the only woman, other than the nursing sisters, officially connected with
the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Forces. Miss Bell speaks Arabic fluently
and correctly. She first became interested in the East when visiting her
uncle at Teheran, where he was British minister. She has made noteworthy
expeditions in Syria and Mesopotamia, and has written a number of
admirable books, among which are _Armurath to Armurath_ and _The Desert
and the Sown_. The undeniable position which she holds must appear doubly
remarkable when the Mohammedan official attitude toward women is borne in
mind. Miss Bell has worked steadily and without a leave in this trying
climate, and her tact and judgment have contributed to the British success
to a degree that can scarcely be overestimated.
The headquarters of the various batteries were in Baghdad. There we had
our permanent billets, and stores. We would often be ordered out in
sections to be away varying lengths of time, though rarely more than a
couple of months. The workshops' officer stayed in permanent charge and
had the difficult task of keeping all the cars in repair. The supply of
spare parts was so uncertain that much skill and ingenuity were called
for, and possessed to a full degree by Lieutenant Linnell of the
Fourteenth.
A few days after I joined I set off with Somerset and one of the battery
officers, Lieutenant Smith, formerly of the Black Watch. We were ordered
to do some patrolling near the ruins of Babylon. Kerbela and Nejef, in the
quality of great Shiah shrines, had never been particularly friendly to
the Turks, who were Sunnis--but the desert tribes are almost invariably
Sunnis, and this coupled with their natural instinct for raiding and
plundering made them eager to take advantage of any interregnum of
authority. We organized a sort of native mounted police, but they were
more picturesque than effective. They were armed with weapons of varying
age and origin--not one was more recent than the middle of the last
century. Now the Budus, the wild desert folk, were frequently equipped
with rifles they had stolen from us, so in a contest the odds were
anything but even.
We took up our quarters at Museyib, a small town on the banks of the
Euphrates, six or eight miles above the Hindiyah Barrage, a dam finished a
few years before, and designed to irrigate a large tract of potentially
rich country. We patrolled out to Mohamediyah, a village on the caravan
desert route to Baghdad, and thence down to Hilleh, around which stand the
ruins of ancient Babylon. The rainy season was just beginning, and it was
obvious that the patrolling could not be continuous, for a twelve-hour
rain would make the country impassable to our heavy cars for two or three
days. We were fortunate in having pleasant company in the officers of a
Punjabi infantry battalion and an Indian cavalry regiment. Having
commandeered an ancient caravan-serai for garage and billets, we set to
work to clean it out and make it as waterproof as circumstances would
permit. An oil-drum with a length of iron telegraph-pole stuck in its top
provided a serviceable stove, and when it rained we played bridge or read.
I was ever ready to reduce my kit to any extent in order to have space for
some books, and Voltaire's _Charles XII_ was the first called upon to
carry me to another part of the world from that in which I at the moment
found myself. I always kept a volume of some sort in my pocket, and during
halts I would read in the shade cast by the turret of my car. The two
volumes of Layard's _Early Adventures_ proved a great success. The writer,
the great Assyriologist, is better known as the author of _Nineveh and
Babylon_. The book I was reading had been written when he was in his early
twenties, but published for the first time forty years later. Layard
started life as a solicitor's clerk in London, but upon being offered a
post in India he had accepted and proceeded thither overland. On reaching
Baghdad he made a side-trip into Kurdistan, and became so enamored of the
life of the tribesmen that he lived there with them on and off for two
years--years filled with adventure of the most thrilling sort.
I had finished a translation of Xenophon shortly before and found it a
very different book than when I was plodding drearily through it in the
original at school. Here it was all vivid and real before my eyes, with
the scene of the great battle of Cunaxa only a few miles from Museyib.
Babylon was in sight of the valiant Greeks, but all through the loss of a
leader it was never to be theirs. On the ground itself one could
appreciate how great a masterpiece the retreat really was, and the
hardiness of the soldiers which caused Xenophon to regard as a "snow
sickness" the starvation and utter weariness which made the numbed men lie
down and die in the snow of the Anatolian highlands. He remarks naïvely
that if you could build a fire and give them something hot to eat, the
sickness was dispelled!
The rain continued to fall and the mud became deeper and deeper. It was
all the Arabs could do to get their produce into market. The bazaar was
not large, but was always thronged. I used to sit in one of the
coffee-houses and drink coffee or tea and smoke the long-stemmed
water-pipe, the narghile. My Arabic was now sufficiently fluent for
ordinary conversation, and in these clubs of the Arab I could hear all the
gossip. Bazaar rumors always told of our advances long before they were
officially given out. Once in Baghdad I heard of an attack we had
launched. On going around to G.H.Q. I mentioned the rumor, and found that
it was not yet known there, but shortly after was confirmed. I had already
in Africa met with the "native wireless," and it will be remembered how in
the Civil War the plantation negroes were often the first to get news of
the battles. It is something that I have never heard satisfactorily
explained.
In the coffee-houses, besides smoking and gossiping, we also played games,
either chess or backgammon or munkula. This last is an exceedingly
primitive and ancient game--it must date almost as far back as jackstones
or knucklebones. I have seen the natives in Central Africa and the Indians
in the far interior of Brazil playing it in almost identical form. In
Mesopotamia the board was a log of wood sliced in two and hinged together.
In either half five or six holes were scooped out, and the game consisted
in dropping cowrie shells or pebbles into the holes. When the number in a
particular hollow came to a certain amount with the addition of the one
dropped in, you won the contents.
In most places the coffee was served in Arab fashion, not Turkish. In the
latter case it is sweet and thick and the tiny cup is half full of
grounds; in the former the coffee is clear and bitter and of unsurpassable
flavor. The diminutive cup is filled several times, but each time there is
only a mouthful poured in. Tea is served in small glasses, without milk,
but with lots of sugar. The spoons in the glasses are pierced with holes
like tea-strainers so that the tea may be stirred without spilling it.
There was in particular one booth I could never tire watching. The old man
who owned it was a vender of pickles. In rows before him were bottles and
jars and bowls containing pickles of all colors--red, yellow, green,
purple, white, and even blue. Above his head were festoons of gayly
painted peppers. He had a long gray beard, wore a green turban and a
flowing robe with a gold-braided waistcoat. In the half-lights of the
crowded, covered bazaar his was a setting in which Dulac would have
revelled.
At Museyib we led a peaceful, uneventful existence--completely shut in by
the mud. We had several bazaar rumors about proposed attacks upon the
engineers who were surveying for a railroad that was to be built to Hilleh
for the purpose of transporting the grain-crop to the capital. Nothing
materialized, however. The conditions were too poor to induce even the
easily encouraged Arabs to raid. One morning when I was wandering around
the gardens on the outskirts of the town I came across some jackals and
shot one with my Webley revolver. It was running and I fired a number of
times, and got back to town to find that my shooting had started all sorts
of excitement and reports of uprisings.
Christmas came and the different officers' messes organized celebrations.
The mess we had joined was largely Scotch, so we decided we must make a
haggis, that "chieftain of the pudden race." The ingredients, save for the
whiskey, were scarcely orthodox, but if it was not a success, at least no
one admitted it.
As soon as the weather cleared we made a run to Kerbela--a lovely town,
with miles of gardens surrounding it and two great mosques. The bazaar was
particularly attractive--plentifully supplied with everything. We got
quantities of the deliciously flavored pistachio-nuts which were difficult
to obtain elsewhere, as well as all sorts of fruit and vegetables. There
were no troops stationed in the vicinity, so the prices were lower than
usual. The orders were that we should go about in armed bands, but I never
saw any marked indication of hostility. The British, true to the
remarkable tact and tolerance that contributes so largely to their success
in dealing with native races, posted Mohammedan sepoys as guards on the
mosques, and no one but Moslems could even go into the courtyards. If this
had not been done, there would have been many disturbances and uprisings,
for the Arabs and Persians felt so strongly on the question that they
regarded with marked hostility those who even gazed into the mosque
courtyards. Why it is so different in Constantinople I do not know, but
there was certainly no hostility shown us in Santa Sophia nor in the
mosque of Omar in Jerusalem. Be that as it may, forbidden fruit is always
sweet, and the Tommies were inclined to force an entrance. During a change
of guard a Tommy who had his curiosity and initiative stimulated through
recourse to arrick, the fiery liquor distilled from dates, stole into the
most holy mosque in Kerbela. By a miracle he was got out unharmed, but for
a few hours a general uprising with an attendant massacre of unbelievers
was feared.
The great mosque lost much of its dignity through an atrocious clock-tower
standing in the courtyard in front of it. It had evidently been found too
expensive to cover this tower with a golden scale to shine in the sun, so
some ingenious architect hit upon the plan of papering it with flattened
kerosene-tins. It must have glinted gloriously at first, but weather and
rain had rusted the cans and they presented but a sorry spectacle. From
the thousand and one uses to which these oil-cans have been put by the
native, one is inclined to think that the greatest benefit that has been
conferred on the natives by modern civilization is from the hands of the
Standard Oil Company.
There were a fair number of Indians living in Kerbela before the war, for
devout Shiahs are anxious to be buried near the martyred sons of Ali, and
when they are unable to move to Kerbela in their lifetime they frequently
make provisions that their remains may be transported thither. The British
found it a convenient abode for native rulers whom they were forced to
depose but still continued to pension.
[Illustration: The Lion of Babylon]
[Illustration: A dragon on the palace wall]
Hilleh, which stands near the ruins of ancient Babylon, is a modern town
very much like Museyib. I never had a chance to study the ruins at any
length. Several times we went over the part that had been excavated by the
Germans immediately before the war. I understand that this is believed to
be the great palace where Belshazzar saw the handwriting on the wall. It
is built of bricks, each one of which is stamped in cuneiform characters.
There are very fine bas-reliefs of animals, both mythical and real. In the
centre is the great stone lion, massively impressive, standing over the
prostrate form of a man. The lion has suffered from fire and man; there
have even been chips made in it recently by Arab rifles, probably not
wantonly, but in some skirmish. Standing alone in its majesty in the midst
of ruin and desolation amid the black tents of a people totally unable to
construct or even appreciate anything of a like nature, it gave one
much to think over and moralize about. The ruins of Babylon have been
excavated only in very small part; there are great isolated mounds which
have never been touched, and you can still pick up in the sand bits of
statuary, and the cylinders that were used as seal-rings. The great city
of Seleucia on the Tigris was built largely with bricks and masonry
brought by barge from the ruins of Babylon through the canal that joined
the two rivers.
The prophecy of Isaiah has fallen true:
And Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldees'
excellency, shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah.
It shall never be inhabited, neither shall it be dwelt in from
generation to generation: neither shall the Arabian pitch tent
there; neither shall the shepherds make their fold there.
But wild beasts of the desert shall lie there; and their houses
shall be full of doleful creatures; and owls shall dwell there,
and satyrs shall dance there.
And the wild beasts of the islands shall cry in their desolate
houses, and dragons in their pleasant palaces: and her time is
near to come, and her days shall not be prolonged.
A few days after Christmas, we were ordered to return to Baghdad. The
going was still bad. We had a Ford tender in advance to find and warn us
of the softest spots. Once it got into the middle of such a bottomless bog
that, after trying everything else, I hit upon the idea of rolling it out.
It was built all enclosed like a bread-van, and we turned it over and over
until we had it clear of the mud. We had hard work with the heavy
cars--sometimes we could tow one out with another, but frequently that
only resulted in getting the two stuck. Once when the cars were badly
bogged I went to a near-by Arab village to get help. I told the head man
that I wanted bundles of brush to throw in front of the cars in order to
make some sort of a foundation to pass them over. He at once started
turning out his people to aid us, but after he had got a number of loads
under way he caught sight of one of his wives, who, instead of coming to
our assistance, was washing some clothes in a copper caldron by the fire.
There followed a scene which demonstrated that even an Arab is by no means
always lord of his own household. The wife refused to budge; the Arab
railed and stormed, but she went calmly on with her washing, paying no
more attention to his fury than if he were a fractious, unreasonable
child. At length, driven to a white heat of rage, the head man upset the
caldron into the fire with his foot. The woman, without a word, got up and
stalked into a near-by hut, from which she refused to emerge. There was
nothing for her discomfited adversary to do but go on with his rounds.
By manoeuvring and digging and towing we managed to make seven miles after
fourteen hours' work that first day. Night found us close beside an Arab
village, from which I got a great bowl of buffalo milk to put into the
men's coffee. Early in the morning we were off again. The going was so
much better that we were able to make Baghdad at ten o'clock in the
evening.
IV
SKIRMISHES AND RECONNAISSANCES ALONG THE KURDISH FRONT
We spent a few days making repairs and outfitting before starting off
again. This time our destination was Deli Abbas, the headquarters of the
Thirteenth Division. The town is situated in the plains below the
foot-hills of the Persian Mountains, on the banks of the Khalis Canal,
some seventy miles north-east of Baghdad. At dawn we passed out of the
north gate, close to where General Maude is buried, and whirled across the
desert for thirty miles to Bakuba, a prosperous city on the banks of the
Diyala. From the junction of the greater Zab down to Kurna, where the
Euphrates joins, this stream is the most important affluent of the Tigris.
It was one of those bright, sparkling mornings on which merely to be alive
and breathe is a joy. We passed a number of caravans, bringing carpets and
rugs from Persia, or fruit and vegetables from the rich agricultural
district around Bakuba. The silks manufactured here are of a fine quality
and well known throughout the country.
After passing the big aerodrome near the town, the going became very bad;
we struggled along through the village of Deltawa, in and out of
unfathomable ditches. The rivers were in flood, and we ran into lakes and
swamps that we cautiously skirted. Dark overtook us in the middle of a
network of bogs, but we came upon an outpost of Welsh Fusiliers and spent
the night with them. We had smashed the bottom plate of one of the cars,
so that all the oil ran out of the crank-case, but with a side of the
ever-useful kerosene tin we patched the car up temporarily and pushed off
at early dawn. Our route wound through groves of palms surrounding the
tumble-down tomb of some holy man, occasional collections of squalid
little huts, and in the intervening "despoblado" we would catch sight of a
jackal crouching in the hollow or slinking off through the scrub. Deli
Abbas proved a half-deserted straggling town which gave evidence of having
once seen prosperous days. Some Turkish aeroplanes heralded our arrival.
In front of us rose the Jebel Hamrin--Red Hills--beyond them the
snow-clad peaks of the Kurdish Range. A few months previous we had
captured the passes over the Jebel, and we were now busy repairing and
improving the roads--in particular that across the Abu Hajjar, not for
nothing named by the Arabs the "Father of Stones." Whenever the going
permitted we went out on reconnaissances--rekkos, as we called them. They
varied but slightly; the one I went on the day after reaching Deli Abbas
might serve as model. We started at daybreak and ran to a little village
called Ain Lailah, the Spring of Night, a lovely name for the small clump
of palm-trees tucked away unexpectedly in a hollow among barren
foot-hills. There we picked up a surveyor--an officer whose business it
was to make maps for the army. We passed through great herds of camels,
some with small children perched on their backs, who joggled about like
sailors on a storm-tossed ship, as the camels made away from the cars.
There were villages of the shapeless black tents of the nomads huddled in
among the desolate dunes. We picked up a Turk deserter who was trying to
reach our lines. He said that his six comrades had been killed by Arabs.
Shortly afterward we ran into a cavalry patrol, but the men escaped over
some very broken ground before we could satisfactorily come to terms with
them. It was lucky for the deserter that we found him before they did, for
his shrift would have been short. We got back to camp at half past eight,
having covered ninety-two miles in our windings--a good day's work.
Each section had two motorcycles attached to it--jackals, as one of the
generals called them, in apt reference to the way in which jackals
accompany a lion when hunting. The cyclists rode ahead to spy out the
country and the best course to follow. When we got into action they would
drop behind, and we used them to send messages back to camp. The best
motorcyclist we had was a Swiss named Milson. He was of part English
descent, and came at once from Switzerland at the outbreak of the war to
enlist. When he joined he spoke only broken English but was an exceedingly
intelligent man and had been attending a technical college. I have never
seen a more skilful rider; he could get his cycle along through the mud
when we were forced to carry the others, and no one was more cool and
unconcerned under fire. The personnel of the battery left nothing to be
desired. One was proud to serve among such a fine set of men. Corporal
Summers drove the car in which I usually rode, and I have never met with a
better driver or one who understood his car so thoroughly, and possessed
that intangible sympathy with it which is the gift of a few, but can be
never attained.
We were still in the rainy season. We had to travel as light as possible,
and all we could bring were forty-pounder tents, which correspond to the
American dog-tent. Very low, they withstood in remarkable fashion the
periodical hurricanes of wind and rain. They kept us fairly dry, too, for
we were careful to ditch them well. There was room for two men to sleep in
the turret of a Rolls, and they could spread a tarpaulin over the top to
keep the rain from coming in through the various openings. The balance of
the men had a communal tent or slept in the tenders. The larger tents in
the near-by camps blew down frequently, but with us it happened only
occasionally. There are happier moments than those spent in the inky
blackness amid a torrential deluge, when you try to extricate yourself
from the wet, clinging folds of falling canvas.
Time hung heavily when the weather was bad, and we were cooped up inside
our tents without even a hostile aeroplane to shoot at. One day when the
going was too poor to take out the heavy cars, I set off in a tender to
visit another section of the battery that was stationed thirty or forty
miles away in the direction of Persia, close by a town called Kizil Robat.
We had a rough trip, with several difficult fords to cross. It was only
through working with the icy water above our waists that we won through
the worst, amid the shouts of "Shabash, Sahib!" ("Well done!") from the
onlooking Indian troops. I reached the camp to find the section absent on
a reconnaissance, for the country was better drained than that over which
we were working. A few minutes later one of the cyclists came in with the
news that the cars were under heavy fire about twenty-five miles away and
one of them was badly bogged. I immediately loaded all the surplus men and
eight Punjabis from a near-by regiment into the tenders. We reached the
scene just after the disabled car had been abandoned. Some of the Turks
were concealed in a village two hundred and fifty yards away; the rest
were behind some high irrigation embankments. The free car had been
unable to circle around or flank them because of the nature of the
terrain. The men had not known that the village was occupied and had
bogged down almost at the same time that the Turks opened fire. By
breaking down an irrigation ditch the enemy succeeded in further flooding
the locality where the automobile was trapped. The Turks made it hot for
the men when they tried to dig out the car. The bullets spattered about
them. It was difficult to tell how many Turks we accounted for. As dark
came on, the occupants of the disabled car abandoned it and joined the
other one, which was standing off the enemy but had lost all four tires
and was running on its rims. We held a consultation and decided to stay
where we were until dawn. We had scarcely made the decision when one of
our cyclists arrived with orders from the brigade commander to return
immediately. Although exceedingly loath to leave the armored car, we had
no other course than to obey.
It was after midnight by the time we made back to camp. We were told that
a small attack had been planned for the morning, and that then we could go
out with the troops and recover our car, using some artillery horses to
drag it free. The troops soon began filing past, but we didn't pull out
till three o'clock, by which time we were reinforced by an armored car
from another battery. We were held back behind the advanced cavalry until
daylight, and felt certain that the Turks would have either destroyed or
succeeded in removing our car. Nor were we wrong, for just as we breasted
the hill that brought the scene of yesterday's engagement into view, we
saw the smoke of an explosion and the men running back into the village.
We cleared the village with the help of a squadron of the Twenty-First
cavalry, and found that the car had been almost freed during the night. It
was a bad wreck, but we were able to tow it. I wished to have a reckoning
with the village head man, and walked to an isolated group of houses a few
hundred yards to the left of the village. As I neared them a lively
fusillade opened and I had to take refuge in a convenient irrigation
ditch. The country was so broken that it was impossible for us to operate,
so we towed the car back to camp.
[Illustration: Hauling out a badly bogged fighting car]
[Illustration: A Mesopotamian garage]