Farewell the Trumpets

by Jan Morris

  Kut was the dingiest of the famous sieges that brought drama and often despair to the story of the British Empire. Perhaps this is because for once there were no Englishwomen there, depriving the soldiers of the challenges to chivalry that ennobled or enlivened Lucknow and Ladysmith. They were alone in Kut, and lived in a sad man’s world of obscenities, comradeship, bad food and bawdy. Townshend himself, though he put a bold face on the situation, knew that he depended entirely upon relief from the south. ‘In military history, the history of entrenched camps is bound up with capitulations … history presents very few examples of the self-deliverance of an army once invested.’ But weeks and months passed, summer turned to autumn, autumn to the bitter winter, and no relief came. Down at Basra, where Nixon saw his ambitions in disarray, all was confusion. The port was a shambles of ill-organization, the command was enmeshed in red tape and rivalry, the medical services were a disgrace.1 When General Sir Fenton Aylmer’s Tigris Relief Force moved off, with a fulsome preliminary message to Townshend on the radio—‘Heartiest congratulations on brilliant deeds of yourself and your command’—it moved so slowly, was led so badly, and faced such tough opposition, that it lost half its own men before it got within 100 miles of Kut.

  The siege itself was a squalid affair. The Turks sniped and shelled the town incessantly, and gradually it crumbled. The rations shrank, the sick list grew, soon no more Arab looters were shot, because there was nothing left to loot. Sometimes there were moments of heroism, or at least excitement. During the first few weeks the Turks repeatedly attacked the town frontally, advancing in dense grey mass across the open countryside, to be decimated by machine-gun fire, or thrown back in hand-to-hand fighting. Once two brave young officers dashed out of town and blew up a bridge of boats. Sometimes aeroplanes flew over and dropped small bundles of supplies. The King-Emperor sent a message—‘I‚ together with your fellow countrymen, continue to follow with admiration the gallant fighting of the troops under your command against great odds, and every effort is being made to support your splendid resistance’: the knowledge that the garrison was serving the Crown, Townshend gallantly replied, was ‘the sheet-anchor of our defence’. Sometimes, as the months passed, they heard distantly from the south the gunfire of the relieving force, and saw its flashes in the sky, far away over the wastes and marshes.

  Mostly, though, it was boredom, and dirt, and hunger, and sickness. Morale began to sag. A few Indians tried to desert. A trace of self-pity entered the general’s thoughts. ‘What worries, what trials, what anxieties!’ he wrote in his diary, and in one of his communiqués to his troops he even blamed the higher command for their troubles—‘I speak straight from the heart‚’ he told them, ‘and you see I have thrown all officialdom overboard.’ By February, 1916, the garrison was on half rations, and five or six men were dying every day from sickness and debilitation. In March an aircraft dropped a letter from General Aylmer‚ not very encouragingly letting the garrison know that he had been removed from his command—‘Goodbye and God bless you all,’ concluded this comfortless communication, ‘and may you be more fortunate than myself.’ By mid-March people were talking of surrender. Townshend himself decided that April 17 was the longest he could hold out, and now General Khalil Bey, the Turkish commander, sent him a courteous but chill suggestion. ‘You have heroically fulfilled your military duty,’ it said. ‘From henceforth I see no likelihood that you will be relieved…. You are free to continue your resistance at Kut or to surrender to my forces, which are growing larger and larger. Receive, General, the assurance of our highest consideration.’

  By mid-April life at Kut had reached its limit, so Townshend reported to Basra, but there was one last tantalizing excitement. A Royal Navy gunboat, the commandeered Lynch paddle-steamer Julnar, tried to break through to the town with 250 tons of supplies. She was navigated by a former pilot of the Euphrates and Tigris Navigation Company, and she set off on her desperate voyage in bright moonlight on the night of April 24. There was no hope of surprise, and as she sailed upstream she was greeted by continuous blasts of fire from both banks. On she went nevertheless, probing her way through the shallows, until only a few miles from Kut she struck a steel hawser stretched diagonally across the stream, and floundering there under a storm of machine-gun fire, was swept across the river and run aground. The Kut garrison had heard all the noise with gathering hope, but when dawn came, and they looked eagerly downstream, they could see the silent shape of the gunboat stranded on the bank, a last broken pledge of their hopes.1

  ‘Whatever has happened, my comrades,’ said Townshend in his last communiqué, ‘you can only be proud of yourselves. We have done our duty to King and Empire: the whole world knows that we have done our duty.’ The surrender, on April 29, 1916, was formal and full of ceremony, in the sudden silence that succeeded the incessant rumble of the guns. Khalil, who was thirty-five and very sure of himself, shook hands with the British officers, as each surrendered his sword; when it was Townshend’s turn the Turk made a short flowery speech, expressing regret that such a brave soldier should be in so grievous a situation, and handing back his sword with the phrase ‘It is as much yours by right as it has ever been.’

  But it was all a charade. Townshend indeed was taken away to a comfortable exile in Constantinople, where he spent the rest of the war in a pleasant island villa, attended by an aide and an orderly, and living a busy social life. His men were not so lucky. After this, the most abject British capitulation in British military history, they entered upon two years of appalling captivity—first in a terrible march northwards through the desiccated provinces of the Turkish Empire, from Kut to Baghdad, from Baghdad to Mosul, from Mosul into Turkey: and then into pestilential prison camps, where they lay sick, half-starved and ill-used until, in the last month of the war, they were released at last. More than half of them died, and of those that survived, many were never healthy again, but bore for the rest of their lives the cruel stigmata of Kut.1

  6

  London took over, Nixon was removed, the army was reorganized, by the end of 1916 they were ready to try again: and in a campaign of cautious thoroughness, backed by overwhelmingly superior forces, General Sir Stanley Maude pushed his way once more up the two rivers, and on March 10, 1917, captured Baghdad at last.1 But later that year, on the western flank of the Turkish Empire, a very different offensive was launched. Mesopotamia was invaded from India, and the muddled and laborious campaign bore all the heavy hallmarks, Curzon’s ‘diurnal revolution’, of Anglo-Indian method. The invasion of Syria was organized from Egypt, and its style was set by a commander of forcible decision, Sir Edmund Allenby, ‘The Bull’.

  Allenby, who arrived in Egypt from France in June 1917, was an Englishman through and through. He was laterally descended from Oliver Cromwell, had been conventionally educated at Haileybury and Sandhurst, and was commissioned into the cavalry. He was a very big man, big-featured and heavily-boned, and he struck strangers often as terse and austere: but he had a gentle private side to him, thoughtful and imaginative. Blissfully married for twenty-five years (he had lost his only son in France), he loved children, birds and books, and was a competent classicist. Almost alone among senior British generals, he had never served in India, and he heard his first shots fired in anger during the Boer War.

  Allenby had not been at his best in France, but in Syria he seldom put a foot wrong. He was one of those men who needed the lonely freedom of absolute command: in the presence of superiors he could be awkward and flannelly, but given complete authority he revealed an unsuspected brilliance. He had a terrible temper, and sometimes lost it unforgivably, but those who liked him loved him, and thought him truly a great man—a ‘giant’, he was variously described by doting subordinates, ‘a true leader’, ‘one who could move mountains’, with ‘a dreamlike confidence, decision and kindness’. He was not an attractive man to look at, being as bovine as his nickname suggested: but there was an English strength and fairness to him which made men trust him
—and when a man knows he is trusted, as Allenby said himself, ‘he can do things’.

  The Syrian war had begun in January, 1915, with a Turkish offensive against the Suez Canal. It was easily beaten off, but when in the following year the British counter-attacked across Sinai, laying a railway and a water pipeline as they went, they were held at Gaza, on the southern edge of the fertile Palestine plain, and severely repulsed. It was a shoddy performance—‘nobody could have saved the Turks from complete collapse’, said Lloyd George, ‘but our General Staff’—and in June, 1917 Allenby was sent from France to redeem it. By now Lloyd George was Prime Minister, heading a Coalition Government that included such imperialist stalwarts as Curzon, Balfour, Churchill and Milner, and employed several members of the South African ‘Kindergarten’. More even than the march upon Baghdad, the invasion of Palestine was to be an imperial campaign, for in Cairo as in London prescient minds saw in the control of Syria the key to the command of the whole Middle East. As we shall presently discover, the British tangled themselves in their own subtleties, in their devices to control the Arab countries after the war, but the first essential step was to establish a right of conquest. To General Allenby thus fell the task of staking out a new imperial province, almost a new Empire. Within four months of the fall of Baghdad, he was preparing his armies for a march to Jerusalem and Damascus.

  7

  They were devious war aims, and Allenby’s campaign was fought with a maximum of snare and subterfuge. He surrounded himself with staff officers of high intelligence, sometimes of scholarly learning, and moved his headquarters from Cairo into the Sinai. There he studied every aspect of Syria, its history, its geography, its flora and fauna, its diseases and its resources. Lloyd George sent him a copy of George Adam Smith’s Historical Atlas of the Holy Land, to use as a campaign aid.1 He also read Herodotus and Strabo, and pored over the Old Testament. Around him he assembled an army of astonishing complexity, like a crusade: it included soldiers from Britain, Australia, New Zealand, India, South Africa, Egypt, Singapore, Hong Kong and the West Indies, besides three battalions of Jews enlisted in the Royal Fusiliers.1 In the Arabian peninsula, to the south, British agents had been encouraging Arab tribal leaders to launch their own rebellion against Turkish suzerainty, and raiding posses of Arab camel-men, often led by British officers, were already active blowing up Turkish railway lines and harassing isolated Turkish garrisons.

  Allenby launched his offensive in October, with the help of a famous (and much-publicized) ruse. One day that month Captain Richard Meinertzhagen, a clever, conceited and highly opinionated young intelligence officer, rode into the desert no-man’s-land that separated the British and Turkish lines around Beersheba, some thirty miles south-east of Gaza. He was spotted and chased by a Turkish cavalry patrol, but after a mile or so dismounted and opened fire upon them. They galloped on, shooting from the saddle. Meinertzhagen hastily remounted and rode on, but as he did so he suddenly lurched sideways, as though he had been hit. Desperately he galloped away towards the British lines, and the Turks saw that he had dropped his binoculars, his rifle, his waterbottle and his haversack, which was bloodstained.

  When the Turks returned to camp and handed the haversack to their intelligence officers, it was found to contain some money, a letter, a notebook, the agenda for a meeting, orders for an attack on Gaza and a telegram reporting preparations for a reconnaissance around Beersheba. So was accomplished one of the most admired of all intelligence deceits, whose effect, the official historian of the campaign was later to write, ‘was hardly to be matched in the history of modern war’. The Turks, and their German commanders, took the captured information seriously, standing ready for a reconnaissance at Beersheba, a major assault on Gaza. Allenby did precisely the opposite, capturing Beersheba after a diversionary bombardment of Gaza, outflanking the Turkish positions, and then switching his main thrust back to the coast again. So the pace and tone of the campaign was set from the start: Allenby was away, and within two weeks his divisions had broken through the Gaza line and were streaming up the Palestine coast to Jaffa.1

  Allenby’s invasion was the last great cavalry campaign in history, and he fought it as a cavalryman, making sweeping use of his 12,000 British, Dominion and Indian horsemen. He experimented with every permutation of bluff, feint and innovation—aircraft, armoured cars, launches on the Dead Sea, offshore torpedo boats, Arab raiders, propaganda leaflets, even a few tanks, the first to be used outside Europe. Time and again he outflanked the Turks, and though he repeatedly halted for rest and consolidation, and was sometimes rebuffed, and delayed for several months in central Palestine, still the impression his offensive leaves is one of swarming khaki hordes pouring, like Mongols or Huns, irresistibly through the passes, up the valleys, into the plains of northern Syria. It took exactly a year, to the day, and its climax was the devastating victory of Megiddo—the Armageddon of the ancients—in September, 1918. There on the Plain of Esdraelon, in one of the most absolute victories of the entire imperial record, the British destroyed the Turkish armies in Syria, effectively putting an end to the Ottoman Empire, and leaving the Middle East vacant for new suzerains. Allenby professed himself ‘almost aghast’ at the completeness of his success.

  A more triumphant moment still, though, for any aficionado of imperialism, occurred ten months earlier. Then the first imperial troops, advancing into the hill country of Judaea, reached the heights of Nebi Samuel, traditionally the home of the prophet Samuel. The Crusaders had called this place Mons Gaudii, Mountain of Joy, because from here they caught their first sight of Jerusalem: now the British too, through the mist and rain of a December morning, saw the Holy City golden-domed below them. To capture Jerusalem must be the dream of any general: to a general of the British Army it was the summit of fulfilment. This was the capital of capitals, last entered by a Christian army 700 years before, and even in 1917, when the vocation of Empire was faltering rather, the Holy City remained perhaps the ultimate objective.

  It had been agreed between the combatants that there would be no fighting in Jerusalem, almost as holy to Muslims as it was to Christians. The Turks resisted strongly in its outskirts, the Welsh Division having to fight hard for the Mount of Olives, but on December 8 they withdrew to the north and left the city undefended. Next morning, as the British advance troops waited uncertainly outside the walls, they saw approaching them from the city a dignitary in a long black coat, striped trousers and a tarboosh, accompanied by a man with a white flag. It was the Mayor of Jerusalem, clutching in his hand the keys of the Holy City. The soldiers did not quite know what to do. Two sergeants greeted him first, offered him a cigarette and had their pictures taken. Then he was passed politely from post to post, headquarters to headquarters, still holding his keys, still attended by the man with the flag, until at last General J. S. O’Shea, commander of the 60th Division, seized history’s opportunity and accepted the keys of Jerusalem.

  In those days the walled city of Jerusalem stood almost uncluttered by suburbs on its rocky site. Its seven gates were still its everyday entrances and exits, its ramparts, undulating with the lie of the land, were as complete as they had been in the time of Saladin. The army which was now encamped outside it, bivouacing among the olive-groves, lay there just as it might have lain in mediaeval times, the smoke from its fires rising all around the city, the dust of its vehicles in clouds or plumes across the landscape. Three days later, when General Allenby took possession of the city, he honoured this sense of timelessness, and entered Jerusalem simply and quietly, on foot.

  He went through the Jaffa Gate, ‘the Gate of the Friend’ in Arabic, which was traditionally the entrance of the foreigner and the travelling merchant. The last foreign visitor of such eminence had been the Kaiser, who arrived there in 1898 in a ceremonial entry of preposterous pomp, preceded by brass bands, white-liveried Uhlans, Arab cavalry and German sailors, being himself dressed in a white silk cloak shot with silver, and wearing on his head a helmet surmounted by a g
igantic golden eagle.1Allenby’s entry was staged in deliberate contrast. He went more as a pilgrim than as a conqueror. The troops who lined the dusty road to the walls were dressed in their battle-frayed khaki, and so was the general himself. The citizens of Jerusalem jostled all about, as though it were not a moment of war at all, but the celebration of some perennial festival. Bearded black-hatted priests leant like schoolboys over the ramparts of the gate above, and all the heady mixture of the Jerusalem populace, its Greeks and its Jews, its Armenians and its Arabs, its Christian nuns and its Muslim imams, pressed behind the line of soldiers, or jammed the balconies of houses. No guns were fired, no flags were flown. Only the bells of Jerusalem rang.

  Behind Allenby walked the American, French and Italian military attachés serving with his armies, and a group of British staff officers, some looking elated, some looking reverent, as though they were going to church, one in particular wearing a crumpled and ill-fitting uniform and moving with an air of distracted and rather donnish detachment. All alone at their head walked the general, and to most people there he undoubtedly represented not so much Christianity, or even the Allied cause, as the British Empire. He walked briskly and expressionlessly, without sword or stick, his boots dusty, his braided cap slightly tilted. Up the sunny incline he marched, in silence, and into the deep shadow cast by the gate, his footsteps echoing as he walked beneath its arch: and then, emerging into the bright sunshine on the other side, Cromwell’s descendant, at the head of the armies of the Empire, entered the Holy City. He is said to have remembered the moment always as the climax of his life.