Letters from Mesopotamia Part 4

At the water's edge, as it recedes, patches of millet had been and were being planted. The river is falling rapidly and navigation becomes more difficult every week.

Kurna is aesthetically disappointing. The junction of the rivers is unimpressive, and the place itself a mere quayside and row of mud houses among thin and measly palms. It is of course the traditional site of Eden.

Above Kurna the river is not only halved in width, as one would expect, but narrows rapidly. Most of the day it was only a hundred yards wide and by evening only 60; and of the sixty only a narrow channel is navigable and that has a deep strong current which makes the handling of the boat very difficult.

In the afternoon we pa.s.sed Ezra's Tomb, which has a beautiful dome of blue tiles, which in India one would date Seventeenth Century.

Otherwise it looked rather "kachcha" and out of repair, but it makes an extremely picturesque group, having two clumps of palms on either side of an otherwise open stretch of river.

Soon afterwards we came to a large Bedouin Village, or rather camp, running up a little creek and covering quite fifteen acres. They can't have been there long, as the whole area was under water two months ago. Their dwellings are made of reeds, a framework of stiff and pliant reeds and a covering of reed-matting; the whole being like the cover of a van stuck into the ground and one end closed; but smaller, about 5ft. 4ft. 7ft. There were about 100 of these and I should put the population at 700.

A whole crowd of boys and some men came out and ran along with us, and dived in for anything we threw overboard. They swam like ducks of course. All the boys and most of the men were quite naked, which is a thing you never see in India. Any boy over twelve there has a loin-cloth. There seemed to be very few men about: a lot of women came to the doors of their huts. They made no attempt to veil their faces, which even the beggar women in Basra did. Only one girl and one woman ran with the boat; the girl dived with the best; the woman was dressed and her function was to carry the spoils. Incidentally our men discovered a better use for their ration biscuits than attempting to eat them. They made excellent ducks and drakes on the water and the swimmers were quite keen on them. I must say they tasted rather musty besides being very hard, but I think the men chiefly objected to a very small brown beetle which was abundant in them.

When the sun got low we tied up to the bank for twenty minutes and a good many of the men had a bathe; but owing to the current we had to make them keep within a yard or two of the bank.

Next morning, Wednesday, a half-gale was blowing against us and progress was slower than ever. The river got wider again, nearly 200 yards in places, and the wind lashed it into waves. It was a great bore, because you couldn't put anything down for a second. Also three days confined to a minute deck-s.p.a.ce made me rather bilious.

In the afternoon the wind blew us ash.o.r.e when we were in sight of Amara, and it took nearly half an hour to get us off again. Finally, we arrived here about 5 p.m.

This is a town of about 10,000 inhabitants, on the left bank of the Tigris. On the river front is a quay about a mile long, and an equally long row of continental-looking houses. It almost reminds one of Dieppe at moments. The river is about 150 yards wide, and on the other side there are hardly any houses, just a narrow fringe of dates and some fields. All the inhabitants of the river-front have been turned out and it is occupied with offices, stores, hospitals and billets. We occupy a block of four houses, which have a common courtyard behind them, a great cloistered yard, which makes an admirable billet for the men.

We officers live in two of the houses, the third is Orderly Room, etc., and the fourth is used by some Native Regiment Officers. There is no furniture whatever, so it is like camping with a house for a tent. We sleep on the roof and live on the verandahs of the little inner courts. It is decidedly cooler than Basra, and last night I wanted a blanket before dawn for the first time since April (excluding the Hills, of course). In my room now (2.45 p.m.) it is 96 but there is plenty of breeze about.

It seems to be just a chance when the mail goes out: I hope to write to Papa later on in the week and give him the news of this place and the regiment. If I spell names of places without a capital letter it will be for an obvious reason. Also note that the place which is marked on the map Kut-al-Amara is always referred to here as Kut.

_P.S_.--In regard to what you say about the ducks, I'm told that teal are common in Turkey and snipe in Arabia, but not so common as mallard in England or pintail in India. The bitterns here boom just like guns.

ATT. 1/4 HANTS, I.E.F. "D,"

C/o INDIA OFFICE, S.W.

AMARAH, _September 4th_,1915.

To R.K.

Yours from Albemarle Street reached me just before we left Basra. It gave me the first news of Charles Lister's second wound. We get almost no news here. Potted _Reuter_ is circulated most days, but each unit may only keep it half an hour, so its two to one against one's seeing it. My only resource is the _Times_ which laboriously dogs my steps from England: but it has already been pinched en route four times, so I can't rely on seeing even that: therefore in the matter of casualties, please be as informative as you can, regardless of originality.

As I told you in my last letter that I was going to Nasiriyah, it won't surprise you to find I've got here instead. We reached Basra (it would be much nicer to spell it Ba.s.sorah, but I can't be bothered to) on the feast of St. Bartholomew, which the Military call 24/8/15.

Considering what places are like out here, B. is wonderfully attractive and picturesque. At least Ashar is, which is the port; Beroea: Corinth:: Ashar: Basra. To begin with it stands between six and eight feet above the river level, an almost unique eminence. Then lots of major and minor creeks branch out from the river and from the main streets. All round and in every unbuilt on s.p.a.ce are endless groves of date palms, with ma.s.ses of yellow dates. The creeks are embanked with brick and lined with popular cafe's where incredible numbers of Arabs squat and eat or drink huggas and hacs.h.i.+sh and the like. The creeks and river swarm with bh.e.l.lums and mahilas. A bh.e.l.lum is a cross between a gondola and a Canada canoe: and a mahila is a barge like the ones used by King Arthur, Elaine or the Lady of Shallott: and its course and destination are generally equally vague.

We stayed six days at B. mainly on a captured Turkish pilgrim s.h.i.+p. I suggest a Turkish pilgrimage as a suitable outlet for the ascetic tendencies of your more earnest spikelets. It was hot, but nothing fabulous. My faithful thermometer never got beyond 104 in my cabin. The disadvantage of any temperature over 100 indoors is that the fan makes you hotter instead of cooler. There are only two ways of dealing with this difficulty. One is to drink a.s.siduously and keep an evaporation bath automatically going: but on this s.h.i.+p the drinks used to give out about 4 p.m. and when it comes to neat Tigris-c.u.m-Euphrates, I prefer it applied externally. So I used to undress at intervals and sponge all over and then stand in front of the fan. While you're wet it's deliciously cool: as soon as you feel the draught getting warm, you dress again and carry on. This plan can't be done here as there are no fans. I suppose you realised that Austen Chamberlain was only indulging his irrepressible sense of humour when he announced in the H. of C. that in Mesopotamia "The health of troops has on the whole been good. Ice and fans are installed wherever possible," _i.e._ nowhere beyond Basra. The hot weather sickness casualties have been just over 30% of the total force: but as they were nearly all heat-stroke and malaria, it ought to be much better now. Already the nights are cool enough for a blanket to be needed just before dawn. Of course they run up the sick list by insane folly. When we moved to our Turkish s.h.i.+p there was every hour of the day or night to choose from to do it in, and plenty of covered barges to do it in. So they selected 10 a.m., put 150 men into an open barge, gave them no breakfast, and left them in the barge two hours to move them 600 yards, and an hour unloading baggage afterwards! Result, out of my forty-nine, three heat-strokes on the spot, and four more sick the next day.

We left Basra on the 30th. It took us two-and-a-half days to do the 130 miles up here, against a strong wind and current. The Regiment has moved here from Nasiriyah. This place is 130 miles North of Basra and 120 South of Kut-el-Amarah (always known as Kut). As to our movements, the only kind of information I can give you would be something like this. There are fifteen thousand blanks, according to trustworthy reports, at blank. We have blank brigades and our troops are blanking at blank which is two-thirds of the way from here to blank; and I think our intention is to blank with all our three blanks as soon as possible, but this blank is remaining on lines of communications here for the present. Not very interesting is it? So I won't reel off any more.

From the little sc.r.a.ps of news that have come through, it looks as if the Balkans were going to be the centre of excitement. If Bulgaria has agreed to let the Germans through as I suspect she has, I'd bet on both Greece and Roumania joining the Allies.

AMARAH.

_September 4th_, 1915.

TO HIS FATHER.

We get hardly any news up here, so please kindly continue your function of war correspondent whenever you have time, and especially mention any casualties which affect me.

One of the few bits of news which have reached us is a report of a speech of yours in which you mention that Milner's Committee recommended the Government to guarantee 45s. a year for four years, but the Government wouldn't. Reuter deduces from this that we have found a way of keeping the whip hand of submarines: but it looks to me much more like Free Trade s.h.i.+bboleths + the fact that there has already been a 30% increase in the area under wheat. I hope you will have written me something about this.

Now for the military news. This battalion, when we arrived here, was nominally nearly 300 strong, but actually it could hardly have paraded 100. This reduction is nearly all due to sickness. The deaths from all causes only total between forty and fifty, out of the original 800: and of these about twenty-five, I think, were killed in action. But there has been an enormous amount of sickness during the hot weather, four-fifths of which has been heat-stroke and malaria. There have been a few cases of enteric and a certain number of dysentery; but next to heat and malaria more men have been knocked out by sores and boils than by any disease. It takes ages for the smallest sore to heal.

Of the original thirty officers, eight are left here, Major Stillwell, who is C.O., one Captain, Page-Roberts, a particularly nice fellow, and five subalterns, named Harris, Forbes, Burrell, Bucknill and Chitty: (Chitty is in hospital): and Jones, the M.O., also a very nice man and a pretty good M.O. too. The new Adjutant is a Captain from 2nd Norfolks named Floyd: he is also nice and seems good: was on Willingdon's staff and knows Jimmy.

In honour of our arrival, they have adopted Double Company system. I am posted to "A" Double Company, of which the Company Commander and only other officer is Harris, aet. 19. So I am second in command and four platoon commanders at once, besides having charge of the machine-guns (not that I am ever to parade with them) while Chitty is sick. It sounds a lot, but with next to no men about, the work is lessened. On paper, "A" D.C was seventy-two strong, which, with my fifty, makes 122: but in fact, of these 122, twenty-five are sick and sixteen detached permanently for duties at headquarters and so on, leaving eighty-one. And these eighty-one are being daily more and more absorbed into fatigues of various kinds and less and less available for parade. In a day or two we shall be the only English battalion remaining here, so that all the duties which can't be entrusted to Indian troops will fall on us.

I haven't had time to observe the birds here very much yet, but they seem interesting, especially the water-birds. With regard to what I wrote to Mamma about the teal, people who have been up the river say they saw a very big flock of them at Kut. There were a lot of snipe with them and about twenty bitterns, which surprises me. And about eighty miles north of here there is a mud flat where great numbers of mallards are a.s.sembling for migration northwards: and there are more bitterns there than there are higher up even. These flocks about the equinoxes are very curious. I expect the mallards will migrate northwards, and the teal soon afterwards will become very scarce, but I hope the bitterns will stay where they are. The snipe are less interesting: they move about all over the place, wherever they can pick up most food. These people put the size of the flock of teal at a hundred and fifty and the mallards at five hundred, but you should, I think, multiply the first by a hundred and the second only by ten.

I got Mamma's letter via the India Office just after we got here. I quite agree with her view of war, though I must admit the officers of 1/4 Hants seem to me improved by it. While sitting on that court martial at Agra I expressed my view in a sonnet which I append, for you to show to Mamma:

How long, O Lord, how long, before the flood Of crimson-welling carnage shall abate?

From sodden plains in West and East the blood Of kindly men streams up in mists of hate Polluting Thy clear air: and nations great In reputation of the arts that bind The world with hopes of Heaven, sink to the state Of brute barbarians, whose ferocious mind Gloats o'er the b.l.o.o.d.y havoc of their kind, Not knowing love or mercy. Lord, how long Shall Satan in high places lead the blind To battle for the pa.s.sions of the strong?

Oh, touch thy children's hearts, that they may know Hate their most hateful, pride their deadliest foe.

I must stop now, as a mail is going out and one never knows when the next will be.

NORFOLK HOUSE.

AMARAH, _September 13th_, 1915.

TO HIS FATHER.

As I have written the news to Mamma this week I will tell you what I gather of the campaign and country generally.

There's no doubt that old Townshend, the G.O.C., means to push on to Baghdad "ekdum"; and if the Foreign Office stops him there will be huge indigna. It seems to me that the F.O. should have made itself quite explicit on the point, one way or the other months ago: to pull up your general in full career is exasperating to him and very wasteful, as he has acc.u.mulated six months' supplies for an army of 16,000 up here, which will have to be mostly s.h.i.+pped back if he is pulled up at Kut. The soldiers all say the F.O. played the same trick on Barratt in the cold weather. They let him get to Qurnah, and he wanted and prepared to push on here and to Nasiryah, which were then the Turkish bases. But the F.O. stopped him and consequently the Turks could resume the offensive, and nearly beat us at Shaibah. The _political_ people say that the soldiers had only themselves to thank they were nearly beaten at Shaibah. They were warned in December that the whole area between Sh. and Basrah would be flooded later on, and were urged either to dig a ca.n.a.l or build a causeway; but they pooh-poohed it: and consequently all supplies and ammunition at Shaibah had to be carried across 8 miles of marsh, 4ft. to 1in. deep.

As for the country, it is said to be very fertile wherever properly irrigated. At present the water is distributed about as badly as it could be. The annual rise of the river makes vast feverish swamps, and the rest of the country is waterless. Any stray Bedouin tribe that feels like growing a crop can go and cut a hole in the bank and irrigate a patch for one season and then leave it; and these cuts form new channels which as often as not lose themselves in a swamp.

Meanwhile this haphazard draining off of the water is seriously impairing the main streams, especially that of the Euphrates, which is now almost unnavigable in the low water season. To develop the country therefore means (1) a comprehensive irrigation and drainage scheme.

Willc.o.c.k's scheme I believe is only for irrigation. I don't know how much the extreme flatness of the country would hamper such a scheme.

Here we are 200 miles by river from the sea and only 28ft. above sea-level. It follows (2) that we must control the country and the nomad tribes from the highest _barrage_ continuously down to the sea.

(3) We must have security that the Turks don't interfere with the rivers above our barrage, or even neglect the river banks.

All this seems to me to point to a repet.i.tion of our Egyptian experience. We shall be drawn, whether we like it or not, into a virtual protectorate at least as far up as the line Kut-Nasiryah, along the Shatt-al-Hai, and that will have to extend laterally on the east to the Persian frontier and on the west to the Arabian tableland.

I don't see how we can hope to get off with less: and that being so, I believe it would be better to take on the whole at once. North of the Shatt-al-Hai line (_i.e_. Kut-Nasiryah) it would be very exhausting to go, and very awkward politically, as you soon get among the holy places of the s.h.i.+ahs, especially Karbala, which is their Mecca. But it's no use blinking the fact that a river is a continuous whole, and experience shows that the power which controls the mouth is sooner or later forced to climb to its source, especially when its up-stream neighbours are hostile and not civilised. And what power of Government will be left to Turkey after the war? It looks as if she will be as bankrupt, both financially and politically, as Persia; and I see no real hope of avoiding a part.i.tion a la Persia into British and Russian spheres of interest. In that case it seems to me the British sphere should go to the Shatt-al-Hai, and the Russian begin where the plain ends, or at any rate north of Mosul. Are you at liberty to tell me whether there is already an understanding with Russia about this country, and if so how far it goes?

As for the climate, I don't think it is any worse than the plains of India. When it is properly drained the fever will be much less: and under peace conditions the water can be properly purified and the heat dealt with. The obvious port is Basra; it is said that the bar outside Fao could easily be dredged to 26ft. The only other really good harbour is Koweit, I gather: but our game is to support the independence of K.: make it the railway terminus, but by using Basra you make your rail-freight as low as possible and have your commercial port where you can directly control matters.