I
I had known F---- through years of hunting and sports in India, but
never until the night that our old British-India coaster lay off the
Shat-el-Arab bar waiting for the turn of the tide to run up to
Bassorah, did I hear him speak of the things that were really next his
heart. Then it was that I was vouchsafed transient vision of the outer
strands of the previsionary web England was weaving beyond the marches
of India against events to come. I will give his story, as nearly as I
can remember, in his own words.
* * * * *
For the best part of the last five years [said he], I have been coming
to Arabia and Mesopotamia on “language study.” In all of that time I
have not been back to England, and I am almost a stranger to the
officers of my own regiment. I talk like an Arab, I am beginning to
think like an Arab, and, what with sunlight and dirt that have gone so
deep under my epidermis that they will never come out, I shall soon
look like an Arab. Perhaps in time--you’d never believe the appeal of
the Koran till you’ve bowed toward Mecca, with a Bedouin on either
side of you, morning and evening, for six months at a stretch--I shall
pray like an Arab. I have had smallpox, dysentery,--which has become
practically chronic,--and a dozen varieties of fevers and skin
diseases, and I’m mottled from head to foot with “Aleppo button”
scars, two of which have never healed. I’ve been alone so much that I
talk to myself even in Calcutta and Simla. The Persians in this region
distrust me, the Russians and Germans hate me, and the Turks are
perfectly frank in saying that they will send me on “the long
pilgrimage” if ever a fair chance offers.
All that my Government does is to allow my pay to go on and to provide
me with a passport that will land me at Koweit, Bassorah, or Bagdad.
If I get into trouble they will not--cannot, in fact--do as much for
me as they would for a spindle-legged Hindu coolie. And all this on
the chance that, some time before I am retired for old age or
invalided from the Indian army, the Great White Bear will try to come
down to the Persian Gulf to slake his age-long thirst. In this
contingency, of course, there is no denying the fact that I shall be
very much in demand, especially if operations are carried on in my own
“sphere,” that of North-Eastern Arabia and Southern Mesopotamia, up to
a line drawn from Bagdad to Hitt.
Afoot, or by horse or camel, I have traversed almost every square mile
of this region. There is not a bazaar from Kerbela to Koweit in which,
disguised, I cannot mingle unsuspected in the throng, or, in case of
need, call upon friends who will do anything, from giving me a
cigarette or a handful of dates to risking their lives to save my own.
I also know every one of the greater, as well as most of the lesser,
Bedouin sheikhs whose peoples roam the deserts between Bassorah and
Damascus; and with one of the most powerful of these--his camels are
over 100,000 in number and his sheep and goats three times that--I
have gone through the “blood brotherhood” ceremony. The blood of our
arms has actually mingled, and each is pledged to stop at no act to
serve the other. My friends, I need hardly say, are all Arabs,
Chaldeans, Syrians, Jews, or people of one of the other subject races
of this region; to the Turk, courteous as he is to me socially in
Bagdad and Bassorah, my name is anathema. A week hence, for instance,
I shall exchange Oriental amenities with the Vali of Bagdad in his
garden on the banks of the Tigris. He will toast me in scented coffee
and drink to the success of my visit; and all the while a double guard
of police will be watching the gates to prevent my getting away to the
desert and my Arab friends. Personally, I know it would pain him if I
were to be shot in the dark for neglecting to answer a sentry’s
challenge; but officially he is dead keen for it, and there is no
doubt that it would do him a lot of good in Stamboul, where he is not
in very high favour at present.
The whole thing, when all is said and done, resolves itself down to
about this: If a war involving operations in this “sphere” comes
within the next twenty years, I,--and a couple of other chaps who are
doing the same sort of work,--provided I do not lose my life, or my
health, or the best of my faculties in the interim, will probably
break all records outside of a Central American revolution for quick
promotion. I should probably be a brigadier-general at forty, with ten
or a dozen letters after my name. But if, as is likely, there is no
war, I shall probably continue these little jaunts into the desert
until my health gives out, when, at best, I shall be invalided home
and retired on the half-pay of a captain or a major.
So, you see, my future depends entirely upon whether or not some of
our neighbours, or would-be neighbours, see fit to “start something”
in this little neck of Central Asia within the next decade or two. And
now that Russia is in the Entente, and we are acting so entirely in
concert with her in Persia, I’m very much afraid that it’s going to be
a case of the “hope deferred which maketh the heart sick.”