And nothing happened but the heat. In July, in ghastly heat, men were expected to take Ramadie. They failed, most of their heavy casualties being from heat-stroke. But that was the Connaught Rangers and a Euphrates affair. At Samarra we experienced nothing more dangerous than Fritz's[20] visits. Once or twice he bombed the station. When the railway began running, there were two accidental derailments, in the second of which several men were killed and General Maude had a narrow escape. By Sumaikchah a British officer and his Indian escort were waylaid and murdered. The murderers were outlawed; but a year later the first on our list of the whole gang walked back into occupied territory and was taken and hanged, despite the wish of the Politicals to spare him. Of all these events, such as they were, we heard from Barron—'the bold, bad Barron,' who left the Leicestershires to take up 'important railway duties' pending the renewal of fighting.
These matters are dull enough; but no recital can be so dull as the times were, and we had to live through them. At Samarra the division worked unmolested through the awful heats, digging the hard ground, cutting avenues for machine-gun fire, making strong points. Wilson had gone, but he had an adequate successor in Haigh. Thanks to him, the Leicestershires established the singular fact that Samarra is the healthiest spot in the world. One man died, in place of the dreadful sequence of deaths a year before at Sannaiyat. The division's daily sick-rate was .9 a thousand! The Leicestershires and the Indian battalions did even better. And yet we spent the summer in a place where fresh vegetables were unprocurable, except a most inadequate supply of melons and (rarely) beans. Djinns scoured the plain, and at any hour of any day half a score of 'dust-devils' could be seen racing or sweeping majestically along—each djinn seemed to make his own wind and choose his own pace—now towering to a height of several hundred feet, with vast, swirling base, and now trailing a tenuous mist across a nulla. Our few hens ran panting into the tents, ejected at one door, only to enter at another. And yet, as I have said, only one man died—with the battalion, that is—and ridiculously few went sick. But by Colonel Knatchbull's death in Baghdad the battalion lost its commander, and the division a very fine soldier. Wounded at Sheikh Saad in January, 1916, he had returned in time for the three railhead battles. He struggled on with sickness, refusing to contemplate a second leave to India, and died at midsummer.
The worst of the heats I escaped. After a spell in Beit Na'ama, the delightful estuary-side officers' hospital, a tangle of citron and fig-groves, with vines making cool roofs, and with the Shat-el-Arab flowing by, I was discharged. Feeling more wretched than ever, I lingered on at Busra in the poisonous billets, filthy Arab houses, named by their present occupants 'Flea Villa,' 'Bug Cottage,' 'Muddy View' (this would be for winter; the world nowhere else holds such mud as Busra mud). Busra is hateful beyond words; any place up the line is preferable, except perhaps Twin Canals[21] and Beled. I was to be returned to duty 'in due course'; but the Transport authorities were never in a hurry. It was like being slowly baked in a brick oven. I had spent ten days so, with no prospect of being given a boat up-stream, when some one told General Fane, the O.C. 7th Division, that I had been very sick and was waiting to get back to duty. He said, 'Nonsense,' and sent a wire direct to G.H.Q., insisting that I be given a month's leave in India. I got it immediately. But for this action, leave could not have come my way. No division ever had a kinder O.C. than Fane. He knew every one, and was constantly doing thoughtful acts such as this.
India, when it found time to give thought to Mesopotamia, chattered of the tremendous Turco-German offensive which was to sweep down from Mosul in the autumn. When I returned, at the end of August, all down the line I found excitement. Only at Samarra itself was quiet and ease of mind, where old comrades greeted me joyously and introduced new-comers. There was Fergusson, reputed to have half a century of ranching and horse-dealing in the Argentine; 'Forty-nine,' said Fowke, in a delighted whisper, assessing his age. (As a matter of fact, Fergusson's years were forty-one.) There was 'Ezra' ('Likewise Beetle,' interpolated Fowke), who had arrived the day I went sick. 'Ezra,' who signed his name as Mason, and was brother of Kenneth Mason, engineer and archaeologist, got his nickname from a supposed modelling of his bald dome upon Ezra's Tomb, by Q'urna. Keely, classical scholar and philosopher, was standing outside his tent, pondering, as I came up to rejoin the battalion. He called me up, and asked me earnestly what girl from Greek literature I should like to have known, even to have had as companion on the Thames at Richmond. 'Nausicaa,' I said. 'Every time,' agreed Keely, brightening up as if a heavy load had been lifted from his mind, and begged me to have a drink in her honour. Bale and Charles Copeman were away, by Al-Ajik; 'in the nearest E.P. tent to Constantinople,' G.A. said. Of our wounded, only G.A. was back. Warren came later; Westlake remained in India.
Some surprise was expressed that I had returned at all. This was Thorpe's doing. To explain, I must go back a little. I knew Thorpe years before the war. We met again in Sannaiyat trenches. His messmates, who desired to know more of Thorpe's old life, asked me how we met first. 'I was chaplain of a jail at Peterborough,' I replied. The statement was received at once; the only head on which further light was sought was as to the number of years that were deducted from his sentence for service in Mesopotamia. (Convicts from India who came out in the Labour Corps to Mesopotamia were remitted ten years.) Now, during my Indian leave, an old friend found me out and took me to spend the last days of my Darjiling visit with him. He was, among other things, superintendent of the prison. I carelessly wrote to Thorpe on a sheet of paper with the printed heading 'Jail-house, Darjiling.' Thorpe spent July and August in taking this sheet round from mess to mess. He blackened my reputation, and opened up a field of speculation as to the reason of my incarceration. 'No doubt this man is a murderer, whom, though he hath escaped from the sea'—from Mesopotamia, say—'yet Justice hath not suffered to live.' He considered that he was level with me for my Peterborough jail-jape, and was much cheered.
It took the best part of September to get up-stream and back to Samarra. When the boat reached Busra, scores of men were prostrate on the deck from heat-stroke and exhaustion. In the Gulf I had a funeral. I tried to skip to the finish of the service, with the page shimmering and jumping before me, but had to hand the book to the captain as I reeled down. He threw the body over, and every one flew up-deck. Later, on the up-stream trip, we realized the fact on which all Mesopotamia agreed, that for sheer horror the deck of a P-boat[22] is unrivalled. Possibly it is due to the glare from the water, but our daily temperatures of between 115° and 125° in the shade seemed a hundredfold higher than they were. Just below Kut we were held up for several days in a camp; not even Sheikh Saad in the old, bad days was more cursed with sandflies.
I had for companion on board Kenneth Mason, engineer and archaeologist. We passed Sannaiyat and the winding reaches where every earth-scar and mound had a history. Here the Turk had blown up the ammunition barges, and for hundreds of yards inland the ground was still strewn with twisted scrap-iron; here he had set his 5.9's on the balloon, and the evening fishing had been interrupted; here used to be the advanced dressing-station in the times of trench warfare; here was Left Bank Group, where our guns had been, the tamarisk thickets and wheeling harriers, and the old shell-holes on the beach. Those crumbling sandbanks were Mason's Mounds, and those were Crofton's O. Pip.[23] Here were Abu Roman Mounds, and here the lines of Nakhailat or Suwada; here were the Beit Aiessa defences; here those of Abdul Hassan and E Mounds. It was on that angle that the Julnar grounded in that despairing, impossible attempt to run the blockade and bring food to Townshend's men. It was in that scrub that the Turks and H.L.I.[24] crashed when both sides launched a simultaneous attack.
We passed Kut. The river was low, and the people were growing lettuce, while they might, on the dried sandbanks. The town front against the palms showed its shell-holes and caverns, and we remembered how we used to see the city, from Dujaileh Redoubt, rising up like a green promontory. From Townshend's first battle there to the day when the 7th Division occupied the lines of Suwada, Kut cost us not less in battle casualties than sixty thousand men. One makes no computation of the dead in the old cholera camps by Abu Roman, or in a score of cemeteries from Sannaiyat and Es-Sinn to Bombay, who perished in that time when
the shark-tracked ships went down
To Bombay Town.
Kut will be a place of pilgrimage, and deserves to be, even among the many shrines of this war. From Sheikh Saad to Shumran is one graveyard and battlefield, a stretch of thirty miles, where over twenty pitched battles took place, many being British defeats. At Kut itself Townshend's old trenches can be traced; and in the town are broken buildings, and, to eastward, the monument erected by the Turks. Across the river is the Shat-el-Hai and its complicated and costly battlefields, and the relics of the famous liquorice factory which Townshend held, and which we took, in 1917, almost last of all. At Shumran, above the town, is the place of the great crossing. And on the ribs of sand, when water is low, are liquorice-stacks and lettuce-beds.