War in the Garden of Eden | Page 5

any importance could
be mentioned but what an officer of the I.W.T. could be found who had
navigated it. The great requisite for transports on the Tigris was a very
light draft, and to fill the requirements boats were requisitioned ranging
from penny steamers of the Thames to river-craft of the Irrawaddy.
Now in bringing a penny steamer from London to Busra the submarine
is one of the lesser perils, and in supplying the wants of the
Expeditionary Force more than eighty vessels were lost at sea,
frequently with all aboard.

As was the custom, we had a barge lashed to either side. These barges
are laden with troops, or horses, or supplies. In our case we had the first
Bengal regiment--a new experiment, undertaken for political reasons.
The Bengali is the Indian who most readily takes to European learning.
Rabindranath Tagore is probably the most widely known member of
the race. They go to Calcutta University and learn a smattering of
English and absorb a certain amount of undigested general knowledge
and theory. These partially educated Bengalis form the Babu class, and
many are employed in the railways. They delight in complicated
phraseology, and this coupled with their accent and seesaw manner of
speaking supply the English a constant source of caricature. As a race
they are inclined to be vain and boastful, and are ever ready to nurse a
grievance against the British Government, feeling that they have been
provided with an education but no means of support. The government
felt that it might help to calm them if a regiment were recruited and
sent to Mesopotamia. How they would do in actual fighting had never
been demonstrated up to the time I left the country, but they take
readily to drill, and it was amusing to hear them ordering each other
about in their clipped English. They were used for garrisoning
Baghdad.
After we left Amara we continued our winding course up-stream. A
boat several hours ahead may be seen only a few hundred yards distant
across the desert. The banks are so flat and level that it looks as if the
other vessels were steaming along on land. The Arab river-craft was
most picturesque. At sunset a mahela, bearing down with filled sail,
might have been the model for Maxfield Parrish's Pirate Ship. The
Arab women ran along the bank beside us, carrying baskets of eggs and
chickens, and occasionally melons. They were possessed of surprising
endurance, and would accompany us indefinitely, heavily laden as they
were. Their robes trailed in the wind as they jumped ditches, screaming
out their wares without a moment's pause. An Indian of the boat's crew
was haggling with a woman about a chicken. He threw her an
eight-anna piece. She picked up the money but would not hand him the
chicken, holding out for her original price. He jumped ashore,
intending to take the chicken. She had a few yards' start and made the
most of it. In and out they chased, over hedge and ditch, down the bank

and up again. Several times he almost had her. She never for a moment
ceased screeching--an operation which seemed to affect her wind not a
particle. At the end of fifteen minutes the Indian gave up amid the
delighted jeers of his comrades, and returned shamefaced and
breathless to jump aboard the boat as we bumped against the bank on
rounding a curve.
One evening we halted where, not many months before, the last of the
battles of Sunnaiyat had been fought. There for months the British had
been held back, while their beleaguered comrades in Kut could hear the
roar of the artillery and hope against hope for the relief that never
reached them. It was one phase of the campaign that closely
approximated the gruelling trench warfare in France. The last
unsuccessful attack was launched a week before the capitulation of the
garrison, and it was almost a year later before the position was
eventually taken. The front-line trenches were but a short distance apart,
and each side had developed a strong and elaborate system of defense.
One flank was protected by an impassable marsh and the other by the
river. When we passed, the field presented an unusually gruesome
appearance even for a battle-field, for the wandering desert Arabs had
been at work, and they do not clean up as thoroughly as the African
hyena. A number had paid the penalty through tampering with
unexploded grenades and "dud" shells, and left their own bones to be
scattered around among the dead they had been looting. The trenches
were a veritable Golgotha with skulls everywhere and dismembered
legs still clad with puttees and boots.
At Kut we disembarked to do the remaining hundred miles to Baghdad
by rail instead of winding