With the Persian Expedition

by Martin Henry Donohoe

Our stay at Ashar barracks was of brief duration. A week after landing in Basra we received orders from General Headquarters to proceed to Bagdad immediately, but steamer accommodation was limited, and it was found impossible to embark the whole of our party at once. However, a compromise was effected with the Local Embarkation Officer, and place was found on an up-river steamer for our first contingent, consisting of General Byron, twenty-four other officers (of whom I was one), and forty N.C.O's.

Our transport was an antiquated paddle steamer, broad of beam, and the whole of her one deck was packed with troops bound for up-river like ourselves. In addition, she towed, moored on either side, two squat barges filled with troops and supplies.

The navigation of the Tigris, even in peace time, when the river is unencumbered, is a hazardous undertaking. Its lower reaches are flat and winding, and when it is in flood the banks are submerged. The stream follows an erratic course, occasionally striking out on an entirely fresh one, and the search for the new channel is often attended with disaster for the daring river mariner. Yet up and down the stream between Kut and Basra British seamen have zigzagged their way by sheer pluck and perseverance, dumping down men and supplies at the advanced base with unfailing regularity. The admirable part played by these river skippers of the Tigris has never been told, and so has never been properly appreciated by their countrymen at home. Day and night they toiled to hurry up the needed reinforcements to the hard-pressed battle line in Mesopotamia, and to feed the army that was driving the Turk from the "Land of the Two Rivers." Drawn from all parts of the Empire, they worthily represented the pluck, courage, and unyielding tenacity of the British race. Had it not been for the river skippers of the Tigris, shy, unostentatious men, sparing of speech and indifferent to praise, the Mesopotamian Campaign must have ended abortively; Kut could never have been retaken, and the Turks would still have been in Bagdad.

The despatches of victorious generals in Mesopotamia have been full of references to valuable aid and service rendered by units and individuals, but, it seems to me, they have entirely overlooked the great contribution of the men of the Tigris River Flotilla, who have apparently been left without reward or recognition.

In the waterway of the Shatt el Arab itself, and before we entered the Tigris proper, we passed scores of river craft. There were dhows laden to the gunwale with river produce being carried swiftly down by the current towards Basra market. Here was an antiquated sternwheeler with her lashed barges alongside, like an old woman with parcels tucked under her arms, going to the base to load up supplies. And, most wonderful of all, here was a London County Council steamer, the Christopher Wren, which had abandoned the Thames for the Tigris and the carrying of happy trippers from Blackfriars to Kew for the transporting of Mr. Thomas Atkins and his kit part of the long river journey towards Bagdad. Some of the Tommies on our steamer eyed her enviously. Here was a touch of the far-distant homeland under Eastern skies! There was a suspicion of a tear in some sentimental eyes, but the wag of the party scored a laugh when he megaphoned with his hands to the skipper of the Wren, "I'm for Battersea, I am!"

A number of these L.C.C. boats had come out from London under their own steam, making the long voyage to the Gulf and Basra through the Bay of Biscay and across the Mediterranean and Red Seas, buffeted by wind and wave, but without losing any of their personnel or suffering any material damage. It was a triumph of seamanship and British pluck.

The banks of the Tigris, and indeed of the Euphrates, at certain seasons of the year are surely the most desolate places on the habitable earth. The date-palm plantations of the Shatt el Arab are succeeded by a monotonous landscape of dull brown desert stretching away as far as the eye can see. To our right, as we wound and twisted our way up river, we occasionally caught a glimpse of the snow-clad mountains of Persia. Dotted here and there along the banks are Arab villages, which seemed to be a conglomeration of goats, sheep, and dusky-brown naked children, all thrown confusedly into the picture. By way of variation, now and then we swept past a desert oasis, where stood a few stunted palm-trees near which a tribe of nomads had set up their black tents of goat's-hair and were spending a week-end on the river bank before trekking afresh into the heart of the desert.

Your real Arab nomad is essentially a child of nature. He spends his life in the wilderness and has a rooted objection—nay, it is, in truth, a positive terror—to visiting any town, big or little. He has an undefinable dread of venturing within a walled city, apparently regarding it in much the same way as a wild bird would regard an iron-barred cage. Any restriction of movement is irksome to him. He loves the free life of the desert, with its limitless possibilities, its far-stretching horizon, and its absence of streets and houses. He is of the tribe of Ishmael, destined to wander on and on, ever remote from the haunts of his fellow-man.

The semi-nomad, on the other hand, is less intractable, and does not chafe so much under the yoke of Western civilization. He is frugal, sober, and thrifty. We passed hundreds of his tribe who live on the banks of the Tigris, cultivating a patch of arable land, and using a wooden plough which must have been old-fashioned even in the days of that earliest recorded agriculturist, Cain.

We groped a tedious way along the sinuous Tigris, missing by a foot or two a down-river steamer and its lashed barges, making fair headway against the swirling waters which swept past us with the speed of a millstream. The current carried us from side to side, first bumping one bank, and then cannoning against the opposite one, until it seemed as if the stout lashings of our captive barges must be torn away. Where the river was especially narrow, we would tie up to the bank and give right-of-way to a convoy going down stream. At night, too, we would either tie up or anchor inshore, and at daylight would be off again.