I only had time to scrawl a short note last night before the mail
went. But I wrote to Papa the day before we left Basra.
Our embarkation was much more sensibly managed this time, a Captain
Forrest of the Oxfords being O.C. troops, and having some sense,
though the brass hats again fixed 10 a.m. as the hour. However he got
all our kits on the barge at 7 and then let the men rest on the big
ship till the time came. Moreover the barge was covered. We embarked
on it at 9.30 and were towed along to the river steamer "Malamir," to
which we transferred our stuff without difficulty as its lower deck
was nearly level with the barge. The only floater was that my new
bearer (who is, I fear, an idiot) succeeded in dropping my heavy kit
bag into the river, where it vanished like a stone. Fortunately that
kind of thing doesn't worry me much; but while I was looking for an
Arab diver to fish for it it suddenly re-appeared the other side of
the boat, and was retrieved.
These river boats are flat-bottomed and only draw six feet. They have
two decks and an awning, and there was just room for our 200 men to
lie about. Altogether there were on board--in the order of the amount
of room they took up--two brass hats, 220 men (four Hants drafts and
some odds and ends), a dozen officers, four horses and a dozen native
servants and a crew.
Altogether I had to leave four sick men at Basra, all due more or less
to that barge episode, and I have still two sickish on my hands, while
two have recovered.
There was a strong head-wind and current so we only made about four or
five knots an hour. The river is full of mud banks, and the channel
winds to and fro in an unexpected manner, so that one can only move by
daylight and then often only by constant sounding. Consequently,
starting at noon on Monday, it took us till 5 p.m. Wednesday to do the
130 miles. It is much less for a crow, but the river winds so, that
one can quite believe Herodotus's yarn of the place where you pass the
same village on three consecutive days. Up to Kurna, which we reached
at 7 a.m. Tuesday, the river is about 500 yards to 300 yards broad,
and the country mainly poor, bare, flat pasture; the date fringe
diminishing and in places altogether disappearing for miles together.
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 passed 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-space made me rather bilious.
In the afternoon the wind blew us ashore 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 Bassorah, 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 space are endless
groves of date palms, with masses of yellow dates. The creeks are
embanked with brick and lined with popular café's where incredible
numbers of Arabs squat and eat or drink huggas and hacshish and the
like. The creeks and river swarm with bhellums and mahilas. A bhellum
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 ship. 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 assiduously and keep an evaporation
bath automatically going: but on this ship the drinks used to give out
about 4 p.m. and when it comes to neat Tigris-cum-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 ship 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 scraps 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.
* * * * *