Chapter 6

In my aid-post we carried on, secure beneath our canopy of racing shells. The slope gave cover against 'over' bullets, except when it was necessary to walk about. Early in the afternoon, during a lull, a doctor appeared and asked if it was safe to bring up his ambulances. I told him 'Yes'; there were dropping bullets, but very little shell-fire. He replied that he would come immediately. But the supply of shells greatly quickened, and he did not appear again till near darkness, when he brought two motor ambulances, taking five sitting and four lying cases in each. He promised to return, but did not. Apart from these eighteen, only the walking wounded got away, pushing back into our noisy and perilous hinterland.

About four o'clock the Turks, in reply to our intense bombardment, put a brief but terrific fire on the mounds, blowing up men on every side. I decided to clear out to where, round the corner, an old wall gave upright shelter. As our first exodus swung round, a huddled, hobbling mass, two 'coal-boxes' burst in quick succession, each closer than the last shell before it. I shouted 'Duck!' We ducked, then made a few yards and ducked for the second time. A perfect sleet of wind and steel seemed to pass overhead. But no one was hit, and we were round the corner, where, I fear, I dropped the Cherub with considerable emphasis on his gammy leg. But indeed we were very lucky. Shells burst on every side of the aid-post--on right and left, but not on us. This was one of the rare occasions when I have felt confidence. Dobson and I were far too busied to worry. Also it seemed hard to believe that a shell would be allowed to fall on that shattered, helpless suffering. I saw, without seeing, things that are burnt into memory. We had no morphia, nothing but bandages. There was a man hit in the head, who just flopped up and down, seemingly invertebrate as an eel, calling out terribly for an hour till he died. Another man, also hit in the head--but he recovered, and I afterwards met him in Bombay--kept muttering, 'Oh those guns! They go through my head!'

A large body of prisoners was massed in the hollow beside us. When these marched off, some seventy wounded were sent to me, under the impression that the place was a regular aid-post. They were horribly smashed. General Thomson's Brigade (14th Division) had enfiladed them with artillery fire from the other bank, with dreadful effect. He got into their reserves, their retreat, their hospitals, and broke them up. In one place his fire caught a body of Turks massing for a counter-attack, beneath big bluffs by the water, and heaped the sand with dead and maimed. These men came with their gaping wounds and snapped limbs. Private Clifton, a friend of mine, brought bucket after bucket of water from the river. They drank almost savagely. My inexpert fingers hurt cruelly as I bandaged them, and they winced and cried. But the next minute they would stroke my hand, to show they understood good intentions. They had a great belief in the superiority of our civilization--at any rate in its medical aspect. They insisted, those who had been bandaged by the Turkish aid-posts, in tearing off their bandages--perfectly good ones, but smaller than ours--and on having new bandages from me. Just when the 5.9's blew us round the corner, Waller, adjutant of the 56th Brigade, R.F.A., came up and asked if I could send any one to look at some men just hit by the tornado. Mester Dobson was as busied as a man could be, his inevitable pipe in his mouth, so I went with Waller. One man was breathing, his head broken behind; the others were dead. Beside one of the corpses was a red mass. I saw, noting the fact automatically and without the least squeamishness, that it was his brains. We carried the living man in.

In the darkness Dobson came and said. 'There's a wounded officer just come in. I've given him a drink and dressed him.' A minute later he said, 'That officer's dead, sir.' I went across, and found it was Scarth, of the 53rd. No braver spirit went out in this day of storm and sorrow than this very gallant boy. He was aged nineteen.

Night fell, and slowly o'er the blood-bought mile They brought a broken body, frail but brave; A boy who carried into death the smile With which he thanked for water that we gave. Steadfast among the steadfast, those who kept The narrow pass whereby the Leicesters swept, Amid the mounded sands of ancient pride He sleeps where Grattan fell and Adams died.

I know his father, and the Himalayan oaks and pines amid which he grew to manhood. Men looking on Scarth loved him. The freshness of his mountain home and his free, happy life clung to him to this end, amid the tumults and terrors of our desert battle.

The son of Hyrtacus, whom Ide Sent, with his quiver at his side, From hunting beasts in forest-brake, To follow in Æneas' wake.[16]

At dusk Wilson came. He had been toiling away, exposed and close up to the fighters, as always--there never was a braver regimental medical officer--and he now asked me to be responsible for getting his wounded away, whilst he searched the battlefield. So all his cases were evacuated into my place. At the same time many chits reached me, addressed to the O.C. Clearing-Station. As there was no such person, I opened these. The regimental aid-posts were pressing to be cleared. My own place had men from seven different regiments, British and Indian, as well as Turks, and Wilson was sending more along. So I found McLeod, and we 'phoned down to the field ambulances. These were congested from yesterday's battle and to-day's walking cases, and replied that nothing could be done till dawn. But we were so insistent that about midnight bullock-carts turned up, and I got fifty wounded away. The 'cahars,'[17] in their zeal to remove all kit belonging to the wounded, carried off my water-bottle, haversack, rations, and communion-kit. But before this I had been down to the Tigris in the darkness, and drunk like a wounded wolf.

To return to the battle as it died away. The Forward Observing Officer with the Leicestershires sent word back that fourteen guns (instead of nine) had been taken. The news was exultantly forwarded to Corps H.Q. When the case proved to be nine only, and those nine lost again, the message was allowed to stand, the authorities hoping against hope that the guns would walk back into our possession. And Fortune was very good to them. Those guns, indeed, came not back; but, as darkness fell, two burning barges, as already mentioned, floated down the river. One was exploding, like a magazine on fire. This contained ammunition. The other barge, when pulled to shore, was found to contain fourteen field-guns, the number specified to Corps--old guns, but serviceable. Johnny, despairing of getting these away, had set fire to the barge to sink them. So the original message stood, and our loss could be glossed over. And the wastefulness of sinking quite good guns was avoided.

The night was sleepless, bitterly cold. Dobson and I kept a watch for Arabs. I sat beside a dead man, and shared his oil-sheet. A few more wounded came in after midnight, among them Sergeant Tivey. All night long wounded Turks crawled the battlefields and cried in the cold. But I heard none of them, for there were groans much nearer. Our unwounded prisoners were crowded into a nulla. Among them was the Turkish Artillery Brigade Commander, who knew some English and kept insisting on a hearing from time to time. But all he ever said was, 'Yes, gentlemen, you have got my guns, but, what is far worse, you have got me.' Had we cared, we might have cheered him with the information that we had not got his guns, but only himself. Yet, considering the relative value, in his eyes, of himself and these, such information would hardly have consoled him.

In this battle occurred a case of a man being 'fey.' An officer gave his kit and money to his batman, for distribution to his platoon, the previous night. As he went into action a friend exchanged greetings. He replied, 'Yes, but I'm afraid I'm not coming back to-day.' No one saw him fall, but he was found dead in the mounds, with several wounds.

The east was reddening when I saw Haughton, Staff-Captain of the 19th Brigade, on the hillock above the aid-post. This Brigade H.Q. were my best friends in the division. I begged a mug of tea from him, so we went along together. I found General Peebles and Brigade-Major Thornhill, and they gave me an excellent breakfast.

The 28th Brigade moved on, following the 21st Brigade, who occupied Samarra. But the wounded remained. Shortly after dawn the medical folk, in fulfilment of their promise, sent up an ordinary motor-car and took away two sitting cases. Nothing else happened. Time passed, and the heat was getting up. So I wandered back some miles, and found hospital-tents. Here was Father Bernard Farrell, the Roman Catholic padre, slaving, as he had done all night. I saw Westlake, and Sowter, who was dying. 'It's been a great fight, padre,' said Sowter, 'a great fight. I'm getting better.' No loss was felt more severely than that of this quiet, able man. He had seen much fighting in France, and in this, his first action with us, he impressed every one with his coolness and efficiency. He had walked across to Lowther, his company commander, to draw his attention to a new and threatening movement of the enemy. Then, as he stopped to bandage a wounded sergeant, a bullet pierced his stomach. The same bullet, leaving his body, went through both legs of Sergeant Lang, the one bullet making six holes. Sowter had been with us one week. I never knew any one whose influence went so deep in so brief a time.

Our seven-days' guest, he came and went his ways, Walking the darkness garlanded with praise! Our seven-days' guest! Yet love that this man gained Others have scarce in three-score years attained.

The hospital-tents were congested with wounded, and the responsible officer declined to take any more. They had no more stretchers, all being used as beds, and no more space. Fortunately an order came from Division that they must immediately remove some wounded Turks. I said, 'I have some wounded Turks.' 'Yes, but I'm afraid those aren't the Turks meant.' 'Well,' I replied, 'I've been up all night, and I'm very footsore. You might at least give me a lift back.' This was conceded, and I returned in the first of five motor-ambulances. The corporal-in-charge had no idea where he was to find the wounded Turks, so I swept him into my place. This I cleared of every one but a few horribly wounded prisoners, and sent on a note to the M.O. of the 51st Sikhs.

The previous day two wounded Turks, a machine-gun officer and a Red Crescent orderly, had arrived in the aid-post. The latter helped nobly with the wounded, so I had a note sent down with them, that they had earned good treatment. The officer had a friend from the same military college in Stamboul, which friend had a ghastly shell-wound in his back. What happened, I think, was this. When his friend was knocked out, the unwounded officer--they were both boys, well under twenty--brought up a medical orderly. All three were then overwhelmed by our rush, and in the confusion the unwounded men kept with the other, to see that he got treatment when opportunity came. So they slipped into my aid-post, where they stopped all night, making no offer to escape. I sent a message to Brigade, but their reply, a verbal one which did not reach me till next evening, was that they had better stay where they were. The unwounded officer's silent anxiety for his friend was most touching, and I pushed the latter away with the midnight convoy. Next morning I sent both officer and orderly to the nearest prisoners' camp; but the sergeant-in-charge returned them, with word that he took only wounded prisoners. So I had to keep them. Weir, the staff-captain, joined me, and we talked to the officer in French while we waited for the divisional second line to come up. We were puzzled as to why the Turks left a position so strong as Istabulat before being actually driven out. The officer's reply was, 'Because of the _tiar_' (aeroplane). I cannot follow this, unless, misunderstanding us, he was referring to this second day's fight and the aeroplane brought down at the beginning. Perhaps, being afraid to send up any other 'planes, they were deceived as to our number. He insisted that we had had three divisions in action, and was mortified when we told him the truth.

The sun was getting very hot, and, since no more ambulances came, we were troubled for the few pitifully smashed Turks who still remained. We got covers of sorts for them, though we could not prevent the flies from festooning their wounds. 'It's up to us to do our best,' said Weir. 'We shouldn't care for it if our wounded were left by them.' In the afternoon ambulances began to arrive, and I evacuated these few and saw the evacuation of the Indian regimental A.P.'s commence. My dead were buried, and their graves effaced, so far as possible, against prowling Buddus. The second line arrived, so my prisoners and I set out on our tired trudge to Samarra. I told the Turks of our Somme successes (as we then took them to be) and our more recent March victories in Flanders, pointing out the big improvement. 'In the beginning we had little artillery, but now we have much.' '_Beaucoup_,' he repeated, with conviction. In every way one spared a brave enemy's feelings. Last year they had won; now it was our turn. 'That is so,' said he. This thought comforted him, and the memory of their great triumphs before Kut in early 1916. Did he not wear a medal for those days? '_Pour le mérite_,' the orderly proudly told me. I begged scraps of biscuits from men on the march, and we shared them. I expressed regret for this march on empty stomachs. '_C'est toujours la marche_,' said the officer, shrugging his shoulders. Truly, it must have been; a nightmare of rapid movement and sleeplessness even for us who pursued--hammer and chase ever since Maude broke up the Turkish lines before Kut.

As we marched I found that the Indians took us for three prisoners and not two, I being a German officer. But when J.Y. cantered up and hailed me, a laugh ran down the column, with the words 'Padre Sahib.' At Samarra the first person we ran into was General Peebles, to whom I handed over my prisoners, with a request that they should be fed. Haughton promised to see to this. Then a pleasant thing happened. The Turkish officer stepped quickly up to me, saluted, and held out his hand. I saluted back, and we shook hands. They were good fellows, both officer and orderly, and carried themselves like free men.

It was now 5 p.m. I joined the 'Tigers.' Fowke and Lowther had each killed a snake after laying their blankets down. They gave me good greeting. I fed and washed, then slept abundantly.

For the two Istabulat battles the official return of captures was: Twenty officers and six hundred and sixty-seven men, one 5.9, fourteen Krupp field-guns, two machine-guns, twelve hundred and forty rifles, a quantity of hand-grenades, two hundred rounds of gun-ammunition, five hundred and forty thousand rounds of rifle-ammunition, four limbers, sixteen engines, two hundred and forty trucks, one crane, spare wheels and other stores, two munition barges. Samarra Station was dismantled, but the engines and trucks were there. Up to the last the Turk had meant to keep the railhead, so the engines were only partly disabled, boilers having been removed from some and other parts from others. By putting parts of engines together we got a sufficiency of usable engines. Within a fortnight we had trains running.

For the battle of the 22nd both Diggins and Lowther got M.C.'s. If it was the former's élan which carried our wave into the enemy's guns, the latter's judgement played a great part in extricating us without disaster. Hasted, the alert and watchful, had already been gazetted after the fall of Baghdad as D.S.O. He left us shortly after, returning to his own regiment, the Durham Light Infantry, in India. In Rawal Pindi he delivered a lecture on the action in which he had played so brilliant a part.

It would be interesting to know if Hasted has ever had an enemy. His personal charm is almost greater than any man has a right to have, especially when the Gods have already made that man an able soldier and administrator. But it is an unfair world.

These awards were announced in a _Gazette_ nearly a year later. To Sowter, had he lived, would have fallen a third M.C. Fowke, as well as Thorpe, got a 'mention,' of which he was utterly unaware, being away sick, till I ran into him in Kantara[18] in 1918, about eleven o'clock at night. I roused him from sleep for a chat. When I told him of his 'mention,' he considered that I was making a very successful attempt to be humorous, and laughed himself to sleep again. At intervals till dawn I heard him still laughing in his dreams at a notion so ridiculous.

I hope that some other will tell of the deeds of the Indian regiments. Even more I hope that some one will tell, as I cannot, of the gallant and costly charge which our cavalry made on the Turkish trenches to our left, a charge which staggered the enemy as he swung round to cut off the Leicestershires. The 32nd Lancers lost, among others, their Colonel (Griffiths) and their Adjutant (Captain Hunter), killed.

These two days' fighting at Istabulat and for Samarra cost us about two thousand four hundred casualties. The 28th Brigade, on the 22nd, lost four hundred and forty-six men. The enemy's losses, including prisoners, must have been at least three thousand.

My one note for April 24 is 'Flies.' It was high summer, and in the terrible and waxing heats we lay for over a month longer, with no tents, and with no shelter save our blanket-bivvies. We were the more wretched in that we occupied an old enemy camp, and were entered into full possession of its legacy of filth and flies. On the first Sunday my morning service was swathed in dust, one swirling misery, and I was sore tempted to preach, foreseeing the days to come, on 'These are but the beginning of sorrows.'

FOOTNOTES:

[12] A lecture delivered by him at Rawal Pindi, India. See Preface.

[13] Action of January 13, 1916.

[14] Hasted.

[15] Hasted.

[16] _Æneid_, Book IX, Conington's translation.

[17] Indian hospital orderlies and bearers.

[18] On the Suez Canal.

V

SUMMER AND WAITING

Samarra was entered on April 23, the 21st and 8th Brigades going through the 19th and 28th Brigades. These brigades followed during the course of the day, and the ridge of Al-Ajik fell into our hands. From Samarra northwards high bluffs run with the river, pushing out to it from plateaus stretching across the heart of Jezireh and climbing again beyond the river to the Jebel Hamrin. Below the bluffs are wide spaces of dead ground, beds which the Tigris has forsaken. On the right bank, before the dead ground begins and directly opposite Samarra town, is a plain some ten or dozen miles in length, between the mounds of the battle of April 22 and the crest of Al-Ajik; this plain may be three miles broad. Al-Ajik covers and commands all approaches from the north, and, with the central plateau, shuts the plain within a crescent. Here, behind Al-Ajik, lay our camp for the next seven months.

North from Al-Ajik the plateau rolls away to Tekrit, and the same rolling country lies to westward also, broken with nulla and water-hole. To Tekrit, more than twenty miles beyond, the Turkish Army fled.

Samarra is a dirty, sand-coloured town, with no touch of brightness but what its famous dome gives it. This dome it was that shone over against the sunset, the last earthly beauty for so many eyes, on that evening of savage battle when the 7th Division flung out its leading brigade and reached, all but held, the Turkish guns. The dome hides the cavern into which the Twelfth Imam vanished, and from which he will emerge, bringing righteousness to a faithless world. Just beyond the dome rises the corkscrew tower, built in imitation of the Babylonian _ziggurats_. To the north-east is 'Julian's Tomb,' a high pyramid in the desert. It was near Samarra that he suffered defeat and died of wounds. For twenty miles round, in Beit Khalifa, Eski Baghdad, and elsewhere, is one confused huddle of ruins. It is hard to believe that such tawdry magnificence as Harun's successors intermittently brought to the town during the precarious times of Abbasid decay is responsible for all these arches and caverns and tumbled bricks. Major Kenneth Mason, already mentioned as having identified Xenophon's Sittake, has collected good reasons for placing Opis, once the great mart of the East, at Eski Baghdad, and not where the maps conjecturally place it, twenty miles farther down Tigris. In summer, green is none save in patches by the river; but a thin scurf of yellow grass and coarse herbage overspread the ruins, in which were abundant partridges and quails. Germans had been excavating before we came, and we found in the town many cases of antiquities, ready packed for transport to Europe. The 7th Division, digging their positions, presently found pottery, glazed fragments, and tear-bottles.

The town is walled, and sits above steep bluffs. Tigris, swift and clear like a mountain stream, races by, dividing round an island. Below the town is another island, with an expanse of shingle towards the right bank; to this island Divisional Head Quarters went, a most unfair avoidance of the 'dust-devils' which plagued their brethren. Here were tamarisk thickets, haunted with great metallic beetles, with such wings as Eastern smiths know how to use. The green bushes were good to the eyes, and a pleasant curtain from flying sand. But a sudden rise in the river flushed its shallow right arm, and made the place an island in reality and all inconvenience. The righteous, seeing this, rejoiced.

The brigades scattered over the plain, the 8th Brigade going on, after brief pause, to the ravines and jungles of the Adhaim, where the war was dying. May's first week swept the Turk out of the Adhaim Valley, and our troops settled down for the summer.

The brigades scattered; blankets came up, and we slept. For over a month we had only bivvies, the usual rifle-supported blanket, tugging and straining at the stones which held it whenever a 'dust-devil' danced by or a sandstorm arose. But E.P.[19] tents dribbled in. Even mails began to arrive, and parcels; and to me, on the first day of ease, came a jubilant telegram from my old friends of the 19th Brigade: 'Come and have tea with us. We have a cake!' I went, and found them where the shingles led to Divisional Island. Blue rollers swung themselves on the air below the cliffs; and on the pebbles an owl skipped and danced, showing off in the beautiful evening sunlight. This was a daily performance, Thornhill told me. It had been General Peebles' birthday, and the brag about the cake was splendidly justified. There were buns also.