Enemy on the Euphrates (30 page)

In the event, Churchill was able to seize an opportunity to escape over the perimeter fence alone while the guards were not watching, leaving behind both Brockie and Haldane and with the result that security was thereafter considerably tightened. Haldane and Brockie were furious. Haldane felt that he had been ‘left in the lurch’ by Churchill, who had ‘walked off with my carefully thought-out plan’. He had ‘simply taken the bread out of my mouth’.

After many adventures, Churchill eventually made his way to Portuguese territory and from there returned in triumph to Durban. His role in the armoured train fight, his capture and escape, made him an instant international celebrity as the telegraph and Reuters news service spread his story far and wide. However, Churchill said nothing about Haldane or Brockie, who were now much more tightly supervised by their prison guards, and although in March 1900 they too eventually made their escape they got none of the hero-worshipping publicity which Churchill received.

Regardless of this particular painful recollection, it would be fair to say that, in general, Haldane was not a particularly happy man. He was now fifty-eight and, although still a handsome, six-foot tall and quite sociable individual (he particularly enjoyed singing light opera and reciting poetry), he had never managed to find a wife, increasingly relying on his sister, Alice, for female company.
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In his own mind this was because he had given his life to the army and sadly neglected his own personal affairs – but the army had scarcely reciprocated. During the first two years of the war, while he had served his country on the Western Front with the rank of Brigadier General, he had been passed
over for promotion on a number of occasions. His belated (in his eyes) promotion to the command of the 6th Corps in August 1916 had somewhat assuaged General Haldane’s melancholy – a melancholy which bordered on self-pity – but he remained convinced that, in his own words, it had been his fate ‘to be born under an evil star’.
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So today Haldane is attending this meeting with Churchill with gritted teeth. Meeting him again under these circumstances is somewhat embarrassing to say the least and does nothing to alleviate his general mood of mild depression; nor is he exactly overjoyed at having to accept command of a region captured and occupied during the much denigrated ‘side show’. Indeed, Haldane knows absolutely nothing about Iraq – except that among those who have served there the near-unanimous opinion is that the place is an absolute ‘shit-hole’.

Churchill is aware of Haldane’s antipathy towards him but in recent weeks he has been pestered by some of Haldane’s friends to find the man a job. He is also aware that Haldane is generally regarded as a taut and efficient commander, one who is probably well suited to the task in hand; and the task in hand is to reduce the garrison in Iraq as quickly and smoothly as possible, both to save costs and so that the forces deployed there can be moved to other parts of the empire where they are desperately needed. Indeed, while Churchill is by no means unimpressed by the advantages conferred upon Britain by the remarkable accretion of territory in Iraq – not the least of which are the potentially rich oil resources which his own department has extensively researched during the past two years – he is also acutely aware that the additional responsibilities thereby incurred have arrived at an extremely inconvenient time; and, in the circumstances, nobody in government appears to have a clear idea about what to do with this problematic new British colony.

In fact, the circumstances in early 1920 were very dire indeed. The last twelve months had been among the most difficult and threatening ever experienced by the British Empire and its ruling class. Both at home and abroad that experience had been one of almost continuous chaos, disorder and outright rebellion. In January 1919 there had been two
mutinies of British troops demanding immediate demobilisation and in Glasgow, a virtual revolution by 35,000 industrial workers had been suppressed only by the deployment of tanks and machine guns. In June, police in Liverpool had gone on strike, resulting in widespread rioting and looting. Throughout the summer and autumn of 1919 mass industrial unrest continued and by the beginning of 1920 the cabinet was anxiously anticipating a revolutionary strike by miners, railwaymen and dockers and had little idea how to combat it. Ministers even received reports that there was ‘a considerable amount of revolutionary talk going on in the Brigade of Guards’.
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Meanwhile, in Ireland, republican politicians had announced that they were setting up their own independent government in Dublin and on 22 January 1919 convened their first parliament. At the same time they called for volunteers to build up their own armed force – the Irish Republican Army. When Britain attempted to restore control from Westminster a widespread campaign of terror began in which British officials and police were hunted down and assassinated. In response, the British government had been forced to recruit a volunteer militia – the so-called Black and Tans – whose mission, in the words of cabinet secretary Maurice Hankey, was to meet terror ‘by a greater terror’.

Abroad, the empire’s situation was equally dire. In Egypt the arrest and deportation of the nationalist leader Fuad Zaghlul on 9 March triggered a major uprising. By the summer of 1919 British troops had largely suppressed it but it had cost almost a thousand Egyptian lives and the death or injury of seventy-five British, but sporadic strikes and other disorders were still continuing in the towns. According to the British authorities, the unrest had manifested a clear ‘Bolshevik tendency’, engaging the sympathy and support of ‘all classes and creeds’.
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In India, too, nationalist sentiment had become intense, exacerbated by General Dyer’s ghastly blunder. On 11 April 1919, faced with largescale agitation in the Punjab, he had ordered his troops to open fire on a rowdy but peaceful demonstration in the city of Amritsar: 379 men women and children had been killed and over 2,000 injured. It was difficult to imagine anything more likely to inflame nationalist sentiment at
a time when Britain was having to rely increasingly upon Indian troops to control the territories of its now vastly expanded empire.

The following month, Amanullah, the new Emir of Afghanistan, abandoning the pro-British neutrality of his late father and seeking to throw off the last vestiges of British-Indian domination of his country, had ordered his army to make an incursion across India’s North-West Frontier. The Emir hoped to take advantage of nationalist sentiment in India, the shortage of experienced troops there and war weariness in Britain to compel Britain to recognise the full independence of Afghanistan and the emir’s right to be addressed as ‘King’. In the event, the Afghan army was defeated but the losses suffered by British and Indian troops during the war were considered excessive for the scale of the fighting and in August the viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, had been forced to accept the emir’s original demands. Nevertheless, by the autumn of 1919 fighting was still continuing on the North-West Frontier. Taking advantage of the Afghan attack, there had been a rising of the wild frontier tribes of Waziristan, further stretching the military resources of India. A series of embarrassing reverses had been suffered by the punitive columns sent to deal with the tribesmen and the situation was still by no means under control.

To complicate matters, Britain was now burdened by huge debts to the USA and the country seemed to be sliding into a recession: unemployment was rising and the great coal-mining industry was in a serious economic crisis. In these circumstances the Treasury, the Bank of England and sections of the press were all clamouring for major cuts in public expenditure and Churchill had to admit that military expenditure could not be exempted from the financial stringency demanded by the markets. The real problem, as Churchill saw it, was the Middle East. Currently there were 9,500 British troops occupying Istanbul, 6,000 in Egypt, 9,000 in Palestine and 14,000 in Iraq plus a further 46,000 Indian troops and a veritable host of labourers, officers’ wives and children and camp followers, the cost of the whole occupation of Iraq amounting to over £18 million per year. It simply wouldn’t do.
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So that is why Churchill is now conducting this uncomfortable interview with General Haldane; because, having reviewed all the various demands upon the military from all the various outposts of Britain’s far-flung Empire, Churchill has decided that Iraq is one area where significant reductions in troop levels can and must be achieved.

The meeting lasts only twenty minutes. Haldane is to leave for Iraq on or about 15 February, subject to suitable travel arrangements becoming available. He is to take command of all British and Indian troops in the vilayets of Basra, Baghdad and Mosul with the primary objective of reducing the garrison whose expense has become ‘an intolerable burden on the British taxpayer’. ‘Being one of that suffering class’, as Haldane later put it, he found himself ‘in full sympathy’ with this objective.

Haldane is also to be responsible for the 14,000 Turkish POWs being held in Iraq pending the termination of all hostilities with Turkey and to examine solutions to the problem of the 50,000 Armenian and ‘Assyrian’ (Nestorian) Christian refugees who have fled into the Mosul region following the collapse of Russian forces in northern Persia. And since the Bolsheviks have recently recaptured the Azerbaijani oil city of Baku and are now rapidly pushing south, threatening the 9,500 British and Indian troops sent to support the newly independent Caucasian republics, Haldane is to ensure that lines of communication across Persia to these troops remain open and protected should it become necessary to evacuate them.
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However, in pursuing all these objectives, Haldane is to liaise closely with the Civil Administration in Iraq in the person of the acting civil commissioner, Captain Wilson, recently promoted major and gazetted brevet lieutenant colonel.
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At which point Churchill politely, but somewhat frostily, thanks Haldane for coming to see him, indicating that the meeting is now over. Haldane in spite of his sympathy with Churchill’s intentions, nevertheless would prefer to defer any general policy of troop reductions in Iraq until he has examined the problem on the spot; but it is clear from Churchill’s demeanour that – as Haldane would later put it – ‘an expression of my views, beyond a general assent, would be of little value,
and I refrained from uttering it.’ But then, just as Haldane is about to leave the room, Churchill takes his hand and, looking him straight in the eye, tells Haldane, ‘I have chosen you for this command, because you are something more than a soldier: write to me regularly – aside from official cables – about how you see things.’
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And Haldane cannot help but feel some of his enmity towards Churchill evaporating.

Had Haldane known the full extent of Churchill’s plans for the imperial control of Iraq he would have been, to say the least, startled. Those plans went much further than a mere reduction in troop numbers. For some time Churchill, under the strong influence of Hugh Trenchard, chief of the air staff, had been studying the possibility of relying almost entirely on air power to administer ‘law and order’ in Britain’s colonial territories and he was increasingly inclined to hand over control of Iraq to the fledgling Royal Air Force, a plan whose realisation would be facilitated by the fact that Churchill now held the office of air minister as well as secretary of state for war. It would be far more economical, he believed, to dispatch a squadron of aircraft to bomb and strafe recalcitrant Arab villages than to send punitive columns of infantry with all the supply and logistics problems which that entailed.

General Haldane, on his own admittance, knew absolutely nothing about Iraq and its current administration. He could have remedied this by visiting the India Office, where voluminous reports on this subject would have been made available to him. Instead he ordered a selection of books from Messrs Hatchard of Piccadilly dealing primarily with the ancient history of Mesopotamia, together with a revised version of the Bible published by Oxford University Press, which he later explained was ‘by no means the least valuable of the literary possessions which he took with him’. So instead of briefing himself about the territory whose garrison he was shortly to command, Haldane left London on 9 February and travelled to the South of France, where he enjoyed a short holiday with friends at Cannes. On the 15th he sailed from Marseilles aboard the P&O liner
Devanha
, arriving at Bombay on 2 March. There he received orders that he should proceed to Delhi to meet the current viceroy, Lord
Chelmsford, and to discuss the situation in Iraq with his predecessor as GOC-in-chief Mesopotamia, Sir George MacMunn, who had replaced General Marshall the previous year.

On 10 March 1920 Haldane set off back to Bombay, from where he embarked on the British India ship
Chakdina
, which was to carry himself, his aide and a small number of Indian reinforcements to Basra. After six days steaming along the coast of Persia and up the Gulf, on 20 March they arrived at the mouth of the Shatt al-‘Arab, awaiting a tide which would take them safely over the great sand bar. So far Haldane had not been impressed by his first views of Iraq. Not only had the journey up the Persian Gulf been ‘devoid of interest’, but at the mouth of the Shatt, ‘the view of the low-lying coast, with its background of datepalms, and the muddy waters all around which soiled the pale green of the sea, inspired no admiration’. ‘The outlook struck me as particularly dreary,’ Haldane observed.

At 3.30 in the afternoon, the
Chakdina
finally docked at Basra, where Haldane was received by a guard of honour of a hundred officers and men of the 2nd Battalion of the Manchester Regiment with their regimental colour.
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Smart enough, Haldane thought, but the ‘other ranks’ were mainly raw recruits from the slums of that dark northern city and with their pale young faces framed by top-heavy solar topees and bandy legs protruding from long baggy shorts, they looked particularly unsuitable for operations in that miserably hot and humid land. In fact, the battalion’s last assignment had been guard duties in Ireland, where they had been mainly carrying out functions which were more of a policing than military nature.