Enemy on the Euphrates (52 page)

There is a preliminary Arab success, then British reinforcements go out as a punitive force. They fight their way (our losses are slight, the Arab losses heavy) to their objective which is meanwhile bombarded by artillery, aeroplanes or gunboats. Finally, perhaps, a village is burnt and the district pacified.

And then Lawrence switched into the sharpest Swiftian irony:

It is odd that we do not use poison gas on these occasions. Bombing the houses is a patchy way of getting the women and children …
¹²

Thereafter, the letter itemised the huge resources Britain was wasting in Iraq and urged a different policy which would ‘save us a million pounds a week’. However, it is at this point that the shallowness of Lawrence’s understanding of what the Iraqi insurgents were actually fighting for emerges. Because, for Lawrence, all that was required was to get rid of Wilson and his team and put in the right sort of man who really understood the Arabs and to whom they would readily acquiesce in accepting some kind of neutered semi-independence. Lawrence knew ‘ten British officials with tried and honourable reputations’ in the Sudan, Sinai, etc. who could ‘set up an Arab Government’ in Baghdad next month. Whether or not Lawrence thought of himself as one of the ten is beside the point – the fact is that, by this time the insurgents (as opposed to the subsidised collaborators in Baghdad and elsewhere) had absolutely no intention of allowing anyone from Britain to set up any sort of government in Iraq: indeed, as far as they were concerned, they already had an Arab government – at Karbela’ and Najaf.

Nevertheless, the letter was an unpleasant blow for Lloyd George and his cabinet. Lawrence was at the height of his popularity in the country and regarded as
the
British expert on the Middle East. It was therefore all the more galling when Lawrence returned to the fray, a fortnight later, but this time in the
Sunday Times
, in which his letter was accompanied by a strongly supportive editorial while the paper’s readers were reminded that Lawrence’s ‘organisation and direction of the Hejaz against the Turks was one of the outstanding romances of the war’.

The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiqués are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our imperial record and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are today not far from disaster.

There followed a blistering attack on the ‘Civil Authorities’ in Iraq, and, without specifically naming him, upon Arnold Wilson. Lawrence went on to claim, ‘We have killed ten thousand Arabs in this rising this summer,’ something which the bloodstained Turkish sultan, Abdul Hamid, ‘would applaud … The Government in Baghdad have been hanging Arabs in that town for political offences which they call rebellion,’ Lawrence declared, and, referring to the British prisoners taken by the insurgents during the attack on the Manchester Column, he asked, ‘Are these illegal executions to provoke the Arabs to reprisals on the three hundred British prisoners they hold? And, if so, is it that their punishment may be more severe, or is it to persuade our other troops to fight to the last?’
¹³

Not surprisingly Lawrence’s dramatic intervention raised even more doubts in the minds of an already perplexed British public as to what precisely was the government’s objective in spending millions of pounds in Iraq and at what point Britain’s mysterious obligations in that distant territory would end.

The summer of 1920 was particularly cold, wet and miserable in the UK, even by British standards, and as the depressing weather continued through July and into August, Churchill felt more and more worn down by the equally depressing political situation in Britain, the colonies and the world at large, especially in Ireland and in Russia, where the Bolsheviks were now victorious. Moreover, it was not only in Britain that opposition to Britain’s involvement in Iraq was becoming deeply unpopular. In India, an article by Gandhi appeared in the Bombay-published journal
Young India
, appealing directly to Muslim sentiment in an attempt to unite Muslims and
Hindus behind his campaign for independence:

England finds Mesopotamia a tough job. The oil of Mosul may feed the fire she has so wantonly lighted and burn her fingers badly. The newspapers say the Arabs do not like the presence of the Indian soldier in their midst. I do not wonder. They are a fierce and brave people and do not understand why Indian soldiers should find themselves in Mesopotamia. Whatever the fate of non-cooperation, I wish that not a single Indian will offer his services for Mesopotamia whether for the civil or the military department.
¹⁴

And in a long article published in the
Bombay Chronicle
on 27 July, the paper denounced the events in Iraq as, ‘A naked act of territorial grab, an “oil deal” which not only violates the Covenant of the League of Nations but offends against the high purposes of the Great War – the vindication of the principle of nationality and self-determination.’
¹⁵

On 13 August, and again on the 19th, Churchill sought to alleviate his depressed state of mind by physical exercise – playing polo at Rugby. But by the end of the month, with news from Iraq increasingly grim, his thoughts turned to the deployment of more ruthless measures against the rebels. On 29 August he wrote to Air Marshal Trenchard urging a more rapid development of poison gas bombs, ‘especially mustard gas’, which could be dropped on the ‘recalcitrant natives’.
¹⁶
Two days later, in a mood of deepening despair, Churchill drafted a long letter to Lloyd George, a letter with an uncharacteristically self-pitying tone:

There is something very sinister to my mind in this Mesopotamian entanglement, coming as it does when Ireland is so great a menace. It seems to me so gratuitous that after all the struggles of the war, just when we want to get together our slender military resources and reestablish our finances and have a little in hand in case of danger here or there, we should be compelled to go on pouring armies and treasure into these thankless deserts.
¹⁷

The war minister went on to complain that ‘we have not got a single friend in the Press on the subject’, and that ‘week after week and month
after month for a long time to come we shall have a continuance of this miserable, wasteful, sporadic warfare.’ In all likelihood it would involve numerous minor disasters and the possibility of a major one. The cost of fighting this war would amount to at least £50 million in the current year, which would wipe out any possible commercial advantages Britain might have from holding on to the territory. As for Sir Percy Cox, whom the cabinet had decided to send back to Iraq to replace Arnold Wilson, Churchill confessed that he ‘did not feel any complete confidence in him’, adding that ‘his personality did not impress me.’

Nevertheless, Churchill assured the prime minister that he was ‘carrying out the Cabinet directions to the best of my ability’ and that ‘every possible soldier that we can find is being set in motion for reinforcement to the utmost limits of our available transport.’ These reinforcements (and by implication the crushing of the revolt) were ‘equally necessary whether we decide to stay or to quit. There is nothing else to do but this and it will take some time.’

In the event, the letter was never sent. Perhaps Churchill recognised its wording was just too revealing of his current state of mind (and, given the widespread antipathy in the country towards him over his ‘anti-Bolshevik warmongering’, he could no longer be entirely confident of the prime minister’s support). Meanwhile, on 26 August, he had written to Haldane assuring him of his absolute determination to help him crush the insurrection:

I take this opportunity of sending you my earnest good wishes for the success of the difficult task you are discharging. The Cabinet have decided that the rebels must be quelled effectively and I shall endeavour to meet all your requirements … Thus, by the middle or end of October you should be possessed of effective striking forces and a vigorous use of these to put down and punish disaffection combined with the policy of setting up an Arab state should bring about a better situation.
¹⁸

For now, though, there was little more he could do; everything depended on Haldane and the speed with which those reinforcements would
arrive. So on 2 September, no doubt pressured by his wife Clementine, Churchill accepted an invitation from his old friend the Duke of Westminster to stay at the Duke’s estate at Mimizan, in south-west France. There, he hoped, a fortnight’s relaxation under the southern sun might sooth his spirits and invigorate his tired, corpulent body.

The sun, whose delightful rays gently bathed the British war minister as he stretched out in a deckchair in one of the Duke of Westminster’s secluded, box-fringed gardens, presented a fearsomely different aspect 2,400 miles to the south-east and 15 degrees latitude below the Duke’s Gascon landscaping. As the 574 officers and men of the 1st Battalion, King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry clambered down onto the dock at Basra on 8 September 1920, after a trying journey up the Gulf from India, the heat fell upon them like some dreadful beast of prey. While waiting for re-embarkation at Bombay they had become acclimatised to an Asian summer to a limited extent; but the 120°f, accompanied by a fiery desert wind which met them in Basra and lasted for the full nine days they were stationed at the neighbouring military camp, was too much for many of the young men from the industrial and mining towns of Wakefield, Doncaster and Pontefract and heatstroke casualties mounted rapidly.
¹

The battalion had been rushed out to Iraq from India before it had been properly equipped, so the unit was compelled to suffer the heat and flies of Makina Camp while Major A. Barker MC, the quartermaster, did his best to round up the missing stores and equipment.
²
Eventually, on 17 September, the battalion was loaded onto a train and transported to Nasiriyya on the Euphrates, where they were brigaded in the 74th Brigade with three Indian infantry battalions – the 2nd Battalion 7th Rajputs, the 1st Battalion 15th Sikhs and the 3rd Battalion 123rd (Outram’s) Rifles – reinforcements which had been rushed to Iraq during the preceding month.

These were but a small proportion of the reinforcements which Churchill had decided to use against the rebels. On 17 August a Pioneer battalion (1/12th Pioneers) had disembarked at Basra together with the 2nd Battalion 96th Infantry, in total 1,518 officers and men, destined to be deployed on the Tigris defending the Kut-to-Baghdad lines of communication. The next day the 3rd Battalion 23rd Sikh Infantry arrived and were ordered to Nasiriyya, followed, two days later, by the 2nd Battalion 117th Mahrattas. Five days later the 2nd Battalion 116th Mahrattas arrived and were dispatched by train to Baghdad and the following day the 2nd Battalion 89th Punjabis disembarked and were also sent north to defend the capital and its communications with Kut. On the last day of August, these were followed by the 3rd Battalion 70th Burmans who were retained in reserve at Basra.
³

Ten days after the arrival of the King’s Own, three more Indian infantry battalions arrived at Basra – the 2nd Battalion 153rd Rifles, the 63rd Palamacottahs and the 3rd Battalion 124th Baluchis; the Baluchis were retained at Basra and the other two battalions sent on to Nasiriyya. They were followed, between 23 and 28 September, by the arrival of four battalions of Gurkhas, totalling 2,547 officers and men; and finally, another Indian unit, the Kapurthala Infantry.

Although two more British units, the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry and the 2nd Battalion East Yorkshire Regiment, also arrived in Iraq at the end of September, of the 15,434 reinforcements which Haldane received between 6 August and 29 September, only 16.8 per cent were British. Haldane’s ‘British’ Army was no less overwhelmingly ‘Indian’ than when he had arrived. Nevertheless, Haldane now considered he had sufficient strength to move decisively against the Arabs.

With no knowledge of these massive British reinforcements, the inhabitants of the liberated areas remained jubilant. Over the previous three months, the insurgents had rejoiced over a series of magnificent victories over the infidel occupation forces – how their heroic tribal armies had inflicted one defeat after another upon the British and their wretched Indian slave-soldiers, driving them from virtually every town and village on the Middle and Lower Euphrates; of the remainder,
British garrisons at Samawa and Kufa were besieged and Hilla was under sporadic attack. On the Diyala, north-east of Baghdad, the Arabs had isolated the British from their troops in Persia; to the west of Baghdad, the insurgent Zauba‘ tribes held sway and had cut off the British outposts at Falluja and Ramadi from the capital; meanwhile, on the Tigris north of Baghdad, Muhammad al-Sadr, having escaped the attempt to capture him, was personally rallying the tribes in an attempt to seize the old walled city of Samarra. Only the death of the revered Grand Mujtahid Mirza Muhammad Taqi Shirazi in August had somewhat dimmed the insurgents’ general mood of exultation.

But among the leadership of the uprising the mood may have been more subdued. In particular, the new Grand Mujtahid, Sheikh al-Shari‘a Isbahani, must have been uneasy with the progress of the rebellion. Emissaries from the holy cities had repeatedly been sent out to the tribes on the Central and Lower Tigris – to the Bani Rabia‘, the Bani Lam and the Al Bu Muhammad – but to no avail. Their sheikhs, now well paid with British subsidies and supported by gangs of heavily armed retainers, dominated their lesser sheikhs and tribesmen and had snuffed out any incipient movements of support for the insurrection. And as yet, there had been no real show of support from the great Muntafiq confederation whose sway extended over the Lower Euphrates and up the Gharraf and Hai rivers.