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 Space, 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 mass 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 god Efficiency. The god 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 space of time. Wharves, shipping, 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 Cox, 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.