Weller's War

by George Weller

  Like Yugoslavia's Peter,* Feisal has known what it is to be fatherless during his princeship. His young father, King Ghazi, was killed when he drove his car into a telegraph pole six years ago. His thin-faced aristocratic grandfather was Feisal I, who rode into Damascus after the last war with the British poet and adventurer T.E. Lawrence and the boy's great-grandfather, the first Arab King Hussein to whom the British promised an Arab empire as the price of his support against the Turks in that war. These almost legendary ancestors weigh heavily on the sober-faced boy king. Every day he lunches with the beautiful Queen Mother, Aliah, but her kindest ministrations cannot quite compensate for Feisal being an only child and fatherless.

  Feisal has two palaces, one a yellow brick affair called Bilat Meliki, where red-coated, blue-trousered Negro and Arab guards sweep him enormous salutes, and another palace, of Walt Disney-like outlines, on the muddy Tigris near Baghdad's outskirts. The former is his schoolroom, ever fragrant with year-round blossoms in the surrounding gardens. The latter is his residence and playground.

  Feisal's dearest ambition is to take an airplane ride. But such value does Iraq place on the king, that he cannot go. “The nearest I ever came was one day when they let me sit in one taxiing around the field,” he said wistfully.

  Feisal has found something near to a father in Regent Prince Abdul Ilah, his 31-year-old uncle. Abdul Ilah is young enough to swim and ride with Feisal like an elder brother but old enough to have authority. Of Feisal, affable Prince Abdul Ilah says: “I notice the king only asks permission to do things when he knows it will be granted. One day I took him to the air field and jokingly asked whether he wanted to fly. Feisal refused to show how much he really wanted to go up, because he knew it was impossible.” Feisal's only regular playmate is Raad, a 9-year-old cousin.

  All of this family are descended directly from Mohammed through the Hashemite line, and among pious Muslims they have this advantage over the Arab world's eldest king, Ibn Saud, who is not descended from the Prophet.

  Among Feisal's favorite toys are American electric trains. He modestly showed me a Boy Scout map he'd drawn of an imaginary site, the X-Bar-Y Ranch in Texas. Feisal listened eagerly when told that parts of western Texas resembled Iraq, with lonely rivers and wide plains. It was evident that the Arab love of horses attracted him to American cowboys.

  The plan is for Feisal to study here until fifteen, then go abroad for two years before ascending the throne at eighteen, in 1953. Feisal's future colleagues in the government are mostly products of American secondary education, since Iraq's chief pre-university schools are Baghdad College, run by American Jesuits, and the American School for Boys, run by two American missionaries.

  ACROSS BLAZING SANDS:

  They're Out for a Torrid Time

  Baghdad, Iraq—April 25, 1945

  Every eight days an American caravan of soldiers, paralleling ancient camel trails, travels from Tel Aviv (in Palestine) to Baghdad. The soldiers are heat-worn veterans of the battle of the Persian Gulf, the battle to supply the Soviet Union with aircraft, vehicles, supplies and food. From Baghdad the soldiers go by rail back to their posts on the steaming Persian Gulf.

  To gain the relief of the green fields, mountain air and civilized atmosphere of the Holy Land, this truckborne caravan has traveled three days from Iraq. The desert journey amounts to about 700 miles each way.

  The usual way for officers and correspondents to traverse the desert is by air, a three-hour journey. To find out how the Persian Gulf Command was able to maintain this trans-desert shuttle, the writer accompanied a column commanded by Lieutenant Wilbur MacDuffie of Atlanta, a tall amiable officer in a jeep. We slept two nights in the desert.

  Even while the Baghdad-bound caravan was ranging itself in front of the tents of Camp Tel-Litwinsky outside the modern Jewish city of Tel Aviv, another caravan was approaching under the command of a thin brown Texan, Lieutenant John Cochran. MacDuffie and Cochran have worked out a tight schedule, in spite of heat and breakdowns, and the Mediterranean-bound and Mesopotamia-bound caravans pass each other on parallel highways of the Plain of Sharon.

  “Where to?” the m.p. demanded at the gate of Tel-Litwinsky. “The Persian Gulf,” answered the redheaded driver of the lead camel-truck. The caravan had sixteen ton-and-half six-wheel personnel carriers, with twelve men or more facing each other on lengthwise seats across an aisleful of luggage and provisions. The big six-wheelers had their sides lashed down with canvas against sun and sand, and three were pulling trailers containing food, spare parts, extra gas and lubricants. The next to last vehicle was the ambulance. The commanding officer, MacDuffie, dressed like everyone else in green fatigues and with a leave-is-over air, took the tail of the column in his jeep. At every breakdown in the desert, however slight, MacDuffie stopped and did not proceed until the truck was repaired.

  Arabs and Jews, working in their fields, paused to watch and sometimes to wave at the caravan. They understood well the letters USA on the doors, but could not figure out the word “American” because it was written in Russian script, for use in northern Iran on the lend-lease line.

  Just as the caravan turned from the Plain of Sharon into the often embattled Plain of Esdraelon, on a route used by Canaanites, Egyptians, Jews, Philistines, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, French, British and other Americans en route to the former American bomber bases around Acre and Haifa, the first trucks of the new convoy just arriving from Mesopotamia were sighted. Their desert trip was over. Their canvas was rolled up, they were howling in anticipation of Tel Aviv's beaches and nightclubs, and they shouted demands for useful telephone numbers as they went into the Plain of Sharon. … The eastbound convoy's members waved back.

  The caravan passed the place where Saul called up the Witch of Endor and the prophet Samuel. They turned into the Plain of Armageddon, with green Jewish settlements on surrounding hills. In some trucks a G.I. who had his mimeographed guide reminded his friends that Gideon, Deborah, Cleopatra, Vespasian, Pompey, Antony, Titus, Napoleon and Allenby had all passed this way. This was soldiers' country, future as well as past, for here, according to the Book of Revelation, is to be fought the final battle between good and evil.

  The G.I.s are still talking about the last Palestine girls they met. “So this lil' gal says to me, ‘You ain't from no New Yawk, not with thet accent you got,’ an' Ah says to huh, ‘Oh, yassum, Ah'm from thuh Bronx, me.’” The general view is that the Palestine girls, whether in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem or Haifa, know much about the Land of Promise beyond the Atlantic and would be glad if they could enter there.

  Where Armageddon enters the Valley of Jezreel, on the way down into the Jordan, the redheaded corporal who leads—Corporal Henry Moen—observes a column of Arab cavalrymen in a big field by the roadside. These other soldiers are members of the Druze Legion, recruited by the British from the fierce tribesmen of the Jebel Druze in southern Syria. Their fine Arab horses are brown and white, divided in patrols by colors. Every fifty miles, without orders from MacDuffie, Moen halts the column and waits for stragglers or breakdowns to catch up. When he halts here, the brigadier commanding the Druze Legion, a vigorous middle-aged Englishman, invites the Americans to come and watch the exercise.

  “This is the parade we shall do on V-Day in Jerusalem,” says the British officer, speaking from the back of his Arab horse.

  Spilling out of their trucks, the Americans watch four patrols of Arab horses go through a complex series of interweaving chains and marches. Carrying lances with pennons, the Druzes do four-and eight-horse wheels, cake-walks, daisy chains, and in-and-out maneuvers. At the end, the Americans burst into handclapping.

  With the full green length of the river below, the desert-bound Americans pass a Sea Level sign and continue down. They cross the Jordan where its rapids are hardly 100 feet wide, and begin ascending long zigzags into pure Arab country, the British mandate of Transjordania, kingdom of the eldest scion of the line of the Prophet. The country grows bare and thin, the gra
ss scarce. The fort on the east side of the river is smaller and weaker than that on the west, though both are British.

  Above the tumbling Jordan, just below the fort, the caravan members break out their K-ration. It is 11 o'clock, and the sun is blinding. The drivers put on their wide canvas-and-leather belts, used on the rough roads of the Irano-Russian border to prevent internal bleeding. Sergeant Linton Revill is the caravan's veteran, having helped set up its route. “We were the size of an Arab camel caravan at first,” he says. “We could take only about fifty men, in four trucks. At times it looked as though the heat would lick us. Last summer it was 130° in the shade, 170° in the sun. Your body was the coolest object around, but that was always around 103°.”

  About two in the afternoon, on the edge of the flinty desert, the caravan pulls into camp at Marfrak in Transjordania. Everyone is thick with dust and bumped into weariness. Caution: “Park everything you have under your cot; the Arabs sometimes get through the barbed wire and reach under the tents.”

  In the northern distance rise the forbidding hills of the wild Jebel Druze in Syria, whose insurgent tribesmen held at bay a whole French army after the last war. Syria, nominally a free republic recognized by the United States and the Soviet Union, is restless today.

  The Marfrak camp has the only American force in Transjordania, which is four-fifths composed of cooks. “Between caravans,” say the desert culinary forces, “we just shoot poker and play spelling games. Once in a while we go over to the camp of the Arab Legion and see an Egyptian movie. The most fun is getting up when we damned please.”

  The air in Marfrak is sharp and dry. Someone proposes going out in the desert toward the Syrian border to see the Unknown City, about ten miles away. The G.I. will try anything once, and two trucks load up instantly. In half an hour, over bumping lava rocks, flint and nettles, they reach the Unknown City.

  Nobody has been able to find out its name, not even the cooks at Marfrak. A city of reddish black stone, it has towers, walls, and curious external staircases. One wall is entered through an enormous stone door, cunningly swung on stone hinges. There is a huge reservoir filled with slimy greenish water. Four Roman arches stand black against the sunset, prickly with nettles. It is hard to find anything written, but a sharp-eyed corporal locates an inscription to the Emperor Valentian. When did he reign? Nobody knows.

  An Arab family is living alone, amid goats and dogs, in a room of the ruins. The father, who speaks a little English, pulls out a letter from his son in Detroit. The letter has reached this nomadic Bedouin family by way of the Syrian post office at Damascus, many days' journey north.

  Bedded down in tents at seven, the caravan is up at three in the morning, the heavy motors of the trucks snorting. Some G.I.s get up at two to secure forward places on the board seats of the trucks, where vibration is less. As the word “let's go” is given, a thin sliver of light is showing along the edge of the eastern horizon. At the same time humming can be heard high overhead. The transport planes that left Cairo shortly after midnight will be in Baghdad for breakfast and Tehran for luncheon. Their red and green lights show among the stars.

  The torrid jump from Marfrak in Transjordania to Rutbah Wells in Iraq is by way of a lonely place of tents and sand called simply H-4. The American convoy goes through H-4 by early morning, after the third fifty-mile stop. Once the black beds of horizon-reaching lava are left behind, no birds are seen. Camels ridden by slouching, muffled Bedouins move along the skyline, but the caravan's most steady companion is the famous pipeline of the Iraq Petroleum Company, the 10-inch fuel standby of the British Mediterranean fleet, which meets the inland sea at Haifa. The pipeline can be traced by a hump of earth over it, stained black in places from leaks. The pipe is underground partly to prevent it being attacked by Arabs, but mostly to prevent it being warped by the heat.

  Sometimes the American drivers hear a low buzzing behind them. Suddenly a light plane like a crop duster, flying at barely twenty feet, passes overhead, with a peering pilot inspecting the ground over the pipeline for leaks.

  All morning long the highway goes toward the rising sun. Sometimes it takes a wadi, or dry riverbed, to southeast, and the sun is on the left of the road. Then it moves into a northeast wadi, and the sun is more to the right. Sometimes the sun sits directly on the road.

  Before noon the caravan reaches the Iraq-Transjordanian border. It is unguarded, for no man could live there. Its marker is a single leaning metal sign, live hot in the sun. The boundary is hinted by a line of sandfilled bitumen drums, sagging and broken, which stretch a few yards into the shard-strewn desert then peter out into disappearance.

  The desert now becomes, if possible, flatter and more featureless. Even the stones get smaller. Grass has long disappeared, but the only true sand is in the bottoms of the wadis. Besides the slight hump over the buried pipeline, and the abandoned bitumen drums, the only companion of the caravan is the telegraph line. Exactly 26 poles to the mile, and marked to fractions, the poles tell precisely how many hot miles remain to Baghdad and the life-giving green banks of the Euphrates and Tigris. When the caravan stops for the breakdowns to catch up, the G.I.s throw stones at the metal poles, which ring when hit.

  Here, in the hottest part of the desert, the company has piled stones over the pipeline. The stones absorb the heat, keep the desert below in shadow and hence cooler, and thus reduce shrinkage and expansion in the pipeline.

  At 384 miles from the Mediterranean, the caravan pulls into Rutbah.

  The caravan's members are too hot and bump-happy to do anything but fall on their cots. Spectacles are covered with dust, and the camp is putting up a losing fight against flies and sand. Oil tins are used for almost everything, from basins to latrines.

  A cook from Rutbah once went out into the desert hunting gazelle. He became lost. An airplane found him five days later, raving and naked, with acute sunburns and what the doctors called “almost complete dehydration.” His eyeballs were white, with only a small black pinpoint for each pupil.

  The caravan is up with the stars on its third morning. In the light before dawn the road can be seen covered with yellowish objects the size of cartridges. Motionless, they are crushed flat as the trucks pass over them. “Those are locusts,” says one G.I. “If we could pick them up and string them on wires, we could sell them to the Baluchi guards at our camp for 20 rials (60¢) a kilo. They eat them.”

  By dawn the locusts, numb from the cold desert night, begin to wake up and flutter feebly away at the roar of the oncoming caravan. By seven they are weaving across the road. By nine the air is alive with them, big and bright yellow, with staring eyes. They fly into the windshields of the trucks, turning them into a mash of yellow. They slip through the crevices in the tarpaulins and flutter around wildly inside the trucks.

  Since Rutbah both pipelines and telegraph poles have veered away, taking a more direct route to Baghdad. At the fifty-mile stops the G.I.s face the clouds of oncoming locusts and throw handfuls of stones at them.

  The trucks, now looking as though bombed with eggs, set out again. The desert turns from grey to a reddish clay color. To the north, about noon, is seen the cobalt waters of Lake Habbaniyeh, fed by underwater leakage from the Euphrates. Then the great river is reached, with its low mud houses. The trucks descend into the “fertile crescent” of Mesopotamia, and in midafternoon cross the Tigris, past the castle of the boy king Feisal II, and reach Baghdad.

  It seems as though the travelers would never want to stir again. But when the tall blond campmaster arranges for two trucks to take volunteers to Babylon, fifty miles away, many are ready to go. Amid its mud-brick and bitumen ruins they see Nebuchadnezzar's hall, and the enigmatic lion of Iraq. And then they are ready to go back to the oven-like posts of the Persian Gulf.

  IT MAKES YOU CRAZY

  Khorramshahr, Iran—May 11, 1945

  With a thermometer outside the heat stroke center showing 111 degrees in the shade at 3 p.m., the military police here, and in Ahwaz
eighty miles north, all agree it is unseasonably cool for May. It ought to be warmer than this, right now.

  Someone walks in and says, “It's 146° in the sun in the motor pool right now.” “We hit that in the shade in August,” comes the response.

  In the desert cities, probably the largest and ugliest military slums in the world, the day begins at seven and ends at one in the afternoon. In the afternoon you just breathe, eat salt tablets, drink water and if lucky enough to wangle a ride, go to the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company's pool on the island of Abadan.

  But the m.p.s keep right on working. They were just eighteen, most of them, when formed in Chicago. This is their third summer in the Persian Gulf Command. They have the official air corps weather records for their first year, back when they thought statistics would be believed. For May, June, July and August 1943 the lowest recorded temperatures were 72°, 104°, 108° and 92°. The average shade temperatures for the same months were 110°, 116°, 122°, and 126°.

  The average heats in the afternoon sun, where they work, were 162°, 166°, 170° and 172°. The hottest it got for this Chicago-in-Persia was 171° in May, 181° in June, 177° in July and 177° in August.

  In Ahwaz, the town in the desert where the railroads from the twin ports of Khorramshahr and Bandar Shapur join, one G.I. says, “In 22 months I've lost 37 pounds. It did me good but I still didn't like it.” Says another, “The sun dries up the liquid in the corner of your eyes and pulls the skin out of shape, so you can't focus.” Advice? “Swing your washed-out underwear twice around your head and it's dry.”

  In this heat you sweat, but dry off so quickly you don't realize what is happening. Then your clothes turn white; that's salt from your body, the only trace left of your perspiration. After a scorcher, one 6-foot-5-inch sergeant from Chicago, 32 months married and 28 months overseas, looks like a lighthouse.