for years back to their homes or to their tents in
the desert with eyes as clear as anybody's.
But the result is that he is beset by the blind.
People come leading blind relatives and friends
from miles and miles away, and more often than
not there is no sight left to them to restore. Their
eyes are completely gone. And this is a fearful
trial for the doctor, because they think he could cure
them all if he wanted to. They even go so far as
221


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
to make prayers to him and try to propitiate him
with gifts, as though he were some kind of wrathful
and unreasonable god.
The I.G.C. says that as soon as it is possible he is
going to organise small units of doctors and oculists
and send them out all over the country on medical
missionary tours. They will perform operations,
attack disease of all kinds, and undertake to hammer
into the heads of the people a little information
about preventive measures, especially as regards
the care of the eyes of small children.
When we left the sad little hospital we went back
to headquarters and climbed to the roof, from
which—with what emotions who can say ?-General
Townshend watched for weary weeks the enemy
surrounding him, and the repeated efforts of his
own people to rescue him. And there we stood
and reviewed the tragic, tremendous story, with
the whole scene of it lying before us like a map.
It was not until the sun had sunk in the far-away
desert glories of evening and the moon had begun
to shine palely on the river that the A.D.C. and I,
with subdued minds and saddened hearts, bade the
commandant good-bye on the river-bank, boarded
our launch, and slipped down round the great bend
to where the comfortable old S-1 lay moored before
the bustling new Kut-a new Kut ablaze with a
myriad cheerful lights.
222


CHAPTER XVIII
WITH GENERAL MAUDE IN COMMAND
LIEUT.-GEN. SIR STANLEY MAUDE took command
of the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force on the
28th of August 1916, and, according to his own
report to the War Office, he devoted himself up to
about mid-December to preliminary preparations
for a resolute offensive, the enemy's intention
apparently being to hold him on the defensive
in the Tigris River region below Kut while they
developed a big drive down through Persia–this
being a revival of their original plan.
Maude had first to develop adequate base sup-
port, and then to get into utmost fighting trim large
bodies of men who had suffered not only the fibre-
destroying tortures incident to a record hot season,
but the demoralising effects of defeat.
By December he had accomplished the concen-
tration of his forces near the enemy positions south
of Kut. On the night of December 13th the Big
Drive began. Until those forces surrounded and
passed north of captured Baghdad on the 11th of
March 1917, they were in practically continuous
action.
There were four divisions of infantry and one
division of cavalry; the corps commanders being
Lieut.-Gen. Sir A. S. Cobbe, V.C., D.S.O., astride
the Tigris, and Lieut.-Gen. Sir William Marshall
with the cavalry and a strong force of infantry to
the westward and on the Shatt-el-Hai. The enemy
was strongly intrenched in long-established posi-
tions on the Hai and at Kut-el-Amara, and it is
interesting to record that hordes of well-armed
223


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
Arabs hovered on the flanks of both armies—as is
their custom-ready to fall upon and help to cut
to pieces whichever side should begin to suffer
defeat.
The weather throughout the period of operations
was execrable, and managed to contribute to the
grand sum of horror and suffering a bewildering
variety of acute irritations. During the early part
of the cool season it is usually burning hot at mid-
day and freezing cold throughout the night, there
being a daily variation in the temperature of from
thirty to fifty degrees. And there are the sand-
storms which, while they last, put a stop to all
activity and inflict upon human flesh a peculiar and
unbelievable torture. Then, when the rains begin,
the fine dust of the plains is turned into the thick
viscid mud through which neither man nor beast
can make any kind of progress. After that the
floods come down the Tigris and Euphrates and
great areas are submerged, while unsubmerged
areas become untenable from the extraordinary
seepage of the tremendous marshes which lie be-
tween the two rivers and east of the Tigris. In
places the desert bubbles as though in fermentation.
All the way through General Maude's account
of the operations there are references to unfavour-
able weather conditions :
Operations were hampered by heavy rains which fell
during the last week in December and the first week in
January, flooding large tracts of country. ..
Where the ground was not too sodden by rain and floods
our cavalry was constantly engaged in reconnaissances, in
harassing the enemy's communications west of the Hai, and
in raids, capturing stock and grain.
The enemy position in the Khadairi Bend was a menace
to our communications with the Hai, for in the event of a
high flood he could inundate portions of our line by open-
ing the river Bunds. It was, therefore, decided to clear
the Khadairi Bend. ...
Intended operations west of the Hai by the cavalry and
224



The British Residency, now General Headquarters, Baghdad.

New Street, Baghdad.


WITH GENERAL MAUDE IN COMMAND
.
a detachment of General Marshall's force were necessarily
abandoned on account of the mist. .
On the 10th of January the attack was resumed in foggy
weather, and the enemy was pressed back trench by trench,
till by nightfall he had fallen back to his last position.
During these operations the fighting had been severe and
mainly hand to hand, but the enemy, in spite of his ten-
acity, had more than met his match in the dash and
resolution of our troops.
The movements of the cavalry had meanwhile been
restricted by the water-logged state of the ground. It had
been intended to move the division via Badrah and Jessan
against the enemy's rear ...
.. and reconnaissance showed
that the proposal was feasible ; but soon after the move-
ment had commenced a heavy thunderstorm burst over
the district, and the flooding of the marsh of Jessan and
its neighbourhood rendered progress impracticable and the
attempt was abandoned.
The most brilliant incident of the whole campaign
was the crossing of the Tigris River north of Kut
in the Shumran Bend. This happened at the end
of two months of terrific fighting and after the Turks
had been driven entirely from the west bank of the
river and had taken up their final strongly defensive
position on the Kut peninsula—the scene of the
siege—and down the east bank in the maze of
trenches on the field of Sunnaiyat, which they had
occupied and had been engaged in strengthening
for nearly a year. This position was protected
from flank attack by the great Suwaikieh Marsh,
which lies, miles on end, within easy seeing dis-
tance eastward from the river. As the General
describes it:
The water-logged state of the country and a high flood on
the Tigris now necessitated a pause, but the time was use-
fully employed in methodical preparation for the passage of
the Tigris at Shumran. Positions for guns and machine-
gun crews to support the crossing were selected, approaches
and ramps were made, and crews were trained to man the
pontoons. In order to keep our intentions concealed, it
was necessary that most of the details, including the move-
P
225


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
ment of guns, should be carried out under cover of night.
Opposite Sunnaiyat, where it was intended to renew the
assault, artillery barrages were carried out daily in order
to induce the enemy to expect such barrages unaccom-
panied by an assault as part of the daily routine. Minor
diversions were also planned to deceive the enemy as to
the point at which it was intended to cross the river.
What General Maude calls 'minor diversions,
created for the purpose of deceiving the enemy,
developed later on, while preparations for the cross-
ing were in progress, into a strong attack by Lieu-
tenant-General Cobbe at Sunnaiyat, the success of
which so surprised the Turks, who believed this
position to be impregnable, that
utterly demoralised and broke into confusion-
fleeing for dear life away to Baghdad.'
The crossing of the river was a wholly impossible
thing-so little anticipated that the enemy was
struck with astonishment and had no time to con-
centrate effective resistance. A captured Turkish
officer said they had discussed the possibility of
such a move, but had decided that against such
resistance as they were prepared to offer only
madmen would attempt it.'
The river was in flood and was three hundred and
forty yards wide at the point where the bridge was
thrown across. This operation being carried out
under machine gun fire which swept ferries and pon-
toons and inflicted heavy losses on the British. But,
in the words of General Maude, the men worked
with 'unconquerable valour and determination.'
They began with the first ferry just before day-
break on 23rd February, and by 4.30 P.M. the
amazing bridge was ready for traffic and the
Turkish army was in full retreat toward Baghdad,
but fighting every foot of the way, While the
advance from Kut to Baghdad was accomplished
in only fifteen days, it was made in the face of such
stubborn resistance as served to cover one field after
another with mingled British and Turkish dead.
226


WITH GENERAL MAUDE IN COMMAND
In no campaign of the war has there been such
continuous hand-to-hand fighting.
The country, a vast region of yellow sand and
grey-green marsh, stretches away to the far horizons
as level as a table-top and without so much as a
bit of scrub brush for cover, so the operation was a
continuous performance of move forward and in-
trench. Along the entire distance there are to-day
the shattered and shell-riven remains of a network
of defences which tell a tale beyond imagining, and
in their stark and glaringly revealed extent they
demonstrate that modern war with all its slaughter
and horror is largely a matter of prodigious physical
labour.
But to return to the operations. In the mean-
time the gunboat flotilla, which had supported the
advance from the river, proceeded upstream, shell-
ing the enemy in retreat and coming itself under
heavy fire from guns of all kinds that were covering
the retirement along the banks.
At Aziziyeh, just half-way to Baghdad—the spot
where the original fatal decision was made-General
Maude halted for reconcentration and reorganisa-
tion of his lines of communication ; but after a
quick readjustment the pursuit was resumed.
Then for two days the armies plunged forward-
eighteen miles one day, seventeen miles the next-
in a blinding dust-storm which limited vision to a
few yards in any direction.
The enemy made a final strong stand in a previ-
ously intrenched position at the Diyala River, and
here for three days the British troops suffered
decimating fire from concealed machine-gun bat-
teries, as they worked in vain to force a passage
of the stream by ferry and pontoon.
Meanwhile General Maude, who had taken one of
the big paddle-wheel supply-boats for headquarters,
moved on up the river and at a point a few miles
south of the mouth of the Diyala threw a bridge
across and transferred two infantry divisions and
227


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
his one division of cavalry to the west bank, up
which they proceeded to march at a forced pace
toward Baghdad. This flank movement, threat-
ening to cut the resisting Turkish forces off, com-
pelled their immediate flight_beyond Baghdad,
their rear-guard engaging the British with admir-
able tenacity and tremendous valour all the way.
It was a matter of considerable regret to most
persons concerned that General Maude made no
triumphal demonstration upon his arrival at
Baghdad. It was thought that a display of pomp
and a parade of victory might have a properly sub-
duing effect upon the native population and serve
to enhance the local prestige of the conquering
forces. But General Maude was undemonstrative
in every way. In obedience to his orders a few
troops were marched through the city from the
south entrance, and a patrol of the streets was in-
stantly established. But as for himself, he ordered
the captain of his floating headquarters to bank
in at the river wall under the British Residency,
and, accompanied only by his personal staff, he
walked ashore and up into the city as casually as
he might have done had he been only a very tired
traveller arriving under the most ordinary circum-
stances.
228


CHAPTER XIX
IN THE SHADOW OF AN ANCIENT RUIN
are
AFTER Kut-el-Amara-Ctesiphon, the last point
of interest below Baghdad.
Ctesiphon is pronounced as it is spelled, except
that the C is silent. In a philologically orthographic,
or whatever it may be, sense the C probably has a
perfectly legitimate excuse for being there—just
as the 'h'has indisputable rights in the middle of
Baghdad—but it is slightly in the way, and there
persons who can never avoid stumbling
over it.
Yukon, for instance, was never able to disregard
it, so he invented a pronunciation all his own. I
do not know exactly what it was, but it had the
C in it, right enough. In fact, it had it in in several
places, and the effect was rather splendid. It was
something like · Cesticicisphison,' and he stuck to
it resolutely in spite of any amount of pointed
reference on the part of others to · Tesifon' in its
simplest form.
There is nothing at Ctesiphon now-nothing but
a wide waste of knobby desert, the mounded
graveyard of a buried city and the lone, mar-
vellous arch which has stood through so many
centuries, offering mute, compelling testimony to
the grandeur of the Eastern Empire destined to
fall before the onrush of barbarian Arab peoples,
newly inspired by the Moslem faith and fired with
fanatic zeal.
But on the banks of the river Tigris the great
arch of Ctesiphon is a comparatively modern
structure. It belongs to the Christian era, and on
229


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
the banks of the river Tigris one begins to pro-
nounce in a familiar way names that were on the
tongues of men five thousand years ago.
The mounds of the dead cities in the midst of the
desolation have not revealed the story of the in-
fancy of the human race, but they have revealed
one of the main sources of the cultural stream upon
which humanity has drifted and, it may be, is drift-
ing always toward broader and more tranquil
depths. Even the age of Sargon-the twenty-
eighth century B.C.-seems on the banks of the
Tigris strangely recent.
Sargon was the first great leader in the history
of the Semitic race, and he was the first ruler to
build up a great nation in western Asia, reaching
from Elam to the Mediterranean and far
up
the
Two Rivers northward. His splendid conquests
made an impression upon the Tigris-Euphrates
world which never faded. ...' So says Breasted,
in his Ancient Times.
But in Sargon's time the legends of the people
with regard to the world's beginning were the
legends we revere to-day, and they were as dimly
remote to them as they are to us. Their gods were
gods of the elements.
About the twenty-second century B.C. a tribe of
Semitic Amorites crossed over from the Mediter-
ranean coast lands and seized what Breasted de-
scribes as “the little town of Babylon, which was
at that time an obscure village
And one
hundred years later there rose in this tribe a great
king. His name was Hammurapi, and it was he
who first made Babylon mistress of the then world,
and welded together a mighty kingdom under the
name of Babylonia.
This was fourteen centuries before Nebuchad-
nezzar was born, yet archæological research has
brought up out of the buried cities of the Baby-
lonian plain a written record of Hammurapi's
reign so clear and so detailed that we can follow
230


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
the current from that fountain has flowed on for thousands
of years, fertilising the souls of men out of its hidden sources
and helping on, by the decree of Divine Providence, the
ultimate triumph of good over evil, of right over wrong.1
The stars of peoples ascended in this land, rose
to their zenith, and declined. A long line of
Assyrian emperors marches across the pages of
history to battle chants and the clank and clash of
the accoutrements of war ;
Sennacherib passes
proudly by to gaze in disdain upon the cities and
palaces of his predecessors, and to build arrogant
Nineveh, from whose mighty walls he gazes east
and west across a world within his grasp.
Came an era when Babylonia was no longer
Babylonia, but Chaldea, with Nebuchadnezzar em-
barked upon a career of such magnificence and
power that after twenty-five centuries humanity
still stands
agape
before conjured-up visions of his
splendour. The Chaldeans, allying themselves with
the Median hosts, march against the walls of
Nineveh ; and two centuries later Xenophon with
his Greek legions passes by and gazes in astonish-
ment upon the mounds of fluted sand which even
then covered the seats of the once mighty Assyrians
as to-day the sand mounds cover the cities on the
Babylonian plain.
Then passes Cyrus, king of Persia, worshipping
Ahuramazda, and hurling his serried hosts against
the Lydians; and finally against the walls of
Babylon-Cyrus freeing the Children of Israel and
commanding that the temple of the Israelitish God
at Jerusalem be rebuilt, while bowing himself before
his altars of fire.
Cambyses, son of Cyrus, conquers Egypt, and
the Persian Empire stretches from Elam to the
sands of the Sahara. After whom Darius, Xerxes,
and Artaxerxes; Xerxes carving on the wall of the
great fire temple at Persepolis :
1 Ten Great Religions, by James Freeman Clarke.
232


IN THE SHADOW OF AN ANCIENT RUIN
Ahuramazda is a mighty god who has created the earth and
heaven and men ; who has given glory to men ; who has made
Xerxes King, the ruler of many. 1, Xerxes, King of Kings,
King of the earth near and far, son of Darius an Achaemenid.
What I have done here, and what I have done elsewhere, I have
done by the grace of Ahuramazda.
Looking down across thirty miles of desert to the
Pusht-i-Kuh, a range of Persian mountains that
lies like a great, long, rugged opal against the
eastern horizon, one sees with the mind's eye the
ruins of Susa-biblical Shushan-where in his
palace Ahasueras, son of Xerxes, 'showed the
riches of his glorious kingdom and the honour of
his excellent majesty many days' and 'made a
feast unto all the people that were present in
Shushan the palace, both unto great and small,
seven days in the court of the garden of the king's
palace :
'Where were white, green, and blue hangings,
fastened with cords of fine linen and purple to
silver rings and pillars of marble....'
Shushan-where the brave and beautiful Esther
got Haman hanged so high, and where “Mordecai
went out from the presence of the king in royal
apparel of blue and white and with a great crown
of gold, and with a garment of fine linen and
purple’ to smite the enemies of the Jews.
It was a colourful age !
Then Alexander, the great Macedonian, son of
that Philip against whom Demosthenes launched
his philippics. What names go hurtling through
one's thoughts !
Alexander the Great marches down across Asia
Minor, through the Cilician Gates, and along the
coast of the Mediterranean, to meet the Persian
forces under the third Darius, and to hurl them back
across the plain and the river Euphrates; to refuse
the better half of the Persian Empire, and then to
march on and on, conquering the world and sighing
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THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
for more worlds to conquer.
Only in the end to
turn back from the far places to Babylon-which
was itself a far place to the exalted Macedonian-
and to die there in the palace of the Babylonian
kings !
He had conquered the world, and his heirs were
his Macedonian generals. One of these, Seleucus,
takes possession of the Land of the Two Rivers and
the rich conquered territories of the Mediterranean
coast. He founds the city of Antioch, and on the
west bank of the Tigris, on the shortest highway
between the two rivers and within a day's easy
march of Babylon, he causes to be built the city of
Seleucia.
The city of Seleucia! It lies directly across the
river from the Arch of Ctesiphon-a great undulat-
ing mound of sand, like the other mounds. Nobody
has yet delved into it for historic records and
treasure. But perhaps it is not worth while. As
ruins
go it is such a modern ruin !
Centuries pass; Rome rises to pre-eminence and
declines, while the fires that Zoroaster kindled in
the hearts of the Persian peoples keep alive in them
a consciousness of race and a will to live.
It was in the third century of the Christian era
that the family of Sassanid arose to the east of the
Mesopotamian rivers and, by an inspired revival
of patriotism among the Persian tribes, succeeded
in establishing the Sassanian Empire.
For a capital the Sassanian kings built the city
of Ctesiphon on the for ever strategically valuable
shortest highway between the two rivers.
The Sassanids were mighty, and the Sassanian
Empire continued to grow in might, the Oriental
splendour of its court having been beyond the
powers of men to describe.
The Sassanid emperors were Sun-gods, worship-
ping Ahuramazda as that deity's representatives
upon earth. They realised in their forms and cere-
234


IN THE SHADOW OF AN ANCIENT RUIN
monials what Alexander had designed for himself,
and nothing could surpass the magnificence and
the colour of the pageant of their lives.
The Arch of Ctesiphon is all that is left of the
audience-hall of the Emperor Khusrau. It dates
from about the sixth century. It is one of the
largest and most extraordinary ruins in the world,
and is so massively and so amazingly built that one
looks round and about over the naked desert in the
midst of which it stands, and wonders how a city
whose builders were so great could possibly disap-
pear from the face of the earth.
The arch itself was the throne-chamber, and on
the other side of it there was another tremendous
wing like the one which still survives. The arch,
it is supposed, was always open at one end, as it is
to-day, and across it, covering its whole vast height
and breadth, was a jewelled tapestry. On this
tapestry was worked a wonderful landscape in
precious stones.
The Sassanian Empire was overthrown in the
middle of the seventh century by the irresistible
cohorts of the Kaliphs, and Baghdad, in its turn,
came to be founded as a great capital in the Cradle
of the World.
This war closes one's mind to old historic vision.
It dwarfs the very ghosts of world conquerors that
have loomed so large in the background of the
world's advancing life, and sets a gulf between
itself and other wars the world has seen across
which no one can get a just perspective.
The British troops on the way to Baghdad with
General Maude knew Ctesiphon principally as the
field of General Townshend's disaster, and they
knew, too, I suppose, that there was a ruin there
-even a mighty ruin. But I doubt if many of
them had a mental vision of it that was not wholly
overwhelmed by the reality.
Some of them, it is said, regarded it chiefly as a
235


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
much too valuable post of observation for the
enemy and wanted to shell it. It is visible from
many miles away down river and across the plain,
and from its top the view would be unobstructed as
far as the strongest glass could reach. But they
were forbidden to touch it, and after the armies had
passed, the new British masters of the immediate
destinies of the land and its peoples caused to have
built all round it a barbed-wire fence, and notices
were posted to explain to the people the great his-
toric value of the old monument and to ask them
to give up their age-old practice of taking bricks out
of it for modern building purposes. It is easy to
believe that Ctesiphon was quarried to build
Baghdad, as the Rome of the Cæsars was quarried
to build the commonplace Rome of later days.
And nothing in Rome very greatly surpasses in
magnificence of construction this wide-flung and
wholly self-supporting arch.
But we must get on now.
We are to lunch with
the British Army Commander in the City of the
Kaliphs. The gentlemen with whom I travelled
were greatly concerned lest I should be expecting
too much. They wanted to shield me from in-
evitable disappointment.
'Baghdad is just worse than nothing,' they said.
'It's a rotten hole!
If you were on your way to Baghdad you
naturally would be expecting too much.
You
would be expecting to see something, at least,
that would offer to your mind a suggestion of the
domed and minareted Moslem city of Oriental
story.
But the flat-roofed and mud-coloured huddle of
human habitations sprawling along the high wall
which lines the great sweeping curve of the palm-
fringed river would appeal to you at once as being
curiously in harmony with the moods of the country
you had learned on your slow journey up-river to
236


IN THE SHADOW OF AN ANCIENT RUIN
gun-
know so well in its desolate but wonderfully sunlit
raggedness.
There are mosques,
of course, with minarets
aplenty, but they are all quite ordinary ; rather
cheap, in fact. All but one. From far down the
river you look across a wide stretch of open desert
and see, hovering away off in a blue haze green-
edged with the
green of palm-trees, the great round
golden dome and the many slender shafts that rise
above the mosque of Kazhi-main. And if you
know no more than you ought to know you will
take this vision for a first glimpse of Baghdad and
be wholly satisfied. But Kazhi-main is on the
west bank of the river, four miles above Baghdad,
and before the city comes into view it has dis-
appeared altogether from your range of vision.
When General Maude took Baghdad there came
steaming up behind his floating headquarters the
battle-scarred fleet of monitors and small river
boats and a long line of supply-boats of various
kinds. The S-1, with General MacMunn and his
staff aboard and with Yukon at her wheel, was
among the first to arrive, the General having come
up directly behind the army with fifty boats
heavily laden with supplies for the immediate
establishment of an advanced base.
As we rounded the last great bend which brings
Baghdad into view they told me how it had seemed
to them then. Not any one of them, the skipper
included, had ever been there before, and they said
the thrill of rounding one wide curve of the river
after another, knowing nothing of what lay beyond
the next, and of coming at last full upon the town
which had been so long the British objective and
for which they had paid such a fearful price, was
overwhelming.
The high banks were black with cheering throngs;
there were people everywhere-on the housetops,
in every window and balcony, lining the river walls.
Their welcome was genuine. When the Turks
237


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
left, anarchy was let loose in the city, and at the
moment the British entered chaos reigned, while
bands of murderous Arabs were looting the bazaars
and scattering terror in every highway and byway.
This state of affairs lasted just as long as it took
British patrols to march through the streets and no
longer, while a few subsequent hangings and im-
prisonments, and the excellent conduct of the
British troops, served to restore almost at once
the complete confidence and serenity of the people.
British occupation of Baghdad was regretted by
nobody but the defeated Turks and the offscourings
of Arabian tribes who were halted in their criminal
pursuits by the immediate establishment of British
law and order.
238


CHAPTER XX
THE MAN OF MESOPOTAMIA
So I did get to Baghdad, after all !
We anchored a short distance off the bank in
front of General Headquarters, and after a little
while a launch came out to get me and took me
down-river a couple of hundred yards to the landing
at the Army Commander's house. He and his two
A.D.C.'s were waiting on the little pontoon plat-
form to receive me, and as he helped me ashore
he said :
Well, here you are! That's good !
Come
along in now, and let 's have some lunch.'
That was all. It was as though I had been away
for a few days and had just returned. But it was
peculiarly characteristic of the man.
His thoughts
ran in clean-cut grooves and his besetting weakness
was punctuality. It was a quarter past one o'clock
and his luncheon-hour was one. He had waited for
me an unprecedented fifteen minutes !
6
The house, at the edge of the high river wall and
reached at low water by a flight of wooden and
very rickety steps, was most interesting. It was
bristlingly historic, of course, having been the home
of two German-Turkish commanders before General
Maude_took possession of it. General von der
Goltz Pasha died in it-of cholera, they say—and
it was the residence of Khalil Pasha, who com-
manded the Turkish forces while Baghdad was
Turkish headquarters.
We walked across a terrace on the river-bank
and entered the dining-room, where everything was
239


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
in readiness for luncheon. This room, a few feet
below the ground-level of the house, had a mud-
brick floor, and its bare walls were painted a fear-
ful saffron hue, which seemed to have had some
intention of being yellow.
Like all other residences in Mesopotamia, the
house was built round a wide, paved court, and the
living-rooms opened on a second-floor balcony on
the inside. It was not a particularly comfortable
house, and was about as elaborate in its furnishings
as a camp in the desert. General Maude occupied
the room in which Von der Goltz died, and seemed
rather pleased with the idea of doing so. Then
there was the western terrace, with a yineless arbour
built over its railing, from which one got a magni-
ficent view up
and down the wide
sweep
of the river.
But since the whole river side of the house had
to be screened in with canvas on account of
the pitiless terrific sun, the terrace was not of
much use.
There were always impressive-looking sentries
posted on it, and also in the corridor outside the
General's room; while on the street side there was
always an adequate guard. There had been fre-
quent plots to assassinate General Maude, and
only a day or two before I arrived a perfectly
arranged scheme had been uncovered by the secret
service, with the result that the schemers got into
very serious difficulties and the guard surrounding
him was strengthened.
As for my own accommodations, General Maude
had written that he was afraid I should be very
uncomfortable, and had then proceeded to have
prepared for me quarters so entirely comfortable
that I felt a definite sense of embarrassment when
I walked into them. It didn't seem quite right,
somehow, that in such a place somebody's time
should have been wasted to make such provision
for me.
After luncheon the General took me himself to
240


THE MAN OF MESOPOTAMIA
my rooms and made a quite thorough investiga-
tion to see that everything was in order.
* This is really no place for a lady!' he said.
' But we've fixed things up a bit-and don't you
go doing without anything we can possibly turn
up for you.'
On my packing-box dressing-table, with a
mottled mirror propped up on it, and on the desk
in my sitting-room, there were violets. Violets in
mud-coloured and dust-enshrouded Baghdad ! They
were small single ones like “ Johnny-jump-ups, but
they were fresh as morning dew. I had to exclaim
about them, of course, and then the General told
me how he came by them. He said that so far as
he knew there was only one bed of violets in all
Mesopotamia.
Somebody must have told the chap who
owns it that I like violets,' he added, so he
sends me some every day. Always have a little
bunch of them on my desk at General Head-
quarters. Nice, aren't they?'
I write all this principally because by doing so
I am able to throw a brief light on a phase of my
host's character with which few persons seemed to
be familiar. I had been told that he was casual to
the point of indifference in his attitude toward
everything but his work, and that I was likely to
find him difficult.' With the grave responsi-
bilities of a war zone weighing upon him, one would
hardly expect a man to be anything but casual
toward unimportant persons and affairs, but
General Maude was as genial and kindly a host as
I should have expected him to be under the most
conventional circumstances.
He was a very impressive figure of a man. He
was six feet three inches tall, and any one would
have known he was a soldier, whether he was in
uniform or not. His innate kindliness expressed
itself in a gleam of humour that was hardly ever
absent from his eyes, and he was rather fascinating
9
241


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
when he talked, because of a slow drawl in his
speech and a vein of quiet fun peculiarly his own.
At the beginning of the war General Maude com-
manded a brigade in France, and was severely
wounded. As a matter of fact, there was a bullet
lodged in his back where the surgeons could not
get at it, and it gave him trouble always. He told
me about this himself and about how, with one leg
temporarily paralysed, he thought for a long time
that he was done for. For services in France he
was made a major-general, and when he recovered
from his wounds he was sent to command the
Thirteenth Division at Gallipoli. After the evacua-
tion of Gallipoli he brought this division to Meso-
potamia and commanded it in all the subsequent
attempts to relieve General Townshend at Kut.
After Townshend's surrender he was appointed to
command the Tigris Corps, and later succeeded to
the full command of the Mesopotamian forces,
after which the uninterrupted success of his career
won for him the enviable title Maude the ever-
victorious.'
He was specially promoted to be a lieutenant-
general for his services in Mesopotamia, and was
made a Knight Commander of the Bath. He was
also a Companion of St. Michael and St. George
and had a D.S.O. for services in the South African
War. The French Government made him a Com-
mander of the Legion of Honour.
Few persons ever referred to General Maude.'
It was always “the Army Commander. And the
atmosphere of command with which he managed
to envelop himself was extraordinary. One felt
the tremendous personal influence of the man.
He was in every man's mind-the Army Com-
mander; on every man's tongue-the Army Com-
mander; a figure so potent that to think of the
Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force without his
calm intelligence behind it, directing it in its ever-
242


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
General MacMunn's A.D.C. was for ever
rag-
ging' him with regard to measures for his own
safety and physical welfare, and I had come to look
upon good-natured scolding as among the definite
duties of an A.D.C. But General Maude would
have considered advice touching his individual
habits an unwarranted interference. In my privi-
leged impudence and blissful ignorance of his char-
acter, I told him one day that I thought a man
in his position who did not regard his health as a
matter of primary concern was guilty of a kind
of treason for which some form of punishment
should be provided.
When any one made so bold as to protest against
his using an aeroplane, he always referred to a
friend of his who fell down a little stairway and
died of a broken leg.'
He was going out to Ramadie one day-head-
quarters on his western line—and one of his A.D.C.'s
asked if he would not please have a message sent
through to them as soon as he arrived.
‘I will not,' he replied. Why should I ? If I
don't get there they will probably let you know
sooner or later. Then you might send out and
gather up
the pieces.
That first afternoon, after he had looked my
quarters over and I had tried to tell him how
grateful I was to him, and how much I appreciated
the privilege of being in Mesopotamia, he asked
what in particular I thought I wanted to do.
‘I want to do everything you will permit me to
do,' I replied.
Yes, of course,' he drawled, in his delightful
way, “but what, for instance ?
May I go to the front ?'
My dear lady, you are at the front.'
Yes, I know, but may I go out to the lines ?'
* You may-wherever you like.
like. What else ?
“May I go to Babylon ?'
No, that, I'm sorry to say, you may not do.
>
244


THE MAN OF MESOPOTAMIA
6
I shall not knowingly take a risk of having you
killed, you know, and the desert between here and
Babylon is infested with hostile Arabs.'
Wouldn't a couple of armoured motor cars be
all right?
They might be, and again they might not.
Motor cars in the desert are not invariably reliable.
I nearly lost a bishop in one of them last week.
He thought he had to see Babylon before his
education would be complete, and the Arabs got
after him. There was quite a party, and a valu-
able party, too. They had to make a run for it,
and anything might have happened to the car, you
know.'
245


ROUND ABOUT TOWN
of all the chapels, hospitals, and Y.M.C.A. quarters
within a radius of a day's toilsome round. And
he made hay while the sun shone at the rate of
about one hundred and fifteen degrees even in the
shade of the few sheltering palms. But I am not
laughing at him, of course. I am laughing at the
young A.D.C. who had to keep up with him. The
only thing I have personally against him is that
trip to Babylon !
Most of the things the aides showed me they saw
for the first time with me, and they were as keen
about it all as I could possibly be, though they had
been in Baghdad nearly a year. The Army Com-
mander bent his brows in mock severity and
threatened to count against them as leave all the
time they spent with me, but he, too, was interested.
To my surprise, Baghdad as a place to be visited
was more or less a closed book to him as well as
to the rest of us, and after spending the morning
on the big job at headquarters, he came home to
luncheon each day with a demand that we tell him
all about our doings.
Baghdad as the City of the Kaliphs and of Harun-
al-Rashid's benevolent strolls is absorbingly inter-
esting, to be sure, but I was far more interested in
observing the effects of modern events and of the
occupation of the historic city by a British army.
If you should be carried by aeroplane from a far
place and dropped_down bound and blindfolded
into the centre of Baghdad to-day, turned round
three or four times and then set free, you would
open your eyes, look about you, and say:
Well, I don't know what town this is, but what-
ever it is the Germans beat me to it!'
The last thing the commander of the Turkish
forces in Mesopotamia did before he gave up the
fight to hold Baghdad was to send a polite mes-
sage across to General Maude asking him to re-
frain from dropping shells or bombs into the city.
247


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
The British thought this rather humorous at the
time, since the most devastating thing their Army
Commander ever dropped or ever intended to drop
into Baghdad was a limited edition of a proclama-
tion calling upon the people to preserve order and
to fear nothing from British troops. But the sub-
lime cheek of it was realised when they began later
to shovel and dig their way into certain sections of
the city through the ruins of British property.
There had been a bank and a number of good
business and office buildings that were built and
occupied before the war by British firms engaged
in international commerce, and all these were re-
duced to heaps of dust and rubbish. Not a sin
piece of British property was left standing except
the Residency, a rather imposing building on the
river-front which reminds one forcefully of the days
when Great Britain maintained a special and some-
what stately relationship with the Turkish Empire.
Without a doubt the Residency also would have
been destroyed had it not been in use at the time
as a Turkish hospital. It must have cost the
German officers some bitter pangs to leave it.
And at that it was in a sorry condition. As a
hospital it was dirty and unkempt beyond any-
body's power to describe, and the British found it
filled to capacity with wounded Turks who had been
abandoned-left behind without a medical officer or
even an orderly to attend to their needs !-this
being one of the few bad counts the British have
marked up against the Turks. And they wonder
about it. One of the medical officers who entered
the city with General Maude's army
summed
up
the
situation as the most horrible mess' he had ever
encountered. That any army medical service
could perpetrate such an outrage against its own
wounded was a thing beyond his British compre-
hension. He was ready to concede that leaving
the wounded behind might have been a necessity,
but he could imagine no circumstances under which
248


ROUND ABOUT TOWN
it might be necessary to leave them without medical
or nursing attendance. It was three days before
the British came in ! My doctor friend told me in
still angry recollection that he wanted almightily
to go on a rampage and soundly thrash everybody
in Baghdad who might have taken care of them
and did not. No wounded men of any nationality
ever got better care than did those Turks at the
hands of the British.
As for the wanton destruction of British private
property, there is no doubt in anybody's mind, so
far as I have been able to discover, that it was
ordered by German officers in a spirit of vindictive
hatred. Just as nobody doubts that the stripping
of the British graves at Kut-el-Amara of the simple
crosses that marked them was a German-inspired
outrage. To rob the dead, wantonly, of the sweet
shelter of identification that means so much to the
loved ones left behind!
It may be that it is wronging the Germans to lay
at their door all such unnecessary outrages against
human decency, but if it is they have nobody but
themselves to blame. The reputation they enjoy
is surely the result of their own unaided efforts ;
efforts magnificently organised and ably directed
wherever they happen for the time being to be in
command of things.
But the Turk—it is rather a curious situation as
regards the Turk. In spite of considerable evi-
dence to the contrary and the number of tremendous
shocks he has received, the average Englishman
has never quite surrendered the idea that in a
general sense the Turk is a gentleman. A gentle-
man, to be sure, who commits wholesale murder
and crimes so overwhelmingly atrocious that they
cause a whole world of men to quake with horror,
but a gentleman, nevertheless, who, as a rule, is
incapable of petty meannesses. Is that not as-
tonishing ?
There is no doubt at all that in straight battle
249


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
the Turk fights in a spirit of 'may the best man
win.' He endeavours with admirable determina-
tion to prove himself the best man, but he never
stoops to unfair advantage and he never displays
in
any way that soul-searing quality of hatred with
which the German people have made the world so
appallingly familiar.
I was never more surprised in my life than when
I was told by a British officer that in Mesopotamia
the British do not require gas and liquid fire, be-
cause the Turks have always steadfastly refused to
employ such things against them.
This is worth a moment's special consideration.
On both sides the Mesopotamian war has been
fought with shot and shell, and, so far as is known
--and aside from the uncertainty as to the fate of
British prisoners in Turkish hands—the Turks have
broken no established rules and have refused
throughout to adopt modern German methods of
inhuman terrorism and frightfulness. They have
observed all the hitherto internationally customary
courtesies and decencies with regard to the wounded
and the dead on the battle-fields; they have re-
spected the Red Cross as their own Red Crescent
has been respected; and have displayed through-
out a tendency to maintain the conventionalities
and to uphold the ethics of what was once known
civilised warfare.'
It is all very curious, and one fails somehow to
understand. It would surprise us very little if the
'terrible Turk’-surely convicted before the world
of terribleness-should resort to barbarous methods
even against such a respected enemy as England.
But it seems he has not, and I have yet to hear
an Englishman refer to the Turkish enemy-as
such—in any but terms of respect. And always
with the simple idea that he must be licked into
line' at whatever cost; the ultimate fate of Turkey
being from an international viewpoint one of the
most important issues of the war.
6
as
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ROUND ABOUT TOWN
There are a great many thoughtful and intelligent
Turks who realise, as I know from personal contact
with them in Constantinople during the war, that
Germany is playing with them her favourite bully's
game of "heads I win, tails you lose.' But for
some unexplained, and as yet inexplicable reason,
the Turks go on playing it.
The British Residency was soon emptied of its
pitiful hundreds of wounded Turks, and became
General Headquarters for the Mesopotamian Ex-
peditionary Force--the G.H.Q. of everyday con-
versation. The Turkish infantry barracks inside
the Wall on the river-bank, the tremendous cavalry
barracks outside the old North Gate, and a number
of other more or less suitable large buildings in the
city, were quickly cleaned out and remodelled for
hospital purposes, while the Turkish General Hos-
pital-a very creditable modern institution, but
also occupied by deserted Turks, and in a very
Turkish state of uncleanness—was put in proper
condition almost overnight.
The junior A.D.C. and I climbed into a low grey
service car in front of the house, and whirled away
at the usual nerve-trying speed of an army car
driven by a soldier chauffeur. We rushed past
G.H.Q. with its mud-brick wall skirting a ragged,
dust-powdered garden ; past low-roofed residences
buried in unkempt greenery ; past a few coffee-
houses, where crowds of picturesquely-clad citizens
sat cross-legged on wooden benches, drawing lazily
at the long stems of narghiles, and so on into a wide,
torn-up, extraordinary street off which here and
there one caught glimpses into deep, dim bazaars
or into side-streets that were piled high with the
debris of deliberate destruction.
This street is casually known as New Street, and
is now Baghdad's principal thoroughfare. It was
cut by Khalil Pasha on the advice of the Germans,
251


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
and it was ruthlessly done. No Turk would ever
think of doing such a thing on his own initiative, the
Turks being partial to narrow,
airless ways and sun-
less passages. The Germans, however, believe in wide
streets and plenty of room, and they are quite right.
But to hew a street as with a battle-axe straight
through the heart of such a city as Baghdad re-
quired some lack of consideration for the feelings
of the inhabitants and the property owners.
There
was no question of investigating or respecting pro-
prietary rights. The street was simply cut through.
And some of the property owners were so cast down
by it that to this day they have not troubled to
remove from the half-cut-away buildings the evi-
dences of human occupation. They left pictures
to dangle forlornly on the walls of rooms, and bits
of furniture here and there to become weather-
beaten and unsightly. They look horribly exposed
and ashamed, these rooms do.
Even a mosque which lay in the way of a straight
line marked out for the street had one corner
hacked away, and to so desecrate a mosque is in
the mind of the orthodox Moslem an unforgivable
offence. No more unpopular thing was ever done
in any city, yet on the whole it was a good thing to
do, and the British have reason to be thankful for
it-and glad that it was done while the Germans
were in control. The British are reaping a reward
of gratitude and trust by undertaking gradually to
reimburse the property owners and to assist them
in rebuilding and in re-establishing themselves in
business. The street was needed.
Baghdad has a population of about one hundred
and forty thousand, but it is compactly built and
over-crowded, and one gets an impression that it is
a small town on a holiday, with everybody in from
the country for miles around. As I drove through
the heart of it I tried to get a vision that would stay
in my mind in photographic detail of the strange
multi-coloured and intermingled life that I was
252


ROUND ABOUT TOWN
seeing for the first time. But it was not possible.
There were too many different kinds of people,
and
too many curious angles and contours of life. Then
there were the khaki and grey—the colours of war
--that one saw as by far the most important and
interesting thing to be seen, yet that contrasted
so sharply with the general scheme of things.
We had to turn out into a ditch to get past a
long convoy of guns that was lumbering and clank-
ing along, accompanied by many officers on hand-
some horses, while on the other side of the street,
disputing the way with automobiles and donkeys,
was a long line of camels ambling disdainfully
through the mob under heavy loads of army duffle
of varying degrees of lumpiness.
In many of the gaping frontless houses, and in
tiny bits of garden here and there, were Persians
and Arabs and Oriental Jews at their everlasting
drowsing over coffee and hubble-bubbles; there
were women, hundreds of them, unveiled for the
most part, but wrapped from head to feet in gor-
geous-hued and all-enveloping abahs ; Kurd
porters staggering under unbelievable burdens, and
other Kurds wearing the same black pot-hat that
was worn by their forefathers thousands of years
ago-as is proved so often by the picture records
discovered in the buried cities; droves of coolie
women all but lost to view under loose enormous
bundles of twigs and desert grass roots that are
carried in for fuel ; lordly turbaned Moslem elders
looking very important in black flowing robes ; red-
fezzed Jews in misfit European clothing ; handsome
Persians in high white lambs-wool caps and long
silken coats of many colours; slaves-slave women
and slave men from East Africa, black as ebony
and with shifty eyes full of inquiry and resent-
ment; and Christians-Christian peoples from the
north and Christians of ancient Chaldean stock who
are Arabian so far as costume is concerned, but who
are unlike their Ishmaelitish brethren in that they
253


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
are as white as Germans, many of them, and have
eyes as blue.
We came at last to the old North Gate where the
New Street ends. The North Gate is a ragged
remnant of the ancient city and has great heavy,
nail-studded doors, swung back. On either side
stands a British sentry, and they saluted us as we
passed by clicking their heels together and smartly
tapping the butts of the guns at the shoulders.
Out beyond the North Gate we came into a vast
expanse of nothing, in the yellow, sandy midst of
which stands the tremendous Turkish cavalry
barracks which is now Indian Stationary Hospital
No. 61, with a capacity of more than thirteen
hundred beds.
It was our intention to drive round the city on
the outer embankment of the dry moat which
skirts what was once the Wall, and this we pro-
ceeded very bumpily and uncomfortably to do.
Baghdad had a wali once upon a time who con-
ceived for some reason the noble idea of destroying
the old Wall, filling in the moat, and turning it all
into one grand boulevard.
A Germanly inclined critic would be likely to say,
And were the Germans responsible for that? No,
probably not. Else it would not have been done
in such a delightfully human and haphazard fashion.
It was a laudable plan, perhaps, but it was carried
out with customary Turkish leisureliness and graft,
and in the result one sees much more of the pre-
liminary destruction than of the intended subse-
quent improvement.
The road we travelled was indescribably awful,
and the comment of the A.D.C.-jerked out rather
comically between bumps-was to the effect that
it was
no-kind–0-va road-over which to
ta-ka lady-j-oy-riding !
But I assured him it was quite all right because
the view was 'per-fectly su-p-erb!'
6
>
254



THE
Through the North gate. Victorious British entering
Baghdad, famous city of the Kaliphs.
4
-





ROUND ABOUT TOWN
Looking westward through the afternoon haze
toward the palm-fringed Tigris, the City of the
Kaliphs seemed to be almost all that one might
want it to be. Its domes and minarets are covered
with bright-coloured tiles or mosaics, and, viewed
at close range, they look rather tawdry. But from
out there in the desert one saw the grace of them,
and their colours seemed to blend into a radiant
glow.
We rolled, rocked, bumped, and teetered down
off the fearful moat road and came into a vast
Mohammedan burial-ground, in the midst of which
stands the mosque-like tomb of the Kaliph Omar.
Then we plunged up again and on to the one-time
East Gate of the city, through which a succession
of conquerors have marched in triumph into
Baghdad.
It seems a great pity that the Turks did not
realise General Maude's intention. He came up
to the city on a river boat, entered it with a mini-
mum of pomp and spectacle, and marched his
troops by the shortest and easiest route on to the
northward in pursuit of the retreating enemy.
If
the Turks had known he would do this, the inter-
resting ancient gate of the conquerors might have
been spared. There is a tradition that whoever
marches through this gate victorious in arms estab-
lishes a lasting rule in Mesopotamia, so before they
left the Turks added considerably to its destruc-
tion and filled in the remaining fragment of its
beautiful arch with a solid block of masonry. They
probably thought General Maude knew about
this tradition and expected him to take advantage
of it, and they were taking no chances on the
establishment of permanent British rule.
A short distance outside the South Gate, at the
edge of a desert that stretches
away
in utter empti-
ness to the eastern horizon, we came upon two very
small, very snug, very curious foreign cemeteries.
They lie close together, but they are definitely
255






The British Guns captured by the Turks at Ctesiphon and Kut. Found here in the Citadel
when General Maude took Baghdad.


ROUND ABOUT TOWN
Baghdad. They are just a small company of
humble little nuns, but they are French, and who
can tell what they must have suffered during the
thirty-two months of Turkish and German domi-
nation !
When the British learned where the Kut prisoners
were buried a number of them wanted to have
the bodies taken up and reburied with all the
honours of war in the new military cemetery out-
side the North Gate. But General Maude said No.
He was strongly opposed to any such course and
positively refused to sanction it.
Poor fellows,' he said, “ let them lie where they
It is their own spot, and nothing we could
possibly do would add anything to the honour that
is already theirs. Some day we will make a little
park of their burial-ground, and give them a
monument-all their own. That would be better,
much better than to disturb them now.'
And at once everybody agreed with him.
are.
We had driven all round the city and came at
last to the south entrance, which leads into the
wide, but altogether hideous, New Street. This
was the entrance through which a small detach-
ment of the conquering British army marched on
the 11th of March 1917.
We passed our own house, which stood not far
from where the vast reaches of the desert leave off
and the town begins, and went on again through
the maze of things, to the mosque of Abdul Gilahin
Quadhir.
We went to the mosque of Abdul Gilahin Quadhir
for no other purpose, I thought, but to convince
ourselves of the uselessness of doing so, though I
did catch tantalising glimpses of a great inner
court, and of graceful fountains round which many
of the faithful were engaged in devout ablutions.
No 'infidel'-it does seem strange to be classed
as an infidel-is allowed to enter a mosque in
R
257


CHAPTER XXII
WHENCE HARUN-AL-RASHID STROLLED
THERE is not much in Baghdad to remind one of
the grandeur and the greatness of its past, but
when I walked lingeringly under the lofty arched
gateway of the Citadel one morning I quite felt
that I was stepping out of the grinding and gruel-
ling Now into the restfulness of the finished ages.
But the first thing I saw was a recently captured
Krupp gun standing out on Harun-al-Rashid's
parade-ground; so I came straight back to
Now.
There is an old bronze cannon just outside the
portal that has been there for no telling how many
generations, and though it would be a wonderful
prize to set up on a British greensward somewhere,
it is perfectly safe where it is because to take it
away would be to rob the women and children.
I don't know how or when it acquired its wizard's
power, but it possesses such power, and no man
child is born within reach of it who is not brought
by his mother and held for a moment in front of its
muzzle while she mutters the incantation which,
by the gun's magic virtue, puts upon him a spell
of human excellence.
I was comparing this delicately decorated in-
strument of the polite warfare of a better age with
the shining, black, business-like and murderous-
looking Krupp when the commandant came hurry-
ing out of a cavern of early-world wickedness to
welcome me.
It must have been a cavern of wickedness. It is
impossible to imagine its walls echoing anything
259


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
but the moans of the tortured and the sibilant
whispers of sin.
The commandant took me at once to see what
had been detaining him. We walked through a
low door in a massive ruined wall, went down some
crumbling steps, and came into a long, perfectly
preserved, grey baked-brick corridor that could
not have been more than five feet wide and was
certainly not less than forty feet high. And it was
wonderfully vaulted overhead. It was a passage-
way of some sort in the ancient palace of the
Kaliphs.
Along one side of it there were numerous open-
ings in a wall about four feet thick which led into
the deepest dungeons that imagination could pic-
ture. And it was in the dungeons that the com-
mandant was interested.
In them the Turks had stored a tremendous
quantity of lead in long round bars that were ricked
in even rows running away into the depths of the
gloom farther than one's eyes could penetrate.
That they should have attempted to destroy
such indestructible material is rather amusing ;
but they did, and in doing so they at least gave
the British some extra and arduous labour. Most
of it escaped and was being moved out and stacked
in a courtyard to await the process which would
convert it into bars bearing the stamp of the
British supply department. But in some of the
dungeons the fires the Turks started continued to
burn until the metal was melted down into solid
And now these masses were being attacked
with picks and drills and the lead was coming out
in great, ragged, shining chunks. I thought it was
the most interesting bit of mining I had ever seen.
Outside, in the lee of a wall that was built about
the year 800, a number of Britishers were feeding
rubbish and desert grass roots into a long, im-
provised brick furnace, over which were suspended
à half-dozen common-looking kettles filled with
masses.
260


WHENCE HARUN-AL-RASHID STROLLED
molten lead that bubbled and boiled, while a num-
ber of other men were engaged in pouring the
metal into moulds strung in rows along the ancient
flagstones.
The Citadel is little else but a vast walled en-
closure now, but it once contained a number of
marvellous buildings, as the ruins of the palace of
the Kaliphs marvellously prove. And the walls
themselves are wonderful. They are about forty
feet across, and consist within of great chambers
that stretch away city blocks in length, their
vaulted ceilings being upheld by mammoth pillared
arches of brick.
These magnificently built walls surround three
sides of the stronghold, and along the fourth flows
the broad, slow-moving Tigris, held within bounds
by a high embankment of time-pitted masonry
which, continuing upward in a splendid sweeping
curve, forms what was once the outer wall of the
palace, and suggests scaling-ladders and all the
Old-World paraphernalia of war.
In the inner wall chambers the Turks stored
modern munitions, and there was a fairly satis-
factory haul of shells of various calibre to go with
captured guns.
But the most precious prizes the British got with
Baghdad were the guns that were taken from
General Townshend at Ctesiphon and Kut. The
Turks did a few things to them, and left them
behind in the Citadel. They turned out to be rub-
bish more or less, but they meant more to the
Englishmen than all the other loot put together.
One of them was sent home to the King.
Then there was a great arsenal filled with small-
arms and small-arms ammunition, and behind this,
in what seems to have been the area of destruction,
and where the British guns were found, was a stack
of about forty thousand rifle-barrels.
The rifles had been fed into a bonfire, and all the
wood on them had been burned away, but the
261


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
barrels, lying in a huge haphazard heap against a
high wall, were at least interesting. They looked
to me like a mountainous pile of fire-blackened and
altogether useless giant reeds. A number of Arab
coolies were engaged in the task of sorting them
out as to sizes and styles, while inside many others
were deftly sorting ammunition and putting things
to rights generally.
The Turks really attempted a wholesale destruc-
tion before they left, but either they were in
too much of a hurry or the construction of the
old buildings is such as to defy even high explo-
sives. They planted dynamite in the pillars of the
wall chambers of the Citadel, but the only damage
observable consists of a few cracks and jagged holes.
Whether or not the dynamite traps that were
found in a number of buildings here and there
throughout the city were purposely left is not
known. It is charitably supposed that they were
all charges that had failed to explode. But they
greatly endangered the lives of hundreds of British
workmen, and it is merely providential that no
serious accidents have occurred.
When they were hastily remodelling and equip-
ping a certain industrial school building for use as
an automobile repair shop they came upon dyna-
mite planted in the flagstones of the floor-enough
to blow up the whole neighbourhood. This was
the first discovery, and you may be sure that there-
after everybody worked warily in explorations with
pick and shovel.
I was not sure I wanted to visit the prison. Its
sinister walls, seen across the wide parade ground,
were enough to make me think to myself, 'Oh,
well, prisons are prisons.'
But the commandant seemed to be rather keen
about it. And besides, he had given nearly two-
thirds of the prisoners a half-day off from work on
a new road up the river in order that I might see
262


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
belongings did not exist. In fact, there was no
fixed system of assessment. A Turkish collector
paid into the coffers of the state the amount decided
upon as his district's quota; he collected as he
could from the taxpayers, and kept the margin of
personal gain sufficiently wide to make his job
attractive.
The British changed all that. They instituted
a system of equitable assessment on established
British lines, and the taxpayer now gets a notice to
betake himself to a certain place and pay a fixed
sum within a fixed period. Most persons are satis-
fied to accept this innovation because they see in
it a positive benefit. Moreover, they see that all
moneys collected, and vast sums besides, are being
spent on public improvements. They have been
able to get along always without good roads, clean
streets, decent sanitary arrangements, and all other
modern necessities, but, once these are provided,
they begin to appreciate the value of them.
But these respectable-looking old men in dur-
ance vile were among the few who liked the old
way better, and who refused to conform to the new
order of things. Their sentences were indeter-
minate in that they would jolly well have to stay
right where they were until they made up their
stubborn minds to come across' and accept
the responsibilities along with the privileges of
citizenship. The warden laughed, and said they
spent hours sitting around mumbling and grum-
bling about it and going over long columns of
figures.
We went on round the court, into the immaculate
kitchens and into workrooms of various kinds-
tailor shops and carpenter sheds—and at every
door the warden spoke the guttural, harsh-sounding
words that brought the prisoners upstanding with
palms out. I understood the wisdom of this pre-
caution when a man in the kitchen a terrible-
looking, black-browed brigand with bad-conduct
264 :


CHAPTER XXIII
ACROSS AN AMAZING RIVER
THE senior A.D.C. and I started out one morning
to explore the opposite bank. We sent our auto-
mobile across early because the single pontoon
bridge which spans the river opens at certain hours
to let the boat traffic through, and at other times
is likely to be closed to ordinary traffic for the
benefit of long military convoys. And to break a
military convoy for personal reasons is Offence
Number One in a war zone.
We crossed at our leisure in the Army Com-
mander's launch, and, being privileged persons,
went cruising on the way through the maze of
marvellous things afloat which make of the Baghdad
river-front a scene of inexhaustible fascination.
First there is the pontoon bridge. Then there
are the goufas. A boat bridge of some description
has spanned the Tigris at Baghdad for ages, it being
impossible, it seems to build an ordinary bridge
across a river that has an annual rise of more than
twenty feet, and that cuts up all kinds of didoes ;
but the one now in service is a 1917 British model,
and is not too thrillingly interesting after one has
seen some others—less substantial, perhaps, but far
more historic-farther down, where crossing and re-
crossing the river under the withering fire of a deter-
mined enemy was so much a part of the British
experience when Maude went north.'
The goufas are wonderful! I suppose I ought to
be reminded by them of something besides the
three wise men of Gotham who went to sea in a
tub.' But nobody else who has written about them
267


ACROSS AN AMAZING RIVER
Sea, the chronicler of the incident wrote that 'fear-
ing lest we should have fallen upon rocks, they
cast four anchors out of the stern and wished for
the day.'
The I.G.C. liked to refer to this. And he had
read somewhere that, because anchoring by the
stern is against all nautical procedure, this passage
engaged the earnest attention of the wise men who
made the King James version of the Bible, and
that there was much discussion about it.
The wording of it was regarded as either a mis-
take in the original translation or a slip of the pen
on the part of the writer. But the subject, having
been referred in all solemnity to certain savants
of the East, was immediately dropped when it was
learned that even then there were many ships
plying up and down the Ægean coast and on the
inland waters of the ancient and unchanging world
behind it that were identical as to bow and stern
and could anchor either way.
For an exciting experience I can recommend a
spin in a glisseur through a waterway crowded with
this kind of slow-moving, cumbersome traffic. The
glisseur-wonderfully descriptive French word !-
and the goufa-also descriptive if you get a suffi-
cient oof in it !-are the antitheses of things afloat,
the glisseur being a flat-bottomed surface-skimmer
with a powerful engine which drives a great wind
wheel at the stern. The impertinent, dangerous
thing makes from thirty to forty-five miles an hour
and more noise than anything else that moves.
I went in a glisseur one day to visit the veterinary
hospital about five miles down the river, and when
I pulled up at the bank at the end of about ten
breathless minutes I found the commandant wait-
ing for me. He said that he was sitting in his
office and had heard me start. And that is how
fast and how noisy a glisseur is.
Besides the glisseurs and goufas, mahaylas and
dhows innumerable, there are the monitors and
269


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
tiny ' fly-boats'crouching like terriers of war
against either bank.
All these carry anti-aircraft guns, and when
• Fritz comes over on a bombing-party--all Turkish
flying men are German-they get busy and make
a noise out of all proportion to their size. They
have never hurt any Fritzes in the air that any-
body knows about, but they bark well.
The A.D.C. and I climbed ashore up the steep
clay bank opposite G.H.Q. and found our motor
car waiting for us, our soldier chauffeur having just
begun to worry himself with the thought that he
had probably misunderstood his orders and gone
to the wrong landing.
But he had not. I selected that landing myself.
It was near the terminal station of the Berlin-to-
Baghdad Railroad, and I was interested in that.
This unprecedentedly historic railroad, having
been completed by the Germans between Samarra
and Baghdad, is now the main line of communica-
tion with the principal British front in Mesopo-
tamia, and its business end is there at the Baghdad
terminal, where acres of sidings and sheds, long
lines of freight-cars, many shunting engines, and
hundreds of labourers coming and going in the
methodical process of handling supplies, combine
to form a picture which could hardly be expected
to please any German. .
And from the terminal of the Berlin-to-Baghdad
Railroad to the tomb of Zobeide, favourite wife
of Harun-al-Rashid !
One's thoughts travel a rapid zigzag course from
age to age in this wonderful land! Though in con-
nection with the little that is left of old Baghdad it
is very difficult to separate fact from the fascinat-
ing fictions that abide in such delightfully hazy
outlines in one's memory.
Zobeide, however, was real enough, and one is
270





CHAPTER XXIV
RIGHTEOUS MEN AND SONS OF INIQUITY
THE junior A.D.C. and I went one afternoon for a
browse in the bazaars. I was interested in carpets.
I wanted to find a really-truly old historic rug of a
vintage that would be mellowed and hallowed by
time. Not for myself, of course, but for a friend
who can afford such things and who had asked me
to find for him in Baghdad—if I ever got to Baghdad
a treasure of a rug to add to his already priceless
collection.
We'd better go round and see Colonel Dickson,'
said the A.D.C. He knows all about where every-
thing is.
So we made our way through the winding maze
of narrow passages to where our car was waiting
at the head of New Street, and pretty soon, on a
byway that sloped down to the river-bank, we
were stopping before the entrance to a long under-
ground corridor dark as midnight.
But there was a perfectly good Britisher in khaki
waiting with a lantern to conduct us through the
gloom, and I wouldn't hesitate to go anywhere
with one such leading the way. And the corridor
was not underground, after all. It was only under
the buildings. And it led at last up into a lovely
garden-a really lovely garden, with arbours and
vines and fresh-looking palm-trees, and flaming
hibiscus against mellow brick walls. Along two
sides of the garden was a weird kind of house,
picturesquely tumble-down and with a wide, railed
balcony running all round it and on out to the river
wall.
S
273


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
And that was where Colonel Dickson lived,
Colonel Dickson being Director of Local Resources
-which aren't! Or which weren't, at least. He
really should be called Discoverer and Developer
of Local Resources—the D.D.L.R.
Colonel Dickson is a South-African-a man of
large and important affairs—and he happened to
be in London when the war began. As he tells it
himself, he divested himself with a single gesture
of all incumbrances, then ran hot-foot to the War
Office, and at the heads of the powers that were
hurled an offer of his utmost services. To keep
him quiet they permitted him for the first year or
so to help along the job of getting mules and other
burdensome but necessary beasts of burden into
France. Then they shanghaied him on board a.
troopship and landed him in Mesopot, where they
put him in charge of the job of rounding up the
plentiful lack of local products.
The lack was quite complete, in fact; but never
mind-men from South Africa are able to show the
world how to do almost anything. Colonel Dick-
son was convinced that the British army was settled
in Mesopotamia for a prolonged occupation; he
had no illusions whatever with regard to the dura-
tion of the war; and nobody could tell him that
the country could not be made to support itself.
He went at once into rather extensive schemes
of irrigation, and by way of samples of the possi-
bilities he soon had a dairy farm in operation and
a few broad acres of one-time desert bright with
the luscious green of waving alfalfa.
He organised the native producers and instituted
the process of inducing them to work for a little
more than their daily bread. He persuaded them
to put into grain every acre that would produce
grain, and encouraged them with vivid prophecies
of a vast prosperity.
And when I met him he was
about to start a great poultry farm at Hilleh, hard
by Babylon, where the chickens would be under
274


RIGHTEOUS MEN AND SONS OF INIQUITY
The jewel of honesty and intelligence' com-
municated the information that we were there to
see the three-hundred-pound carpet, and I rather
expected to be bowed to very low and to have it
trotted right out for me.
Not at all. One would have thought
they had
customers in looking for three-hundred-pound car-
pets every few minutes, and they made a to-do as
though they had mislaid it or didn't know which
one I meant, or something. One rug after another
was brought out and spread on the slowly accumu-
lating pile on the floor, and time after time I
asked, “How much ? ' only to get in reply the most
absurd attempts at unintelligent hold-up that I
had ever encountered, and I am rather familiar
with Oriental contempt for Occidental judgment.
'I could buy any rug we've seen from any New
York dealer for a quarter less,' I said, “and the
New York dealer would have to be counting in
duty and transportation charges.'
Yes,' said the A.D.C., ' but think of the romance
of buying it in Baghdad, and at a time like
this! That's what these fellows take into con-
sideration. They know our sentimentalities better
than we know them ourselves.'
At last the three-hundred-pounder was brought
out. Fifteen hundred dollars! Four thousand
five hundred rupees
I was ready to be thrilled-expected to be up-
lifted by the magic spell of divine art; tempted by
the beauty of the thing almost beyond my power
to remember that fifteen hundred dollars is a good
deal of another person's money to spend.
I was so safe that it is absurd to write about it.
If I owned the
rug
I should put
it
away some-
where in a safe-deposit vault where I could boast
about it without ever having to look at it. I
believe absolutely that the princess pawned it, but
I think she did it because she was shut up in a
harem with it and just couldn't stand it another
!
277


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
food, the supplies that came on the Army Com-
mander's table being subjected to special and most
careful supervision.
He might have told the doctors that he was too
well taken care of to require a cholera inoculation.
280


CHAPTER XXV
AN UNIQUE ENTERTAINMENT
my word.
Ar dinner one evening we were discussing, as usual,
my programme for the next day, and General
Maude said to me :
How would you like to see Hamlet played in
Arabic by Children of Israel who are direct de-
scendants of the left-overs from the Babylonian
captivity?'
I thought it was some kind of complicated jest,
and answered guardedly, saying something about
the novelty of such a performance.
' Novel it may be,' said he, but after about the
first round it's sure to be a beastly bore. In a
weak moment I promised to be present, however, so
I suppose I shall have to go. I always try to keep
It 's an entertainment being given by a
Jewish school to-morrow night, and they've been
getting ready for it for weeks. Amateurs ! And
Hamlet, of all things ! I'd like to have you go,
but not unless you think it would amuse you.'
I assured him that however slightly I might be
amused I was bound to be tremendously inter-
ested, and that I should like very much to go.
Then readily enough I fell in with a plot to get
away at the end of the first act in spite of any-
thing that might be done to detain us.
Little we
knew
We left the house at half-past eight. And it was
very cold. Not being an A.D.C., and having
nothing to fear from the big man, I protested
against his going out without an overcoat, but he
only laughed and refused to send back for one.
.
281


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
the balconies and the surrounding windows, was
startingly colourful. The middle of the court was
crowded with women in bright silk robes and abahs,
and our attention was called to the fact that they
were unveiled. That was extraordinary. It was
the first time high-class Baghdadi women had ever
been known to appear in a public place with un-
covered faces, and it was a subtle acknowledgment
of the trustworthiness of the British. That was
what it was intended to be.
Under British rule,' said one man, our women
need never be veiled.”
The men in the audience-Jews, Persians, Arabs,
Kurds, Syrians, Chaldeans, and representatives of
a dozen Eastern races, were all in their finest and
most elaborate garments, and there was a variety in
head-dress-tarboush, kuffiyeh, turban, and Persian-
lamb cap--positively bewildering.
When General Maude entered, this amazing
throng rose to its feet and cheered him loudly and
long, and I am sure that any one observing him
at the moment would have seen a look of pained
astonishment cross his face. They had erected a
little platform for him in the centre of the first
row of seats directly in front of the stage. This
was covered with a beautiful Persian carpet, and
the chair he had to occupy was draped with stiff
brocade. A lower and less pretentious chair had
been placed beside him for my benefit, and I sank
into it with a sense of helpless inability to escape
from a situation wherein I felt I was conspicuously
superfluous,
A good half-hour was wasted in preliminary
courtesies. One person after another came up and
greeted the General, and there were numerous in-
troductions. The chief rabbi of the city, a large,
black-bearded man in long silken robes and a
white-and-gold turban, took a seat below the other
end of the little platform and assisted in the cere-
monies, while the headmaster, a typical Baghdadi
284


AN UNIQUE ENTERTAINMENT
Jew with a French education and old-fashioned
French manners, hovered about and displayed his
pleasure in the occasion
by much suave gesticula-
tion and many smiles. Then they brought a small
table and placed it before the Army Commander
and me, on which were two cups, a pot of coffee, a
bowl of sugar, and a jug of milk.
Before the recollection of that one must pause to
speculate and wonder. Yet one may speculate and
wonder for all time. What can anyone ever
possibly know? As I write, General Maude lies
dead in a desert grave outside the old North Gate,
and the night he died they were saying boldly and
insistently in the bazaars that he was murdered !
He drank the coffee, and he poured into it a large
quantity of the cold raw milk. I drank the coffee,
too, but without milk.
When we looked at our programmes we dis-
covered that Hamlet was to be the eleventh number,
and that among the ten other numbers-children's
dances and recitations, odes, choruses and solos-
was a French comedy in three acts. All in one
evening ? Impossible ! But, yes !
The first number was an address to General
Maude delivered in French by a little Jewish girl
who wore a white muslin frock, and had a wreath
of pink paper roses round her hair.
She read the address from a piece of foolscap
paper, which shook in her nervous little hand until
one could hear it rattle. It was a kind of eulogy
of the Big Chief and of Britons in general, and was
full of references to Baghdad's great good fortune
in having come at last under honest and honourable
government. Perfectly sincere, too!
The words ‘Mon Général' occurred with great
frequency, and every time the child pronounced
them she thrust one foot forward and made a
sweeping gesture with her left arm.
It was very
painful, but delightful in that it was so friendly,
and so kindly meant. At the end of practically
285


CHAPTER XXVI
A DAY'S END
COLONEL DICKSON was going down to Hilleh with
an armoured and guarded convoy to bring back
some grain and to attend to some details with re-
gard to his poultry farm. Hilleh is within a few
miles of Babylon, and he saw no reason why I
should not be permitted to accompany him. A
sufficient party would take me on over to Babylon,
and it would be a valuable experience for all
of us.
6
* No reason at all why you shouldn't go!’ he
said. We'll be strong enough to meet any band
of Arabs that could possibly get together. You
ask the Army Commander if you may go.'
Not I!' I replied. 'He told me I was not to
go to Babylon, and he told me why, and so far as I
am concerned that's the end of it. I never could
pluck up courage enough to ask him again.'
Well, you leave it to me,' said he.
And I was quite willing to do so. General Maude
was wonderfully good-natured; he had a specially
warm spot in his heart for the energetic Colonel,
and the Colonel was most persuasive. So I began
at once to regard a trip to Babylon as being among
the almost inevitable events of the immediate
future.
6
Colonel Dickson was giving a dinner-party that
night which was to be a most interesting event.
The Army Commander seldom dined anywhere
except in his own house, but he had accepted the
Colonel's invitation, and it was rumoured that
288





A DAY'S END
great preparations were going forward in the
Colonel's mess. I imagine that nobody who was
present at that dinner will ever forget it.
It was a most unusual occurrence for General
Maude to be late for luncheon. He was late that
day. We had waited about fifteen minutes, when
an orderly came in to say that we were to go ahead
without him. It cast a gloom upon us, though I
don't know why. I don't know why, unless it was
that we all enjoyed the luncheon-hour with him
and disliked having it broken into. There was
always very interesting talk.
About fifteen minutes later he came in by the
terrace entrance. He looked tired and drawn, but
I imagine nobody ever thought seriously of illness
in connection with him. He was so splendidly
stalwart. Even then he was in excellent spirits,
as he usually was, but he rather startled us with an
announcement that he was not going to have any
lunch.
About once a month,' he said, I find it does
me good to go without food in the middle of the
day.'
Then he leaned on the back of his chair and made
some characteristically humorous inquiries about
what I was doing and how I was getting on. I had
taken a glisseur that morning and had gone down-
river to see a large veterinary hospital in a palm-
garden. I was full of enthusiasm about it, but I
felt, curiously, that something was wrong, so I had
little to say. He excused himself presently, and
went down along the terrace to his room. And I
never saw him again. .
As soon as he had gone I remarked that he looked
very ill, but was assured that he was merely tired.
His military secretary, Colonel Williams, did say
that he would soon be done for ' if he didn't give
himself a short leave. He had not had a day's
leave since he took command of the army.
T
289


A DAY'S END
I went to the dinner with the junior A.D.C.,
and we had not been seated at table more than
ten minutes when an orderly came in with a mes-
sage for Colonel Willcox, who got up and left
immediately.
It was a splendid company of men and a most
interesting party. The Red Cross band, stationed
at the far end of the balcony, played a rather
extraordinary programme which the Colonel had
had printed. For the times and the place there
was an elaborate menu, and a young artist member
of the mess had drawn cartoons on the menu-cards,
each one of which struck very cleverly at some
characteristic of the guest for whom it was in-
tended. It was a jolly party, and there was con-
siderable comment about the superior advantages
to be enjoyed by a Director of Local Resources.
He had exhausted the possibilities of local re-
sources to make the dinner a success. And he had
done it principally for the Army Commander. But
the Army Commander was not there.
The A.D.C. and I drove up in front of our own
house about eleven o'clock. We were quite happily
discussing the party-a most unusual event in
Baghdad, remember—and were laughing about
things that had been said and done.
Colonel Williams came hurrying down the path
from the doorway to meet us, and there was a
sudden hush. The Army Commander, he said,
was very ill.
The younger A.D.C.--and very young-was closer
to his chief than any one else, loving him devotedly.
What is it?' he asked
presently.
Cholera-in its most virulent form!' said the
Colonel.
6
291


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
Army Commander's house, drooped its folds on a
level with the Union Jack. And I felt then, with
a thrill of pride, that the two stood prophetically
sentinel over the high destinies of humanity which
he who lay beneath them could no longer help to
direct. Together to-day, I thought, they pay
honour to the honoured dead. Throughout the
world hereafter together they will carry on-
equally clean and lofty in purpose and principle ;
each resplendent with unconquerable power !
It was about midday that ‘Fritz came across to
pay his respects.' There had been so many guns
throughout the morning that I did not instantly
recognise the difference, but it took me only a
moment to realise that such a quick succession of
shots, and from every direction at once, could
never be intended as a salute for the dead. I was
sitting in my cabin on the S-1, and rushed out on
deck just in time to see him directly over G.H.Q.,
and flying fairly low.
He passed over our helpless old boat, and we had
a breathless moment wondering if he would drop
something on us. All the monitors and little
'fly-boats' down along the banks were roaring at
him, but he got across all right, and we watched
him as long as he was in sight. He was flying west-
ward toward the Euphrates front, with every gun
in the vicinity blazing away at him, and with a
sufficient accuracy of range at least to ring him
about with feathery white smoke puffs of exploding
shells.
We wondered then if this untimely visit had any
special significance. Did the enemy know that the
Army Commander was dead? The news had been
flashed to the world, and there was little reason to
hope that the German operators had not picked it
up. We only hoped that our own operators had
not mentioned the name of the terrible disease that
killed him. If the Turks and Germans knew he
294


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
I make this explanation, which I believe to be
absolutely correct, because I have been asked so
often, Why—why did he do it?
Why? Because he was a gentleman and, as a
gentleman naturally would on such an occasion, he
had relaxed for the moment a necessarily rigid
vigilance.
I should like to say, too, that to me it seems
very strange that I should be writing all this. It
was by the merest chance that I was there—his
guest when he died-and through it all I felt, as I
feel now, curiously like an intruder upon the scene
of a great historic event with which, if there be an
eternal fitness of things, I could have no possible
connection.
He was buried with spectacular simplicity.
A deep silence lay upon the town. The street
through which his body was carried to the North
Gate was banked on either side to the very roofs
with a dark-robed multitude of men and women,
who seemed not to move at all and who spoke in
whispers.
Outside the walls, in the midst of illimitable
reaches of blank desolation, they have made a new
cemetery for British dead, and from the North
Gate a roadway is flung out to it in a wide curve
round an area of pitted and city-disturbed desert.
This roadway was lined with Indian troops,
standing at ease, when I passed through with the
American consul. We went on to the bleak, un-
believable cemetery, in which there are always rows
upon rows of ready and waiting graves, and stood
with the representatives of all the divisions of the
army and all the services of war, beside the grave
that had been prepared for the Army Commander.
And from there we watched the slow approach
of the sad burden, draped in the folds of the Union
Jack and carried aloft from the North Gate on the
shoulders of men.
296


CHAPTER XXVIII
AND THEN
I CANNOT believe that any one took up again the
burden of the day's work at that day's end
without a sense of added burden. But, after all,
it was just that one more of England's men had
died. England's men would carry on.
Lieut.-General Sir William Marshall, then corps
commander on the eastern front, was appointed to
succeed General Maude in full command of the
Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force, and, because
of my own tremendous interest in all that has been
done and is being done in Mesopotamia, because I
had come to realise the importance of the Mesopo-
tamian zone in the great scheme of world-defence,
I was glad to be able to associate General Marshall
in my own mind with General Maude's expressed
opinion of him.
I was going out one day to have luncheon with
him at his field headquarters on the eastern front,
and to see what could be shown to me in his sphere
of operations-forty miles or more across the desert
to the northeastward from Baghdad. The evening
before, General Maude was discussing with me at
dinner, as he always did, the details of the plans
that had been made for me.
* You are going to-morrow,' he said, 'to visit a
far better soldier than I am.'
It was a startling remark, but if I had had any
impulse to make a banal response his perfect seri-
ousness would have checked it.
* That is generous of you,' I replied.
Generous ? Not at all! Merely intelligent.
6
298


AND THEN
>
He's a splendid officer. Wish I were half as
capable. But this being an office man—! I envy
him his service in the field. A man likes to be
with the troops, you know. When I was a division
commander I had my best days. Best I ever had
or ever will have. But don't you forget what I tell
you about General Marshall. He's a great soldier.
General Marshall assumed temporary command
while the big fight was being made for General
Maude's life. Then came the day when the drums
were muffled and the guns were made to speak
their measured, heart-chilling tribute to the dead,
but-it was as though the armies lost never a step.
General Marshall had taken up the burden.
The Army Commander's last order was :
Carry on!'
An order to be obeyed !
After a few days I started back down the river
Tigris - a long journey : back past the historic
landmarks; past the looming Arch of Ctesiphon;
past old Kut of thrilling memories and new Kut
of the bright lights and the never-ending toil;
past the ghastly waste of Sunnaiyat; past Amara
with its acres of hospitals ; past marching-posts at
the river's edge; through the vast silence of the
great desert where the tents of Bedouin encamp-
ments show black against the burning lights of
sunset ; past the unending procession of boats car-
rying supplies up-river to the far-away armies ; ;
round the wonderful Devil's Elbow in the amazing
Narrows; past Ezra's tomb with its blue dome
lifted under a bending, caressing palm-tree; past
the un-Eden-like Garden of Eden; and so once
more into the broad Shatt-el-Arab and back again
at the house on the Bund where live the officers of
the Lines of Communication.
Then a trip up the Euphrates to the British posi-
tion at Nasriyeħ, an expedition into the desert to
299


AND THEN
They are draped with tassel-bordered curtains
caught back with silken cords. She looks little
enough like a fighting-ship, but she mounts some
fine modern guns, nevertheless, and in connection
with recent events she has been exceedingly useful.
Everybody loves her.
And she did look gay and festive that morning.
Under an awning of the flags of the Allied nations,
which was stretched over the after deck, the
Admiral had spread many rugs and had set chairs
and couches in tête-à-tête and other nice arrange-
ments to make a place of reception and comfort for
his guests, while round a gun a hollow-square
luncheon table had been built and gaily decorated.
The Admiral's part in the programme was to be
the firing of a salute at the conclusion of the
ceremony.
The unwieldy old gunboat made a very difficult
way through the too numerous craft of all kinds
lying at anchor or moving swiftly about in the
river at Basra ; then slowly enough we slipped down
the twenty miles of wide channel, past the date-
plantations, grey and drooping with an accumu-
lated burden of dust; past a dozen and one narrow,
enticing creeks where one knew the orioles and
kingfishers were playing in the tangled vines ; past
the ships the Turks sank to no purpose in the
stream; and past an up-river procession of cargo-
carriers, troopships, and hospital ships from over-
As the morning wore on the clouds gathered
in banks along the south-west horizon, and the chill
in the air began to give way before the warming-up
processes of the sun.
' It isn't going to rain, after all,' said the General.
He was to make the great speech in the King's
name, and was marching up and down the deck,
practising it, much, I would say, after the manner
of a big, overgrown schoolboy.
““ In the name of His Majesty, the King-
Emperor !” Oh, hang it all! In recognition of
seas.
303



+
The grave of General Maude.


AND THEN
one of the Sheikh's old cannon would have served
to convince the most self-controlled that he needed
either a rest cure or a tonic.
There are eleven fairly sizable guns bristling
round the palace, but only two of them are capable
of making a noise, and it was painfully evident that
the Arabs who had been entrusted with the im-
portant duty of responding to the British salute
had relied on luck with a too complete and un-
inquiring confidence. It took them fifteen minutes
to fire twelve guns, the intervals being anything
from three seconds to five full minutes. One lost
count, but while it was going on there was nothing
to do but sit perfectly quiet-or try to.
Then the colourful refreshments were passed
around, along with coffee served in exquisite cups
set in holders of gold filigree. One of the women
from Abadan said she knew a Persian princess who
always served coffee in cups like that, and expected
her guests to take them away as souvenirs.
I
hardly think the Sheikh lost any of his, but if I
had known that Persian princess I should have
wanted to drink coffee at her expense at least
twelve times.
I begged a swift launch from the General—the
one in which the D.P.C. had made the trip down
from Basra—and decided to linger behind my party,
see some more of the Sheikh and his fascinating
environment, then go on down to Muhammerah
town and run back up-river in the late afternoon.
The D.P.C. would go back on the Lawrence.
This little supplementary programme for myself
appealed to my sense of the fitness of things,
whereas sitting down to luncheon with my own
kind on a gunboat's deck did not appeal to me in
the least.
But it is necessary that I should stop now.
Otherwise I should go on and tell about the inner
309


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
mysteries of the palace; about the harem ; about
some amazing barbaric decorations in inner courts,
and some more wonderful carpets; about under-
ground hot-weather rooms furnished for the utmost
in luxurious, somnolent ease; and about some in-
teresting and sporting young sons of the Sheikh-
all of which and whom he showed me himself while
he rather nervously fingered the ribbon and the gold
chain which hung about his neck.
But what I really want to tell is about getting
back up-river. Time sped so swiftly that I didn't
realise its passing, and when I suddenly glanced
at my watch I found it was half-past five. By that
time I was with the British consul and his wife in
the depths of the bazaar of old Muhammerah, glee-
fully bargaining with a good-natured Persian over a
beautifully wrought silver-sheathed dagger which I
longed to possess.
And I am sure that glancing at my watch cost
me at least five dollars. In another two minutes
he would have split the difference with me. But I
was so startled that I said, “Oh, here !' Then he
got the money and I got the dagger.
There I was with nothing but a shell of a launch
-as it seemed to me—to travel in, and Basra more
than thirty miles away! And it would be dark in
another half-hour !
My two khaki-clad Britishers at the engine and
the wheel were not particularly pleased with me.
I could see that. And then I made the mistake of
saying, as I climbed aboard :
I'm afraid I'm a little late,' rather twirling the
' late. It was the kind of apology that would
make any normal man want to lay violent hands on
somebody or something, but my pilot looked down
upon me from his six feet or more of magnificent
muscularity and said :
'Well, iť 'u'd be all right if we had any lights !!
And I rather thought he twirled the lights.
Good Heavens! And we had those sunken
310


THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD
darkly, in fact, with our motor-horn constantly
sounding. And then it was that the rain descended
upon us.
It was not rain; it was a deluge.
Shelter ? No, not out on the broad bosom of the
Shatt-el-Arab in a little open launch. But nobody
minded that. The rains had begun. It was the
first drop that had fallen in Mesopotamia for more
than eight months. The thirsty land would drink
it up and begin to bubble and seethe, and the
British army would soon be mired to its knees.
But in the eyes of his people the prestige of Sir
Khazal Khan, Sheikh of Muhammerah, Knight
Commander and wearer of the Grand Cross of the
Most Eminent Order of the Indian Empire, would
be immeasurably enhanced.
The next afternoon I went back down the Shatt-
el-Arab on a troopship, leaving with keen regret
that amazing land wherein an invading army of
right-minded men has done and continues to do
such extraordinary things.
THE END
Printed in Great Britain by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty
at the Edinburgh University Press



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