'No, sirrr. I thocht it would have enrrraged them. But I'd have ye know, sirrr, that it's hairrrdly safe to be aboot.'
We came, says Xenophon, to 'a large and thickly populated city named Sittake.' His troops encamped 'near a large and beautiful park, which was thick with all sorts of trees, at a distance of fifteen stades from the river.'[1] This description still holds true of Sumaikchah. The ancient irrigation channels are dry, and the town has shrunken; but it remains a large garden-village. Here were melons and oranges, fowls and turkeys, exorbitantly priced, of course; possibly Xenophon's troops got their goods more cheaply in the year 399 B.C.
Sumaikchah is an oasis with eighty wells. The water was full of salts. It was bad as water; it was execrable as tea. Many of the wells on the Baghdad-Samarra Railway have these natural salts. Every one who left Sumaikchah next morning was suffering from diarrhœa. Here again one remembers the Anabasis and the troublesome experience which the notes I read at school ascribed to poisonous honey gathered from the flowers of rhododendron ponticum.
Our brief stay here was unlike anything we had known, except in our racing glimpse of the flowery approaches to Kut. The village had palms and rose bushes. A coarse hyacinth, found already at Mushaidiyeh, now seeding, grew along the railway and in the wheat. We camped amid green corn; round us were storksbills, very many, and a white orchis, slight and easily hidden, the same orchis that I found afterwards in Palestine and in the Hollow Vale of Syria. A small poppy and a bright thistle set their flares of crimson and gold in the green; sowthistle and myosote freaked it with blue; a tall gladiolus, also to be found later by the Aujeh and on Carmel, made pink clusters. Thus did flowers overlay the fretting spikes of our road, and adorn and hide 'the coming bulk of Death.'
Through Saturday we rested. Fritz came, of course; and there was a little harmless sniping.
The knowledge filtered in that fighting was again at hand. It was accepted without comment, with the soldier's well-known fatalism, the child of faith and despair. 'Every man thinks,' said one to me, 'I don't care who he is. But we believe it's all right till our number's up. Take M——, for instance. When he was left out at Sannaiyat we all envied him; we thought we were for it. But we went through Sannaiyat; and M—— was the first of us to be killed at Mushaidiyeh, his very first action, where we had hardly any casualties.'
In the evening the rest of the division came up to take our place. Sunday, by old prescription, was the 7th Division's battle-day; next Sunday being Easter, it was not to be supposed that so fair an occasion would be passed over. Accordingly, when I put in my services, I was told that the brigade would march before dawn, and that some scrapping was anticipated. The Turks were holding Beled Station, half a dozen miles away in a straight line. Their main force was at Harbe, four miles farther. The maps were no use, and distances had to be guessed. 'The force against us,' observed the Brigade-Major, 'is somewhere between a hundred Turks and two guns, and four thousand Turks and thirty-two guns.' 'And if it's the four thousand and thirty-two guns?' 'Then we shall sit tight, and scream for help,' he answered delightedly.
2. The Action for Beled
Davies's Column were away before breakfast. In the dim light we moved through wet fields of some kind of globe-seeded plant, abundantly variegated with gladiolus and hyacinth. Every one was suffering from our course of Sumaikchah waters, and progress was slow. Splashing through the marshes, we came to undulating upland, long, steady slopes, pebble-strewn and with pockets of grass and poppies. The morning winds made these uplands exceedingly beautiful. Colonel Knatchbull said, the week he died, that what he most remembered from Beled were the flowers through which we marched to battle. As we approached them, the ruffling wind laid its hand on the grasses, and they became emerald waves, a green spray of blades tossing and flashing in the full sunlight. As we passed, the same wind bowed them before it, and they were a shining, silken cloth. The poppies were a larger sort than those in the wheatfields, and of a very glorious crimson. In among the grasses was yellow coltsfoot; among the pebbles were sowthistle, mignonette, pink bindweed, and great patches of storksbill. Many noted the beauty of these flowers, a scene so un-Mesopotamian in its brightness. We were tasting of the joy and life of springtide in happier latitudes, a wine long praetermitted to our lips; and among us were those who would not drink of this wine again till they drank it new in their Father's Kingdom. After Beled we saw no more flowers.
With the first line was my friend Private W——. As we pushed forward he looked up, as his custom was, for a 'message.' Perchance, with so many fears and hopes stirring, there was some buzzing along the heavenly wires; but the only word he could get was this one, 'Because.' He puzzled upon it, till the whole flashed on his brain—'Because Thy lovingkindness is better than life, my lips shall praise Thee.' Thenceforward he went his ways content; neither can any man have gathered greater pleasure from the beauty of the morning and those unwonted flowers than this Plymouth Brother, a gardener by profession, and, as I found in later days, amid the rich deep meadows of the Holy Land, a passionate lover of all wild plants.