by N S Nash
The torrential rain continued unabated and trenches filled with water. The Tigris broke its banks and both sides now focused on surviving the weather. The Turks, too, were cold, wet and thoroughly miserable. However, their wounded were spread across a smaller area and more easily recovered.
Aylmer decided to ask for a six-hour truce, not a suggestion to which the Turks readily agreed. Eventually, under a white flag, both sides made a start on burying the dead – very difficult in a flooded landscape – and collecting more of the wounded. At this point, on to the battlefield appeared ‘Arabs’ or perhaps Turkish soldiers. These people set to work killing the wounded and stripping the dead. It was monstrous behaviour, and white flag or not, British and Indian soldiers ran to help. Belatedly, Turkish officers intervened and the murder ceased. Barker, no great admirer of the Arab in any of his forms, concluded that these murdering jackals were in some way allied to the Turks, who were ashamed of the association (p. 177).
On the morning of 22 January, Aylmer signalled to his new commander, General Lake, and to Townshend that he had to cease his attack because of the parlous state of his troops and the atrocious weather. He commented on the added obstacle that the rapidly increasing floods presented. With this message the odds on a relief of Kut lengthened considerably.
Historians, among them A.J. Barker, have concluded from the comfort of an armchair that the Battle of the Hanna Defile should never have been fought. With 20/20 hindsight, it is evident that the 7th Division was on a hiding to nothing. Younghusband’s leadership was consistently poor; he had still not factored in the quality of his opposition or the impregnability of its bunkers. The employment of his limited artillery was flawed and his inflexible approach gave the Turks advance warning of his intentions. The weather conditions were dire and, if anything, favoured the defence.
Colonel Barker was right.
The worsening situation in Mesopotamia, of which this debacle was the latest in a series, was kept under wraps by a comprehensive censoring process, and the letters that soldiers wrote home went through a fine censorship filter. The despatches of war correspondents were also very closely controlled and no criticism of either the political direction of the campaign or the military leadership was permitted. The means of communication were severely limited, and they too were under government control. The official position was that all was well; only the blandest reports were permitted to leave the country. This thoroughly unhealthy and dishonest official attitude gave blanket protection to those who were failing miserably in their duty.
However, in Kut, Townshend had control of the telegraph system and used it fully for his personal use. He sent copious messages to his many theatrical friends and to his family. To his discredit, he prevented any of his soldiers using the same facility, and one signalman who did seek to reach his family had his message intercepted by a ship of the Royal Navy, at sea. He was reported to Townshend and referred for trial by court martial – the outcome of that is unknown.
Political correctness was not invented in the twenty-first century, because it was alive and well in Mesopotamia in 1915–16. The expression ‘friendly Arab’ was proscribed223 on the basis that it inferred that there were unfriendly Arabs – of whom there were a multitude. All manner of euphemisms were employed to describe these people, such as ‘marauder in Turkish pay’ and ‘Kurds and others’. The myth was propagated that food was plentiful, morale very high, the health of the troops could not be better, and ‘Medical problem? What medical problem?’ In the years since and in the countless campaigns that have been fought over the last hundred years, nothing much has changed – today the ‘spin’ is more sophisticated but no less dishonest.
58. The GOC and staff officers of the besieged 6 Indian Division. Captain Clifton ADC, Major E.E. Forbes DAD Transport, Colonel Annesley ADS & T, Colonel U.W. Evens GSO 1, Colonel P. Hehir ADMS, General Townshend (Braddon). This is a rare image of Colonel Hehir, perhaps the only senior medic to emerge from Mesopotamia with his professional skills recognised.
On 26 January, in besieged Kut, Townshend was aware of the failure at the Hanna Defile and he issued a communiqué to his troops. The style is unmistakably Charlie. He addressed his remarks to his soldiers and said:
The relief force under General Aylmer has been unsuccessful in its efforts to dislodge the Turks on the left bank of the river, some 14 miles below the position of Es Sinn, where we defeated the Turks in September last, when their strength was greater than it is now. Our relieving force suffered severe loss and had very bad weather to contend against. They are entrenched close to the Turkish position. More reinforcements are on their way upriver, and I confidently expect to be relieved during the first half of the month of February.
I desire all ranks to know why I decided to stand at Kut during our retirement from Ctesiphon. It was, because so long as we hold Kut the Turks cannot get their ships, barges, stores and munitions past this place and so cannot move down to attack Amarah. Thus we are holding up the whole Turkish advance. It also gives time for our reinforcements to come upriver from Basra and so restore success to our arms; it gives time to our allies, the Russians, who are overrunning Persia, to move towards Baghdad. I had a personal message from General Baratoff, commanding the Russian Expeditionary Force in Persia, the other day telling me of his admiration of what you men of the 6th Division and troops attached have done in the past two months and telling me of his own progress on the road from Kirmanshah, to Baghdad.
By standing at Kut I maintain the territory we have won in the past year at the expense of much blood, commencing with your glorious victory at Shaiba, and thus we maintain the campaign as a glorious one instead of letting disaster pursue its course down to Amarah and perhaps beyond.
I have ample food for eighty-four days and that is not counting the 3,000 animals, which can be eaten. When I defended Chitral some twenty years ago, we lived well on atta224 and horseflesh, but I repeat, I expect confidently to be relieved in the first half of the month of February.
Our duty stands out plain and simple. It is our duty to our Empire, to our beloved King and Country, to stand here and hold up the Turkish advance as we are doing now, and with the help of all, heart and soul with me together, we will make this defence to be remembered in history as a glorious one. All England and India are watching us now and are proud of the splendid courage and devotion you have shown. Let us all remember the defence of Plevna, for that is what is in my mind.
I am absolutely calm and confident as to the result. The Turk, although good behind a trench, is of little value in the attack. They have tried it once, and their losses in one night in their attempt on the fort were 2,000 alone. They have also had very heavy losses from General Aylmer’s musketry and guns, and I have no doubt that they have had enough.
I want to tell you now, that when I was ordered to advance on Ctesiphon, I officially demanded an army corps, or two divisions, to perform the task successfully. Having pointed out the grave danger of doing this with one division only, I had done my duty. You know the result and whether I was right or not; your names will go down to history as the heroes of Ctesiphon, for heroes you proved yourself in that battle.
Perhaps by right I should not have told you of the above, but I feel I owe it to all of you to speak straightly and openly and to take you into my confidence. God knows I felt our heavy losses, and the suffering of my poor brave wounded, and I will remember it as long as I live. I may truly say that no general I know of has been more loyally obeyed and served than I have been in command of the 6th Division.
These words are long, I am afraid, but I speak straight from the heart, and you see I have thrown all officialdom overboard. We will succeed; mark my words. Save your ammunition as if it is gold.
This lengthy document did no more than express Townshend’s aspirations. His first sentence was a not very subtle comparison of his stunning victory at Es Sinn and Aylmer’s failure against a weaker enemy in the same place.
The reality was
that he held his Indian soldiers in ill-disguised contempt. He made very few visits to his wounded, languishing in hospital, and then only to the British soldiers. The tenor of his remarks is inappropriate for a general officer. That said, Townshend did enjoy the affection of his soldiers. He was an extrovert, positive personality and he was pushing on an open door because a soldier wants to like and respect his senior officers. It is the ‘factory setting’, in computer terms. However, the closer one served to Charles Townshend, the less effective were the rose-tinted spectacles and the more one was likely to be critical of him.
General Sir Percy Lake, in his previous appointment in India, as Chief of the General Staff, had been privy to all the countless signals that had flowed between Basra and Simla and, not unreasonably, thought that he had a handle on matters in Mesopotamia. Little did he know of Nixon’s longterm manipulation of the facts and the depth of his deceit. Nevertheless, in that earlier appointment, Lake had wide-ranging responsibility for the conduct of the campaign and the logistic support, or lack of it. He cannot be excused for his failure to identify all the problems and resolve them.
By any yardstick, and although duped by Nixon, he had failed.
However, it was only on his arrival in mid-January 1916 that he quickly discovered just how bad the situation was and the extent to which Nixon had misled him. He was appalled by what he found. Lake made a start on sorting out the mess, but this was not going to be a quick fix and he was not the man best equipped to tackle the deep-rooted issues. Although Nixon had left Lake a dreadful legacy, Hardinge still, surprisingly, gave his unqualified approbation to the erstwhile commander-in-chief.
Major General M. Cowper CB CIE, the officer responsible for ‘in-theatre’ logistics, warned Simla that the paddle steamers that were now being provided were unsuitable for use on the Tigris, and the square-ended barges that were arriving did not meet the specification and were also unsuitable. Cowper drew the conclusion that these were factors that would adversely affect attempts to relieve Kut. General Duff reacted very badly and wrote back to Lake, saying:
Please warn General Cowper that if anything of this sort again occurs or if I receive any more querulous or petulant demands for shipping, I shall at once remove him from the force and will refuse him further employment of any kind.225
Cowper’s duty was to raise these issues and although his precise form of words is unknown, he did not deserve such an unvarnished threat in response. This shows Duff up to be a foolish bully and is probably indicative of his attitude to the whole campaign. Duff’s anger washed off on Lake, who, of course, he had only just selected. Duff was Lake’s superior, but the two would have had a long professional and social relationship.
Lieutenant General Sir Percy Lake KCB KCMG was sixty years of age and his appointment was intended to be temporary until a War Office nominee could take up the job. He was very closely acquainted with all the senior officers serving in the theatre. For example, he knew Townshend very well and, in 1913, he had had to rebuke him for stepping over the line (again) when Charlie was commanding a brigade. Lake had supported the appointments of Barrett, Nixon, Townshend, Aylmer and Younghusband. Inevitably he had a personal relationship with all of these officers and it is the nature of an army that he would have felt a sense of comradeship towards them all. Aylmer, for example, had only months previously been Adjutant General of the Indian Army, and his office had been in close proximity to that of Lake.
The new Army Commander boarded a steamer on 24 January, and journeyed upriver to consult with Aylmer and to see for himself the conditions facing his front-line soldiers. He left behind an abject shambles in Basra and found a different shambles above the Wadi River when he arrived on 27 January. The medical debacle of the week before had still not been fully resolved, the wounded had not been cleared, nor had all the dead been buried.
Lake now commanded about 63,000 men – a vast force, of which 15,000 were British and the balance Indian. However, of his 63,000, no less than 8,000 were hospital cases and a further 15,000 were in some way unable to take their place in the line. His effective strength was of the order of 40,000 and so, numerically at least, he was about as strong as von der Goltz.
59. An illustration of how barges were used to increase the capacity of river steamers. (IWM)
Aylmer could only muster 14,000 at best, although 11,000 reinforcements were en route, weather permitting. As recently as 20 January, intelligence sources advised that 36,000 Turks had left the Dardanelles to confront the British. It became clear that Lake’s priority remained the relief of Kut. He had the opportunity to take command in the field himself but, after some blunt discussions, Lake returned to Basra on 29 January, leaving operations in the unsteady hands of Aylmer. Lake’s insurance policy was in the shape of Lieutenant General Sir George Gorringe, whom he appointed as Aylmer’s chief of staff. Gorringe, at forty-seven, was a generation younger than Lake or Nixon, and noted for his ruthlessness.
Lake returned to the chaos of Basra. The Indian Government, recognising that all was not well, had overreacted to Lake’s initial request for three months’ reserve of ‘materiel’ in all its varied forms. Ships hurried to Basra and there they lay at anchor for weeks waiting to be unloaded as there were still no wharfing facilities. Utter disorganisation was the order of the day. The dearth of trained and specialist staff officers added to the problem and poor Lake had, unknowingly, exacerbated existing problems.
Aylmer regrouped, was reinforced, considered his options and worked to maintain his corps in the bleak desert. The month of February 1916 saw no further serious fighting, but in Kut the privations of the siege were manifest. Edward Mousley was one of many whose health was starting to fail. He recorded in his diary that:
The horse rations have fallen way to very little; we give them pieces of palm tree to gnaw on. The rheumatism is much worse. It is bleak and cold in the observation post. One can only psychologise viciously on the point of view between a full man and an empty one. Eating maketh a satisfied man, drinking, a merry man, smoking, a contented man. But eating, drinking and smoking maketh a happy man.
It is not far from the truth to say I have today none of these. For by eating one cannot mean a slice of chaff bread, nor by drinking a water-coloured liquid like our siege tea, nor yet by smoking a collection of strange dried twigs and dust. Man, it has been most excellently observed, cannot live by bread alone. How much less, then, can he live on half chaff and half flour? [Mousley’s italics.]226
In the early spring of March 1916, it finally became clear to the myopic IG that things had gone very badly wrong in Mesopotamia and a day of reckoning was not too far distant. General Duff recognised that it was time to try, at this very late stage, to ameliorate at least some of the damage. In London, disquiet over the management of the campaign in Mesopotamia had come to a head. Kitchener, the Minister for War, and Lieutanant General Sir ‘Wully’ Robertson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, agreed that enough was enough. The War Committee called for a comprehensive evaluation of the situation and the upshot was that, with immediate effect, the Imperial General Staff in London would assume responsibility for operations in Mesopotamia.
This was a hugely important, completely correct decision – because it prised the hands of Hardinge and Duff off the levers of military power. If it was perceived to be a severe, if veiled, administrative rebuke, that is because it was.
It was the closing days of the tenure of Charles Hardinge as Viceroy, but urged by Chamberlain in early December 1915, he had caused Duff to initiate an inquiry to report on the medical arrangements in the theatre of his concern. The first attempt at an investigation, in January 1916, had gone off at half cock and failed miserably. Later, and when all the chickens had come home to roost, Hardinge sought to give the impression that the abortive mission was quite independent of any advice, instruction or action from London.227
The two worthies selected to look into the matter were Lord Chelmsford and Surgeon General MacNeese (soon to re
place Babtie). Chelmsford had already been named as the successor to Hardinge and so he did not appear. MacNeese, a weak personality, was ‘got around’228 by Nixon and consequently produced a report so unsatisfactory that it was scrapped.
By now, news was filtering back to Britain, and even the King and Queen let it be known that they were disturbed by what they had heard.229 Austen Chamberlain, Secretary of State for India, was fully aware that things were going seriously wrong. Despite that, General Sir Beauchamp Duff was decorated with the Grand Cross of the Star of India (GCSI) in March. This can only have been with the agreement of Hardinge and Chamberlain, and possibly with the acquiescence of the King Emperor, in whose name the award was made. Lord Curzon wrote privately to Chamberlain expressing his disgust, saying of the decoration, ‘What for the Lord only knows – hardly for Mesopotamia.’230
Meanwhile, valuable time had been lost. In March 1916, a new commission was formed and Sir William Vincent, a senior Indian civil official, and Major General A.H. Bingley, two of the members of this commission, began their duties. They were subsequently joined at Basra by the third member, Mr E.A. Ridsdale, a Red Cross Commissioner.
This group became known as the ‘Vincent-Bingley Commission’. The report of this commission was swiftly compiled and was signed on 29 June 1916. It was not published, but was utterly damning, and dismayed Duff and the acolytes around him.
The three members of the Commission did not pull any punches and, having visited Mesopotamia, they had taken evidence first-hand from participants on all sides of the medical scandal. They named those whom they judged to have failed in their duty, and if Duff had ever thought that Vincent-Bingley would ease the pressure, he got that very, very wrong. The Report threw graphic, specific, fresh fuel upon the fire and inflamed the opinion of those who read of the grotesque deficiencies of the medical service in Mesopotamia.