Chapter 3
A New Zealander came into hospital one day from Shaiba way. He was a wireless man, and being so, had found something in the desert that puzzled the science of his mind. He explained the matter. Out there it is a white, undulating expanse, burning hot, but with more air than in Basra. There are extraordinary effects of perspective. A man standing a short way off may assume gigantic proportions, or look like a dwarf. A motor car near by would seem to lose its solidity and dissolve into a few filmy lines. The mirage of water is everywhere. An Arab might lie in the open and no one would see him. A post might look like a horseman at full gallop. It was a country of topsy-turveydom as regards the subjective estimate of the eyes. But what puzzled the wireless man was this. He thought he understood how eye-strain and difference of refractive power of the layers of heated air, or reflected light from the ground and such physical considerations could cause these illusions. But what he could not understand was how it came about that several men would experience exactly the same illusion. Why should a post simultaneously appear as an Arab on horseback or an Arab crawling stealthily on the ground to half a dozen men? Mirage, like Rumour, is a curious thing. It may have some inner connection with the set of a man's feelings. It has its pleasant side when it paints water and palms where there is no water nor any palms. It has its sinister side when it clothes the most innocent features of the landscape in images of dread. Who knows how it touched up that flying column of ambulance wagons in the eyes of the Turks? There are certain areas that are constantly the site of mirage. Our gunners found this a continual difficulty at the front, for the hostile Arabs, knowing the mirage areas, would get into them and make ranging impossible. A transport column on the move through mirage is a curious sight. You see, across the plain, a long line of black dots, which are the wagons on the move. But apparently they are passing through the centre of a narrow lake, that runs in the same direction as their line of advance. The reflection in the lake is perfect in every detail and that is suspicious, for a train of wagons and horses crossing a shallow lake would stir up the water and disturb reflection. But there is another thing that helps you to recognise mirage. At the tail of the column rises a cloud of dust and here and there along the line you can make out a little wreath of dust rising apparently from the surface of the mirroring water.
The fall of Kut did not ease the pressure at the hospitals. The sick rate was increasing steadily. The Shimal, the north-west wind that comes just in time to make it possible for you to believe in Providence, was not due until the middle of June. Down by the river-side, where the official meteorological station stood, the day temperature was far over 100 degrees, and up in the airless creeks, in the palm groves, it was much higher. Clinical thermometers cracked if they were left lying about on tables. Our staff was getting seriously depleted. No Tommy had to work so hard as those hospital orderlies, and it is not surprising that our casualties in sick men were very heavy. Clerks in the office became ward masters at a moment's notice. But in spite of all this the spirit of the place remained unshaken. However great the heat, it did not destroy that sense of humour which is the glory of the British Army. Rather be beaten and retain that sense than be victorious and lose it. And if you come to think of it, no man who retains his sense of humour is ever really beaten.
VI
THE DAY'S WORK
The great distances that separate the main stations in Mesopotamia, and the long sea voyage between Basra and Bombay, threw a considerable strain on that part of the army that sits in offices and deals with army forms. At Poona the supreme headquarters of the campaign resided amid the clear breezes of the Indian hills. The consequence was that in cases where two or three copies of a form would have sufficed on the Western front, there it was necessary to multiply them indefinitely, so as to satisfy all the various authorities down the line. For example, in sending sick to India, a nominal roll is compiled with name, number, rank, regiment, nature of disease and so on. This, in triplicate, is an ordinary procedure anywhere. But in Basra it was necessary, for some reason, to make out over twenty copies, and this is a long business on a typewriter that will only do a small number at a time, and is wanted for other things. It also caused a great delay before indents could materialise. You wished, say, to order a truss for a patient. Out there, owing to the heat, articles of this nature perished quickly. You reported the measurements to the quartermaster. He made a copy of the indent in triplicate, as well as an office copy. The indents went to the Assistant Director of Medical Services for approval. They were then sent back to the quartermaster. He then sent them to the Base Medical Depot, who acknowledged their receipt and said they would be sent to India as soon as possible. In India they passed through other complicated machinery and the weeks went by. A truss, I suppose, is worth a few shillings.
There were three other factors that added to the difficulties, apart from distance. One was the bar at the mouth of the river, which made it impossible for deeply laden vessels coming up the Persian Gulf and drawing many feet of water to pass without unloading in part into another vessel. The other was that strip of river between Kurna and Amara known as the Narrows, where river boats with supplies stuck constantly, especially when the floods fell and the water was low. One boat sticking here would hold up all traffic.
The third factor was the effect of the excessive heat. This effect, rather subtle in itself, might be called the psychological factor of the situation, for there is not the slightest doubt that it produced a kind of cussedness in everyone, from the highest to the lowest, and sapped energy and made changes unwelcome. For excessive and prolonged heat--and the hot season lasted seven or eight months--rouses a defensive mechanism of inertia whose aim is to preserve life. You saw that in the earliest cases of incipient heat-stroke. A man felt suddenly all the power go out of his legs. He wanted to lie down, and this was the best thing he could do.
Mental exertion became almost impossible. Reading was not easy, writing was a burden, and thinking a matter of extreme difficulty. Your interest lay in watching the simplest thing. A Japanese fly-trap with its slowly-turning, sticky surfaces was fascinating. There was a spice of oriental cruelty in the way it slowly entrapped the fly, and it was exactly that which made the appeal. You soon understood how it comes about that the Eastern takes all the natural facts of life for granted, without bothering about fine shades, and acts on them unquestioningly. What is called altruism in the West seems artificial. It is not cynicism exactly that the place breeds, and I never met anyone who was sentimental in Mesopotamia, but it is a kind of descent that occurs to a level of values that are coloured black and white, quite plain. A man who expected to throw a spell over the country and act as a stimulant on everyone would truly need to possess a prodigious character. "In the tropics there is going on continually and unconsciously a tax on the nervous system which is absent in temperate climates. The nervous system, especially those parts which regulate the temperature of the body, is always on the strain, and the result is that in time it suffers from more or less exhaustion." The common effect of this is a "deficient mental energy generally commencing with unnatural drowsiness or loss of appetite and a yearning for stimulants which culminates in that lowering of nerve potential which we know so well as neurasthenia." Thus write the professors of medicine in India on the effects of prolonged heat. I would add to it a large mental element, partly induced by the lack of any kind of amusement, by the want of interest, and by the peculiar effect of a landscape that is entirely flat and uniform. An artificial mountain scenery, painted on canvas, such as one used to see at Earl's Court, would have been a blessed relief. I think a London fog would have been delightful. Towards the end of September, a few small, fleecy clouds appeared one day in the sky and everyone ran out and stared solemnly at them as if they were angels. But there is one phrase that sums up the prolonged effects of heat better than any scientific rigmarole. It takes the silk out of a man.
In Basra there was published daily a small, excellent newspaper which gave the latest Reuters and printed selections from papers that came by the mail. It was sorely missed when we went up river. I believe it was edited by a lady. There was a club in Ashar where it was possible to sit under electric fans. In old Basra there was an Arab theatre, containing a few dancing girls and a cinematograph. But the arrival of the mails was the great feature of life out there. They came roughly once a week, and it is difficult to describe with what emotions they were received. The whole district became revivified for a space under their influence.
Through the month of June the sickness increased and work went on steadily increasing. We had 400 beds in the wards at that time, and it was necessary to find accommodation for an average of 700 patients. Anyone who was likely to be sick for any length of time was sent to India whenever the opportunity arose. Down at the British Hospital on the river front they were sending cases off that were likely to be more than three days ill. It was an oriental polyglot scene down there on the hospital quay in the comparative cool of evening, when the big white hospital ship lay off the bank and crowds of ticketed patients sat under the shelters waiting their turn to embark. Now and then a pale nurse, dressed in white, with white helmet and red-lined parasol would walk through the throng. Arab _belumchis_, Jews, Persians, Armenians, Sikhs, Gurkhas, Pathans, and Ghats crowded the bank, voluble and picturesque. Dhobies thrashed clothes at the river edge. Bhisties drew water in kerosene tins. Convalescent Tommies in blue dungaree, fished stolidly--wishing they were bound for India. The roofs of the square white buildings were filled with nurses taking tea. Launches whirled up and discharged Staff officers. All down the centre of the stream lay big vessels. Already the place had a cosmopolitan spirit--a new-born genius--and one could see it dimly in the future, when the Baghdad railway runs through it to Kuweit, a white city, garish with painted promenades and electric lights, with as many languages sounding in the street as in Port Said.
The dates were now hanging in big masses of oval, greeny-yellow fruit, some in clusters of two hundredweight and more, and the palm leaves were turning brown at their points. The scarlet of the pomegranate trees had vanished from the date groves and the floods were beginning to fall. It had been necessary to surround the hospital clearing with a mud wall, or bund, about four feet in height, in order to keep out the water, for at times there is as much as a six foot rise when the tide comes up the Shatt-el-Arab.
At any simple job of this kind the Arabs are quite good. They can plaster mud on a roof, or make a bund, or run up a mud and reed hut, or raise the level of the flooring of a ward, and they take their time over it. But anything that savours of machinery is usually beyond them. It was a common saying amongst the Arabs that sickness stopped as soon as the dates were gathered in. That proved to be untrue. It was a long while until the dates were ripe, and after they were gathered sickness still continued. The amount of heat those dates required before they turned yellow and soft, and their skins began to crinkle faintly, was extraordinary. For weeks and weeks they remained hard and green, though exposed to the fiercest heat of the sun. Pomegranates, in the same way, hung for months before their skins turned to that beautiful deep mahogany hue of the ripe fruit.
On a particular day at the end of June one might have fancied a crisis had been reached. Curiously enough, by the irony of coincidence, the Reuters of that day contained the news that it had been stated in Parliament that, in the interests of the public, no statement would be made about the state of affairs in Mesopotamia.
That night it was rumoured that Verdun had fallen....
The gift of a large fleet of motor ambulances presented by the cinema people at home was a great boon, for urgent cases could be transported to hospital rapidly, instead of jolting over the plain in bullock tongas. Unfortunately, the axles of these cars were not quite equal to the rough work, and in a short time they were sent away to other spheres where roads were better. The ground in our neighbourhood was so undermined by floods that on one occasion one of these cars, standing empty, suddenly broke through the upper crust up to its axles. A great deal of perspiration flowed before it was extricated.
In the meanwhile the creek was full of _mahallas_ loading up equipment, for we had received orders to go higher up-river.
VII
THE NARROWS
We left Basra when the Arabs, and the Indian troops, were celebrating the Mohammedan feast of Ramadhan. During the feast, which lasts a month, night is turned into day. No food is allowed, in theory, from sunrise to sunset. Drums beat, dogs howl, cocks crow and the revellers shout and wail and clap their hands in long, rhythmic, staccato periods, and explosions of powder occur under the crescent moon.
A small, double-decked, squat river boat which had been captured from the Turks took us on board. It burned oil fuel. A single canvas awning with many gaps in it covered the upper deck. The lower deck was nearly taken up by engine and boiler, save for a small saloon aft, and water tanks and a galley forward. Our strength was about 100 men with twenty Indians belonging to the hospital, and there were a few odd details travelling as well and the crowding was considerable. On each side of the steamer were big barges. On the port side was a barge of mules. On the starboard side a barge of fodder, and various bales and cases, surmounted by a crowd of coolies. The smell from either side was like a Zoo. We set off in high spirits, for we had heard that Amara, whither we were bound, was a Paradise compared to Basra. The heat was excessive. Behind the funnel on deck, where our quarters lay, it was 125 degrees, and the awning did not do much towards keeping out the burden of the sun. The country through which we passed was green-tinged with sparse palms, and absolutely flat. In the river were long strings of _mahallas_, being towed by teams of Arabs. These craft may take sixteen days to reach Amara. In the heat of the day the towing team gets into the river and moves slowly along up to their waists in water. Owing to a long stop at Margil, which lies two miles above Basra, and is the site of the Supply people, we did not make much progress the first day. At sunset it is necessary to tie up, or anchor, in the stream. The night was not so bad save for mosquitoes, and after a sousing of river water, drawn forward of the mule barge, and a cup of tea at dawn, we felt cheerful. We started at four-thirty and passed Kurna.
Kurna is the Garden of Eden. It lies at the junction of the Euphrates and Tigris, and is a small hamlet of white houses. Here there is a wide area of date palms and a great brown, tranquil stretch of river. A white doorway in a yellow wall, shaped like a pear, marks the supposed position of Paradise. The doorway bears a tablet with an Arabic inscription. Behind the doorway, just visible over the wall, a tree grows. This may or may not be the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, because a dwarfed sinister tree lower down, to which barges tie up, is given the name. But I prefer the one in its walled garden, a faded, simple, harmless-looking tree. And the result of eating its fruit can be moralised on here, for on one side of it is the bazaar square, where whisky and beer and tobacco are sold, and on the other side is the telegraph office with the news of the war blazoned on the iron-studded door and an armed sentry before it.
Beyond Kurna the Tigris takes some immense curves so that at times you seem to see the sails of _mahallas_ all round the horizon. We lay on deck, staring idly at the unvarying landscape which quivered under the sun. Occasionally Arab villages were passed, constructed out of the matting made from reeds, which is a local industry. The reeds grow in big patches all the way up the river banks. On the second night we tied up below Ezra's tomb. There was local Arab trouble in this part at the time and we passed an outpost of native troops; also a mud hut, standing solitary in a swamp in the plain and bearing the words "Leicester Lounge" in black lettering. It seemed deserted.
At night there was a lot of lamp-signalling all round the horizon in naval code. One caught M.M.O. repeatedly and then a lot of figures. Some fires lit up the sky line to the north. On that night the heat was beyond description. A plague of sand-flies and mosquitoes descended on the ship. No one slept a wink. The mules screamed and kicked. There was not a breath of air. A heavy smell pervaded the ship, and at times it seemed that one's mind wandered a little. Before dawn a great cry came out of the steamy darkness from some worshipping Arab and was repeated twice. After a long silence a cock crew far across the plain and was answered a hundred times. Then came a misty blue light and a sudden glare of yellow. The day had begun and the engines started.
A monitor passed, bristling with guns and painted a vivid green. Ezra's tomb is a mosque standing stark on the brown plain beside the river in a clump of palms. It is kept in beautiful preservation, for it is visited by pilgrim Jews. Against the lovely blue of the dome, with its circle of gold, a tall palm leans, bending sharply inward as if to kiss the Prophet's last resting-place in some sudden mood of devotion. Some way above it lies a big village, and as we passed crowds of Arabs lined the bank. Naked boys dived into the river after money. The women, dashing types with nose rings, clad in robes of wonderful vermilion and purple colours, ran along the banks with fowls and eggs for sale. Herds of black buffalo, submerged up to the nose, basked in the water.
At one lonely place we passed a small shelter, a roof of yellow matting supported by a few posts, containing six rather pale-hued women with richly coloured robes and bangles seated in a semi-circle on the ground. Outside stood the lord of the manor, very swarthy, in dazzling white, with a rifle slung over his shoulder, scowling ferociously as he surveyed the plains. He was a kind of policeman, I believe, in our pay. At any rate he seemed to be, like policemen in general, a strong lover of domestic life. Six wives may have contributed a little towards overcoming the extreme monotony of life in the place.
Above Ezra's tomb begin the Narrows. The Tigris becomes very narrow, pouring its filthy yellow water at a great speed between the sharply cut banks. The turns are so sharp, being at times much more acute than a right angle, that the only way to get round is to charge the bank, bump off with a great churning of paddles and creaking of lashings and clanging of the telegraph from the bridge, and work the steamer's nose into the centre of the stream again. The banks, at these spots, are perfectly smooth and polished owing to the constant impacts. By themselves the river steamers could get round more skilfully, but with their clumsy barges on each side it was impossible. The S-boats--the stern wheelers--of which there are only a few, do not carry barges, and therefore their handiness and speed are much greater. They can run from Basra to Sheik Saad, close to the front, within three days, and can travel by night if necessary.
At three in the afternoon as we bumped and scraped and panted up the tortuous river, we came on the familiar sight of a convoy stuck, broadside on, across the river in front of us. A little smoke came from her funnel. The sun beat savagely down on her apparently deserted decks. Behind her there was nothing but shimmering plain and the occasional flash of water. Our engine-room telegraph rang. The engines stopped and we slewed into the bank and dropped anchor. Then the skipper and his navigating lieutenants withdrew to their cabins and the engine-room staff, composed of an Englishman who had run boats up to Baghdad for ten years, and a few Christian Baghdadies--powerful dark men, who seemed to speak a kind of French--disposed themselves for rest on the lower deck, and a great peace descended on the scene. Away over the horizon, north and south, some columns of smoke were visible coming from other convoys that were converging on the Narrows. It was necessary to wait for the tide, as well as for a tug. There was nothing to do but to watch the plain. At first sight it appeared lifeless, an expanse of golden browns, reds and yellows, with a sharp purple rim on the skyline. But closer observation showed long lines of cattle, mere dots in the distance, moving slowly in search of pasture. In the shadow of a hummock an Arab boy and girl sat together motionless. A mile along the level two Arabs were rhythmically swinging water up from a cutting by means of a shallow vessel with ropes attached to the side. The flash of it caught the eye, and there was a patch of vivid emerald where the water fell. To the north it was possible to make out the arms of a semaphore lying idle. There was no sound in the place. The river itself flowed silently. Only the occasional deep drone of a hornet or the note of a mosquito came to the ear. The sun seemed to be drawing the land together, sucking up all the sap it contained.
As we sat and gazed at these bending and twisting Narrows the idea arose that it might be possible, by a little cutting, to do away with the worst bits and open up a straight channel. For there were two main places of obstruction, called the Devil's Elbow and Pear Drop Reach. But it is necessary to say this with caution, for tampering with great rivers like the Tigris may cause unthought-of trouble. It upsets the natural balance of the waters.