The Secrets of a Kuttite Part 21

Daily I practise walking on the wall, a s.p.a.ce that offers opportunity for a good promenade. I want to see how much I can do. Altogether I feel a little better but the dysentery has left me very weak, and after a half-mile have to sit down.

I have contrived to send my British orderly to the town where, with the money I have raised by selling some of my kit, he has bought on occasion small pieces of meat or fish, a few vegetables, and even a small fowl which we shared among six sick people. We stewed the fowl to rags and drank the soup.

I have been allowed by special leave to visit General Smith in hospital. He had asked me during the last days of Kut to do A.D.C. again to him in captivity. This was an excellent chance for which I was most grateful, as it seemed doubtful whether I would last the trek. But I have no money and can't get any, and am averse to travelling on my general's supply, as money now is one's chance of life. I told him frankly that I am doubtful about being fit enough to carry on very efficiently for him, but as he is to travel in a carriage over the desert for all those hundreds of miles I could do a certain amount, and I hoped to be of use in knowing something of French and German. However, in my woebegone condition I was promptly turned down. I recognize now that I am in for the ordeal of the survival of the fittest with a heavy handicap.

We hear sometimes terrible accounts of the hards.h.i.+ps undergone over these hundreds of miles of foodless and often waterless land, to struggle over which is an achievement even for a strong man. But for one thing, we should be too dismayed to start--that is the hope and will strong within us to survive.

One recognizes this show has become a compet.i.tion between a man and a merciless fate. I believe I shall get through.

Major Middlemas and Lieutenant Greenwood shared my room and we slept on our blankets on the floor.

_Later._--We have been allowed three times into the town and wandered through a bazaar full of bootshops and cafes.

Gunner Holmes sticks faithfully to me. He is lucky to have escaped the lot of the others. Shortly after our arrival we saw what even the oldest soldiers amongst us regarded as the most awful spectacle of their lives--the sight of a column of British soldiers under Turk and Arab guards entering Baghdad after the march from Kut. They were literally walking corpses, some doubled with the pains of cholera, some limping from blows received _en route_. They were pressed on by their guards. Some had lost their boots and shoes or had parted with them for food. Some fell, but under the coercion of loud shouts or a Turkish heel got up and lurched forward again.

We heard from hospital of the awful sufferings of the men here who were quite unnecessarily confined in a bare baked-up field near the station. Indians and British were all mixed up, a deliberate effort of the Turk to encourage strife between the Mussulman prisoners and the others. For some days, mad with thirst, they struggled around a tiny foul pool into which the sick crawled and collapsed. It became stirred up with mud but the men, poor fellows, drank it.

They have no cover from the sun except a few wretched sticks propped on poles.

Baghdad is a very old city. But from its grimy and ill-kept streets and from its dust-smothered houses, the glamour of its ancient romance seems very far off. One minaret of Byzantine design we pa.s.sed on our way to the town. There is nothing else to tell one of its glorious past, in fact it is said that all Baghdad was on the other bank. It is merely a drab, dull succession of buildings formed of the sun-baked mud of the desert. On the river, however, especially at sunset when the dirt and dust are obscured and only the pipes of the Baghdadis and Arabs blaze in the dusk, it is decidedly picturesque.

All the sick, even if only partly able to walk, start on the desert trek for Mosul in a few days. We have heard so much of waterless marches and barren lands crossed only by the nastiest Arabs, that one has the resistless desire to try one's chance. To move is to live; to stay here is to die.

_Later._--I have made a small tour of some antique shops in the bazaar with a delightful youth named Lacy of the Hants.

He has just left school and is as slender and green as the young willow, and yet he has contrived to keep his manners intact, to await quietly his turn and to prefer dignified acquiescence to selfishness. We found quite an amount of silver work and even china, some of which we heard had found its way here during the war from an old caravan route from China.

I have corrupted my first sentry by giving him a drink, swallowed a horrible cognac, the immediate effects of which were promising, and learned two Turkish words. One is "yok," which means "there is not," and the other is "yesak,"

which means forbidden!

_Mosul, June 14th._--Nearly three weeks ago at Baghdad the convalescent and sick who were able to move at all were given several false starts, and then without notice marched in the fierce heat to the railway station nearly two miles off. We then lay down in the road until evening when the train was found to be unable to start. We bought some bread and at intervals managed leave from our guards to get water. In the early morning we left by train for Samarra, the rail head eighty miles off, a tiny village on the scorching plain. Dust storms enveloped us as we marched to quarters which were on the ground inside a serai. A few branches interwoven overhead afforded most inadequate shelter. Here we met some other officers who had been left behind from previous columns. Feverish preparations filled the interval while we awaited donkeys which were to transport us. One heard that previous columns had bought the few available stores, and that the Arabs had learned to put up prices. The novelty for the Turk of white prisoners was wearing off, and altogether we seemed in for a rough time.

We were allowed to go down to the river near by to bathe under escort. On one occasion our padre quoted "By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept when we thought of thee, O Zion." We realized we were the Third Captivity. In fact he might have selected another psalm.

About a quarter of the donkeys turned up. Our senior officer objected; but ultimately we had to start with what we could get, a half donkey for one's kit and one-third for oneself.

We had to walk in turns, and from the size and condition of the donkeys a collapse was soon inevitable. Major Middlemas and I piled our kit on a large donkey, whom we called the Cynic, from the cut of his head and from his eye and his perpetual sneer, no doubt brought about by a disgust of the Turk's hopeless _bandobast_. He went at his own pace.

The sun was setting on the desert as our column of about forty British officers, a number of native officers, and some sick men whom we took as orderlies, wound slowly over the scorching sand. Dust from the forward column blinded us, and one was frequently almost ridden down by others pressing on. A riding animal I shared with Lieutenant Lee-Bennett, who feeling ill collapsed after doing a mile or two, and so he rode most of the time. He had been very ill, whereas I was recovering, and although racked with pain I managed to keep going by holding on to a strap. At intervals in the hot night we halted. I shall never forget the impressiveness of this scene. Our long shadows reached far over the plain. For the most part we were silent men, and determination to get as far as possible was in every one's heart, but it was an absolute gamble. Here and there friends walked beside a donkey and held a sick man up. I felt an inner conviction I would manage all right, and this kept me up in many a doubtful moment later. Here and there an Indian Mussulman soldier fell out for a few seconds, and with his forehead in the desert dust paid his devotion to Allah. More than one of our guards did so likewise. A glorious sky of red sailing clouds stretched above us, and there came over me the battle picture of Detaille's "Dream," a procession of soldier spirits marching across the sky with banners streaming, while down on the plain below, among stacks of piled rifles, men lay sleeping among the dead.

Some Arab set up his chant and the rhythm then fitted in exactly with that of Beethoven's funeral march. I was sorry for having had to start without some of my friends.

Lieutenant Lacy of the Hants was too ill. He has drawn very much on his youth. I have been much struck with his quiet manly self-possession.

It was a feverish night, and as it wore on we found our strength giving out. To fall out was to be neglected and lost.

One pressed on as in a sort of nightmare. Now and then a donkey fell or refused to budge and our orderlies had to be carried also. This meant casting kit. At last we reached the camping place, but there was no water. After an hour or two of broken sleep we were aroused by shouts of "Haidee" (hurry), "Yallah" (get on). Now our donkeys had been requisitioned from Arabs at Samarra, and Turkish payment is generally nothing. These Arabs followed us in the night. In the morning most of the donkeys were missing. We had had to sleep where we were ordered and could not guard them ourselves. This meant a fruitless search, and after much labour the Cynic only was recovered from another convoy. Our riding animal was gone so I had to walk. It was an awful march once the sun had got up. In the distance a few sandstone hills appeared. Our tongues were swollen and our throats on fire as we at last staggered on to the river. The donkeys bolted into the water, and some fell in with their packs on them. After a rest of two hours we went on again over stony defiles. I had to fall out several times and then had some luck in buying from an Arab a ride on his tiny donkey, whom I called Peter Pan, a small thing not two feet high but awfully game. We pulled each other up the hills, and hours afterwards tumbled into Te Krit, a hostile Arab village which treated our men abominably.

We slept in a Serai stable place and rested two days, purchasing what food we could. On the river front was a camp of our soldiers dying from enteritis and dysentery.

Medicine that had been left in charge of a native a.s.sistant surgeon had been sold to the Turks and the money kept by him. Many and loud were the complaints of our men against him. This man I understand is to be dealt with. He was an absolute traitor, in fact, murderer. The Turks had no medicine, and what this man sold had been carefully preserved and given to the camp by a previous column. The ration for the men (who had no money) was indigestible bread, and they were only allowed to crawl to the muddy river which made dysentery worse. The Arabs were particularly bad, and it wasn't safe to go outside the door without a guard. While defending my bundle of scanty clothes on the donkey from a big Arab, his friends made off with my spare haversack of utensils, and I lost this haversack also with my water-bottle.

From here the trek became a daily affair. Men fell out and died or were left in some village. Donkeys collapsed and kit had to be abandoned. From out of the darkness one heard moaning cries of "Marghaya, Sahib" "Marghaya" (dying) from our Indian friends who could go no farther. One looked into the night and saw the Arab fires, and knew the fate of him who fell out.

Turkish troops pa.s.sing our column in the night seized our water-bottles and rugs or anything they could get without making too much disturbance, and although I have no doubt this was against orders, still no one seems concerned to see Turkish orders carried out. We made bivouac tents of our rugs by the river at which we fetched up each night. The country became a sand-gra.s.sy waste. Here and there were a few goats or sheep herded by the river. The rest was desert.

At Khan Khernina, a stopping place on the Tigris, we prepared for the long waterless march of which we had heard so much.

We bought waterskins, cast spare kit, and with our dates, chupattis, and the bones of our last meal for stew, for we could afford meat only once a week as our small pay from Baghdad was almost finished, we pressed on. It was a terrible march for sick men. Hour after hour we kept going, our thirst increasing and our water evaporating from the skins. I had no donkey but borrowed one here and there from my brother officers.

We all tried to help our orderlies also.

Later, I coaxed on a small beast that had collapsed and had been left to die. Gunner Holmes and I had to chastise him along and he required pus.h.i.+ng. After a time we got him to go a little better and tried making him walk behind our water-bottles strung on the donkey ahead that carried now three officers' kits. Every one asked why we bothered. That night, however, when other donkeys were giving out and the halting place drew near, our donkey revived and made off at a great rate expecting to end up with his usual draught of water. It was this beast that helped us to negotiate the worst patch.

The night of the first great waterless march we rested on the _maidan_, a hilly bare spot near some salt springs, and had a most entertaining time of it. Dust storms revolved around us and donkeys stamped over our heads as they stampeded.

Kit, men, and beasts became indistinguishable. Nightmare followed nightmare in quick succession, and shortly after, while it was still dark, we were hurried on. The thing was to get in the lead of the column and, having the use of a donkey for the first hour, I left with the leading file alongside Fauad Bey, our half-Turk, half-Arab Commander. This meant getting ready early. He was a rough sort but his chief sins were ignorance and faulty judgment and inability to make any sort of _bandobast_. With proper orders much of our sorrows could have been obviated. The waterless march continued through dust and heat. Donkey after donkey collapsed. Our last drop of water was evaporating, so we drank it. At last, after some hours, we looked down over a depression and the cry "mai," "mai" (water), came from our guards ahead--they, too, wanted water.

The Tigris lay far below. The cry was taken up in Hindustani "pani," "pani." It travelled down the column giving hope to the faltering. The village was still three miles off.

Then a thunderstorm with heavy rain broke over us. The beautiful water soaked on to our skin. We loved it.

An hour or so afterwards we reached Shergat, that in old times was a.s.shur--the a.s.syrian capital of the 13th century, B.C. The excavations enabled us to see something of the life of that ancient town. There seemed much Roman work there, too. In the first hour we drank and drank and drank again, and then got into the river, sick men and all, to let the glorious element caress us once again. Then we settled down for sleep among donkeys, drivers, and Turks, the bearers flouris.h.i.+ng pots all round us. The better rooms on the balcony and first floor were for senior officers. I was feeling very weakened and could not sleep for pain in my spine, but hoped to get through as the waterless march was over.

Malaria returned the second night, and with a temperature of 105 I heard we were off. I felt appallingly unsteady and my head throbbed to every movement of the donkey, as it does in such cases. I was lucky to have any donkey at all, because some of the native orderlies having lost their own donkeys clean shaved most of the others, thus erasing the letters that had been cut out of the hair of the animal. Wild and high raged many a conflict over donkeys. I found mine had been re-branded and was claimed by another. At the last moment I managed to get a tiny animal from an Arab water-carrier for my last money.

Once again we filed out to the setting sun past Bedouin camps. We crossed some heavy water-courses, and more than one humorous event occurred thereat. To see a colonel seated on a diminutive donkey that stuck midstream, refusing to budge either forward or backward while the water gradually climbed up the angry colonel's breeches, was quite entertaining.

In such cases a fat Turk or Arab would seize the animal's nose while the others pushed the beast or the colonel from behind. I remember that on one such occasion a very "bobbery" major rode a donkey that had conceived an affection for mine, and always followed my little beast. So when we stuck midstream the major's beast stopped also, and, less lucky than I, his animal happened to have stopped on some quicksand so that when finally my beast was got to move the major's could not. The whole four of us were equally put out. I suggested later that we should exchange donkeys, but as I had only a slight lien on my animal the major disagreed.

A detailed account of our many wanderings would spoil the perspective of this diary. We went on through the nights and through the days; through dust-storms and heat, by night pa.s.sing the fires of Arabs who awaited the stragglers, sometimes camping by Bedouin tents or pebbly water-courses, always following the trail of dead, for every mile or so one saw mounds of our dead soldiers by the wayside. We left Hammamali, a village of sulphur-baths, on the 14th June, and stumbling over rocky ground for some hours we reached far-famed Mosul, and with great delight saw again a few trees.

Then appeared the mounds of Nineveh and the mounds of the palace of the great King Sardanapalus. But even the shades of Sargon, Shalmaneser and Sennacherib scarcely interested us. In the foreground we saw a great tomb which we were told was John the Baptist's! And Alexander's great battlefield of Arbela lay on the eastern plain.

The impression of life in Mosul is bad. We have some rooms in an appalling dirty barracks among gangs of Kurds in chains. Every day or so one of these is hung. Down below in the bas.e.m.e.nt our men are dying wholesale. They are the survivors of previous columns. We have been compulsory guests of a Turkish officers' club. They charged us three times as much as the town did, and generally neglected us. General Melliss, however, told us to-day to go to the town.

We quoted his high authority freely and went to a most excellent little Italian restaurant. The proprietor was from Naples, and we had some conversation of his old haunts. He did us very well and quite reasonably, actually cas.h.i.+ng a cheque or two for us.

_Nisibin, June 26th._--After many false rumours of wagons and carts for transport and the usual half-dozen false starts we left Mosul on June 20th. Early in the morning before starting I slipped out in the confusion of preparing the columns and did the round of Mosul absolutely unattended. With the little Turkish I had picked up and French here and there, I visited the bank quarter to try to raise some money by cheque.

There was no chance of this, but I succeeded in changing the notes I had for smaller. The notes were not accepted in the bazaar, and one was charged for paper change. I had not the fortune of meeting one likely person or I should not have returned, but to attempt to escape without help in such a place with the desert all around was too hopeless. I saw merely bazaar and squabbling Arabs.

On the 20th a few tiny donkeys were given us for riding animals, about enough to allow one officer out of six a ride one hour in three. Some donkeys were on three legs, some so poor and sick they could scarcely move. For transport we were shown a set of a dozen untrained, wild and unharnessed camels, altogether the most savage and nasty brutes I have ever seen. They were unapproachable and snapped and gyrated and then trotted away. If a kit were fixed on they proceeded to brush it off. One or two had a rotten saddletree without any girths, bridles or head-straps there were none, only a piece of rotten rag or rope being around the animals'

heads. We had, however, already laid in a stock of the best rope we could get, and having first fitted this into the jaws of the brutes, proceeded to fix on our kit. I was very amused at the efforts of the Turks to help us. They tied the kit actually on one camel's neck, and our Indian bearers went one better by tying it on to his legs. However, finally we got most of our kit on board, and then the fun started. First one and then another got loose, as the servants were too weak to hold them. Soon the road was a procession of fleeing camels dropping bundle after bundle in their headlong flight.

This pantomime went on for hours. It was awfully hot.

We took a long time to get them refitted. An hour later, blinded with perspiration and dust and in the last stage of exhaustion, we set out again, having done only about four miles of this terrible trek of which we had heard so much and which was now said to be worse than the other we had just finished. We plodded on. Presently loud shouts of consternation broke from the rear, and we saw a gigantic camel laden up with well-roped valises, firewood, and stores topped with rugs, and a fowl or two. He simply charged through the procession, brus.h.i.+ng every bit of kit off the other camels as he pa.s.sed and setting off two or three along with him. One camel followed him with a helpless bearer seated on the top of the stores, the head-rope gone. His shouts as he was borne toward the wrong part of the horizon would have been funny if it had not meant disaster for his sahib. We rested an hour or two and then went on in two columns, one of which got lost and did several miles too much, joining us before the dawn in time to start again. The camel pantomime continued. I walked or borrowed a ride from an Arab. My endurance was to me the marvellous thing.

I was almost two stone underweight, and very unwell from the long bout of colitis, my digestion quite out of gear, weak from want of nourishment and my sh.e.l.l-bruise, not to mention continual pain from my eyes. Yet with all the exertion and sleepless nights, so fascinating was movement after long inaction that I managed to go along quite well, and at times felt my legs swinging rhythmically along in the night and believed it possible to be well one day again. One donkey I managed to get for my baggage and that of my fellow voyager, Lieutenant Stapleton, I.A.R., who was an official "of important dimensions" in the I.C.S., and although not much _au fait_ with knots and donkeys, made a most excellent purchasing officer, as his Arabic was so doubtful that the Arabs, being at a loss to know his wants, had to produce all their possessions, and in this way we ended up more than once in having a goat's head when he had set out to describe the more expensive chicken. He was keen on ologies, and we called him the Ologist. One tried to extract humour out of our incongruous situations, but getting tired of being humorous we ended by examining things from the resigned angle of the fatalist.

Each day before the dawn broke we were up, and after a breakfast of tea, black bread, a small piece of cheese and two figs, or generally only raisins, we prepared to leave. Then the camel pantomime started afresh, and it was no uncommon sight to see half our convoy of camels bolting headlong in the wrong direction before a crowd of galloping gendarmes and Turks, their uplifted tails disappearing over a sand-ridge against the rising sun and their kit distributed at intervals on the plain.

On this trek we lost the sense of time. Sometimes we marched by day, but generally in the evening and well on into the night. But for us time was not. I knew two seasons only: when we walked and when we did not. I did not always sleep. We have had to rely on provisions we brought with us and live chiefly on raisins. Sometimes one was on foot, sometimes one rode, and a broken-down wagon or two offered a fraction of a seat to any one that collapsed up to the number of six. But so many from one cause or another got sick or footsore that the extra had to hang on to the wagon.

Our Commandant, Fauad Bey, has been in a most obstreperous and belligerent mood for days. He allowed our senior officer, Colonel c.u.mmings, to remain and fish at the latter's request at the first camp out of Mosul on the understanding that he would follow with his escort the same night. The colonel turned up some days later, and whatever misunderstanding there was, Fauad considered his kindness abused, and made the whole column suffer with regulations and restrictions.

At Demir Kapu we finished the most strenuous march I have ever done. It was a dry, waterless stretch of forty kilometres over parched ground with not even salt springs _en route_.

Again and again we had nothing left but the will to go on.

My donkey collapsed, and with difficulty I got him to a swamp of foul slime in which, besides many bones, were the half-picked skeletons of two donkeys that had apparently been drowned in their attempt to get water.

So dry and thirsty were the animals that most of them rushed into the slimy pool up to their backs and then subsided, kit and all, into the mud. We extricated them, and having drunk our fill also of slime, we set out for the last few miles.

This water was green and filled with germs, but one's experience had pretty well inoculated one by this time. Our thirst was not to be denied. One's soul was hot within one and one's tongue dry and hard. With our limit of transport there was no alternative, and most of us had had no money wherewith to buy "mussocks" (waterskins). The column reached out for miles. Even our guard were quite done.

At length we reached Demir Kapu (iron gates), where a cool translucent stream runs through some rocks, and we drank and bathed, and some having slept began to fish. At our next halting-place a dust-storm descended on our camp in the night.

I have been in dust-storms in various places, but this was of a new order. With a roar like thunder a deluge of sand fell upon us, travelling terrifically fast. It tore down bivouacs, carried off tents and valises, pulled up picketing pegs, and rolled even heavy pots hundreds of yards off, where they were buried in the sand and many lost. We could not stand against it any more than against an incoming tide. It lasted for some minutes. One buried one's head and lay with all one's weight on one's kit. I understand how people are often suffocated in these storms, as even this was quite long enough. My chief loss was my topee, for which I looked long in the dark and even walked along the river to within a few yards of an Arab village to see if it had been carried down. The next day my improvised headgear of a towel proved inadequate, and I went down with an awful attack of sunstroke. Our medical officer allowed me to ride some of the way in the ambulance cart, as my temperature, he said, was quite high. Thanks to his kindness and attention and wet cloths I picked up enough to walk a little. I arrived at Nisibin feeling very ill and feverish.

I am writing under an old Roman stone bridge. Nisibin was once the outpost of the Roman Empire, and ruins of an ancient university life are found on the plain and along the wall. It is frightfully hot. There is little food in the bazaar and prices are the highest yet met, a handful of raisins being about half a crown.

I set out yesterday for the hospital to recover a topee, as I heard a British officer had died there. After many wanderings through tiny streets and dark quarters and backyards and many redirections, I was led through a doorway of matting hanging from the mud-brick wall into a courtyard, where through an opening in the wall I saw a sight that staggered the imagination.