EGYPT TO THE PERSIAN GULF
Afloat in an insect-house--Captain Kettle in command--Overcrowding
and small-pox--The s.s. _Tower of Babel_--A shark scare--Koweit.
Forty-eight hours after disembarking at Alexandria we were steaming
down the Gulf of Suez on board a second transport bound for the
Persian Gulf.
It would be difficult to imagine a greater contrast than that between
the vessel which brought us across the Mediterranean and the one that
was now carrying us towards the portals of the Middle East. The
latter was a decrepit steamer, indescribably filthy, which had been
running in the China trade for a quarter of a century. Though
favoured by the mildest of weather, the old tub groaned in every
joint as she thumped her way down the Red Sea towards the Indian
Ocean. Long overdue for the scrap-heap, when the war broke out she
was turned into a transport, and thenceforth carried cargoes of
British troops instead of Chinese coolies. Her decks and upper works
were thickly encrusted with dirt, the careful hoarding of years; and
a paint-brush had not touched her for generations. Her cabins were
so many entomological museums where insect life {13} flourished. In
the worm-eaten recesses of the woodwork lurked colonies of parasites
gathered from every corner of the globe, fighting for the principle
of self-determination of small nations. The bathroom door, held in
place by a single rusty hinge, hung at a drunken angle, and the
inflow pipe of the bath was choked with rust. At night, as you slept
in your bunk, playful mice, by way of establishing friendly
relations, would nibble at your big toe, and a whole family of
cockroaches would attempt new long-distance-sprinting records up and
down the bedclothes.
The Captain of the ship was a sharp-featured ferret-eyed individual
who sometimes wore a collar. No one knew his exact nationality, but
he bore a tolerable resemblance to Cutcliffe Hyne's immortal "Captain
Kettle." Indeed, he was said to cultivate this resemblance by every
means in his power. He had a pointed, unshaven chin; he wore a
much-faded uniform cap tilted over one ear. On the bridge you would
see him with hands thrust deep in his trouser pockets and chewing a
cigar. As master of a tramp, he had nosed his way into almost every
port in both hemispheres. He had traded from China to Peru, and
along the Pacific Coast of America. In his wanderings he had
acquired a Yankee accent and a varied and picturesque polyglot
vocabulary which, when the floodgates of his wrath were opened, he
turned with telling effect upon his Lascar crew or his European
officers. He was a man of moods and {14} strange oaths, a good
seaman with a marked taste for poker and magazine literature of the
cheap sensational kind.
Such, then, was our ship, and such its skipper! When we had arrived
at Suez, where we embarked, there were several cases of smallpox
amongst its Lascar firemen. The Embarkation Officer had feared
infection, and had hesitated to send us on board; but he was
overruled by a higher authority somewhere in Egypt or England. There
was no other transport available, it was said; the units for India
and for Persia were urgently needed; and, smallpox or no smallpox,
sail we must--and did.
The ship was terribly overcrowded. The Indian troops "pigged it"
aft; the British troops were accommodated in the hold; and those of
the officers who were unable to find quarters elsewhere unstrapped
their camp bed and slept on deck. Fortunately it was the cool season
in the Red Sea; the days were warm, but not uncomfortably so; and the
nights were sharp and bracing, the head-wind which we carried with us
all the way to Aden keeping the thermometer from climbing beyond the
normal.
Once clear of Suez everybody settled down to work, a very useful
relief to the discomforts of life on an overcrowded transport.
Youthful subalterns joining the Indian Army set themselves to study
Hindustani grammars and vocabularies with the valiant intention of
acquiring colloquial proficiency before they even sighted Bombay.
Members of the {15} Bagdad Party, stimulated by this exhibition of
industry, tackled Persian and Russian. We had two officers who
offered themselves as teachers of the language of Iran--Lieutenant
Akhbar, a native-born Persian whose English home was at Manchester,
and Captain Cooper of the Dorsets, who had studied Oriental tongues
in England, and had been wounded at Gallipoli in a hand-to-hand fight
with the Turks.
For Russian also there was no lack of teachers, the Russian officers,
Captain Eve, and I taking charge of classes. In my own section,
elementary Russian, I had twenty-two N.C.O.'s as eager and willing
pupils. The majority were Australians, and, although dismayed at
first by the bizarre appearance of the unfamiliar characters, and the
seemingly unsurmountable difficulties of what one Anzac aptly
described as "this upside-down language," they put their backs into
it with very remarkable results, plodding away at their lessons hour
after hour with unwearying zeal. Some had picked up a smattering of
"Na Poo" French on the Western Front; a few spoke French fairly well;
but the majority knew no foreign language at all; yet the quick alert
Australian brain captured the entire Russian alphabet in forty-eight
hours after beginning the preliminary assault.
I have sometimes thought since that to the Gods on High our ship must
have appeared a sort of floating Tower of Babel, so intent on
speaking strange tongues were each and all.
Before we reached the Indian Ocean, one of the {16} ship's officers
disappeared in a mysterious manner. He was missed from the bridge at
midnight and, although diligent search was made, no trace of him was
ever found, and it had to be assumed that he had jumped or fallen
overboard. Our Goanese stewards who were Christians looked upon this
incident with the greatest misgivings. Knowing the superstitions of
the Lascar crew, they secretly felt that the missing officer had been
thrown overboard by some of them to placate a huge shark that had
been following the ship for days. The Lascars have a great dread of
such company at sea. To their untutored minds this voracious brute
following a vessel foretells death to someone on board; so better a
sacrificial victim than perhaps one of themselves!
Personally, I do not think for a moment that Lascar superstition was
responsible for the disappearance of the missing man, nor that these
people are given to the propitiation of the Man-Eaters of the Red
Sea. But when, two nights later, one of the Lascars vanished as
mysteriously as had the ship's officer, and this too in calm weather,
it looked as if some Evil Spirit had found a place on board.
Stewards and crew now became terrified. The former would not venture
alone on the deck at night, and the Lascars, sorely puzzled over the
fate of their comrade, went about their work in fear and trembling.
This dread of the mysterious and the unseen became contagious and
affected others outside the ship's company. Subalterns who had been
sleeping {17} on hammocks slung close to the ship's rail and whose
courage had been proved on many a field, now decided that, shark
worship or no shark worship, they would be safer elsewhere, and
transferred themselves to the 'tween decks. Anyhow, the Sea Demon
must by this time have been satisfied, for we lost no more of our
personnel.
We arrived off Koweit in the Gulf of Persia on March 1st, seventeen
days after leaving Suez.
Koweit, or Kuwet, is an important seaport on the Arabian side at the
south-west angle of the Persian Gulf, about eighty miles due south of
Basra, our port of destination. Kuwet is the diminutive form of Kut,
a common term in Irak for a walled village, and the port lies in the
south side of a bay twenty miles long and five miles wide. Seen
through our glasses it did not seem a prepossessing place, for the
bare stony desert stretched away for miles behind the town. Yet only
by accident had it escaped greatness. In 1850 General Chesny, who
knew these parts by heart, recommended it as the terminus of his
proposed Euphrates Valley Railway; and, when the extension of the
Anatolian Railway to Bagdad and the Gulf was mooted, Koweit was long
regarded as a possible terminus. But the War altered all that, and
it is doubtful now if Koweit, which lives by its sea commerce alone,
will even achieve the distinction of becoming the terminal point of a
branch line of the railway which is destined to link up two
continents.
{18}
The Turks and Germans have long had their eyes open to the great
possibilities of Koweit. The former in 1898 attempted a military
occupation, but were warned off by the British, and abandoned their
efforts to obtain a foothold in this commercial outpost of the Gulf,
while the ruling Sheikh was sagacious enough to be aware of the
danger of Turkish absorption, and to avert it by placing his
dominions under the protection of Great Britain. The
German-subsidized Hamburg-Amerika Line made an eleventh hour attempt
to capture the trade of the Gulf, and in the months immediately
preceding the War devoted special attention to Koweit and Basra
trade, carrying freight at rates which must have meant a heavy
financial loss. It was all part of the German Weltpolitik to oust us
from these lucrative markets of the Middle East, and to secure for
German shipping a monopoly of the Gulf carrying trade. With the
German-controlled Bagdad Railway approaching completion, one shudders
to realize what would have been our fate economically, if the
sea-borne trade of Basra and Koweit had passed under the flag and
into the hands of the enterprising Hun.
Basra lies about eighty miles to the north of Koweit. It is here
that the Shatt el Arab (literally the river of the Arabs, or,
otherwise, the commingled Euphrates and Tigris) empties itself into
the Persian Gulf. Vessels with a greater draught than nineteen feet
cannot easily negotiate the bar. Our own transport was bound for
Bombay, so it was with a feeling {19} of thankfulness that we quitted
her for ever and were transferred to a British India liner, the
_Erinrupy_, which since the beginning of the War has been used as a
hospital ship. She was spick and span, and the general air of
cleanliness was so marked after the filthy tub that had conveyed us
from Suez that we trod her decks and ventured into her cabins with an
air of apologetic timidity.
It was half a day's run up river to Basra. Next morning we were
speeding along with the swirling brown waters of the Shatt el Arab
lapping our counter, the land of Iran on our right, and that of Irak
on our left. It grew warmer, and there was a good deal of moisture
in the air. The low flat shores, cut up by irrigation canals, were
covered by date-palm groves. Dhows and other strange river craft,
laden with merchandise, dotted the surface of the brown waters, and
the glorious green of the foreshores was a welcome relief to eyes
tired of the arid sterility of the Arabian shore. A few miles below
Basra we steered a careful course, passing the sunken hulls of two
Turkish gunboats which the enemy had submerged in the fairway in the
hope of blocking the river channel and preventing the victorious
British maritime and war flotillas from reaching Basra. Like most
other operations undertaken by the Turks the effort was badly
bungled, and the channel was left free to our ships.
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