Enemy on the Euphrates (48 page)

Brigadier General Young’s punishment column consisted of the 1st Battalion of the Rifle Brigade, the 1st Battalion of the 94th (Russell’s) Infantry, around one hundred troopers of the 1st King’s Dragoon Guards and a similar number of the 7th Dragoon Guards, one section of
the 16th Machine Gun Squadron, one section of Royal Horse Artillery and one section of the 50th Pack artillery; there was also a small army medical unit attached to the column. By the evening of 11 August the column had reached Ba’quba after some problems of rail transport had been overcome and was preparing to set out on its mission to ‘punish’ the rebel villages some eighteen miles distant from Ba’quba railway station. However, later that night, Haldane, still fretting about security in the capital, decided that he needed the Rifle Brigade back in Baghdad. He therefore ordered Brigadier Young to keep the riflemen at Ba’quba and entrain them for Baghdad at 6.00 p.m. on the 12th, apparently the first available opportunity. This meant that as Young’s column set off to attack the enemy villages in the early hours of 12 August the only infantry in his column were the five hundred or so Indian troops of the 94th.

It was still dark when the march began and it was not long before the column’s Arab guide began to propose repeated changes of direction, suggesting to Brigadier Young that either the man had no real knowledge of the area or he was untrustworthy and could be leading them into an ambush. Sure enough, just an hour before dawn, with the column now strung out over a considerable distance and the head of the column about four miles from its destination, the Indian infantry, who were marching in the rear, were suddenly attacked by a party of mounted Arabs, throwing the sepoys into complete confusion. What followed was almost a repeat of the Manchester Column disaster, as the panic spread to the drivers of the pack artillery and their mules stampeded through the horse artillery and ambulance unit, resulting in many other animals following suit with their vehicles.

Fortunately, the Arab force attacking the rear of the column was only a small one and although the Indian infantry remained in a state of panic for some time, the return of the British cavalry at 5.00 a.m., having burned one of the villages, re-established some degree of order. But as further parties of Arabs now began to harass them, Brigadier Young decided to retreat to Ba’quba, which was reached at around noon.

Soon afterwards the local PO reported that, according to the information reaching him, a heavy attack on Ba’quba itself was imminent
and he urged Young to defend the town and protect the resident British and Indian civilians. But when Young passed the request to Haldane he was ordered to immediately evacuate the town and return to Baghdad. By 7 p.m. that evening all the troops and civilians at Ba’quba had abandoned the town which was immediately occupied by tribesmen of the ‘Azza who set up their own local government.
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Shortly after this small Arab success, an incident occurred which underlines a weakness which was to dog the insurgent movement throughout the remaining months of the uprising. In spite of the Grand Mujtahid’s urging that the Arabs should all support the independence movement, keep united and avoid the kind of petty intertribal feuds which had characterised tribal society before the war, there were some who couldn’t resist taking advantage of the growing chaos to settle old scores rather than fight the British. A few days after the ‘Azza had entered Ba’quba, Sheikh Habib learned that raiding parties from the ‘Ubayd tribe, traditional enemies of the ‘Azza, were attacking their grazing lands around Dali Abbas, making off with their animals and killing any man who got in their way.
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So Sheikh Habib was forced to lead his men back to Dali Abbas and, for the time being, withdraw from the fight against the British.

However, this did not provide much consolation for the British. Their abandonment of Ba’quba left only a small party of infantry with ten days’ rations to guard the bridge over the Diyala. In effect this meant that the whole of the area east of the Diyala and as far north as the Persian border now fell under the control of the rebels. It also left the town of Shahraban, twenty-seven miles north-east of Ba’quba, with its small British-led garrison of levies, completely isolated from government-controlled territory and in so doing it would sign the death warrant of the town’s five resident Englishmen.

With the arrival of the first reinforcements from India on 10 August, Wilson felt the capital was a little more secure and he was now emboldened to crush the dissent which was swelling with every report (some accurate, some not so) of British defeats on the Euphrates. The following day he finally gave orders for the arrest of four of the leading members of
Haras al-Istiqlal – Yusuf Suwaydi, Ja‘far Abu al-Timman, ‘Ali al-Bazirgan and Sheikh Ahmad Daud. However, the attempt to seize the Baghdad nationalist leaders was bungled. Perhaps because news of the impending arrests leaked out, large crowds gathered in front of the leaders’ houses and, in the violent confrontation which followed, three policemen were wounded and six Baghdadis were killed and twelve wounded.
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In the commotion three of the Istiqlal leaders – Suwaydi, Abu al-Timman and Bazirgan – managed to escape with only Sheikh Daud being captured. Later, the fugitive leaders managed to get out of Baghdad and make their way to the liberated cities of Najaf and Karbela’. Meanwhile Muhammad al-Sadr in Kadhimayn also fled the city and went north to join the insurgents operating around Ba’quba.
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Steps were now taken to put an end to the seditious mauluds. On 12 August a proclamation was issued to the people of Baghdad by Brigadier General Sanders, GOC Baghdad, accusing the organisers of the mauluds of ‘abusing’ their freedom of worship, forbidding any further such mauluds and establishing a military court to try all ‘offences against public order’.

Draconian punishments duly followed. Some of those who had played an important part in the mauluds were rounded up and sent to imprisonment on Henjam. Six Baghdadis who had allegedly fired upon the police during the bungled attempt to arrest the leaders of Istiqlal were tried by the military court and hanged. Another four men who were arrested for ‘wounding a sentry in Baghdad and taking his rifle’ were also hanged.
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The following month, executions continued. Paid informants denounced those suspected of ‘sedition’. For example, ‘Abd al-Majid Kana, a member of Istiqlal, was accused of leading a gang whose intention was to assassinate pro-British notables and was hanged on 23 September.
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Nevertheless, Wilson now sent an exceptionally dismal and pessimistic telegram to the India Office, copying it to the British authorities at Simla, Tehran, Istanbul, Cairo and Jerusalem. It was as though he was seriously contemplating a major British defeat and wanted to make it clear to as many of his colleagues as possible just how overwhelmingly hostile was the general situation he was facing and, by implication, how
unfair it would be to lay any future criticism at
his
doorstep.

There were now, he informed the India Office, ‘further unfavourable developments’. The insurgency had spread north. Public buildings in the town of Ba’quba had been sacked by ‘riff-raff of the town’ assisted by local tribesmen; Shahraban and Qilil Esbat had also been sacked and a PO had been either killed or captured; at Khanaqin near the Persian border, government offices had been burned and a PO and his wife forced to flee; and British detachments at Ramadi and Falluja were now cut off from Baghdad by the rebels. Furthermore, Wilson was now definitely of the opinion that there would have to be a complete withdrawal from Mosul, to which he added that any remaining British women and children in the country should be speedily evacuated.
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Many of the problems Wilson attributed to ‘the perception of our military weakness’ since – as he put it in an earlier telegram – ‘to kick a man when he is down is the most popular pastime in the East sanctioned by centuries of precept and practice’.
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Two days later, Wilson dispatched an additional and unusually brief telegram: it ended with the words ‘All civil officers at Shahraban were murdered.’ In fact only two of those killed belonged to the Civil Administration but the circumstances in which five British officers and NCOs were killed would further exacerbate the increasingly antagonistic relations between Wilson and Haldane.

The small British colony in Shahraban consisted of the APO and officer in command, Captain W.T. Wrigley, late of the 5th Wiltshires, the commander of the levies, Captain J. T. Bradfield of the 4th Somerset Light Infantry, and two British levy instructors, Sergeant Major Newton and Sergeant Instructor Nesbitt. Bradfield, Newton and Nesbitt had under their charge fifty Arab and Kurdish levies. Also resident in the town was Captain E. L. Buchanan of the Irrigation Department, formerly an officer in the RAF. What neither Wilson nor Haldane knew was that Captain Buchanan was accompanied by his wife, who had ignored the general instructions that all women and children should withdraw to Baghdad pending their removal to either Persia or India.

The small British contingent first began to note a change in the political atmosphere at Shahraban on 8 August, when Mrs Buchanan tried to send her sick Armenian maid to Baghdad by train but found that the line had been cut. At the same time the British officers began to receive various reports of small, hostile incidents, such as the immobilisation of Captain Wrigley’s Ford motor car by its former Arab driver and an attack on one of the levies, who had his rifle and ammunition taken from him.
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By the evening of the 11th the situation had deteriorated to such an extent that Captain Wrigley advised Mr and Mrs Buchanan to leave their house and sleep in the qishla, the old Turkish fort. The night passed uneventfully and the Buchanans returned to their home at 4.30 a.m. the following day, but it soon became clear that all was not well in the town: the streets around their house were unusually quiet and the nearby coffee shop was deserted all day, even at six in the evening when it was usually full of customers. That night they returned to sleep at the qishla. Then, at 10.30 in the morning of 13 August, an Indian civilian who had been supervising the irrigation works arrived at the Buchanans’ house, telling them that the staff there, including his own brother, had been attacked by tribesmen during the night. Half an hour later Wrigley arrived at the Buchanans’ house and instructed them to get their servants to collect as much in the way of supplies as possible and take them to his own billet. At 12.30 p.m. Wrigley, who had meanwhile been organising the defences of the qishla, returned to the billet with Captain Bradfield, who straightaway wrote out a message to the PO at Daltawa, some twenty-five miles away on the other side of the Diyala, asking for assistance. The message was entrusted to an Arab in British service but was never delivered.

Meanwhile, the small British contingent at Shahraban still had no idea that they had been abandoned by the GHQ in Baghdad and left to fend for themselves since the last contingents of Brigadier Young’s column had withdrawn across the Diyala the previous night.

At around 1.00 p.m. parties of mounted Arabs began arriving in the town and the British hurried into the qishla. In addition to the five
British officers and NCOs and Mrs Buchanan the tiny garrison now included a Mr Baines, manager of the government-run grass farm outside the town (who was previously unknown to Mrs Buchanan), two of Mrs Buchanan’s servants, a small number of Bengali civilians employed by the Civil Administration, and the fifty Arab and Kurdish levies. The two gates of the qishla were now shut and bolted although, while the front gate was of iron bars, the rear gate was only of wood with a single wooden bolt. Against it, Captain Wrigley’s disabled car had been pushed closeup for extra security.

Almost immediately around 800 rebels surrounded the barracks and began an intense fusillade against the defenders. The same could not be said for the levies, who fired away wildly, without taking aim and heedless of their limited supplies of ammunition. Each levy was equipped with only 200 rounds and while there was a reserve supply of 4,000 rounds, this still only worked out at 280 per levy. Moreover, it wasn’t long before they began to desert in ones and twos and it became clear to the British – according to the record of Mrs Buchanan – that ‘the Levies … were quite out of hand and would not obey their orders.’
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Then, at around 3.00 p.m., a British aircraft was sighted. The delighted British officers laid out bed sheets on the flat roof of the qishla as distress signals and as the aircraft flew over them at around 500 feet all the men on the roof waved and gesticulated, trying to indicate their plight. The aircraft then flew away and, in the opinion of Mrs Buchanan, ‘whoever were in the plane must have seen in what plight we were, how few were the garrison and how many the tribesmen.’ For a time their hopes were raised as they imagined the aircraft returning ‘bringing Lewis guns and ammunition’. But the aircraft did not reappear.

After an interval during which the attack subsided, at about 3.45 p.m. the firing was renewed heavily from all quarters. Wrigley and Bradfield now proposed a plan whereby, if help had not arrived by 3.00 a.m. the following day, they would fight their way out on horseback with the remaining levies and attempt to reach Daltawa. In the meantime they decided to make an attempt to parley with the rebels. Wrigley believed he recognised a local notable among the attackers and, calling out to him
by name, he and Captain Bradfield indicated that they wished to discuss terms. For a brief space there was a pause in the fighting as the two sides prepared to meet. Unfortunately some of the remaining levies of Kurdish origin, who failed to understand the situation, suddenly opened fire upon the insurgents who, suspecting treachery, renewed the attack.
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By 6.15 p.m. the rebels had begun to scale the walls and some of them broke through the weakened rear wooden gate. It was all over in the next few minutes. Sergeant Nisbett was shot at the gate. Sergeant Major Newton died on the roof. Bradfield and Wrigley lost their rifles in hand-to-hand fighting and retreated into the Buchanans’ room, where her husband had armed them both with revolvers, a heavy colt for himself, but with only five rounds of ammunition, and a small Browning for his wife.