Brooking had just made a most successful attack on the Euphrates front,
capturing the town of Ramadie, with almost five thousand prisoners. It was
believed to be the intention of the army commander to try to relieve the
pressure against General Allenby's forces in Palestine by attacking the
enemy on all three of their Mesopotamian fronts. Accordingly, we were
ordered to march out after sunset one night, prepared to attack the enemy
position at daybreak. During a short halt by the last rays of the setting
sun I caught sight of a number of Mohammedan soldiers prostrating
themselves toward Mecca in their evening prayers, while their Christian or
pagan comrades looked stolidly on. It was late October, and although the
days were still very hot and oppressive, the nights were almost bitterly
cold. A night-march is always a disagreeable business. The head of the
column checks and halts, and those in the rear have no idea whether it is
an involuntary stop for a few minutes, or whether they are to halt for an
hour or more, owing to some complication of orders. So we stood shivering,
and longed for a smoke, but of course that was strictly forbidden, for the
cigarettes of an army would form a very good indication of its whereabouts
on a dark night. All night we marched and halted, and started on again;
the dust choked us, and the hours seemed interminable, until at last at
two in the morning word was passed along that we could have an hour's
sleep. The greater part of the year in Mesopotamia the regulation army
dress consisted of a tunic and "shorts." These are long trousers cut off
just above the knee, and the wearer may either use wrap puttees, or
leather leggings, or golf stockings. They are a great help in the heat,
as may easily be understood, and they allow, of course, much freer knee
action, particularly when your clothes are wet. The reverse side of the
medal reads that when you try to sleep without a blanket on a cold night,
you find that your knees are uncomfortably exposed. Still we were, most of
us, so drunk with sleep that it would have taken more than that to keep us
awake. At three we resumed our march, and attacked just at dawn. The enemy
had abandoned the first-line positions, and we met with but little
resistance in the second. Our cavalry, which was concentrated at several
points in nullahs (dry river-beds), suffered at the hands of the hostile
aircraft. The Turk had evidently determined to fall back to Tekrit without
putting up a serious defense. They certainly could have given us a much
worse time than they did, for they had dug in well and scientifically.
Among the prisoners we took there were some that proved to be very worth
while. These Turkish officers were, as a whole a good lot--well dressed
and well educated. Many spoke French. There is an excellent gunnery school
at Constantinople, and one of the officers we captured had been a senior
instructor there for many years. We had with us among our intelligence
officers a Captain Bettelheim, born in Constantinople of Belgian
parentage. He had served with the Turks against the Italians and with the
British against the Boers. This gunnery officer turned out to be an old
comrade of his in the Italian War. Many of the officers we got knew him,
for he had been chief of police in Constantinople. Apparently none of them
bore him the slightest ill-will when they found him serving against them.
Among the supplies we captured at Daur were a lot of our own rifles and
ammunition that the Arabs had stolen and sold to the Turks. It was
impossible to entirely stop this, guard our dumps as best we could. On
dark nights they would creep right into camp, and it was never safe to
have the hospital barges tie up to the banks for the night on their way
down the river. On many occasions the Arabs crawled aboard and finished
off the wounded. There was only one thing to be said for the Arab, and
that was that he played no favorite, but attacked, as a rule, whichever
side came handier. We were told, and I believe it to be true, that during
the fighting at Sunnaiyat the Turks sent over to know if we would agree
to a three days' truce, during which time we should join forces against
the Arabs, who were watching on the flank to pick off stragglers or ration
convoys.
That night we bivouacked at Daur, and were unmolested except for the enemy
aircraft that came over and "laid eggs." Next morning we advanced on
Tekrit. Our orders were to make a feint, and if we found that the Turk
meant to stay and fight it out seriously, we were to fall back. Some
gazelles got into the no man's land between us and the Turk, and in the
midst of the firing ran gracefully up the line, stopping every now and
then to stare about in amazement. Later on in the Argonne forest in France
we had the same thing happen with some wild boars. The enemy seemed in no
way inclined to evacuate Tekrit, so in accordance with instructions we
returned to our previous night's encampment at Daur. On the way back we
passed an old "arabana," a Turkish coupé, standing abandoned in the
desert, with a couple of dead horses by it. It may have been used by some
Turkish general in the retreat of two days before. It was the sort of
coupé one associates entirely with well-kept parks and crowded city
streets, and the incongruity of its lonely isolation amid the sand-dunes
caused an amused ripple of comment.
Our instructions were to march back to Samarra early next morning, but
shortly before midnight orders came through from General Maude for us to
advance again upon Tekrit and take it. Next day we halted and took stock
in view of the new orders. The cavalry again suffered at the hands of the
Turkish aircraft. I went to corps headquarters in the afternoon, and a
crowd of "red tabs," as the staff-officers were called, were seated around
a little table having the inevitable tea. A number of the generals had
come in to discuss the plan of attack for the following day. Suddenly a
Turk aeroplane made its appearance, flying quite low, and dropping bombs
at regular intervals. It dropped two, and then a third on a little hill in
a straight line from the staff conclave. It looked as if the next would be
a direct hit, and the staff did the only wise thing, and took cover as
flat on the ground as nature would allow; but the Hun's spacing was bad,
and the next bomb fell some little way beyond. I remember our glee at
what we regarded as a capital joke on the staff. The line-officer's humor
becomes a trifle robust where the "gilded staff" is concerned,
notwithstanding the fact that most staff-officers have seen active and
distinguished service in the line.
Our anti-aircraft guns--"Archies" we called them--were mounted on trucks,
and on account of their weight had some difficulty getting up. I shall not
soon forget our delight when they lumbered into view, for although I never
happened personally to see an aeroplane brought down by an "Archie," there
was no doubt about it but that they did not bomb us with the same
equanimity when our anti-aircrafts were at hand.
[Illustration: Captured Turkish camel corps]
That night we marched out on Tekrit, and as dawn was breaking were ready
to attack. As the mist cleared, an alarming but ludicrous sight met our
eyes. On the extreme right some caterpillar tractors hauling our "heavies"
were advancing straight on Tekrit, as if they had taken themselves for
tanks. They were not long in discovering their mistake, and amid a mixed
salvo they clumsily turned and made off at their best pace, which was not
more than three miles an hour. Luckily, they soon got under some
excellent defilade, but not until they had suffered heavily.
Our artillery did some good work, but while we were waiting to attack we
suffered rather heavily. We had to advance over a wide stretch of open
country to reach the Turkish first lines. By nightfall the second line of
trenches was practically all in our hands. Meanwhile the cavalry had
circled way around the flank up-stream of Tekrit to cut the enemy off if
he attempted to retreat. The town is on the right bank of the Tigris, and
we had a small force that had come up from Samarra on the left bank, for
we had no means of ferrying troops across. Our casualties during the day
had amounted to about two thousand. The Seaforths had suffered heavily,
but no more so than some of the native regiments. In Mesopotamia there
were many changes in the standing of the Indian battalions. The
Maharattas, for instance, had never previously been regarded as anything
at all unusual, but they have now a very distinguished record to take
pride in. The general feeling was that the Gurkhas did not quite live up
to their reputation. But the Indian troops as a whole did so exceedingly
well that there is little purpose in making comparisons amongst them. At
this time, so I was informed, the Expeditionary Force, counting all
branches, totalled about a million, and a very large percentage of this
came from India. We drew our supplies from India and Australia, and it is
interesting to note that we preferred the Australian canned beef and
mutton (bully beef and bully mutton, as it was called) to the American.
At dusk the fighting died down, and we were told to hold on and go over at
daybreak. As I was making my way back to headquarters a general pounced
upon me and told me to get quickly into a car and go as rapidly as
possible to Daur to bring up a motor ration-convoy with fodder for the
cavalry horses and food for the riders. A Ford car happened to pass by,
and he stopped it and shoved me in, with some last hurried injunction. It
was quite fifteen miles back, and the country was so cut up by nullahs or
ravines that in most places it was inadvisable to leave the road, which
was, of course, jammed with a double stream of transport of every
description. When we were three or four miles from Daur a tire blew out.
The driver had used his last spare, so there was nothing to do but keep
going on the rim. The car was of the delivery-wagon type--"pill-boxes"
were what they were known as--and while we were stopped taking stock I
happened to catch sight of a good-sized bedding-roll behind. "Some one's
out of luck," said I to the driver; "whose roll is it?" "The corps
commander's, sir," was his reply. After exhausting my limited vocabulary,
I realized that it was far too late to stop another motor and send this
one back, so I just kept going. Across the bed of one more ravine, the
sand up to the hubs, and we were in the Daur camp. I managed to rank some
one out of a spare tire and started back again. My driver proved unable to
drive at night, at all events at a pace that would put us anywhere before
dawn, so I was forced to take the wheel. By the time I had the convoy
properly located I was rather despondent of the corps commander's temper,
even should I eventually reach him that night, which seemed a remote
chance, for the best any one could do was give me the rough location on a
map. Still, taking my luminous compass, I set out to steer a cross-country
course. I ran into five or six small groups of ambulances filled with
wounded, trying to find their way to Daur, and completely lost. Most had
given up--some were unknowingly headed back for Tekrit. I could do no more
than give them the right direction, which I knew they had no chance of
holding. Of course I could have no headlights, and the ditches were many,
but in some miraculous way, more through good luck than good management, I
did find corps headquarters, and what was better still, the general's
reprimand took the form of bread and ham and a stiff peg of whiskey--the
first food I had had since before daylight.
During the night the Turks evacuated the town. Their forces were certainly
mobile. They could cover the most surprising distances, and live on almost
nothing. We marched in and occupied. White flags were flying from all the
houses, which were not nearly so much damaged from the bombardment as one
would have supposed. This was invariably the case; indeed, it is
surprising to see how much shelling a town can undergo without noticeable
effect. It takes a long time to level a town in the way it has been done
in northern France. In this region the banks of the river average about
one hundred and fifty feet in height, and Tekrit is built at the junction
of two ravines. No two streets are on the same level; sometimes the roofs
of the houses on a lower level serve as the streets for the houses above.
Many of the booths in the bazaar were open and transacting business when
we arrived, an excellent proof of how firmly the Arabs believed in British
fair dealing. Our men bought cigarettes, matches, and vegetables. Yusuf
had lived here three or four years, so I despatched him to get chickens
and eggs for the mess. I ran into Marshall, who was on his way to dine
with the mayor, who had turned out to be an old friend of his. He asked me
to join him, and we climbed up to a very comfortable house, built around a
large courtyard. It was the best meal we had either of us had in
days--great pilaus of rice, excellent chicken, and fresh unleavened bread.
This bread looks like a very large and thin griddle-cake. The Arab uses it
as a plate. Eating with your hands is at first rather difficult. Before
falling to, a ewer is brought around to you, and you are supplied with
soap--a servant pours water from the ewer over your hands, and then gives
you a towel. After eating, the same process is gone through with. There
are certain formalities that must be regarded--one of them being that you
must not eat or drink with your left hand.
In Tekrit we did not find as much in the way of supplies and ammunition as
we had hoped. The Turk had destroyed the greater part of his store. We did
find great quantities of wood, and in that barren, treeless country it was
worth a lot. Most of the inhabitants of Tekrit are raftsmen by profession.
Their rafts have been made in the same manner since before the days of
Xerxes and Darius. Inflated goatskins are used as a basis for a platform
of poles, cut in the up-stream forests. On these, starting from Diarbekr
or Mosul, they float down all their goods. When they reach Tekrit they
leave the poles there, and start up-stream on foot, carrying their
deflated goatskins. The Turks used this method a great deal bringing down
their supplies. In pre-war days the rafts, keleks as they are called,
would often come straight through to Baghdad, but many were always broken
up at Tekrit, for there is a desert route running across to Hit on the
Euphrates, and the supplies from up-river were taken across this in camel
caravans.
The aerodrome lay six or seven miles above the town, and I was anxious to
see it and the comfortable billets the Germans had built themselves. I
found a friend whose duties required motor transportation, and we set off
in his car. A dust-storm was raging, and we had some difficulty in finding
our way through the network of trenches. Once outside, the storm became
worse, and we could only see a few yards in front of us. We got completely
lost, and after nearly running over the edge of the bluff, gave up the
attempt, and slowly worked our way back.
When we started off on the advance I was reading Xenophon's _Anabasis_. On
the day when we were ordered to march on Tekrit a captain of the Royal
Flying Corps, an ex-master at Eton, was in the mess, and when I told him
that I was nearly out of reading matter, he said that next time he came
over he would drop me Plutarch's _Lives_. I asked him to drop it at corps
headquarters, and that a friend of mine there would see that I got it. The
next day in the heat of the fighting a plane came over low, signalling
that it was dropping a message. As the streamer fell close by, there was a
rush to pick it up and learn how the attack was progressing. Fortunately,
I was far away when the packet was opened and found to contain the book
that the pilot had promised to drop for me.
After we had been occupying the town for a few days, orders came through
to prepare to fall back on Samarra. The line of communication was so long
that it was impossible to maintain us, except at too great a cost to the
transportation facilities possessed by the Expeditionary Forces. Eight or
ten months later, when we had more rails in hand, a line was laid to
Tekrit, which had been abandoned by the Turks under the threat of our
advance to Kirkuk, in the Persian hills. It was difficult to explain to
the men, particularly to the Indians, the necessity for falling back. All
they could understand was that we had taken the town at no small cost, and
now we were about to give it up.
For several days I was busy helping to prepare rafts to take down the
timber and such other captured supplies as were worth removing. The river
was low, leaving a broad stretch of beach below the town, and to this we
brought down the poles. Several camels had died near the water, probably
from the results of our shelling, and the hot weather soon made them very
unpleasant companions. The first day was bad enough; the second was worse.
The natives were not in the least affected. They brought their washing and
worked among them--they came down and drew their drinking-water from the
river, either beside the camels or down-stream of them, with complete
indifference. It is true this water percolates drop by drop through large,
porous clay pots before it is drunk, but even so, it would have seemed
that they would have preferred its coming from up-stream of the derelict
"ships of the desert." On the third day, to their mild surprise, we
managed with infinite difficulty to tow the camels out through the shallow
water into the main stream.
We finally got our rafts built, over eighty in number, and arranged for
enough Arab pilots to take care of half of them. On the remainder we put
Indian sepoys. They made quite a fleet when we finally got them all
started down-stream. Two were broken up in the rapids near Daur, the rest
reached Samarra in safety on the second day.
We had a pleasant camp on the bluffs below Tekrit--high-enough above the
plain to be free of the ordinary dust-storms, and the prospect of
returning to Samarra was scarcely more pleasant to us than to the men.
Five days after we had taken the town, we turned our backs on it and
marched slowly back to rail-head.
III
PATROLLING THE RUINS OF BABYLON
We returned to find Samarra buried in dust and more desolate than ever. A
few days later came the first rain-storm. After a night's downpour the air
was radiantly clear, and it was joy to ride off on the rounds, no longer
like Zeus, enveloped in a cloud.
It was a relief to see the heat-stroke camps broken up. During the summer
months our ranks were fearfully thinned through the sun. Although it was
the British troops that suffered most, the Indians were by no means
immune. Before the camps were properly organized the percentage of
mortality was exceedingly large, for the only effective treatment
necessitates the use of much ice. The patient runs a temperature which it
was impossible to control until the ice-making machines were installed.
The camps were situated in the coolest and most comfortable places, but in
spite of everything, death was a frequent result, and recoveries were apt
to be only partial. Men who had had a bad stroke were rarely of any
further use in the country.
Another sickness of the hot season which now began to claim less victims
was sand-fly fever. This fever, which, as its name indicates, was
contracted from the bites of sand-flies, varied widely in virulence.
Sometimes it was so severe that the victim had to be evacuated to India;
as a rule he went no farther than a base hospital at Baghdad or Amara.
One of the things about which the Tommy felt most keenly in the
Mesopotamian campaign was that there was no such thing as a "Cushy
Blighty." To take you to "Blighty" a wound must mean permanent
disablement, otherwise you either convalesced in the country or, at best,
were sent to India. In the same manner there were no short leaves, for
there was nowhere to go. At the most rapid rate of travelling it took two
weeks to get to India, and once there, although the people did everything
possible in the way of entertaining, the enlisted man found little to make
him less homesick than he had been in Mesopotamia. Transportation was so
difficult and the trip so long that only under very exceptional
circumstances was leave to England given. One spring it was announced
that officers wishing to get either married or divorced could apply for
leave with good hopes of success. Many applied, but a number returned
without having fulfilled either condition, so that the following year no
leaves were given upon those grounds. The army commander put all divorce
cases into the hands of an officer whose civil occupation had been the
law, and who arranged them without the necessity of granting home leave.
A week after our return to Samarra a rumor started that General Maude was
down with cholera. For some time past there had been sporadic cases,
though not enough to be counted an epidemic. The sepoys had suffered
chiefly, but not exclusively, for the British ranks also supplied a quota
of victims. An officer on the staff of the military governor of Baghdad
had recently died. We heard that the army commander had the virulent form,
and knew there could be no chance of his recovery. The announcement of his
death was a heavy blow to all, and many were the gloomy forebodings. The
whole army had implicit confidence in their leader, and deeply mourned his
loss. The usual rumors of foul play and poison went the rounds, but I
soon after heard Colonel Wilcox--in pre-war days an able and renowned
practitioner of Harley Street--say that it was an undoubted case of
cholera. The colonel had attended General Maude throughout the illness.
The general had never taken the cholera prophylactic, although Colonel
Wilcox had on many occasions urged him to do so, the last time being only
a few days before the disease developed.
[Illustration: Towing an armored car across a river]
[Illustration: Reconnaissance]
General Marshall, who had commanded General Maude's old division, the
Thirteenth, took over. The Seventeenth lost General Gillman, who thereupon
became chief of staff. This was a great loss to his division, for he was
the idol of the men, but the interest of the Expeditionary Force was
naturally and justly given precedence.
In due course my transfer to the Motor Machine-Gun Corps came through
approved, and I was assigned to the Fourteenth battery of light-armored
motor-cars, commanded by Captain Nigel Somerset, whose grandfather, Lord
Raglan, had died, nursed by Florence Nightingale, while in command of the
British forces in the Crimean War. Somerset himself was in the infantry at
the outbreak of the war and had been twice wounded in France. He was an
excellent leader, possessing as he did dash, judgment, and personal
magnetism. A battery was composed of eight armored cars, subdivided into
four sections. There was a continually varying number of tenders and
workshop lorries. The fighting cars were Rolls-Royces, the others Napiers
and Fords.
At that time there were only four batteries in the country. We were army
troops--that is to say, we were not attached to any individual brigade, or
division, or corps, but were temporarily assigned first here and then
there, as the need arose.
In attacks we worked in co-operation with the cavalry. Although on
occasions they tried to use us as tanks, it was not successful, for our
armor-plate was too light. We were also employed in raiding, and in
quelling Arab uprisings. This latter use threw us into close touch with
the political officers. These were a most interesting lot of men. They
were recruited in part from the army, but largely from civil life. They
took over the civil administration of the conquered territory and
judiciously upheld native justice. Many remarkable characters were
numbered among them--men who had devoted a lifetime to the study of the
intricacies of Oriental diplomacy. They were distinguished by the white
tabs on the collars of their regulation uniforms; but white was by no
means invariably the sign of peace, for many of the political officers
were killed, and more than once in isolated towns in unsettled districts
they sustained sieges that lasted for several days. We often took a
political officer out with us on a raid or reconnaissance, finding his
knowledge of the language and customs of great assistance. Sir Percy Cox
was at the head, with the title "Chief Political Officer" and the rank of
general. His career in the Persian Gulf has been as distinguished as it is
long, and his handling of the very delicate situations arising in
Mesopotamia has called forth the unstinted praise of soldier and civilian
alike.