CHAPTER II

EGYPT TO THE PERSIAN GULF

Afloat in an insect-house--Captain Kettle in command--Overcrowding and small-pox--The s.s. _Tower of Babel_--A shark scare--Koweit.

Forty-eight hours after disembarking at Alexandria we were steaming down the Gulf of Suez on board a second transport bound for the Persian Gulf.

It would be difficult to imagine a greater contrast than that between the vessel which brought us across the Mediterranean and the one that was now carrying us towards the portals of the Middle East. The latter was a decrepit steamer, indescribably filthy, which had been running in the China trade for a quarter of a century. Though favoured by the mildest of weather, the old tub groaned in every joint as she thumped her way down the Red Sea towards the Indian Ocean. Long overdue for the scrap-heap, when the war broke out she was turned into a transport, and thenceforth carried cargoes of British troops instead of Chinese coolies. Her decks and upper works were thickly encrusted with dirt, the careful hoarding of years; and a paint-brush had not touched her for generations. Her cabins were so many entomological museums where insect life {13} flourished. In the worm-eaten recesses of the woodwork lurked colonies of parasites gathered from every corner of the globe, fighting for the principle of self-determination of small nations. The bathroom door, held in place by a single rusty hinge, hung at a drunken angle, and the inflow pipe of the bath was choked with rust. At night, as you slept in your bunk, playful mice, by way of establishing friendly relations, would nibble at your big toe, and a whole family of cockroaches would attempt new long-distance-sprinting records up and down the bedclothes.

The Captain of the ship was a sharp-featured ferret-eyed individual who sometimes wore a collar. No one knew his exact nationality, but he bore a tolerable resemblance to Cutcliffe Hyne's immortal "Captain Kettle." Indeed, he was said to cultivate this resemblance by every means in his power. He had a pointed, unshaven chin; he wore a much-faded uniform cap tilted over one ear. On the bridge you would see him with hands thrust deep in his trouser pockets and chewing a cigar. As master of a tramp, he had nosed his way into almost every port in both hemispheres. He had traded from China to Peru, and along the Pacific Coast of America. In his wanderings he had acquired a Yankee accent and a varied and picturesque polyglot vocabulary which, when the floodgates of his wrath were opened, he turned with telling effect upon his Lascar crew or his European officers. He was a man of moods and {14} strange oaths, a good seaman with a marked taste for poker and magazine literature of the cheap sensational kind.

Such, then, was our ship, and such its skipper! When we had arrived at Suez, where we embarked, there were several cases of smallpox amongst its Lascar firemen. The Embarkation Officer had feared infection, and had hesitated to send us on board; but he was overruled by a higher authority somewhere in Egypt or England. There was no other transport available, it was said; the units for India and for Persia were urgently needed; and, smallpox or no smallpox, sail we must--and did.

The ship was terribly overcrowded. The Indian troops "pigged it" aft; the British troops were accommodated in the hold; and those of the officers who were unable to find quarters elsewhere unstrapped their camp bed and slept on deck. Fortunately it was the cool season in the Red Sea; the days were warm, but not uncomfortably so; and the nights were sharp and bracing, the head-wind which we carried with us all the way to Aden keeping the thermometer from climbing beyond the normal.

Once clear of Suez everybody settled down to work, a very useful relief to the discomforts of life on an overcrowded transport. Youthful subalterns joining the Indian Army set themselves to study Hindustani grammars and vocabularies with the valiant intention of acquiring colloquial proficiency before they even sighted Bombay. Members of the {15} Bagdad Party, stimulated by this exhibition of industry, tackled Persian and Russian. We had two officers who offered themselves as teachers of the language of Iran--Lieutenant Akhbar, a native-born Persian whose English home was at Manchester, and Captain Cooper of the Dorsets, who had studied Oriental tongues in England, and had been wounded at Gallipoli in a hand-to-hand fight with the Turks.

For Russian also there was no lack of teachers, the Russian officers, Captain Eve, and I taking charge of classes. In my own section, elementary Russian, I had twenty-two N.C.O.'s as eager and willing pupils. The majority were Australians, and, although dismayed at first by the bizarre appearance of the unfamiliar characters, and the seemingly unsurmountable difficulties of what one Anzac aptly described as "this upside-down language," they put their backs into it with very remarkable results, plodding away at their lessons hour after hour with unwearying zeal. Some had picked up a smattering of "Na Poo" French on the Western Front; a few spoke French fairly well; but the majority knew no foreign language at all; yet the quick alert Australian brain captured the entire Russian alphabet in forty-eight hours after beginning the preliminary assault.

I have sometimes thought since that to the Gods on High our ship must have appeared a sort of floating Tower of Babel, so intent on speaking strange tongues were each and all.

Before we reached the Indian Ocean, one of the {16} ship's officers disappeared in a mysterious manner. He was missed from the bridge at midnight and, although diligent search was made, no trace of him was ever found, and it had to be assumed that he had jumped or fallen overboard. Our Goanese stewards who were Christians looked upon this incident with the greatest misgivings. Knowing the superstitions of the Lascar crew, they secretly felt that the missing officer had been thrown overboard by some of them to placate a huge shark that had been following the ship for days. The Lascars have a great dread of such company at sea. To their untutored minds this voracious brute following a vessel foretells death to someone on board; so better a sacrificial victim than perhaps one of themselves!

Personally, I do not think for a moment that Lascar superstition was responsible for the disappearance of the missing man, nor that these people are given to the propitiation of the Man-Eaters of the Red Sea. But when, two nights later, one of the Lascars vanished as mysteriously as had the ship's officer, and this too in calm weather, it looked as if some Evil Spirit had found a place on board. Stewards and crew now became terrified. The former would not venture alone on the deck at night, and the Lascars, sorely puzzled over the fate of their comrade, went about their work in fear and trembling.

This dread of the mysterious and the unseen became contagious and affected others outside the ship's company. Subalterns who had been sleeping {17} on hammocks slung close to the ship's rail and whose courage had been proved on many a field, now decided that, shark worship or no shark worship, they would be safer elsewhere, and transferred themselves to the 'tween decks. Anyhow, the Sea Demon must by this time have been satisfied, for we lost no more of our personnel.

We arrived off Koweit in the Gulf of Persia on March 1st, seventeen days after leaving Suez.

Koweit, or Kuwet, is an important seaport on the Arabian side at the south-west angle of the Persian Gulf, about eighty miles due south of Basra, our port of destination. Kuwet is the diminutive form of Kut, a common term in Irak for a walled village, and the port lies in the south side of a bay twenty miles long and five miles wide. Seen through our glasses it did not seem a prepossessing place, for the bare stony desert stretched away for miles behind the town. Yet only by accident had it escaped greatness. In 1850 General Chesny, who knew these parts by heart, recommended it as the terminus of his proposed Euphrates Valley Railway; and, when the extension of the Anatolian Railway to Bagdad and the Gulf was mooted, Koweit was long regarded as a possible terminus. But the War altered all that, and it is doubtful now if Koweit, which lives by its sea commerce alone, will even achieve the distinction of becoming the terminal point of a branch line of the railway which is destined to link up two continents.

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The Turks and Germans have long had their eyes open to the great possibilities of Koweit. The former in 1898 attempted a military occupation, but were warned off by the British, and abandoned their efforts to obtain a foothold in this commercial outpost of the Gulf, while the ruling Sheikh was sagacious enough to be aware of the danger of Turkish absorption, and to avert it by placing his dominions under the protection of Great Britain. The German-subsidized Hamburg-Amerika Line made an eleventh hour attempt to capture the trade of the Gulf, and in the months immediately preceding the War devoted special attention to Koweit and Basra trade, carrying freight at rates which must have meant a heavy financial loss. It was all part of the German Weltpolitik to oust us from these lucrative markets of the Middle East, and to secure for German shipping a monopoly of the Gulf carrying trade. With the German-controlled Bagdad Railway approaching completion, one shudders to realize what would have been our fate economically, if the sea-borne trade of Basra and Koweit had passed under the flag and into the hands of the enterprising Hun.

Basra lies about eighty miles to the north of Koweit. It is here that the Shatt el Arab (literally the river of the Arabs, or, otherwise, the commingled Euphrates and Tigris) empties itself into the Persian Gulf. Vessels with a greater draught than nineteen feet cannot easily negotiate the bar. Our own transport was bound for Bombay, so it was with a feeling {19} of thankfulness that we quitted her for ever and were transferred to a British India liner, the _Erinrupy_, which since the beginning of the War has been used as a hospital ship. She was spick and span, and the general air of cleanliness was so marked after the filthy tub that had conveyed us from Suez that we trod her decks and ventured into her cabins with an air of apologetic timidity.

It was half a day's run up river to Basra. Next morning we were speeding along with the swirling brown waters of the Shatt el Arab lapping our counter, the land of Iran on our right, and that of Irak on our left. It grew warmer, and there was a good deal of moisture in the air. The low flat shores, cut up by irrigation canals, were covered by date-palm groves. Dhows and other strange river craft, laden with merchandise, dotted the surface of the brown waters, and the glorious green of the foreshores was a welcome relief to eyes tired of the arid sterility of the Arabian shore. A few miles below Basra we steered a careful course, passing the sunken hulls of two Turkish gunboats which the enemy had submerged in the fairway in the hope of blocking the river channel and preventing the victorious British maritime and war flotillas from reaching Basra. Like most other operations undertaken by the Turks the effort was badly bungled, and the channel was left free to our ships.

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