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. Cocky 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 mahassere?" ("Was Sahib here in the siege?") I answered him: "Naam. Kasr mali fil mahassere." ("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 transmutability of bright colours.
Here in this very spot, the first British army of history to do so, its dauntless heroism and sacrifice unavailing, succumbed 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 assailability 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 Sèvres 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.