Enemy on the Euphrates (15 page)

By 18 November, Townshend had learned from his handful of reconnaissance aircraft that an Ottoman force of 11–12,000 had taken up position sixteen miles south of Baghdad on the left bank of the Tigris near the village of Salman Pak. The force was commanded by Colonel Yusuf Nur ud-Din Bey, the former police chief of Basra; it was dug in, protected by barbed wire, in two parallel lines of defence terminating in a fortified redoubt. If Townshend was going to take Baghdad, he had no choice but to attack it; but his whole force was no more than 12,000 men and a frontal attack on a fixed position without numerical superiority was doomed from the start.

Four days later, on a battlefield overlooked by the great arch of Ctesiphon – all that remained of the ancient city of the Parthians and Sassanids – Townshend’s troops, many of them inexperienced Indian recruits, were thrown against the Ottoman positions. The British appear to have seriously underestimated Nur ud-Din’s strength. With a total of 21,000 men with fifty-two artillery pieces and twenty machine guns, Nur ud-Din’s army far outnumbered Townshend’s. And of the four divisions under Nur ud-Din’s command, three – the 45th, the 38th and the 35th – were composed largely of Arab regulars together with some Kurds.
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In a straggling and chaotic battle which was fought intermittently over three days, the Anglo-Indian force lost 4,200 dead or wounded. The Ottoman forces fought unexpectedly well, including the Arab 142nd infantry regiment (part of the 35th Division), Faruqi’s old unit, which he had previously insisted was seriously disaffected.
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With the Arab and Turkish troops mounting fierce counter-attacks, on the afternoon of the 25th the decision was taken to retire to Lajj, a small town on the Tigris about ten miles south of Salman Pak. But by now Turkish reinforcements commanded by the energetic but ruthless Khalil Pasha, nephew of Enver Pasha, were arriving and Townshend soon realised that he had no choice but to retreat the hundred miles back to Kut al-‘Amara, which he considered to be more defensible than any of the other Tigris towns.

The march back to Kut was a grim ordeal. Pressed hard by the Ottoman regulars in their rear and harassed on their flanks by Arab tribal irregulars who killed and robbed any wounded falling by the wayside, the exhausted remnants of Townshend’s force eventually arrived at Kut on 2 December. Initially confident that he could hold Kut until reinforcements arrived, on 6 December Townshend sent his cavalry and transport downriver in order to reduce the number of mouths he would have to feed if the Turks besieged him. Among those ordered to leave was an Indian Army political officer named Captain Gerard Leachman, whom we shall meet again later in this story.

Too late, Townshend realised that, in spite of optimistic reassurances, Nixon would be unable to send a relief column in sufficient strength to lift the siege until after Kut’s supplies had run out. By 7 December Khalil Pasha had closed a ring of 20,000 men around Kut, leaving Townshend’s 10,000 Indian and British troops, 3,500 Indian non-combatants and around 6,000 Arab civilians trapped in a loop of the Tigris only less than two miles long and a mile wide.

On the very same day that Townshend became trapped in Kut, the cabinet accepted Kitchener’s advice – finally given after weeks of dithering – that they had no choice but to evacuate the army from Gallipoli. Winter had arrived early and the beleaguered Allied troops
were suffering intensely in their shallow trenches and dugouts huddled under the surrounding Turkish guns on the heights above them. However, the new Allied commander, General Charles Monroe, carefully put together a plan for a staged night withdrawal concealed from the Turks by a variety of clever stratagems such as automatically firing rifles using water-powered weights or candles which burned through strings to pull the triggers of the unmanned weapons. This gave the illusion that his troops were remaining in their positions even while they were being loaded into the boats that would evacuate them. Ironically, the evacuation of Gallipoli turned out to be the greatest – indeed, the only – success of the whole campaign.

While Sykes, in London, was turning his attention to reaching an agreement with the French, McMahon in Cairo was being pressed to come to a final arrangement with Husayn which would bring his Bedouin fighters into the war on the Allied side and provide some limited relief for the accumulating military setbacks on both the Western
and
Eastern Fronts.

Although the Sharif had responded warmly to a letter from McMahon on 24 October 1915 in which the latter agreed to Husayn’s request for specific assurances about the frontiers of his Arab state, his reply of 5 November, expressing his ‘great gratification’ at this sudden change in Britain’s attitude, was qualified by continuing disagreement about precisely which territories should be included, in particular the future status of the Syrian region west of the line Damascus–Homs–Hama–Aleppo (i.e. the future state of Lebanon). With respect to Basra and Baghdad, where McMahon had suggested that ‘special administrative arrangements’ (i.e. some degree of British control) might apply, Husayn reminded McMahon that ‘the provinces of Iraq were part of the former Arab Empire and indeed were the seat of government in the days of the Caliph ‘Ali ibn Abu-Talib … and all the Caliphs after him.’ However, although Husayn made it clear that ‘we should find it impossible to persuade or compel the Arab nation to renounce that honourable association’, he was willing to allow those parts currently occupied by British troops to remain so occupied ‘for a period to be determined by
negotiation’ provided that the Sharif’s ‘Arab Kingdom’ was compensated for this temporary alienation by means of ‘suitable pecuniary assistance’.

McMahon replied to Husayn yet again on 13 December. But as McMahon’s agent arrived in Mecca with the letter, another missive was also delivered to the Sharif – from Lieutenant Faruqi. Eight days earlier, Faruqi had composed a long letter to Husayn informing him, for the first time, of his existence.
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He introduced himself as an officer in the Ottoman army and as ‘the first member of al-‘Ahd’. He informed Husayn that he was one of the officers who had met his son Faysal in Aleppo in May 1915 and he told Husayn about how he had decided to desert to the British.

The British, he told Husayn, had explained to him the contents of McMahon’s letter of 24 October in which they had accepted Husayn’s proposed frontiers but excluded the territory west of the line Damascus–Homs–Hama–Aleppo because of French interests there; British interests in Basra and Baghdad would also have to be recognised, he had been told. However, Faruqi also told Husayn – in sharp contradiction to what he had apparently said to Sykes – that he had made it clear to the British that ‘the Arabs would not give up one square foot of land in Syria and that the Arab state must include all of Syria and Iraq’, although it would be possible to recognise the purely economic interests of Britain in Iraq and of the French in Syria.

In spite of the fact that McMahon’s letter of 13 December added little to their previous exchanges, the fact that it was accompanied by £20,000 in gold with which Husayn would be able to buy the support of many Bedouin chiefs of the Hejaz clearly signalled that the British were now in earnest. In fact, Faruqi had already told him in his own letter that the British felt they had more to gain from Husayn’s support than vice versa. Husayn was also pleased to hear of Faruqi’s presence in Cairo and his apparently strong influence upon the British – an influence which was seemingly reinforcing Husayn’s own representations as to the extent of his desired Arab empire.

After yet another exchange of letters, on 30 January 1916 McMahon replied with what was to be his final missive in the labyrinthine
communications which had commenced six months earlier. Implying that the postwar status of the Baghdad vilayet was by no means settled, he promised that Britain would ‘examine the question with the utmost care after the defeat of the enemy’. As for the Syrian coastal regions including Beirut, he thanked Husayn for his recognition that they must ‘avoid anything that might impair the alliance between Great Britain and France’ and, implying that Husayn would eventually be able to count on the support of Britain after the war, McMahon stated that success ‘may bind us to each other in a lasting friendship which shall bring profit and contentment to us all’.
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Three months later, Britain’s defeat at Gallipoli was followed by an even more devastating setback in the war against the Ottomans. By mid-April 1916 it had become clear that all attempts to relieve the siege of Kut had failed. Negotiations on surrender began on 27 April, during which Townshend, with Kitchener’s approval, offered Khalil Pasha all his artillery and £1 million in return for his men being allowed to leave Kut on parole. Khalil immediately referred the offer to his uncle, Enver Pasha, who replied, ‘Money is not wanted by us.’ Townshend then raised the cash offer to £2 million but, insulted by what they considered an attempt to bribe them, Khalil and Enver declined once again. Realising at last that the Turks were intent on unconditional surrender, Townshend resigned himself to the inevitable and on 28 April began destroying his guns.

There was little mercy for the British and Indian ‘other ranks’ or the local Arab population after the Turks entered Kut. Hangings and torture were the lot of those Arabs who were deemed to have collaborated with the British, and the prisoners themselves were dispatched on a veritable death march to Anatolia, where the survivors were condemned to forced labour. Around two-thirds of the British and Indian troops who surrendered died of disease or maltreatment. General Townshend, on the other hand, was taken to Istanbul, where he lived out the rest of the war in pleasant semi-confinement, convinced to the last that the Turkish commanders were ‘Gentlemen’.

For Britain’s war leaders, one defeat by ‘orientals’ had been shocking; two defeats seemed utterly appalling. As far as the war in the East was
concerned, there was now ‘only one show in town’ – a revolt against the Turks by Sharif Husayn and his men. Fortunately, current and future promises of gold in very large quantities were about to produce the desired outcome.

On 5 June 1916 Kitchener, the architect of the ‘Eastern Strategy’, whose vaguely worded message to the Sharif in September 1914 concerning the caliphate had set in motion the train of events which had since unfolded, drowned in the icy waters of the North Sea when the cruiser HMS
Hampshire
carrying him on a diplomatic mission to Russia was sunk by a German submarine. On the very same day, Husayn’s sons ‘Ali and Faysal raised the banner of revolt at Medina and five days later the Sharif himself joined the rebellion, having previously been promised a subsidy of £50,000 per month in gold sovereigns, 5,000 rifles and a quarter of a million rounds of ammunition by decision of the British cabinet, a figure which would be raised to £125,000 in gold a month later, and eventually rise to £200,000 per month by mid-1917.
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Colonel Gerard Leachman in Arab dress during one of his adventurous spying missions,
c.
1912

After the Emirs Faysal and ‘Ali raised their standards they led the tribesmen who had rallied to their call to a position south-east of Medina to await the recruitment of further tribal forces. Husayn’s own troops attacked the Turkish garrison in Mecca on 10 June 1916 and, at the same time, a force of around 4,000 tribesmen of the Harb confederation launched an attack on Turkish positions at the Red Sea port of Jedda. At Mecca, most of the city was under the control of the rebels within three days, but a major fort and the garrison building held out for a further three weeks. At Jedda, the Arab attack failed when the Turks opened fire upon them with artillery. However, shelling by the elderly British light cruiser HMS
Fox
eventually forced the Turks to surrender on 16 June.

Lieutenant Faruqi, whose presence in the Hejaz had meanwhile been requested by Emir Zayd, accompanied the British on board HMS
Fox
and later recorded his emotions in a report to Clayton: ‘I have drunk the cup of happiness for being able to hit the mean Turks actually … Praise be to God who granted me the means and enabled me to fight against the Turks and smash them … No better life than is now.’
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It was, however, the only military engagement against the Turks that Faruqi was to be involved in – if ‘involved’ is the correct word.

From June to September 1916 further gains were made. Rabigh, an important coastal town, fell to a local uprising led by Husayn bin Mubarak of the Masruh Harb, and Yanbu‘, another coastal town, was captured at the end of July. Inland, Ta’if was taken by Emir ‘Abdallah’s forces on 22 September. But there were also worrying indications of problems to come.