Caught by the Turks

by Francis Yeats-Brown

"Where there is no racing the people perish."

The first-line Turk has many fine qualities, of which generosity and gallantry are not the least. Something in Anglo-Saxon blood is in sympathy with the adventure-loving, flower-loving Turk. But, alas! there is another type of Ottoman, with the taint of Tamerlane. "When he is good he is very very good, but when he is bad he is horrid."

In the latter category I must regretfully place the sergeant who commanded our escort. He came of decent stock (to judge by his charming sisters, and his own appearance indeed) but his mind was all mud and blood. He had been Hunified. Turkey would always be fighting, he said. The English were almost defeated. The Armenians were almost exterminated. But the Greeks remained to be dealt with, and the cursed Arabs. Finally the Germans themselves. In an apotheosis of Prussianism Turkey was to turn on her Allies and drive them out. Such was his creed. But a glow of courage lit the dark places of his mind. He loved fighting for the sheer fun of the thing. A few days beyond Samarra we were attacked by some wandering Arabs, who swept down on us in a crescent. Our guards panicked, but he stood his ground, and, seizing a rifle, dispersed the enemy by some well-directed shots. Whether we were near deliverance or death on that occasion I do not know, but that the panic amongst our escort was not wholly unreasonable was evinced by the fact that only a few hours earlier we had passed the headless trunk of a gendarme, strapped upon a donkey. He had been decapitated as a warning to the Samarratans that two can play at the game of savagery.

The sight of the corpse had unnerved our guard, and as for myself, I did not know whether to be glad or sorry when the Arabs attacked us. To be taken by them meant either going back to the English or to the dust from which we came. The alternative was too heroic to be agreeable. Contrariwise, I was much disappointed when our sergeant finally drove them off. That evening, as if to point the moral, we found the body of another gendarme, also murdered, lying on a dung-heap outside the rest-house. This was at Shergat, the former capital of the Assyrians, and now a squalid village, where, however, the widows of Ashur were still "loud in their wail."

Here we dined with the fattest man I have ever seen. He was really a pig personified, but as we both gobbled out of the same dish and ate the same salt, I will not further enlarge on his appearance.

In the upper reaches of the Tigris there are wild geese so tame that they come waddling up to inspect the rare travellers through their land. I thought it might be possible to catch one of these animals on foot. Coquettishly enough they kept a certain distance. "We don't mind your looking at us," they seemed to say, "but we do object to being pawed about." With the coming of the railway I am afraid a gun will destroy their belief in human kind.

The geese appeared to enjoy the smell of sulphuretted hydrogen, which prevails in these regions. The whole country is rich in natural oils and bitumen. One day it will make somebody's fortune, no doubt, and then the geese will waddle away from perspiring prospectors. . . .

Before we arrived at Mosul we stopped for a bath at the hot springs of Hammam-Ali, where we met (in the water) a patriarch with a white beard, who confidently assured us that he was a hundred years old and would continue to live for another hundred, such were the beneficent properties of the water. Before his days are numbered he may live to see a Hydro at Hammam-Ali—poor old patriarch. He told us a lot about Jonah (whose tomb is at Nineveh, just opposite Mosul, on the other side of the river), and I am not sure that he did not claim acquaintance with that patriarch. He was quite one of the family.

Mosul, he told us, was a heaven on earth, a land flowing with milk and honey, where we should ride all day on the best horses of Arabia, and feast all night in gardens such as the blessed houris might adorn.

It was with a certain elation, therefore, that I saw the distant prospect of Mosul next morning, set in its surrounding hills. A fair city it seemed, white and cool, with orange groves down to the river and many date-trees. But a closer acquaintance brought cruel disappointment, as generally happens in the East. The blight of the Ottoman was everywhere; there was dirt, decrepitude, and decay in every corner. Children with eye-disease, and adults with leprosies more terrible than Naaman's jostled each other in the mean streets. Whole quarters of the city had given up the ghost, and become refuse heaps, where curs grouted amongst offal. Mosul, like our escort-sergeant's mind, seemed a muddle of mud and blood.