Enemy on the Euphrates (31 page)

Afterwards, Haldane drove around the city and base which now covered an area of twenty square miles and got his first view of the miles of wharves and riverside buildings which had been built to support the invasion and subsequent campaigns ‘up-country’. Reducing this to a more manageable size and making commensurate cuts in the garrison was going to be an ‘Augean task’, Haldane ruefully concluded.

The next day, at four in the morning, the general boarded a comfortable stern-wheeler and began the journey up the Tigris to Baghdad,
arriving at ‘Amara two days later. It was the flood season and for miles on either side of the river there was little to see except a vast expanse of water fringed far away to the east by the mountains of the Pusht-i-Kuh. With sadness, Haldane pictured those British and Indian troops plodding their way up the river bank in that first, doomed attempt to capture Baghdad. ‘Never could a march have been performed with surroundings less inspiring,’ he thought.
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Two days later, Haldane disembarked at Kut and continued his journey to Baghdad by special military train along the one-metre-gauge railway which the British had built after Kut had been retaken. It was getting dark as the train pulled into the terminus, Hinaydi station, a few miles south of the city itself, and as Haldane stepped down from his carriage he was very tired after an extremely uncomfortable hundred-mile journey. On the platform stood a large welcoming party of senior military officers, local Arab notables and members of the Civil Administration. As he worked his way down the line, saluting, shaking hands and making occasional polite remarks as seemed appropriate, he eventually found himself face to face for the first time with Acting Civil Commissioner Arnold Wilson.

This first encounter must have brought to mind an incident that had taken place shortly before Haldane’s departure from England. He had been dining with an old acquaintance, Sir John Hewitt, at the latter’s club. The previous year Sir John had been sent out to Iraq by the War Office to examine whether certain expenditures should have been charged to the military or to the Civil Administration, and on returning to England had produced an official report, some of whose conclusions were unwelcome to the latter. Sir John and General Haldane had spent a quite convivial evening together, reminiscing about the war and enjoying a bottle of good Riesling. Suddenly Hewitt took hold of Haldane’s wrist and, leaning forward, whispered, ‘Before you go, Aylmer, I must give you a piece of advice – you can take it or leave it, but I’m going to give it to you anyway – Get rid of Wilson.’
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Precisely why he was to ‘get rid of Wilson’ was never made clear, except that Hewitt had apparently found Wilson uncooperative. In any
case, Wilson, as acting civil commissioner, was employed by the India Office while Haldane was employed by the War Office and had no direct powers over his civilian colleague. Moreover, as far as Haldane could see in the gathering darkness, Brevet Lieutenant Colonel Wilson was a soldierly looking type of person with no obvious personal defects, and for the time being he decided he would discount his old friend’s opinion and form his own judgement of Wilson as he proceeded to carry out the war minister’s orders. What he did not yet appreciate was that the orders which Churchill had given him were quite inconsistent with the objectives already decided upon by Wilson and the team of admiring young political officers with whom he had now surrounded himself.

By the time General Haldane arrived in Baghdad, a large part of Wilson’s project had already been achieved. The country had been split up into sixteen administrative divisions each ruled by a PO – ‘Amara, Arbil, Baghdad, Ba’quba, Basra, Diwaniyya, Diyala, Hilla, Kirkuk, Kut, Mosul, Nasiriyya, Samarra, Shamiyya, Sulaymaniyya and Qurna – these, in turn, being subdivided into forty separate districts, each under the control of an APO. To man this complex structure a force of 534 POs, APOs, departmental officers and other senior staff (of which 507 were British) earning more than Rs 600 per month (equivalent, in ‘standard of living’ terms, to around £2,200 in the UK in today’s money) had been recruited to administer the country, supervise the collection of taxes, and run the departments responsible for public works, irrigation, postal services etc.
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Of these, 106 officers represented the executive staff of divisions, of which fifteen were actually based in Persia. In addition there were a further 515 British and 2,209 Indian Civil Administration staff on a monthly pay scale lower than Rs 600. At the apex of this bureaucratic pyramid stood Wilson, who, as acting civil commissioner, drew a monthly salary of £300 (£11,000 in today’s money).
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On the other hand, by October 1919 none of the proposed provincial councils had been set up and only four of the sixteen divisions had been provided with divisional councils, and these met only occasionally to consider matters placed before them by the POs. Even in these cases the Arab notables who were appointed as members
soon experienced the high-handed methods of their new masters. For example, at Basra, the PO laid down an elaborate set of standing orders among whose provisions was the rule that no member should speak for more than five minutes, a somewhat onerous imposition upon the local worthies whose traditional eloquence would easily exhaust this time limit merely in making polite introductions.
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A far more onerous imposition, but one which was experienced not in the towns but in the countryside, was forced labour. For example, in late 1918 around 1,000 Arabs from the Rumaytha district on the Lower Euphrates had been dragooned into the work of laying steel rails for the new one-metre-gauge railway network the British were building from Samawa to Diwaniyya. Forced labour was also widely employed in the agricultural sector. The staff of the Civil Administration’s Irrigation Department had very definite ideas about how Iraq’s water resources should be used and developed – ideas which often ran contrary to traditional usage and custom – and they didn’t hesitate to call upon their local POs to compel tribes in the vicinity of the irrigation works for which they were responsible to provide labour parties for making or repairing flood banks and other public works; men like Colonel Leachman were always more than ready to assist in this task by means of a few swift blows of his cut-down polo stick.
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In their day, the Turks had also used tribal labour for these tasks but they had usually been careful to consult the local sheikhs concerning any new scheme, taking care to point out the benefits that would be likely to accrue to the local population. The British, on the other hand, simply demanded labour, without explanation, whether the works in question were seen as beneficial to the Arabs or not, and there were a good many cases where the ‘expertise’ of the British irrigation officers proved sadly inferior to the knowledge of the Arabs forced to work on their schemes, resulting in unanticipated and undesired changes to the water flow and similar mistakes.
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However, forced labour was only one dimension of the new Civil Administration’s passion for control – its other essential element was taxation: those who were the unwilling ‘beneficiaries’ of British control
also had to pay for it – and it was becoming increasingly expensive. Between the financial years 1917/18 and 1918/19 the total expenditure of the Civil Administration in occupied Iraq had already increased by 66 per cent, but between 1918/19 and 1919/20 it increased by a further 177 per cent. Of the total expenditure for 1919/20, nearly a third was attributable to ‘Headquarters Administration, Political Officers and the Revenue (Taxation) organisation’, in other words the machinery of domination. By way of comparison, Public Works accounted for 10.7 per cent and Education a mere 1.9 per cent.
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Under the Turks, the taxation regime had been haphazard in collection, being largely delegated to the tribal sheikhs who received, in return, a share of the income. Tax assessments were highly variable, made on the basis of the estimated profits earned by the tribes which occupied government-owned lands. In other words, allowance was made for the annual vagaries of climate, irrigation, flood control, pests, dust storms and so on.
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In addition, from time to time, many tribes escaped their obligations by the simple expedient of making life extremely unpleasant for their sheikhly tax collectors. The British changed most of this. Where possible, sheikhs unfriendly to the British were replaced by others who were willing to collaborate.
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The old Turkish tax-farming system was retained but the element of proportionality in the old regime was gradually replaced by fixed assessments while police and ‘levies’ – paramilitary forces recruited from among the tribes themselves, backed by regular troops when necessary – enforced collection with an iron hand. And where a tribe prevented the authorities from inspecting their crops for tax-collection purposes, the offending tribe was indiscriminately bombed.
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As a result, by the end of 1918 the British tax authorities had collected more land revenues than had the Ottomans in any prewar year. So ‘efficient’ was the tax-collection regime that in every year of the British occupation the budget of the Civil Administration was in surplus. However, it was in the years of Wilson’s incumbency that these surpluses grew most rapidly. Indeed, as Wilson was determined to prove, it was not the expense of the Civil Administration which so
burdened the British taxpayer – there was none: it more than paid for itself – it was the continuing cost of the huge military establishment which had been built up to support the war in Iraq. But because, as yet, no peace treaty had been signed with the Turks, and the Kemalists and Bolshevists threatened the security of Mosul and northern Persia, his administration still had need of this military shield.

Unfortunately for Wilson and his colleagues this was not fully understood in Britain. There had recently been some criticism of the alleged profligacy of his administration in the press, notably – and in Wilson’s opinion, inexcusably – in the
Times
itself. But Wilson and his men also had their admirers. Such a one was the Revd Joseph T. Parfit MA, of the Church Missionary Society, who had recently visited Iraq and in a few months’ time would publish a veritable panegyric on British-occupied Iraq entitled
Marvellous Mesopotamia: The World’s Wonderland.
According to the Reverend Parfit, Wilson’s regime was ‘a masterpiece of efficient administration’, which, among other achievements had ‘largely succeeded in bringing about the moral reformation’ of its ‘fanatical inhabitants’. Indeed, under the British Civil Administration, Parfit concluded, ‘The most desolate country in the world is being rapidly transformed into something like a paradise.’
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General Haldane, on the other hand, whose first impressions of Iraq were more redolent of Hades than Heaven, soon decided that he was not at all happy with the state of affairs in Wilson’s satrapy. The total forces under his command – forces which he had been ordered to reduce as quickly as possible – numbered only 73,000, of which 61,000 were Indian.
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As a junior officer, Haldane had commanded Indian troops during the Tirah Campaign of 1897–8 in the Khyber Pass and he was well aware that, in general, Indian troops, drawn mainly from the Punjab, had usually shown themselves doughty fighters when led by good officers. However, such an exceptionally high proportion of Indian to British troops filled Haldane with unease. To make matters worse, over a third of the troops under his command were tied up in various non-combatant duties, such as guarding Turkish prisoners or working in the various departments of the Civil Administration in the
absence of civilian recruits from England. Moreover, around half of his British troops were either hundreds of miles away in Persia – supposedly deployed to deal with any advance by the Bolsheviks – sick, or in transit. So long as the country remained quiet he could probably manage; but if there were simultaneous disturbances in different parts of the country the situation could quickly become critical.

Three days after his arrival at his Baghdad HQ, on 27 March 1920, the new GOC-in-chief set off on a tour of all the garrisons, in particular those which were small and isolated. On his return, he concluded that the quality of the British troops – most of them recruited after the 1918 armistice and who so far had never fired a shot in anger – left much to be desired.
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Some infantry units consisted largely of half-disciplined, pale-faced boys who were always going sick.
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The situation was much the same with the British cavalry, many of whom were still in the elementary stages of learning to ride.

He also noticed that the airport outside Baghdad had absolutely no protection: no blockhouses, no barbed wire – any ‘thieving
Budoo
’ could get in and help himself to whatever loot he fancied. Indeed, he had already noticed that a good deal of pilfering was going on – and it was not just the light-fingered Arabs who were involved. There were far too many temporary and warrant officers who seemed excessively keen to ‘shake the pagoda tree’, in the old India parlance. As another British officer put it, shortly after his arrival in Iraq, ‘One could almost feel the miasma of lethargy, apathy and corruption that pervaded the whole country.’
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As for Wilson’s ‘politicals’, Haldane thought they were a pretty mixed bunch. Some of them had only recently been recruited into the Mesopotamian Civil Administration from British junior officers who had joined at the armistice and subsequently been demobilised and were totally lacking in experience in ‘handling the Arab’. That sort of thing could cause trouble, and the last thing the general wanted was trouble. And there were others, officers of the railway, public works, irrigation, levies and sundry other employees of the sprawling administration, who were quite unsuitable for their duties. As a British officer in a recently
arrived Indian cavalry regiment put it, ‘Nearly the whole of these were below the average type of Sahib one meets in India and one or two were frequently drunk. On seeing them one could understand the Arab not thinking much of us.’
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