It was the same sea power that enabled England to make each of them efficient in itself. Not only did the sea bring them their hundreds of thousands of fighting men, but the sea brought them everything needed to let their men fight with success. As to the Mesopotamian campaign, it was, as its very name implies, a river campaign, and the utilisation of the Turkish rivers, especially the Tigris, was the first essential of success. Nothing was so remarkable in all the history of the campaign as the way in which the Tigris was broken in and transformed from an almost insuperable obstacle into a great military highway. By a hard and sustained effort, impossible for any nation but the mistress of the seas, the turbulent undisciplined river was tamed and enlisted in the service of the invaders, and its carrying power was increased nearly a thousandfold. When Maude began his advance, its surface was swarming with steamboats that had found their way, thanks to the daring and skill of British seamen, from the Hughli and the Irawadi and the Thames, until they were numerous enough to carry a large army into the heart of the Turkish Empire, and to keep it supplied with all the multitudinous necessities of modern war.
The river steamers were supported by rapidly constructed railways and roads, and all manner of engineering works; new irrigation channels were made or ancient channels reopened; many of the wild Arab tribes were gradually brought to see the advantages of order and service; crops were raised and gathered; altogether the activities of our people were innumerable, and the conquest of a country almost as large as the United Kingdom went hand-in-hand with the measures necessary for making it prosperous and contented.
What its future will be no one can say. To take over such a country, with its turbulent population and unsettled frontiers and outlying responsibilities of many kinds, is a formidable task; but in any case the conquest of it, from such an enemy as the Turk, was no small contribution to the work done by the British Empire in the Great War. It was performed at a distance from England, among scenes unfamiliar to Englishmen, and, partly owing to Press restrictions, it did not greatly appeal to the country’s attention, which was naturally enough fixed upon the progress of the conflict in Europe; but it was none the less a great achievement, and one of which all concerned in it may well be proud.
Among those concerned in it was the Regiment whose history forms the subject of this book, and there remains to be considered now the part which the Regiment played in the campaign.
The Thirteenth were perhaps fortunate in that they did not come to Mesopotamia until 1916, when the first half, and the most trying half, of the Mesopotamian Campaign was over. They had no part in the earlier fighting, when the British force was small and ill-found, and its difficulties great. They were spared the troubles and sufferings endured by the troops who conquered the lower part of the country; they did not march up with Townshend to the bloody field of Ctesiphon, or share in the desperate efforts to break through to his relief when he was shut up in Kut. When they landed at Basra all that was over. Horrified at the losses and sufferings entailed by its attempt—one of its customary attempts—to make a small force do the work of a large one, the nation had suddenly woken up to the needs of Mesopotamia; and, blaming every one but those chiefly to blame, itself and its statesmen, was now pouring in without stint Regiments and guns and river steamers and every kind of war material. It could not bring back to life the thousands of men sacrificed, or undo the injustice done to some of its best soldiers, but it was determined that the Mesopotamian force should for the future fight with reasonable chances of success; and though its attention was soon diverted again, it certainly made a fine effort, the result of which was to endure. The Thirteenth came in on the turn of the tide, and though they had before them two years of hard work and hard fighting, they were never to know the bitterness of defeat.
Nevertheless the work was severe, and the issue of the fighting was often doubtful for a time. That it uniformly ended in success, and eventually in complete triumph, was proof of very high qualities in the men who led and the men who followed. For the Turk is a stubborn enemy. He was once acknowledged, by general consent, as the best soldier in Europe; and if time has deprived him of some of his reputation, it still stands deservedly high.
As in the Palestine campaign, so in Mesopotamia, the Cavalry found its chance. There, as in all modern war, it was no doubt the Infantry and guns which mainly decided the fate of battles; but the Cavalry had much to do for the armies both before and after battle, in reconnaissance, in sweeping the country for supplies, in pursuit, and in the turning movements which at times brought about the enemy’s ruin. Even in the actual shock of battle they were not wholly excluded from a share of fighting and honour. Some tributes to the value of their services in Mesopotamia have already been recorded in earlier chapters. There is one service which perhaps has not been sufficiently brought out. The whole plan of General Maude’s attack upon the Turkish army which faced him on the north bank of the Tigris, when he began his advance in December 1916, was to push up the south bank, and keep threatening their rear from that side until they had so extended the line held by their troops that they were no longer strong enough to hold it all securely—to prevent his forcing a passage at some point and getting in behind their main body. As he put it in a letter to General Symons: “The Turks were very sticky and would not go for a long time, but we gradually stretched them and stretched them till owing to their casualties they were much weakened, and then we struck boldly at their tail across the Tigris. I had been hammering at this for two months, and the fact that they would not give up Sannaiyat, and consequently placed themselves in the dangerous position of having a line of communication in prolongation of their battle front, was their undoing.”
And the Cavalry had much to do with this stretching process. In his despatch giving an account of the whole advance to Baghdad, General Maude writes:—
“The work of the Cavalry had been difficult. The flat terrain intersected with nalas obstructed movement without providing cover, and the state of the country after heavy rains made progress even for short distances laborious. The absence of water, too, away from the river, limited its radius of action. Nevertheless its reconnaissance work and the blows delivered against the enemy’s communications helped in no small way to bring about that dissipation of his forces which was so essential to our success, and the pressure applied after the passage of the Tigris to the retreating enemy was instrumental in completing his final rout.”
The Thirteenth, working from their camp on the Hai river, did their full share of the Cavalry work so described.