Istabulat were fought in positions some miles apart. The title of
Istabulat, or of Dujail River, may fitly be reserved for the first
action. The action of the 22nd may then be known as that of Istabulat
Mounds. The Istabulat fight was one in which my own Brigade were
spectators, except for isolated and piece-meal action. We were in
reserve; and the 8th Brigade, of the 3rd Division, were in support, in
line with us, and behind the Median Wall. The enemy were trying a new
bowler, Shefket Pasha being in command, vice Kazim Karabekir Bey, who
had resigned from command of their Eighteenth Corps just before Baghdad
fell. We should not have supposed that this made any difference, even
had we known.
The Istabulat battle has been described in print,[9] though
inadequately and, in one important respect, most unfairly. That
unfairness I shall correct in the next chapter. But for this first
action I do not propose to do more than give an outline of the work of
the two Brigades engaged, and an account of our own part in reserve.
The enemy's position was of immense strength. Old mounds made an
upraised plateau, through which the Dujail Canal ran swiftly between
steep and lofty banks. The 19th and 21st Brigades attacked in
converging columns, the first thrusting right in, the second coming
with an arm sweep round. Thus, both frontal and flank attacks were
provided. The enemy's position was so strong, his redoubts so lofty,
and the whole formidable terrain had been so entrenched and wired round
that I do not believe we hoped to do more than eat our way into a part
of his line. The operation was magnificent bluff. His morale was
calculated to be now so low that he was likely to evacuate the position
if we bit deeply into it. If this view is correct, General Maude was
taking a heavy risk. But he not only always made all preparation
possible before he struck, but on occasion did not hesitate to strike
where the odds should have been against success, but the prize of
success was great, and the morale of the troops against him weakened by
repeated blows. In the Jebel Hamrin his calculation failed. But at
Istabulat it succeeded. But, had the Turk been as he was in Sannaiyat
days, two months back, we should have had a week of dreadful fighting
instead of one bloody day. Holding Istabulat heights was a force
estimated at seven thousand four hundred infantry and five hundred
sabres, with thirty-two guns. This force, in its perfect position, we
attacked with two weak brigades.
The carts had scuttled away; J.Y. and his cat had stalked off through
the dimness. We were shivering behind the wall. At 5 a.m. the
bombardment opened. From five to seven we brought every gun to bear on
the enemy. Istabulat, like the last of Sannaiyat's five battles, was an
artillery battle, in the sense that the infantry, less strongly and
splendidly supported, would have been helpless. 'I'll never say a word
against the gunners again after to-day and Sannaiyat,' said a wounded
Seaforths' officer to me in the evening. The field-guns were well up
from the start, and the 'hows' soon advanced. When the action began,
the latter were half-a-mile behind us at the wall. It was an impressive
sight, the smoke rushing out with each discharge, and then swaying back
with the gun's recoil. But the guns were rarely stationary long, and we
soon had the unwonted experience of finding ourselves well behind our
own artillery. Finally, in places our batteries were firing at almost
point-blank range; the enemy was simply blasted out of his trenches.
Fowke's dust-up drew a few shells; and the Turk strengthened his right
to meet this new threat. But presently Fritz came over, very low and
very impudent. He reported that it was only Fowke, and sheered off with
a contempt quite visible from the ground. He was so low that we fired
at him with rifles, vainly; then he went, and was swooping down on the
Seaforths' attack and machine-gunning it.
The 19th Brigade got their first objectives with very few casualties.
But then the enemy poured a murderous fire on to them from every sort
of weapon. The 21st Brigade all but accomplished their impossible task.
At a critical point a terrible misfortune occurred. The 9th
Bhopals--who were playfully and better known as the 9th
'Bo-Peeps'--crossed in front of a strong machine-gun position instead
of outflanking it. The Turks held their fire till the regiment was
close up. The latter lost two hundred men in three minutes; and a large
body of Turks, who were wavering on the edge of surrender, fell back
instead. The Bhopals never recovered from this disaster. The skeleton
of a battalion which survived the fight was sent down the line, and its
place taken by the 1st Guides from India.
Two other battalions of the 21st Brigade, the 2nd Black Watch and the
1/8th Gurkhas, crossed a plain bare of cover. They crossed at terrible
cost, and scaled the all but sheer walls of the Turkish left. But it
was too much; and a counter-attack swept the survivors off, and took
two officers and several men prisoners. Evening found our forces held,
though the whole enemy front line was ours and our teeth were fixed
deeply into the position. The Black Watch had lost all four company
commanders, killed.
It is not possible to convey to paper the heroism and agony of this
day. Mackenzie, of the Seaforths, who won the D.S.O. two months
previously at Sannaiyat for valour which in any previous war would have
won the V.C., was shot dead as he was offering his water-bottle to a
wounded Turk. Irvine, of the 9th Bhopals, was wounded, and lay out all
day; two wounded Turks looked after him, surrendering when we
ultimately came up. The Gurkhas and Bhopals took two hundred and thirty
prisoners. A Black Watch private captured nine Turks and brought them
in, himself supporting the last of the file, who was wounded. A
machine-gunner, isolated when his comrades were killed or driven back,
although wounded, worked his gun till we advanced again.
The artillery, as was inevitable from the rôle they filled, suffered.
Major the Earl of Suffolk, commanding B/56th Battery, was killed by
shrapnel through the heart. He was a popular, unassuming man.
Lieutenant Stewart, of the same battery, was wounded. Colonel Cotter,
commanding the 56th Brigade, R.F.A., was hit in the forehead.
Lieutenant Hart's wrist was shot through. The 14th Battery had two
hundred 5.9's burst round them; yet they brought up their team, one by
one, and got the guns away, losing men, but no animals.
Meanwhile from the Median Wall the 'Tigers'[10] watched the fight. One
could not help being reminded of the grand-stand at a football match.
Sitting on the further side and below the crest, the officers watched
the Indians pushing over the plain steadily through heavy shelling. We
saw dreadful pounding away on our left, where 5.9's plunged and burst
among the trenches the Seaforths were holding. Yet even a battle grows
monotonous; so in the afternoon we went down to the trenches before the
wall to rest, so far as heat and flies would permit. In that period of
slackness a number of men swarmed up the wall. Instead of sitting where
we had done, they sat on the crest, against the sky-line. Hitherto the
shrapnel had not come nearer than a ridge four hundred yards away,
which had been often and well peppered. But now came the hateful
whistle, and the ridge was swept from end to end with both H.E. and
shrapnel. In our trenches we were spattered with pebbles. Thorpe, next
to me, got a piece of H.E. in his coat. But we escaped a direct hit.
One shell passing overhead skimmed the ridge and burst on the other
side, scattering Colonel Knatchbull's kit and smashing his fishing-rod.
It killed a groom and wounded three other men, and wounded three
horses so badly that they all had to be killed. It is always men on
duty, holding horses or otherwise unable to escape, who pay for the
curiosity of the idle.
Firing continued very heavy till dusk. In the evening I buried the man
killed by the shell, and then went back to find the clearing-station.
Part of a padre's recognized function is to cull and purvey news. And I
had many friends engaged. A couple of miles back I found the 7th
British Field Ambulance, to which my own chief, A.E. Knott, was
attached. The sight here was far more nerve-racking than a battlefield.
It was an open human shambles, with miserable men lying about, some
waiting on tables to be operated on. Knott was about to help in
amputating a leg. In the few words I had with him I learnt that Suffolk
was killed. I think I am right when I say that he was the only man
killed among our 7th Division gunners. (We had other artillery with us,
and they lost heavily.) It seemed strangely mediaeval, as from the days
of Agincourt or Creçi, that Death, scarring so many, but forbearing to
exact their uttermost, should strike down so great a name and one that
is written on so many pages of our history. I knew well how many would
mourn the man. I asked Knott the question of questions, 'What are our
casualties?' These, one knew, must be heavy; but I was appalled by his
reply, 'Sixteen hundred to one o'clock.'
I left the wretched scene and went back. Part of the way McLeod, of the
Seaforths, his right arm in a sling, wandered with me, talking dazedly
of the day and its fortunes. I found an officer with whom I had
travelled on a river-boat not long before, when his mind held the
presentiment of death in his first action. He, like McLeod, went out
from Istabulat with the card, 'G.S.[11] wound, right arm.' So much for
presentiment in some cases. A different case occurred next day.
I found my mess sitting down to dinner. 'Montag' Warren, our P.M.C.,
had excellently acquired dates and white mulberries, which last made a
stew, poorly tasting, but a change from long monotony. A clamour
greeted me. 'Where've you been, padre? What's the news?' I told them we
had got on well. Then some one asked, 'But what did you hear about our
casualties?' Minds were tense, for every one knew that next day our
brigade must take up the attack, and for a whole day we had seen Hell
in full eruption on our right. I told them other things I had
learnt--told them anything that might brush aside the awkward question.
But they demanded to know. Neither do I see how I could have avoided
telling. So at last I said, 'Well, what I was told was sixteen
hundred.'
Silence fell. To some, sixteen hundred may seem a butcher's bill so
trifling that brave men--and these were men superlatively brave,
officers of the 17th Foot, and some of them had seen more pitched
battles than years, had known Ypres and Loos and Neuve Chapelle,
Gallipoli and Sheikh Saad--would not concede it a momentary blanching
of the cheek. But these sixteen hundred casualties were out of barely
four thousand men engaged, including gunners. In that minute each man
communed with his own spirit,
Voyaging through strange fields of thought alone.
The reader will be weary of _Henry V._ Nevertheless Shakespeare came to
the aid of us, his countrymen, again as gallant old Fowke quoted from
the heart and brain of England:
He which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart....
We would not die in that man's company,
That fears his fellowship to die with us.
So laughter ended a terrible day. Next day our tiny band was the
spearhead of a handful of fifteen hundred bayonets, who caught the Turk
in his fastnesses, wrested guns and prisoners from him, and slew and
broke his forces so that they recoiled for thirty miles.
There was no rest. Through the darkness J.Y. flitted to and fro, and
here and there a spectral blaze flickered furtively. We had neither
blankets nor greatcoats, for fear of shell-fire made it impossible to
bring the carts up. The night was infernal with cold; sand-flies rose
in myriads from the ground; we shivered and itched in our shorts. Old
aches and pains found me out, rheumatism and troubles of a tropical
climate. I lay between two men, both of whom had seen their last
sunset; one was Sergeant-Major Whatsize. Infinitely far off seemed
peace and the time, as Grant-Anderson expressed it,
When the Gurkhas cease from gurkhing, and the Sikhs are sick no
more.
At midnight came a roar, then a crashing. It was Johnny blowing up
Istabulat Station. At three o'clock we were aroused.
FOOTNOTES:
[7] _Anabasis_, Book ii.
[8] The Divisional Heads of Ordnance and Supply and Transport.
[9] 'The Battle that Won Samarrah,' by Brigadier-General A.G. Wauchope,
C.M.G., D.S.O.; _Blackwood's_, April, 1918.
[10] The Leicestershires' badge is a tiger, commemorating service in
India a century ago.
[11] Gun-shot.
IV
THE BATTLE FOR SAMARRA
Salute the sacred dead,
Who went and who return not.
J.R. LOWELL.
Day was welcome, for it brought movement, though movement harassed by
cold and then by heat and ever-increasing clouds of flies. We snatched
our mugs of tea, our bread and bacon. At 3.30 we moved off. We marched
behind the wall, then crossed the Dujail, and pushed towards the left
flank of the enemy's position. Vast clouds of white dust shut us close
from any knowledge as we climbed up a narrow pass. Fortunately the
light was hardly even dim yet.
We dropped into a plain, and saw the Hero's Way by which the others had
gone. Dead Gurkhas and Highlanders lay everywhere. I have always felt
that the sight of a dead Highlander touches even deeper springs of
pathos than the sight of any other corpse. Analysed, the feeling comes
to this, I think: in his kilt he seems so obviously a peasant, lying
murdered on the breast of the Universal Mother.
So we marvelled as we saw the way and the way's price--marvelled that
any could have survived to that stiff, towering redoubt, with its moat
of trenches and the trenches ringing its sides; and marvelled most of
all that any should have scaled its top, though for a moment only.
These trenches held abundant dead, Turks and our own. On the reverse
slope I came on rows of the enemy, huddled on their knees, their hands
lifted to shield their heads from the shrapnel which had killed them.
Below ran Dujail in its steep ditch; inland the plateau rose, against
which the 19th Brigade had surged.
For once the Turk's retreat had been precipitate. That master of
rearguard warfare had meant to stand here, to save railhead and all its
rolling-stock. His dead were more than ours; and all our way was strewn
with débris. Candles and cones of sugar were in plenty, ammunition,
blankets--for Johnny had not been cold, as we had--bivvies, clothes,
slippers. I carried an ammunition-box a few miles, thinking it would
make a good letter-case.
The enemy had gone. Before passing to tell of this new day's battle I
quote, from Hasted's[12] account, a description of Istabulat lines:
The Turks intended to spend the summer there; they did not
contemplate an attack before the hot weather set in. Three
well-concealed lines of trenches had been prepared, on small
hills and amongst deep nullas, with the water-supply of the
Dujail running through the centre. Advanced redoubts and strong
points made the defences formidable.
The brigade formed up about 6.30 a.m., the 53rd Sikhs coming in from
picket on the extreme right. We passed the 56th Brigade, R.F.A., whose
officers eagerly came with us a short distance, telling us of the
previous day. We halted for breakfast.
[Illustration: BATTLE OF ISTABULAT MOUNDS THE POSITION AT NOON
APRIL 22nd]
Verbal orders came from Division. They were just 'Push on vigorously.'
With it was coupled an assurance that there was nothing against us,
that the enemy was fleeing, thoroughly demoralized.
We moved on. From across the Tigris guns boomed steadily. Distant
glimpses of river showed shoals, islands, spaces green with
cultivation. An enemy plane, reconnoitring, was shot down, and pilot
and observer killed. This incident had an important influence on the
battle which followed. Even at this stage of the campaign, we fought in
Mesopotamia, both sides, with the most exiguous number of planes. The
Turks having lost their best machine and pilot, our old friend Fritz,
feared to risk another. Hence, when the mounds of the ancient city of
Istabulat lay across our front, the hostile observation was from the
ground in front and from our left flank only. And we were enabled to
pass through a depression, whilst his fire went overhead, and so into
the mounds.
We passed a 5.9 disabled by a direct hit and nearly buried. The bare
country was cracked with nullas, some of them deep. Then we opened into
artillery formation, and entered utter desert. In front were
innumerable mounds, a dead town of long ago. We went warily, with that
quiet expectation, almost the hardest of all experiences to endure, of
the first shell's coming. The official message was that the enemy was
incapable of serious opposition. But of this the rank and file knew
nothing; had they known, old experience would have made them sceptical.
Fowke's view, that all would prove to be for the worst in the worst of
all possible worlds and arrangements, was the reigning philosophy. An
adapted edition of Schopenhauer would have sold well in the mess (or
anywhere in Mesopotamia). Novelists speak of the hero being conscious
that eyes, in the forest or in his room at night (as may be), are
watching, watching. This knowledge governs the feeling of 'going in
artillery formation,' with the added knowledge that, though in broad
sun, you cannot hope to see your foe, who is certain to spring on you,
and merely waits till you are well under fire.
The bolt fell. About 9 a.m. a double report was heard; then the Cherub
sent back word, 'Four enemy snipers retiring.' By 9.30 firing was
heavy. The Cherub was wounded, and his two scouts killed. The enemy was
invisible, and mirage made ranging impossible. The ground four hundred
yards away was a fairyland that danced and glimmered. When a target was
perceived, of Turks racing back, the orders for fire were changed
quickly, from 'Three hundred yards' to 'fourteen hundred yards.' Very
vainly. This mirage continued throughout the fight. Ahead was what we
called the 'Second Median Wall,' a crumbled wall some twenty feet high,
which ran across the front of the mounds. To its extreme left, our
right, and in front of this wall, was the Turkish police-post of
Istabulat, by which the battle was presently to be raging.
In those mounds the enemy had excellent cover. Our leading company
followed the scouts, and took possession of the ruins. The 'Tigers'
were arranged in four lines, according to companies, with less than
three hundred yards between the lines. Dropping bullets fell fast,
especially in the rear lines. About 10 a.m. two shells burst about a
hundred yards in front of Wilson and myself. Then Hell opened all her
mouths and spat at us. The battalion lay down and waited.
Twelve-pounder 'pipsqueaks' came in abundance, with a sprinkling of
heavier stuff. Many soldiers prefer the latter. You can hear a 5.9
coming, and it gives you time to collect yourself, and thus perhaps
escape giving others the trouble to collect what is left of you. I
remember once hearing General Peebles say that in his long experience
of many wars he had known only three men absolutely devoid of fear,
'Smith and Brown and--Jones' (mentioning a notorious and most-admired
fire-eating brigadier, a little man in whom bursting shells produced
every symptom of intoxication except inability to get about). Then he
added, 'I'm not sure about Jones.'
It is interesting to notice the different ways in which nervousness
shows. I remember one man in whom was never observed the slightest
emotion amid the terriblest happenings, till one day some one noticed
that whenever he went forward he turned up his jacket-collar, as if to
shelter from that fiery rain. Myself, I hate the beginning of conflict,
and am eager to push well into it and under the shell-barrage. As there
is said to be a cool core in the heart of flame, so there is a certain
cool centre for the spirit where horror is radiating out to a wide
circumference. In the depths one must surrender one's efforts and trust
to elemental powers and agonies, but in the shallows all the calls are
on the 'transitory being' whose flesh and blood are pitted against
machinery. How can the nerves and trembling thought bear up? Yet they
have borne up, even in men quick with sense and imagination. I felt
restless as we lay on the flat desert listening to the bullets singing
by or to a nosecap's leisured search for a victim, dipping and twisting
to left and right till at last it thudded down. If one must lie still,
then company gives a feeling of security. Fate may have, doubtless has,
a special down on you, but even Fate is unlikely to blow you to bits if
the act involves blowing to bits several of her more favoured sons. So
I remember with amusement my vague vexation with the curiosity that
always made my companion get up and stroll about when under fire,
peering round. Though he went scarcely five yards, it seemed like
desertion.
We watched our guns run up to the 'Pimple,' a recently built-up mound
slightly ahead of us, lately used as a Turkish O. Pip, now accruing to
us for the same purpose. The infantry assumed that these wagons and
limbers moving a hundred yards to our right would draw all the enemy's
fire, in which case we, helpless on the flat, would be shelled out of
this existence. But this did not happen; why, I cannot guess, unless I
have correctly traced the reason for that bad observation so marked in
the Turkish gunning all through this day. We were in the slightest
possible depression, with a scarcely perceptible lift on our left and a
steady rise before. Shells plunged incessantly down our left, and went
whistling far beyond us. But comparatively few burst among us; and the
shrapnel burst far too high to do damage.
Our batteries were in position at the 'Pimple.' We rose, marched
through a tornado of noise, right-turned, and went across the muzzle of
our own guns, also in full blast. In front I saw lines of
Leicestershires scaling the slope and melting into the mounds.
My diary notes: 'Men's delight to see river.' We came suddenly upon
Brother Tigris, basking in beautiful sunlight, becalmed in bays beneath
lofty bluffs. In this dreadful land water meant everything; we had had
experiences of thirst, not to be effaced in a lifetime. Away from the
river men grew uneasy. The river meant abundance to drink, and bathing;
everywhere else water was bad, or the supply precarious. We had been
away from the river since that night opposite Sindiyeh. So not the
crashing shells, the 'pipsqueaks' ripping the air like dried paper, nor
the bullets pinging by, prevented men from greeting so dear a sight.
Standing on the beach of imminent strife, in act to plunge, men cried,
'The Tigress, the Tigress!' Instantly a scene flashed back to memory
from the book so often near to thought in these days: how Xenophon,
weary and anxious with the restlessness and depression of his
much-tried troops, heard a clamour from those who had reached a
hill-crest, and, riding swiftly up to take measures against the
expected peril, found them shouting '_Thalatta, Thalatta_.' Seafaring
folk, the most of them, they had caught, far below, their first glimpse
of the Euxine, truly a hospitable water to them, since it could bear
them home.
Wilson dressed his first wounded in sheltered, broken ground, high
above the river. The peaceful beauty of the place is with me still.
Above the blue, unruffled pools green flycatchers darted, and rollers
spread metallic wings. The left bank lay low and very lovely with
flowers and fields. 'I will answer you,' said Sir Walter Raleigh, asked
his opinion of a glass of wine, given as he went to execution, 'as the
man did who was going to Tyburn. "This is a good drink, if a man might
but tarry by it."' Wilson left me here with Dobson; but almost
immediately he sent back asking us to rejoin him. Our few cases, all
walking ones, remained in this shelter till such time as they could
fall back, and Dobson and I crossed into the mounds.