expected as soon as hostilities ceased. Another tune has been called
now, and we find countless advocates of the policy to get out of
Mesopotamia altogether and let well alone. Capitalization, like charity,
we are told must begin at home, and thirty millions, estimated by the
Inspector of Irrigation in Egypt, as necessary to turn Mesopotamia into
a prosperous country with an annual revenue in fifty years time of ten
millions a year, should be used for house building in England and not
for empire building in Chaldea. On the other hand, wise men have told us
that the Mesopotamian oilfields near Mosul are to be of great
importance, like the Persian wells that have their pipe-line outfall at
Abadan, and that a firm and fatherly hand is necessary to keep the
country in a state of trade development. Should our sphere of influence
be withdrawn from Mesopotamia things will revert back to chaos. Already
trouble with the various tribes is brewing.
Not the least of the problems in controlling the marauding activities of
some of the nomadic tribes is the difficulty of meting out adequate
punishment to peace-breakers. The fact that all the stock-in-trade of a
township amounts to a few pots and pans and house material of cane
matting and mud makes it impossible to impress them by destroying their
houses. In a few days everything would be rebuilt as before. It could
often happen that the punitive expedition arrived to find the town moved
to some district not mentioned in the orders for the day.
[Illustration: A BRITISH CRUISER IN THE PERSIAN GULF]
Mesopotamia under the Turks was in some ways worse off than others of
his badly governed possessions. The officials who were sent from
Constantinople into various provinces regarded the job as a poor one, as
far as the amenities of life were concerned, and one to be endured while
making as big a pile as possible from the ground-down natives. I should
imagine that one of these officials would be about as popular with the
landowners as a publican was among the Jews.
An ancient prophecy foretells that the great river Euphrates shall be
dried up that the way of the kings of the East shall be prepared. The
time has come, if the war was indeed Armageddon. German engineers in
1914 had made a highway and effectively "dried up" the waters of the
river for the passage of the armies. They themselves expected to be
kings of the East although coming from the West, and some, it is
interesting to note, explain the Prussians as of Oriental origin. At the
same time the claims both of oil and empire kept us busy in the Persian
Gulf. It looked as if we were to share this new kingdom or sphere of
influence with Germany, until the war came and sorted things out.
There are some who see in vast irrigation schemes a "drying up" of the
Euphrates that shall bring colonists from the Far East so that the
denizens of China or Japan shall begin, like the Saxons in Kent, to get
a footing in the country and become, in very substance, the Yellow
Peril.
He is a rash man who would prophesy concerning the future of Mesopotamia
as far as our empire is concerned. Perhaps before these pages are in
print something decisive will have occurred. We read daily in our
newspapers of rumours of war with restless tribes around Mosul, and of
raids and skirmishes.
The land of Shinar, where Abraham dwelt, with its silent traces of the
great civilizations which it fostered, Babylonian and Assyrian, Persian,
Greek and Arabian, is once more, by the chances of war, an open book,
and time alone will show what is to be written therein.
[Illustration]
FOOTNOTES:
[1] "Adventures with a Sketch Book."
[2] Tennyson: "Recollections of the Arabian Nights."
[3] From Ragozin's _Chaldea_.
THE END
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR._
ADVENTURES WITH A SKETCH BOOK
With numerous Illustrations in colour and black and white by the Author.
Crown 4to. 12/6 net.
"Artistically, and from the literary point of view, it is one of the
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"Contains many clever drawings.... Charmingly sketched."--_Evening
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_BY THE SAME AUTHOR._
THE LAST CRUSADE
1914-1918
With 100 Sketches In Colour, Monochrome, and Line made by the author in
the autumn and winter of 1918, when sent on duty to Palestine by the
Admiralty for the Imperial War Museum. Crown 4to £1 5s. net.
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"The drawings possess great artistic merit. One of the most attractive
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