by Jan Morris
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The bugles of England (wrote J. D. Burns of Melbourne)1 are blowing o’er the sea,
Calling out across the years, calling now to me.
They woke me from dreaming in the dawning of the day,
The bugles of England: and how could I stay?
To the wife of a volunteer in Winnipeg or Alice Springs, to the Sikh rifleman from Amritsar or the illiterate Gold Coast askari, the bugles must have sounded distant indeed. Why were they going? What were they fighting for? The first Gurkha detachments for Europe, approaching Calcutta for embarkation, sharpened their kukris as the train drew into the city, supposing that they were nearing the battlefront. The epicentre of the war was western Europe, its issue was essentially the balance of power in Europe, its deepest causes lay not in the overseas enterprises of the Powers, but in cloudier and more complex differences within their own cramped neighbourhoods.
The imperial soldiers found themselves transported, all too often, direct from their own sunlit spaces to the mud and drizzle of Flanders and France, where they floundered and died, were gassed or mined or mutilated, shivered in the unaccustomed cold or miserably ate their alien rations, year after year, trench after trench, sadness after sadness to the end. But the war reached out to the imperial territories, too. German ships were hunted down in atolls of the Pacific or in African creeks, campaigns were fought to capture the German colonies of Africa and the Pacific, and at the back of British strategic thinking there often lay an imperial aim or instinct. The more imaginative of the British strategists cast their eyes beyond the confined butchery of western Europe, towards the greater landscapes and grander chances of their imperial tradition. Kitchener himself was baffled by the trench fighting in France—‘this isn’t war’, he used to say—and his planners were divided into rival schools, ‘westerners’ who believed the whole effort should be directed towards victory in Europe, ‘easterners’ who responded to these more liberated impulses. The latter looked in particular towards an old arena of imperial intrigue and aspirations, the Ottoman Empire.
The Turks entered the war on the German side in October 1914. Theoretically they were suzerains of almost all the Arab World, even including Egypt, and their emergence now as enemies conveniently clarified the anomalous British position in the Middle East. Traditionally the British had supported Turkey—whatever happened to the Ottoman Empire, Lord Salisbury had decreed, could only be for the worse, ‘and therefore it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible’. Also the Sultan of Turkey, in his capacity as Caliph of the Faithful, commanded the spiritual allegiance of some 70 million Indian Muslims, and was not lightly to be antagonized by the temporal rulers of India. The British already possessed, though, a shadow-empire of their own in the countries that lay between India and the Mediterranean. They ruled Egypt and Aden, they controlled the Persian Gulf, as the greatest Muslim Power they felt themselves to have special interests in Arabia, the Holy Land of Islam. Their oil supplies came from southern Persia, which they had declared a British sphere of influence, and all over the Arab countries they had agents and emissaries, from the diplomats of the Levant Consular Service to the young men who, from time to time, struck out from Kuwait or Bahrein to make contact with the Bedouin of the Arabian interior.
Now all was clearer. By April, 1915, an official committee was discussing what ought to be done with the Ottoman Empire after the war—divided among the victorious allies, partitioned into zones of influence, or set up as some kind of independent State. Whatever happened, the committee agreed, British interests must first be safeguarded, in an area particularly important to the Empire: and the best way to safeguard interests, as everyone knew, was to control the place yourself, whether you did it frankly or covertly. The war against Turkey was an imperial war. The Turks, whose military reputation was dim but whose armies were powerfully stiffened by German generals, officers and men, presently called for a jihad, a Muslim holy war against infidels.1 Unsuccessful attacks were made upon Aden and the Suez Canal. The British responded in kind, and embarked upon three offensives against the Turks. One was a miserable kind of victory. One was a resplendent success. One was a great defeat, and gave to the imperial annals the most poignant of all their tragedies.2
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The Turkish possession called Mesopotamia, the Land of the Two Rivers, now Iraq, had been a subject of British anxiety for years. It was one way to get to India. British explorers, surveyors and spies knew it well, and a British company, Lynch Brothers, had a monopoly of steam navigation on its rivers. In recent years the Germans had been active there, building their Berlin to Baghdad Railway, and the imperial strategists had long been agitated by the thought of an enemy moving down the line of the Tigris and Euphrates to the Persian Gulf. By 1914 they were concerned too for the security of the Persian oilfields. The oil was pumped to a refinery on the island of Abadan, at the head of the Gulf, which lay directly across a narrow channel from the Mesopotamian port of Basra. Once Turkey came into the war, the British assumed, it might only be a matter of hours before the oil was cut off, the refinery destroyed and half the Royal Navy immobilized.
The invasion of Mesopotamia—‘Mespot’ to the British Army—began then as an operation to seal off the Persian Gulf, and protect Abadan by seizing Basra. The Gulf had always been supervised from India rather than Britain, so it was an Indian Army expedition, commanded by an elderly Anglo-Indian general, equipped from Indian sources, escorted by the battleship Ocean from the East Indies Station, which in November 1914 sailed up the Gulf in four transports and successfully disembarked in the port of Basra. The Turkish authorities, such as they were, fled. The local Turkish forces, consisting mainly of Arab conscripts, did not long resist. The rambling mud city behind its waterside palms readily submitted, and in no time at all there was a British Political Office there, and an indefatigable Political Officer, Percy Cox, Indian Political Service, brisk behind his files in his upstairs office.
Well and good: Turkish counter-attacks were beaten off: but a new general, Sir John Nixon, assumed the command in the spring of 1915, and he had plans to go further, and to move his troops northward up the line of the rivers. He was partly concerned to push his defence lines further inland, by the truest principles of the Forward Policy, but he was also impelled by profounder imperial instincts. In this he was not alone. In London the War Cabinet felt that, with Abadan safe, the expedition’s task was done: but the activists of the Indian Empire had their eyes on greater prizes, on Baghdad, everyone’s epitome of an oriental city, and on Mesopotamia itself, which to some strategists, as well as many theologians, was truly the heartland of the world. Cox had already proposed an advance to Baghdad. Nixon had been ordered to prepare plans. ‘So far as we can see’, minuted the Indian General Staff in Simla, ‘all advantages, political and strategical, point to as early a move on Baghdad as possible.’
Southern Mesopotamia, where the Tigris and the Euphrates flowed, first separately, then united, towards the Persian Gulf, was more beguiling in history than in fact. Here were Babylon and Nineveh, here Sennacherib had fought his battles, here indeed, some said, had been the Garden of Eden at the start of the world. But it was a fearful country now. Much of it was empty desert, inhabitated by lawless predatory Arabs who loathed nearly everyone, the rest wide and foetid fen, inhabited by amphibious marshmen who detested everyone else. The irrigation works of the ancients had long since crumbled, and the long years of Turkish rule had left only decay and depression. There were no paved roads, no railways. Such towns as existed were hardly more than excretions of mud, like piles of rubbish in the wasteland, relieved only by the minarets of shabby mosques, or the lugubrious walls of forts. In the summer it was indescribably hot, in the winter unbearably cold. In the dry season everything was baked like leather, in the wet season 10,000 square miles were flooded, the waters gradually oozing away to leave malodorous wastes of marsh. Fleas, sand-flies and mosquitoes tormented the place, and its inhabitants lived lives of i
gnorant poverty, enlivened only by sporadic excitements of crime or brigandage, the illusions of religion and the consolations of sex.
Is this the land of dear old Adam (one British soldier wondered),
And beautiful Mother Eve?
If so dear reader small blame to them
For sinning and having to leave.
There was almost nowhere in India as forbidding as this. It offered none of the boyish stimulations of frontier war, upon which the Indian Army had been raised: yet intuitively perhaps, led on by the highway of the great rivers, and by the promise of great achievement, General Nixon deployed one of his two divisions northwards, towards Amara, Kut and Ctesiphon, and the distant prospect of Baghdad. In April, 1915, the Viceroy of India, Lord Hardinge, arrived himself to inspect the situation1: at the end of May the imperial forces set off for their first objective to the north, Amara.
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The British field commander was Major-General Charles Townshend, of the 6th (Poona) Division, of whom we caught a sentimental glimpse when, as a promising captain, he stood at Kitchener’s side in the ruins of Gordon’s Residency. Now fifty-four, he was a moody, contradictory, eccentric man. The heir presumptive to a marquisate, he had high social aspirations, besides being intensely ambitious. He relished publicity, loved to strike poses with his banjo and fluent French, but was a soldier of mercurial gifts—a soldier out of the common mould, who studied Napoleon assiduously, and perhaps thought himself a successor. Townshend was much liked by his British soldiers, but not by his Indians: and this was perhaps because he had no high regard for Africans and Asians in general, having beaten them in battle from Chitral to Omdurman, and proposing to do it again now.
The country south of Amara was flooded, and the main Turkish defence position was a series of islands in the flats, protected by mines. To attack it Townshend put one of his brigades upon the water. His infantry paddled out in 500 commandeered Tigris boats, called bellums. His machine-guns were on rafts, his field guns in tugs and barges, and there were launches to sweep the minefields, and three sloops of the Indian Marine to give supporting fire. It was all an exhilarating success. All among the flooded palms this amphibious army sailed, the launches first, the sloops next, the troops in their armada of quaint craft punting themselves forwards with poles. When they came to a Turkish position, every gun was turned upon it until, the frightful mess of mud and explosives having subsided, the infantry waded ashore with fixed bayonets to capture it. The Turks did not long resist this unnerving process. By noon on the day of the attack they could be seen scurrying away in boats from every remaining island; by nightfall the whole Turkish force was in retreat, helter-skelter up the Tigris to Amara.
First thing in the morning Townshend was off, personally, in pursuit. His brigade was embarked upon paddle-steamers, but the general himself, with his staff and a few soldiers, boarded the sloop Espiègle (1,070 tons), and with her two sister ships, Clio and Odin, and four steam-launches, charged up the river at full speed after the retreating enemy. This was ‘Townshend’s Regatta’, ‘the Mespot Navy’, and it was one of the most exuberant little actions of the First World War. The three ships looked more like yachts than warships, with their bowsprits and elegant prows, and their crews treating the operation like a sporting event, wildly navigating a river which swung about in violent curves, had dangerous shallows everywhere, was mined in many places and had never been properly charted.
The current was fierce. Time and again they bumped the muddy banks, and they generally had no notion what lay around the next bend. Far ahead of them raced the Turks: two steamers towing barge-loads of troops, and trailed all about by a fleet of river dhows, tacking frenziedly back and forth against the current. In the evening, when the British spotted their distant sails and opened fire, the Turkish steamers hastily slipped their tows and left the soldiers to their fate: but Townshend, detailing the Odin to take them prisoner, swept past the confused flotilla of barges and riverboats, and pressed on excitedly for Amara.
Next day they caught the two steamers, one abandoned, one flying a white flag, and it was time for the sloops to turn back. The water was only a few feet deep now. Townshend, though, had the bit between his teeth. With a handful of soldiers he transferred to the paddle-launch Comet, which had once been the official yacht of the British representative in Baghdad, and with the three other launches, each towing a barge with a 4.7-inch gun on it, sailed impulsively on. By now his brigade was far behind, but as his boats raced up the river, White Ensigns fluttering, rifles bristling, white flags appeared in one astonished riverain village after another, and all along the banks Arabs bowed low in submission.
Early the next afternoon, June 3, 1915, they saw Amara, a big brown sprawl beside the river. It was swarming with Turkish troops, but when the first of the launches approached its quay hundreds of them walked down to the bank with their hands above their heads. Townshend’s brigade was 100 miles behind him. His total force on the spot comprised one brigadier-general, one naval captain, 100 soldiers and the crews of the launches. He sent ashore a corporal and twelve men, and to them the Turkish commander surrendered the town and all its garrison. Two thousand men gave themselves up, and all afternoon the Turkish officers queued on the quayside beside the Comet to hand over their swords. ‘Safely captured’, one of them is supposed to have cabled his wife that evening.
‘How much I enjoyed the whole thing’, the general wrote to his French wife. ‘I told you, darling, that I only wanted my chance! I have only known the 6th Division for a year, and they’d storm the gates of hell if I told them to….’
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Yet before another six months was over they were all to follow his orders, diseased and defeated, into the appalling prison camps of Turkey, where half of them died. Elated though Townshend was by the success of his Regatta, after so long in Mesopotamia his army was tired, ill-equipped and under strength. It was debilitated by dysentery and paratyphoid, it had no fresh vegetables, no ice and a pitiful supply of medical equipment. Townshend himself was hit by so severe a virus that he was shipped back to India for sick leave. It was known that 30,000 Turkish reinforcements were on their way, including divisions of a higher quality, German-trained and probably German-commanded. By now General Nixon, though, had his eyes firmly upon Baghdad. Though London was still lukewarm about further advances, Simla had doubts, and Townshend himself was cautious about taking inadequate forces too deep into enemy territory, still by the beginning of September, 1915, the 6th Division, Townshend back in command, was ready to move north again.
At first all went as brilliantly as before. Townshend captured the next river town, Kut-el-Amara, in a tour de force of surprise and deception, and seemed both to his own men and to the Turks one of those generals who cannot lose. General Nixon reported to Simla and to London that he felt strong enough for an immediate attack on Baghdad itself, and more by default than by initiative, for the Cabinet was obsessed with the greater war elsewhere, and desperate for victories anywhere, the advance was sanctioned. Among its purposes was, so Asquith told the House of Commons, ‘generally to maintain the authority of our Flag in the East’.
Townshend prepared the new advance with misgivings. He thought Kut was as far as they could go—his forces were inadequate, his lines of communications were insecure, and the Turks were entrenched astride the Tigris and the road to Baghdad. Sure enough at Ctesiphon, only eighteen miles from the capital, where the great mud-brick arch of the Sassanian emperors rose gaunt and lonely in the desert, he suffered his first rebuff. There stood a Turkish army of very different calibre, powerfully reinforced by veterans from other fronts, skilfully positioned behind wire entanglements in the presence of the Arch itself.1 Exhausted and thirsty in the terrible heat, encumbered by sick, wounded and thousands of prisoners, the 6th Division drove the Turks out, but could go no further themselves. The force was isolated and vulnerable, and Townshend decided to withdraw: sending his non-combatants down the river to Basra, he retreated himself
with his army back into the walls of Kut-el-Amara. There within a week he was besieged. The Turks completely surrounded the town, and on December 8, 1915 a bombardment began.
Some 13,000 British and Indian soldiers, with thirty-nine guns, formed the garrison of Kut. They still had faith in their general, ‘Our Charlie’, who had led them with such racy skill all the way north from Basra, and he himself exuded confidence at first. His communiqués to his men were frank, breezy and full of spirit. ‘Reinforcements are being sent at once from Basra to relieve us’, he said in the first of them. ‘The honour of our mother country and the Empire demands that we all work heart and soul in the defence of this place.’ It was a dreadful enough place to hold. Built within a loop of the Tigris, Kut was a very dirty, very dejected, very apathetic town. Surrounded on all sides by the flat and featureless desert, its only green the palm groves and gardens on the outskirts of town, it was a brown muddle of baked mud buildings, with a mesh of narrow streets meandering through it, the pimple-domed arcade of a covered bazaar, and the minaret of a mosque protruding above its roofs like a marker, to announce its presence in the waste. Its only industry was a liquorice factory, reached by a bridge of boats across the river: for the rest it lay there all but defeated, it seemed, by the heat, the emptiness, the poverty, the tedium of life. Some 6,000 Iraqis were immured in Kut too. The sanitation was frightful, and dysentery was endemic.