by N S Nash
This book is the result and the title is a statement, not a question.
In order to consider the validity of the case against the men who were, allegedly, culpably incompetent it is necessary to visit the battlefields, but it is not my intention to rehash in minute detail the ghastly events that led to so many fruitless deaths.
A hundred years after the events I describe, the soldiers’ bones still lie in the desert sand, unvisited in a land once more wracked with extreme violence. One wonders was it all worth it?
The Mesopotamia Commission (MC) was formed to examine a toxic combination of misjudgements, dishonesty and ineptitude. When the MC reported, in June 1917, its findings embarrassed His Majesty’s Government (HMG), which was at a loss to see a way forward.
The formation and composition of the Commission was flawed. Although it was empowered to take evidence on oath it had no powers of discipline and its only weapon was that of censure. When the Commission’s work was completed its Report became a political football and the tangible benefits were scant. Throughout this text, extracts from the Mesopotamia Commission Report (MC Report) are in italics.
The judgements made in this book are based on my interpretation of the contemporary accounts and the MC Report. My readers must decide if I have struck a fair balance and draw their own conclusions.
Tank Nash
Malmesbury
April 2016
Chapter 1
Hardinge at Bay
‘A leader is a dealer in hope.’
(Napoleon)
3 July 1917 was a warm summer day in London and the Chamber of the House of Lords was overcrowded and stuffy. The attendance of so many peers was a clear indication that something of significance was about to happen.
A tall, slim, 59-year-old man in a frock coat entered, stood briefly by the Clerk’s table and looked around. On either side of the Chamber he saw four terraces of benches, all completely filled, which rose above the floor of the House. Above them ran a line of galleries, occupied this afternoon by peeresses and members of the lower house.
The chattering voices were stilled and all eyes were focussed on the man at the Clerk’s table.
He was Lord Hardinge, latterly Viceroy of India, and one of the most distinguished public servants in the land. He also had the dubious distinction of being the most senior of those subject to severe criticism in the recently published Mesopotamia Commission Report.
This report, now firmly in the public domain, published the result of enquiries into the conduct of the disastrous military campaign of 1914–16. This took place in what was, allegedly, the Garden of Eden but which turned into a version of hell for the British and Indian soldiers engaged there. Of those, 30,000 died and thousands more were still languishing in Turkish prison camps in conditions of extreme privation.
Lord Hardinge was to make a public statement, which his friends all hoped would completely rebut the ‘absurd’ charges laid at his door. This was a key moment in the career of a distinguished public servant and also of some significance to His Majesty’s Government, led by the priapic David Lloyd George.
Hardinge walked briskly up to the table. Exuding self-control and apparently quite unflustered by the situation, he laid his notes down. He tugged at his coat, put on his spectacles, rested his right hand on his notes and allowed his left arm to hang at his side. A journalist who was present observed:
His body was turned to face diagonally across the Chamber. From this position he rarely moved, and then only to turn one sheet of paper aside as he had finished reading from it.
It was a model of deliverance, clearly enunciated, in well audible, measured tones. There was no impassioned appeal to sentiment, plea for leniency of criticism. Just a plain, well thought out, logically arrayed statement of justification from the point of view of the Indian Government. It was scrupulously free from embittered recrimination.
The performance was really a notable one; the more so seeing that it was the first time he had ever spoken in the House of Lords.
The impression I got was that he had said his say and did not care what the world might choose to think of him.1
The MC had formed its conclusions several months before and had published its Report on 20 June 1917. A minority report included the utterly damning observation that Hardinge, as Viceroy, and General Sir Beauchamp Duff, the Commander in Chief of the Indian Army, had shown:
little desire to help and some desire to actually obstruct the energetic prosecution of the war.
This was an accusation that implied malfeasance, bordering on treachery. Little wonder then that the House of Lords was packed and that the Report had stunned the Government. It had sat on the Report for several weeks, but now HMG was in a dilemma as to how to deal with the quite specific charges made against several of the ‘great and the good’.
The speech by Hardinge, in which he absolved himself of any culpability for the defeat of Indian Expeditionary Force ‘D’ (IEF ‘D’) and of the neglect of the sick and wounded, did not staunch the flow of criticism. His biographer, B.C. Bush, was overly generous in his judgment when he wrote that, ‘the general reaction to his defence was favourable.’ This was not the case. Busch continued, ‘It was his maiden speech in House of Lords and he had not convinced his audience on all the charges, but most recognised his culpability was on a different level to that of the military authorities.’2 The speech was widely reported in the Press,3 on 4 July 1917, and the reaction to his performance was generally negative. Hardinge had said nothing to rebut the strictures of the MC and had not helped his cause. He was unduly verbose, reiterated facts that were not in dispute but, crucially, he did not address the key issues.
1. Lord Hardinge of Penshurst.
The following day the Press commented as follows:
Daily Mail
Lord Hardinge’s defence does not rebut – it hardly answers the judgment that the majority of the Commission were compelled to pass on him.
Morning Post
The public in reading Lord Hardinge’s speech will no doubt be reminded of a certain unhappy attempt to shift responsibility, of which Mesopotamia was again the scene when the man blamed the woman and the woman blamed the serpent. In the result – if our recollection serves – judgment was pronounced on all three. It is a pity that Lord Hardinge did not resign, for he was condemned by an impartial tribunal.
Daily Telegraph
Thorough reform of the higher command in the administration of India is a proved and pressing necessity. Lord Hardinge was silent on one matter which general common sense seized upon as the most deplorably weak and unbusinesslike of all administrative facilities with which the Commission dealt, namely the practice of governing the Indian Empire, to say nothing of conducting a military effort of unparalleled magnitude from a hill top in the Himalayas.
Daily Chronicle
[We] doubt whether of those who have most carefully studied the reports will be found half a dozen whose judgment is materially modified by what Lord Hardinge said.
Daily News
The impression left by Lord Hardinge’s speech in no way diminishes the disquieting effect of the Report.
The Times
Although Lord Hardinge’s statement brought to light few new facts, it was accepted as an important addition to the material on which the public and both Houses of Parliament will pronounce final judgment. The debates, for which the Government has promised facilities, can hardly be delayed beyond next week. It is true that the Government have not yet decided on the nature of their disciplinary measures, but when the law officers’ opinions and precedents are before them, they cannot long be postponed.
* * *
Clearly this issue, which had aroused public opinion, still had some way to run. The House of Commons would, of necessity, now debate the matter at length. Along the way the performance of some very senior military officers would be questioned and the Government would have cause to regret the manner in which it set up the MC in the first pla
ce. A full-on public scandal was underway and to ‘the man on the Clapham omnibus’ of legend there seemed to be every likelihood that heads would roll.
Chapter notes
1 ‘Journal’ (By special wire) 5 New Bridge St, EC4, 3 July 1917.
2 Busch, B.C., Hardinge of Penshurst, p.269.
3 The Aberdeen Daily News, 4 July 1917.
Chapter 2
Mesopotamia and its Oil
‘Your greatness does not depend upon the size of your command but in the manner in which you exercise it.’
(Marshal of France Ferdinand Foch, Major General Sir George Aston, The Biography of Foch, 1929)
The drama embracing Lord Hardinge in London that summer’s day could trace its roots back to 1912 when Admiral Lord ‘Jackie’ Fisher, now retired, was invited to chair a Royal Commission to enquire into the practicality of using ‘Liquid Fuel’. In effect, was it practical or desirable to power the Royal Navy by oil? Fisher’s Commission reported, in the affirmative, on 27 November 1912.4
At the insistence of the perceptive Fisher,5 HMS Queen Elizabeth and the others of her class now being built would be fuelled by oil – a commodity of which Britain had none. Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty (1911–15) commented that, ‘to change the foundation of the Navy from British coal to foreign oil was a formidable decision in itself.’
Britain may have been resting on a foundation of coal, but the technology had moved on and the limitations of coal had been robustly addressed by a singularly robust and capable personality. There was no doubt that, ‘providing the fleet with coal was the greatest logistical headache of the age,’6 and Fisher judged, correctly, that the future was oil. As a priority the Royal Navy, then the greatest fleet in the world, had to be assured of an ample provision. A major factor in this provision was geography and that of Mesopotamia, in particular, because the head of the Persian Gulf was where oil was available in abundant quantity.
Churchill knew that, if the supply of oil could be secured, ‘we should be able to raise the whole power and efficiency of the Navy to a definitely higher level: better ships, better crews, higher economies, more intense forms of war power – in a word, mastery itself was the prize of the venture.’7
The principal features of this part of the world are the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. Both rise in the Taurus Mountains of southern Turkey and their sources are only about 20 miles apart. They then flow, broadly north to south, through what was Mesopotamia (now Turkey, Iraq and Syria) and meet to form the Shatt al-Arab waterway at the ill-favoured town of Kurnah (Kurna or al-Qurnah). Kurnah is about 40 miles north of the larger and more important town of Basra.
The Euphrates is 1,900 miles long from its source to the confluence with the Tigris. The latter, to the east of the Euphrates, is about 1,150 miles to that confluence. From time immemorial this river, the only highway, has attracted settlement along its banks. Not the least of these settlements is Baghdad, the capital of what is now called Iraq. Baghdad lies 502 ‘Tigris miles’ north of Basra but only 279 miles as an energetic bird might fly. The two sinuous and relatively shallow rivers were central to military campaigning in that part of the world a hundred years ago, when there was an absolute dearth of roads and railways.
The precise source of that oil provision, so important to Fisher and the Royal Navy, was on the island of Abadan where the Karun River flows into the Shatt al-Arab, about 21 miles south of Basra. This river is more rapid than the Tigris; although shallow in places it is less winding, and easily navigable. In 1914, Messrs Lynch, who had a small fleet of steamers running up the Karun and also plying between Basra and Baghdad, provided steam navigation upon these rivers. The company vessels were of a type specifically designed to cope with the eccentricities of the Tigris and there was a fount of expertise to be found among their captains.
The British Government was a major shareholder in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company and so had an abiding interest in the island of Abadan, where the oil pipelines terminated. The strategic importance of Basra to the north was that it was not only the largest settlement but was also the gateway to Abadan for southbound river traffic coming from the hinterland of Mesopotamia. The Shatt al–Arab, ‘regarded technically as Turkish waters’,8 is, hereabouts, about 600 yards wide and from 7–12 feet deep, depending on the season. The Royal Navy had been policing the Shatt, the Gulf and the Indian Ocean beyond, by suppressing piracy for decades with the tacit consent of the Turkish and Arab states along the shores.
Mesopotamia was then, and is now, one of the hottest, most forbidding and hostile places on the planet. In 1914 it was entirely dependent on the two rivers for its water supply and for movement north/south. The country traversed by the two great rivers is a vast plain intersected by swamps and without roads of any description. (Above Kut there was a caravan road to Baghdad.) The soil is a sandy loam, which turns swiftly to tenacious, clinging mud after rain to the degree that, in wet weather and floods, none of the country bordering the Tigris below Kut is fit for wheeled vehicles. ‘The climate is exceptionally hot, damp and enervating, with periodical snaps of icy storms in winter. In the heat of the summer a double fly tent is an inadequate protection against sunstroke. Military movements are exceptionally difficult, the rivers being the preferred mode of transport.’9
The other phenomenon that served to make life difficult, especially for soldiers, was the arbitrary appearance of mirages. They are all-pervading and convey a distorted image, and not only of movement, when animals appear to be men. Static objects are subject to similar visual corruption. Trees become hills; bushes and defensive features take on a different and misleading guise.
In the dry season wheeled transport is generally practicable, but the plethora of irrigation canals and creeks that branch out from the river on both sides are wide enough and deep enough to form significant obstacles to riverside movement. Each has to be bridged in turn – this in a country without any material suitable for bridging. An old Arab proverb, much quoted in every book on this campaign, summed it all up by saying, ‘When Allah made hell he did not find it bad enough and so he made Mesopotamia – and then, he added flies.’
It was a miserable and uncomfortable place but it was the source of the all-important oil that had to be secured in the face of possible Turkish/German opposition. Hitherto, Britain and Turkey had enjoyed amiable relations, but complacency in the Foreign Office and the casual indifference of His Majesty’s Government had allowed an ambitious Germany to move in to fill a gap in Turkish affections. The Germans exercised increasingly greater influence in Turkey and were ensconced in the infrastructure of the Turkish armed forces, usually in command appointments. This, literally, put a German finger on the trigger.
HMG realised, belatedly in 1914, that every effort now had to be made to prevent Turkey taking up arms with Germany against the British Empire because of its interest in the Mesopotamian area.
In the summer of 1914, Britain’s relations with Turkey were cool, getting cooler, and they got positively frosty when two warships, the Reshadieh and Sultan Osman 1 that were being built in Britain for the Ottoman Navy, were diverted to the Royal Navy. They duly became HMS Agincourt and Erin. The Turks were predictably aggrieved, but the pragmatic decision by Churchill, in his role as First Lord of the Admiralty, was entirely sensible. The writing was already on the wall and to supply two ships to a possible or even a probable enemy would have been foolish.
In early October 1914, elements of the Ottoman Navy, under German command and on German initiative, attacked the Russian Black Sea Fleet at Odessa and inflicted heavy casualties. The German finger had squeezed the metaphorical trigger in an event that, in short order, led to hostilities between Britain and Turkey. War was declared on 5 November 1914. In Mesopotamia there were four enemies: the Turkish Army, marauding Arabs, the climate and the geography.10
However, in 1921, Talaat Pasha, the wartime Turkish leader in 1914, published his memoirs and clarified the events that finally tied Turkey to Germany. He wrot
e:
Our German admiral, Souchon, deliberately took our best Turkish ships [the Goeben and others] and bombarded the Russian fleet and some of the Russian cities. We were generally supposed to have sanctioned this; and during the War I let this impression stand, rather than quarrel with the Germans.
Now that I am no longer at the head of affairs, I want it positively known that our Ministry knew nothing of the intended attack. Neither I nor any other official authorised it. On the contrary, we were much upset by it. All the Cabinet members were very angry; we held a hurried meeting, and several of them resigned in protest. The rest of us agreed to try to smooth the matter over.
The Russian ambassador at once sent us a vigorous protest. So did the French and British representatives. The latter two, however, were still hopeful of peace, and proposed that we make our innocence clear by dismissing our German admiral and sailors, and becoming strictly neutral.
We could not prolong this absurd situation. To satisfy the Entente by a public repudiation of Admiral Souchon would have meant the loss of our German alliance forever. We held another anxious Cabinet meeting, the important one at which war was decided on.
My own position was that while much annoyed at the Black Sea affair, I nevertheless continued to believe that we should join with Germany. The Entente could give us nothing but the renewal of promises, so often broken, to preserve to us our present territory. Hence there was nothing to be gained by joining them. Moreover, if we refused aid to our German allies now in the time of their need, they would naturally refuse to help us if they were victorious.
If we stayed neutral, whichever side won would surely punish Turkey for not having joined them, and would satisfy their territorial ambitions at our expense.11
From this account it is apparent that the Turks had no desire to fight a war, but as they were drawn in, so too was Britain. In the latter case, and once war was declared, things did not go well. Poor diplomatic communications between India and London were the foundation stone of the events that followed. The Indian Government (IG) entertained an unrealistic political aim and under-resourced the military campaign to achieve that aim. In combination and compounded by inept leadership in the field, these factors would lead, inexorably, to a bloody and humiliating military defeat.