The Secrets of a Kuttite Part 46

My wife knew several of our garrison when her father's regiment, the 24th S.W.B.'s, was in India years ago. I entertained her with stories of the amusing side of Kut. She was highly delighted at the little Arab boy's question as to whether she also had been in the siege!

We climbed the roof. The pattern of the sh.e.l.l burst that killed poor Colonel Courtenay and Garnett and Begg is still there. Then we visited the horse lines and took a car over the crumbling trenches to the Brick Kilns, where General Smith and I had our first dug-out. It seemed strange, indeed, to go along "on top" in a car where for so long to show even a _topee_ was to offer a dead mark to the Turks over the river.

The Brick Kilns most of all retain and impart to one again the spirit of Kut. The dug-out is still dug out, and bits of blown-up guns all round about. The position of Colonel Broke-Smith's Battery (63rd R.F.A.) I located near by. One seemed to hear his genial voice as he stumped along these very trenches to see if his guns were on their night lines. He was a magnificent gunner, and neither the siege nor captivity sapped far into his joyous indifference. I remember delivering a message to him under a sharp fire in the action of Um-al-Tabul, glorious to Townshend's memory. Sh.e.l.ls were bursting all around as he sat up his limber pole. I should think it impossible for any voice to sound more gleeful and exhilarating, and at the same time with more whip in it than his. He had got the precise range of that glorious target of crowded Turks, surprised at 1000 yards. Under each burst of his shrapnel I saw the running figures suddenly changed to flat black patches.

In fact, we could distinguish bursts by gaps suddenly appearing in the black horde. He came to lunch at my club on our meeting in the War Office after the Armistice, and admitted that when the Turks were particularly troublesome in his captivity, he used to recall with much satisfaction that glorious target.

As we walked to position after position, incidents long forgotten came up to the surface of my mind. Here was where we made the ramp for the debouch, there where poor Bombardier X was sniped. This was where the floods burst in over the bank and flooded us out. That where we made our last line. We came across a patch on the _maidan_, thick with sh.e.l.l cases and pieces of segment. This to my delight I located as the position of my old battery, the 76th R.F.A.

The six gun emplacements are clearly discernible, and my dug-out, in which I had spent so many weird hours, gaped eloquently before me. Gra.s.s grew on the walls.

The picturesque position of 86th R.F.A. in the palms is overgrown, but the smashed trees and sh.e.l.l-pierced wall and dug-outs gave me my bearings. The fort has been erased.

Last of all I succeeded in finding in the town the billet of the Sixth Divisional Ammunition Column, which later on I had shared with Tudway and Mellor. The upper story that had been partly demolished by the sh.e.l.l which occasioned the bruise to my back has now been cut away. The front door was barred and the billet vacant. By entering through an adjoining house, and scaling the wall on top over which the Turks had swarmed, I got down and forced the door for my wife and Major Jeffery to enter. The cupboard which I had filled with bricks was still there, as also the room in which the sh.e.l.ls had entered four and a half years before. Only four and a half years, and yet how far had I walked and seen since then! The back wall over which we used to peep at the Tigris is smashed down by bombardment, and the whole place bespattered with bullet marks.

The last glimpse I had had here was of my poor Don Juan's black tail on the verandah post, and of triumphant Turks kicking our orderly. To stand here once again, but as a free man accompanied by my wife and a Political Officer in that fire-changed scene, in that spot of long-enforced soliloquy, was surely more wonderful than coincidence. c.o.c.ky would have called it Destiny, and Tudway, "Outside chance."

While we were talking, an Arab from next door burst in, greatly excited. "Sahib chunet hina fil maha.s.sere?" ("Was Sahib here in the siege?") I answered him: "Naam. Kasr mali fil maha.s.sere." ("Yes--my palace of the siege.") He laughed. Kasr means palace. We remembered each other perfectly. He continued to salaam at my feet as something too wonderful. He said he remembered selling us some date juice (at an enormous figure, by the way).

He was surprised I had learned to speak to him in Arabic, and we had a long talk on old days. He recounted their troubles and persecutions after the Turks entered. A small Arab boy here at the P.O.'s house remembers me up in my observation post. An excellent little fellow, he has followed me about everywhere, or waited at my door--"Arid ashuf Sahib. Ma'arid backsheesh." "I want to see Sahib. I do not want backsheesh."

_10 p.m._--An hour ago I was about to go to bed, but the moon was floating on the Tigris. Two moons; one in the sky, one in the water, just as of old. It was irresistible, so I went forth with a pipe.

Once again Kut is asleep. Over the river Woolpress throws its familiar shadow, only a little more dilapidated and shattered. Beyond that, beyond the palms and the town, all around, skirting the desert, encircling--the trenches are falling.

History fades. The desert encroaches once more.

Since last here I have lived centuries of time, at no moment very far from, and in some precious moments very close to, the silent Heart of the East. Silent yet not inaudible its murmurs can reach a patient and humble listener. And into two or three years of captivity "from within" may be crowded the revelation of the experience of many years. In these precious moments the whisperings remain largely inarticulate, and then in our difficulty we mistakenly identify the desert with its effect on us. Robert Hichens clothes it with mystery, and Chu Chin Chow with the trans.m.u.tability of bright colours.

Here in this very spot, the first British army of history to do so, its dauntless heroism and sacrifice unavailing, succ.u.mbed to the finiteness of mortals. From this spot the survivors were trailed in dying columns across the ancient routes of the East, an object-lesson of the a.s.sailability of our prestige. It will take more than a successful campaign to erase that memory. The moral is we should not attempt what we are not prepared to carry through.

To-night, then, in this moment of a complete cycle in my history, I would like to think the advancement we have made in this country is consolidated and permanent. Is it? Apart from the fact that the arrangements for this country exist under the Treaty of Versailles, a treaty largely inoperative on account of divergence in the Entente, do we yet realize that a good deal of the recent rebellion is a national movement in a country extraordinarily hard to contain with a depleted army? Is it yet fully realized that for the first time in the history of an Empire we have in this country--mandate though it be--a nursling territory with every flank, except a mile or two of sea, politically open?

On one side awakened Russia, adjoining Persia of grandee or gentleman bandit government; on the north, the hornet's nest of the Highlands of Kurdistan; on the west, the illimitable eternity of the Arab's desert.

Adequate garrisoning is out of the question for financial reasons, and we are just realizing here, as in Ireland, that to conquer a country is one thing and to police it another.

General Townshend's advance represented the high-water mark of his conquest--until he was cut off! But now "they are all about us." To impose any programme on these people--as is the case also with the Turks--which they do not absolutely endorse, must involve policing. How earnestly did people at the Armistice, who knew Turkey and Turkish intrigues, urge this fact on our advisers at home! And now, two years afterwards, I see that the Treaty of Sevres is to be modified in favour of the Turks. How very clearly this was foreseen as inevitable by some of us! The desert and Mohammedan question must be examined _ab initio_.

It should not be contingent on or sequential to other matters of European politics--because it is of a different world.

The fact is that, in the desert, nature is at a minimum.

There is no mountain ravine, no forest to determine the path of man. Here are the Great Silence, the Great Solitude, Illimitable s.p.a.ce, and a Sea of Time. Here introspection is at a premium, the mind is unfettered and chainless. Perhaps it is free. And in this world of Stillness and Emptiness man moves as a considerable object. From the desert came all the prophets. Cities and customs arise and disappear into the sand. Dynasty succeeds dynasty, as conquest succeeds conquest.

In the end you have the sand and the horizon as at first.

Can it be wondered at, therefore, that in such soil a transplanted mushroom of civilization cannot be expected to flourish? In 1914 Mesopotamia was much as two thousand years ago. An advanced civilization with elaborate impedimenta is deposited on to it. This civilization, then, must either have an army adequate to protect it or it must conform to whatever standard of efficiency, to whatever degree of perfection, the local inhabitant will tolerate.

This cardinal fact has been obscured by a ma.s.s of controversy and interesting side issues, _e.g._ to what extent the possibilities of this country can ever be realized unless we enter on a gigantic irrigation scheme and plug up the hills at the source of these rivers. But the farther afield and the more elaborate our development, the more this cardinal fact holds good.

Goethe tells us to take the duty nearest to us. But this is precisely what the hard-working officials of the Civil Administration have done. We went from commitment to commitment, and this duty led to that, this problem to the one adjoining. Which may make for good progress in war, but for a programme of peace it overlooks the cardinal principle.

Nor do I think that the Arab can be expected to appreciate the fact that pending the arrival of a definite Treaty with Turkey, the spirit of government and development must be expected to be arbitrary--for we declared otherwise in our proclamation to them. Greater clairvoyance and experience in the direction of policy might have borne steadily in view this cardinal fact instead of relentlessly pursuing the G.o.d Efficiency. The G.o.d Efficiency was invented by Prussia, and with all its completeness and perfection the war found it to be only a machine. It overlooked human factors; it missed cardinal facts.

Yet, coming back to Kut once more! None of our beleaguered garrison on this Babylonian plain could have believed it humanly possible to effect such a metamorphosis in this land in so short a s.p.a.ce of time. Wharves, s.h.i.+pping, and railway systems, electric light and fans, Courts of Justice, Revenue, Agricultural and Finance Departments, Government Press, British and Arab daily papers--it has been built up by great and unsparing effort, and so far as earnestness and will to succeed went, the officers of the Civil Administration have worked tremendously hard. My own chief, Sir Edgar Bonham-Carter, I have known work continuously all through the heat from early morning until late into the night.

It was from this bank in December, 1915, that, previous to his arrival recently as a High Commissioner, I last saw Sir Percy c.o.x, then Chief Political Officer, as he left by the last boat for downstream. I talked with him this week before leaving Baghdad, and found him much older.

He must have had a long spell of work without leave. The Persian Treaty which he made for us at Teheran is, I hear, moribund, and this must have been a great disappointment to him.

Nevertheless, he has undertaken the enormous responsibility and difficulties here most courageously. The Arab welcome to him on his arrival the other day was little short of homage to a king. It has changed the situation a good deal.

To-morrow we go from here by paddle-boat to Basra, en route for home on leave.

Bacon tells us that writing maketh an exact man. Perhaps to know when one has said enough is to be exact.

Let us then away from Kut at once and for ever.

_London, March, 1921_ (_continued_).--Kuttavi!--I have cut.

Or rather, Kuttaverunt, the doctors have, as they think I should not return to the climate of Mesopotamia.

I am back in this dear sweet land, beautiful even in all her sorrows. Back, round the pivot of palm trees to where I was before the war, behind me the eloquent vacuum through which the world has rolled. It is almost a complete vacuum, as _Punch_ might say, a host of flitting, fading shadows.

But at times I see a long, wide river winding over endless plains, with here and there a solitary palm. And I hear the long cry proceeding from the dark figure crouching in the bows as he takes the soundings, "Bahout pa-a-ni!"--the long, lone cry that ever and anon by day and night floats intermittently to the ears of the traveller in that ancient land.

It, too, has borrowed from the desert something that is deterministic and ineffaceable.

Back to this window. And so, "Another cycle is complete!"

THE END