THE CITY OF SINBAD
Arrival at Basra--A city of filth--Transformation by the
British--Introducing sport to the natives--The Arabs and the cinema.
Basra or Busra, the Bastra of Marco Polo, and for ever linked with
the adventures of Sinbad the Sailor, is one of the most important
ports of Asiatic Turkey, and sits on the right bank of the Shatt el
Arab a short distance below the confluence of the Tigris and the
Euphrates.
It is built on low-lying marshy land where the malarial mosquito
leads an energetic and healthy life. Basra proper is about a mile
from the river, up a narrow and malodorous creek, and when the tide
is out the mud of this creek cries out in strange tongues. The
natives, however, seem to thrive upon its nauseating vapours. It is
at once the source of their water supply and the receptacle for
sewerage. In this delectable spot, as indeed throughout Asiatic
Turkey and Persia, sanitary science is still unborn, and the streets
are the dumping-ground for refuse.
The long, narrow bellem, with its pointed prow, in general appearance
not unlike a gondola, is the chief means of communication between the
Shatt {21} el Arab and Basra itself. If the tide is low, the Arab in
charge poles up or down stream, and when you arrive at your
destination you generally pick your way through festering mud to the
landing-place.
One's first feelings are of wonder and bewilderment that the entire
population has not long ago been wiped out by disease. Going up and
down stream at low tide I have seen Arab women rinsing the salad for
the family meal side by side with others dealing with the family
washing. Then the bellem boy, thirsty, would lean over the side of
the craft, scoop up a handful or two of the water, and drink it. As
successors to the dirty and lazy Turk the British in occupation of
Basra have set themselves to remedy this state of affairs, but it is
uphill work. Manners and customs of centuries are not easily laid
aside, and your Asiatic sniffs suspiciously at anything labelled
Sanitary Reform, while the very mention of the word Hygiene sounds to
him like blasphemy against the abominations with which he loves to
surround himself. The Turk never bothered his head whether the
inhabitants lived in unhealthy conditions. When an epidemic broke
out and carried off a certain proportion of the population, the
Turkish Governor would bow his head in meek resignation before the
inscrutable will of Allah.
The architecture of Basra is of a distinctly primitive type. The
houses are built chiefly of sun-dried bricks, and the roofs are flat,
covered with mud laid {22} over rafters of date-wood and surrounded
by a low parapet.
Basra had been used as the British base for the advance against the
Turks on the Tigris. From here had been rationed the army and the
guns that reconquered Kut and opened the difficult road to Bagdad.
The magician's wand of the British soldier-wallah wrought wonders in
the place. Malarial swamps were filled in, and hospitals and
administrative buildings erected. Wharves equipped with giant cranes
sprang into being on the quayside, and, as we were landed, the busy
river scene, with fussy tugs towing huge laden barges, and the
quayside packed with transports, irresistibly recalled some populous
port in the Antipodes or Britain itself, rather than the seaside
capital of a vilayet in Asiatic Turkey.
That Basra had a great future in store for it as a shipping centre
was early recognized by Major-General Sir George McMunn, who for some
time held the post of Inspector-General of Lines of Communications at
Basra. He was one of those rare soldiers with a genius for
organization and a capacity for bringing to bear upon big problems a
wide range of outlook, and he was never hampered by those military
trammels which often mar the professional soldier and make a good
general an exceedingly bad civil administrator. So General McMunn
set to work to give Basra an impetus along the path of commercial
progress. He planned a model city {23} which was to include
residential and business sites, electric tramways, modern hotels, and
public parks. It was a stupendous undertaking, but McMunn
accomplished much in the face of great financial difficulties. He
endowed Basra with a first-class hotel run by a chef and an hotel
staff recruited from London, installed electric light, gave the
evil-smelling town a vigorous spring-cleaning, and with stone
quarried in Arabia buried beneath stout paving the slimy mud of some
of the Basra streets.
Ashar which fronts the Shatt el Arab is really the business centre of
Basra. Its bazaars running parallel with Basra Creek are dark,
evil-smelling, and over-crowded by human bipeds who swarm about ant
fashion, and are born, live, and die in these purlieus.
In the course of an hour during the busy part of the day you can
count on meeting representatives of all the races and creeds of Asia
in the streets and bazaars of Ashar or lower Basra. Here ebbs and
flows the flotsam of the East--Jews, Arabs, Armenians, Kurds,
Persians, Chaldeans (merchants or traffickers these!), and coolies
from India, Burma, and China, with wanderers from the remote khanates
of Russian Turkestan, the latter in quaint headdress and wearing
sheepskin coats whose vicinity is rather trying to sensitive noses
when the thermometer is well above eighty in the shade.
General Byron, with Major Newcombe of the Canadian Contingent,
Captain Eve, some other members of our party, and myself were
quartered in {24} the old Turkish cavalry barracks, while the
remainder went into camp at Makina, two miles out. The Turks, it is
true, were gone never to return, but in the honeycombed recesses of
the crumbling dust-covered walls of Ashar barracks their troopers had
left behind many old friends who, from the very first, displayed an
envenomed animosity towards us, and attacked British officers and men
with a vigour which the Turkish Army itself had never excelled.
Every night raiding parties, defying alike our protective mosquito
nets and the poison-gas effect of Keating's, found their way into our
beds; and every morning we would crawl from between the sheets
bearing visible marks of these night forays.
It is always said, and generally believed, that the British signalize
their occupation of a country by laying down a cricket pitch and
building a church. They did all these things and more at Basra.
There was a garrison church, a simple building with a special care
for the temperature of a Gulf Sunday. There were several sports
clubs, and one at Makina, which might be called the suburb of Ashar,
had good tennis courts. Beyond, in the desert, was a racecourse
where the local Derby and Grand National were run off.
The ordinary native of Iran and of the "Land of the Two Rivers" has
not hitherto shown any marked taste for either mild or violent
physical exercise. But Basra, I found, was a noted exception to
this, and youth of the place were badly bitten by the {25} sports
mania. As the doctors would say, "the disease spread with alarming
rapidity, and spared neither young nor old." After a few weeks
devoted to picking up points as spectators at "soccer" matches, a
native team would secure possession of a rather battered football and
start work, "Basra Mixed" trying conclusions with "Ashar Bazaar," for
example. The rules were neither Rugby nor Association, but a local
extemporization of both; and the dress was not the classic costume of
the British football field, but a medley of all the garbs of Asia.
Stately Arabs in long flowing robes, suffering from the prevailing
sports fever, would forget their dignity to the extent of running
after a football and trying to kick it. Chaldean Christian would
mingle in the scrum with Jew and Mussulman. Individual players
sometimes received the kick intended for the ball. Off the field
this would have led to racial trouble and perhaps bloodshed, but as a
rule these slight departures from the strict football code were
accepted in the best possible spirit, being regarded no doubt as part
of the game itself.
Of course things did not always run so smoothly. Sometimes the ball
was entirely lost sight of, and lay lonely and isolated in some
corner of the field, while the players would resolve themselves into
a sort of Pan-Asian congress on the ethics of games in general.
Everyone spoke at once and in his own tongue. On such occasions a
passing British soldier would be summoned to assist at the
deliberations, {26} and in "Na Poo" Arabic would straighten out the
tangle. Then play would be resumed, everybody bowing to the superior
wisdom of the soldier sahib, and accepting his decision
unquestioningly.
The youth of Basra, more precocious than their elders, converted the
streets of Ashar into a playing-ground where tip-cat, bat and ball,
marbles, diabolo, and sundry other forms of juvenile recreation found
eager devotees at all hours of the day in narrow streets generally
crowded with army transport.
The cinema also exercised a great influence on the native mind.
Never quite understanding its working, he accepted it all
philosophically as part of the travelling outfit of that strange race
of infidels from far away who had chased the Turks from the shores of
the Arabian Sea, who seemed to be able to make themselves into birds
at will, and who rushed over the roadless desert in snorting
horseless carriages. Men such as these were capable of anything, and
when the first cinema film arrived, the Arabs filled to overflowing
the ramshackle building which served as a theatre. In Basra I often
went to the cinema, not so much for the show itself as to watch the
joy with which that primitive child of nature, the Arab, followed the
mishaps and triumphs of the hero through three reels. How they were
moved to tears by his sufferings! And how they shouted with joy when
the villain of the piece was hoist by his own petard and his career
of rascality abruptly and fittingly terminated!
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One thing, I found on talking to some of these native onlookers,
puzzled their minds exceedingly, and that was the morals and manners
of European women as shown on the screen. The Arab is a fervent
stickler for the conventionalities, and it was a great shock to his
religious scruples to see women promenading in low-necked dresses
with uncovered faces, frequenting restaurants with strange men not
their husbands, and imbibing strong drink. "The devil must be kept
busy in Faringistan raking all these shameless creatures into the
bottomless pit!" said one Arab to me, when I asked him what he
thought of the cinema. It was useless to seek to explain that cinema
scenes did not represent the real life of the Englishman or the
American, and that all our women do not earn their living as cinema
artists.
In Basra I never saw a Mohammedan woman frequenting a cinema
performance. Even had she won over her husband's consent to such an
innovation, public opinion would veto her presence there, and she
would not be permitted to look upon this devil's machine illustrating
foreign "wickedness."
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