War in the Garden of Eden

by Kermit Roosevelt

As we passed through the Strait of Ormuz memories of the early days of European supremacy in the East crowded back, for I had read many a vellum-covered volume in Portuguese about the early struggles for supremacy in the gulf. One in particular interested me. The Portuguese were hemmed in at Ormuz by a greatly superior English force. The expected reinforcements never arrived, and at length their resources sank so low, and they suffered in addition, or in consequence, so greatly from disease that they decided to sail forth and give battle. This they did, but before they joined in fight the ships of the two admirals sailed up near each other—the Portuguese commander sent the British a gorgeous scarlet ceremonial cloak, the British responded by sending him a handsomely embossed sword. The British admiral donned the cloak, the Portuguese grasped the sword; a page brought each a cup of wine; they pledged each other, threw the goblets into the sea, and fell to. The British were victorious. Times indeed have sadly changed in the last three hundred years!

I was much struck with the accuracy of the geographical descriptions in Camoens' letters and odes. He is the greatest of the Portuguese poets and wrote the larger part of his master-epic, "The Lusiad," while exiled in India. For seventeen years he led an adventurous life in the East; and it is easy to recognize many harbors and stretches of coast line from his inimitable portrayal.

Busra, our destination, lies about sixty miles from the mouth of the Shatt el Arab, which is the name given to the combined Tigris and Euphrates after their junction at Kurna, another fifty or sixty miles above. At the entrance to the river lies a sand-bar, effectively blocking access to boats of as great draft as the Saxon. We therefore transshipped to some British India vessels, and exceedingly comfortable we found them, designed as they were for tropic runs. We steamed up past the Island of Abadan, where stand the refineries of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. It is hard to overestimate the important part that company has played in the conduct of the Mesopotamian campaign. Motor transport was nowhere else a greater necessity. There was no possibility of living on the country; at first, at all events. General Dickson, the director of local resources, later set in to so build up and encourage agriculture that the army should eventually be supported, in the staples of life, by local produce. Transportation was ever a hard nut to crack. Railroads were built, but though the nature of the country called for little grading, obtaining rails, except in small quantities, was impossible. The ones brought were chiefly secured by taking up the double track of Indian railways. This process naturally had a limit, and only lines of prime importance could be laid down. Thus you could go by rail from Busra to Amara, and from Kut to Baghdad, but the stretch between Amara and Kut had never been built, up to the time I left the country. General Maude once told me that pressure was being continually brought by the high command in England or India to have that connecting-link built, but that he was convinced that the rails would be far more essential elsewhere, and had no intention of yielding.

I don't know the total number of motor vehicles, but there were more than five thousand Fords alone. On several occasions small columns of infantry were transported in Fords, five men and the driver to a car. Indians of every caste and religion were turned into drivers, and although it seemed sufficiently out of place to come across wizened, khaki-clad Indo-Chinese driving lorries in France, the incongruity was even more marked when one beheld a great bearded Sikh with his turbaned head bent over the steering-wheel of a Ford.

Modern Busra stands on the banks of Ashar Creek. The ancient city whence Sinbad the sailor set forth is now seven or eight miles inland, buried under the shifting sands of the desert. Busra was a seaport not so many hundreds of years ago. Before that again, Kurna was a seaport, and the two rivers probably only joined in the ocean, but they have gradually enlarged the continent and forced back the sea. The present rate of encroachment amounts, I was told, to nearly twelve feet a year.

The modern town has increased many fold with the advent of the Expeditionary Force, and much of the improvement is of a necessarily permanent nature; in particular the wharfs and roads. Indeed, one of the most striking features of the Mesopotamian campaign is the permanency of the improvements made by the British. In order to conquer the country it was necessary to develop it,—build railways and bridges and roads and telegraph systems,—and it has all been done in a substantial manner. It is impossible to contemplate with equanimity the possibility of the country reverting to a rule where all this progress would soon disappear and the former stagnancy and injustice again hold sway.

Ashar Creek at Busra

As soon as we landed I wandered off to the bazaar—"suq" is what the Arab calls it. In Busra there are a number of excellent ones. By that I don't mean that there are art treasures of the East to be found in them, for almost everything could be duplicated at a better price in New York. It is the grouping of wares, the mode of sale, and, above all, the salesmen and buyers that make a bazaar—the old bearded Persian sitting cross-legged in his booth, the motley crowd jostling through the narrow, vaulted passageway, the veiled women, the hawk-featured, turbaned men, the Jews, the Chaldeans, the Arabs, the Armenians, the stalwart Kurds, and through it all a leaven of khaki-clad Indians, purchasing for the regimental mess. All these and an ever-present exotic, intangible something are what the bazaar means. Close by the entrance stood a booth festooned with lamps and lanterns of every sort, with above it scrawled "Aladdin-Ibn-Said." My Arabic was not at that time sufficient to enable me to discover from the owner whether he claimed illustrious ancestry or had merely been named after a patron saint.

A few days after landing at Busra we embarked on a paddle-wheel boat to pursue our way up-stream the five hundred intervening miles to Baghdad. Along the banks of the river stretched endless miles of date-palms. We watched the Arabs at their work of fertilizing them, for in this country these palms have to depend on human agency to transfer the pollen. At Kurna we entered the Garden of Eden, and one could quite appreciate the feelings of the disgusted Tommy who exclaimed: "If this is the Garden, it wouldn't take no bloody angel with a flaming sword to turn me back." The direct descendant of the Tree is pointed out; whether its properties are inherited I never heard, but certainly the native would have little to learn by eating the fruit.