Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (19 page)

There was almost nowhere in India as forbidding as this. It offered none of the boyish stimulations of frontier war, upon which the Indian Army had been raised: yet intuitively perhaps, led on by the highway of the great rivers, and by the promise of great achievement, General Nixon deployed one of his two divisions northwards, towards Amara, Kut and Ctesiphon, and the distant prospect of Baghdad. In April, 1915, the Viceroy of India, Lord Hardinge, arrived himself to inspect the situation
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: at the end of May the imperial forces set off for their first objective to the north, Amara.

The British field commander was Major-General Charles Townshend, of the 6th (Poona) Division, of whom we caught a sentimental glimpse when, as a promising captain, he stood at Kitchener’s side in the ruins of Gordon’s Residency. Now fifty-four, he was a moody, contradictory, eccentric man. The heir presumptive to a marquisate, he had high social aspirations, besides being intensely ambitious. He relished publicity, loved to strike poses with his banjo and fluent French, but was a soldier of mercurial gifts—a soldier out of the common mould, who studied Napoleon assiduously, and perhaps thought himself a successor. Townshend was much liked by his British soldiers, but not by his Indians: and this was perhaps because he had no high regard for Africans and Asians in general, having beaten them in battle from Chitral to Omdurman, and proposing to do it again now.

The country south of Amara was flooded, and the main Turkish defence position was a series of islands in the flats, protected by mines. To attack it Townshend put one of his brigades upon the water. His infantry paddled out in 500 commandeered Tigris boats, called bellums. His machine-guns were on rafts, his field guns in tugs and barges, and there were launches to sweep the minefields, and three sloops of the Indian Marine to give supporting fire. It was all an exhilarating success. All among the flooded palms this
amphibious army sailed, the launches first, the sloops next, the troops in their armada of quaint craft punting themselves forwards with poles. When they came to a Turkish position, every gun was turned upon it until, the frightful mess of mud and explosives having subsided, the infantry waded ashore with fixed bayonets to capture it. The Turks did not long resist this unnerving process. By noon on the day of the attack they could be seen scurrying away in boats from every remaining island; by nightfall the whole Turkish force was in retreat, helter-skelter up the Tigris to Amara.

First thing in the morning Townshend was off, personally, in pursuit. His brigade was embarked upon paddle-steamers, but the general himself, with his staff and a few soldiers, boarded the sloop
Espiègle
(1,070 tons), and with her two sister ships,
Clio
and
Odin,
and four steam-launches, charged up the river at full speed after the retreating enemy. This was ‘Townshend’s Regatta’, ‘the Mespot Navy’, and it was one of the most exuberant little actions of the First World War. The three ships looked more like yachts than warships, with their bowsprits and elegant prows, and their crews treating the operation like a sporting event, wildly navigating a river which swung about in violent curves, had dangerous shallows everywhere, was mined in many places and had never been properly charted.

The current was fierce. Time and again they bumped the muddy banks, and they generally had no notion what lay around the next bend. Far ahead of them raced the Turks: two steamers towing barge-loads of troops, and trailed all about by a fleet of river dhows, tacking frenziedly back and forth against the current. In the evening, when the British spotted their distant sails and opened fire, the Turkish steamers hastily slipped their tows and left the soldiers to their fate: but Townshend, detailing the
Odin
to take them prisoner, swept past the confused flotilla of barges and riverboats, and pressed on excitedly for Amara.

Next day they caught the two steamers, one abandoned, one flying a white flag, and it was time for the sloops to turn back. The water was only a few feet deep now. Townshend, though, had the bit between his teeth. With a handful of soldiers he transferred to the paddle-launch
Comet
,
which had once been the official yacht of
the British representative in Baghdad, and with the three other launches, each towing a barge with a 4.7-inch gun on it, sailed impulsively on. By now his brigade was far behind, but as his boats raced up the river, White Ensigns fluttering, rifles bristling, white flags appeared in one astonished riverain village after another, and all along the banks Arabs bowed low in submission.

Early the next afternoon, June 3, 1915, they saw Amara, a big brown sprawl beside the river. It was swarming with Turkish troops, but when the first of the launches approached its quay hundreds of them walked down to the bank with their hands above their heads. Townshend’s brigade was 100 miles behind him. His total force on the spot comprised one brigadier-general, one naval captain, 100 soldiers and the crews of the launches. He sent ashore a corporal and twelve men, and to them the Turkish commander surrendered the town and all its garrison. Two thousand men gave themselves up, and all afternoon the Turkish officers queued on the quayside beside the
Comet
to hand over their swords. ‘Safely captured’, one of them is supposed to have cabled his wife that evening.

‘How much I enjoyed the whole thing’, the general wrote to his French wife. ‘I told you, darling, that I only wanted my chance! I have only known the 6th Division for a year, and they’d storm the gates of hell if I told them to….’

Yet before another six months was over they were all to follow his orders, diseased and defeated, into the appalling prison camps of Turkey, where half of them died. Elated though Townshend was by the success of his Regatta, after so long in Mesopotamia his army was tired, ill-equipped and under strength. It was debilitated by dysentery and paratyphoid, it had no fresh vegetables, no ice and a pitiful supply of medical equipment. Townshend himself was hit by so severe a virus that he was shipped back to India for sick leave. It was known that 30,000 Turkish reinforcements were on their way, including divisions of a higher quality, German-trained and probably German-commanded. By now General Nixon,
though, had his eyes firmly upon Baghdad. Though London was still lukewarm about further advances, Simla had doubts, and Townshend himself was cautious about taking inadequate forces too deep into enemy territory, still by the beginning of September, 1915, the 6th Division, Townshend back in command, was ready to move north again.

At first all went as brilliantly as before. Townshend captured the next river town, Kut-el-Amara, in a
tour
de
force
of surprise and deception, and seemed both to his own men and to the Turks one of those generals who cannot lose. General Nixon reported to Simla and to London that he felt strong enough for an immediate attack on Baghdad itself, and more by default than by initiative, for the Cabinet was obsessed with the greater war elsewhere, and desperate for victories anywhere, the advance was sanctioned. Among its purposes was, so Asquith told the House of Commons, ‘generally to maintain the authority of our Flag in the East’.

Townshend prepared the new advance with misgivings. He thought Kut was as far as they could go—his forces were inadequate, his lines of communications were insecure, and the Turks were entrenched astride the Tigris and the road to Baghdad. Sure enough at Ctesiphon, only eighteen miles from the capital, where the great mud-brick arch of the Sassanian emperors rose gaunt and lonely in the desert, he suffered his first rebuff. There stood a Turkish army of very different calibre, powerfully reinforced by veterans from other fronts, skilfully positioned behind wire entanglements in the presence of the Arch itself.
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Exhausted and thirsty in the terrible heat, encumbered by sick, wounded and thousands of prisoners, the 6th Division drove the Turks out, but could go no further themselves. The force was isolated and vulnerable, and Townshend decided to withdraw: sending his non-combatants down the river to Basra, he retreated himself with his army back into the walls of Kut-el-Amara. There within a week he
was besieged. The Turks completely surrounded the town, and on December 8, 1915 a bombardment began.

Some 13,000 British and Indian soldiers, with thirty-nine guns, formed the garrison of Kut. They still had faith in their general, ‘Our Charlie’, who had led them with such racy skill all the way north from Basra, and he himself exuded confidence at first. His communiqués to his men were frank, breezy and full of spirit. ‘Reinforcements are being sent at once from Basra to relieve us’, he said in the first of them. ‘The honour of our mother country and the Empire demands that we all work heart and soul in the defence of this place.’ It was a dreadful enough place to hold. Built within a loop of the Tigris, Kut was a very dirty, very dejected, very apathetic town. Surrounded on all sides by the flat and featureless desert, its only green the palm groves and gardens on the outskirts of town, it was a brown muddle of baked mud buildings, with a mesh of narrow streets meandering through it, the pimple-domed arcade of a covered bazaar, and the minaret of a mosque protruding above its roofs like a marker, to announce its presence in the waste. Its only industry was a liquorice factory, reached by a bridge of boats across the river: for the rest it lay there all but defeated, it seemed, by the heat, the emptiness, the poverty, the tedium of life. Some 6,000 Iraqis were immured in Kut too. The sanitation was frightful, and dysentery was endemic.

Kut was the
dingiest
of the famous sieges that brought drama and often despair to the story of the British Empire. Perhaps this is because for once there were no Englishwomen there, depriving the soldiers of the challenges to chivalry that ennobled or enlivened Lucknow and Ladysmith. They were alone in Kut, and lived in a sad man’s world of obscenities, comradeship, bad food and bawdy. Townshend himself, though he put a bold face on the situation, knew that he depended entirely upon relief from the south. ‘In military history, the history of entrenched camps is bound up with capitulations … history presents very few examples of the self-deliverance of an army once invested.’ But weeks and months passed, summer turned to autumn, autumn to the bitter winter, and no relief came. Down at Basra, where Nixon saw his ambitions in disarray, all was confusion. The port was a shambles of ill-organization,
the command was enmeshed in red tape and rivalry, the medical services were a disgrace.
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When General Sir Fenton Aylmer’s Tigris Relief Force moved off, with a fulsome preliminary message to Townshend on the radio—‘Heartiest congratulations on brilliant deeds of yourself and your command’—it moved so slowly, was led so badly, and faced such tough opposition, that it lost half its own men before it got within 100 miles of Kut.

The siege itself was a squalid affair. The Turks sniped and shelled the town incessantly, and gradually it crumbled. The rations shrank, the sick list grew, soon no more Arab looters were shot, because there was nothing left to loot. Sometimes there were moments of heroism, or at least excitement. During the first few weeks the Turks repeatedly attacked the town frontally, advancing in dense grey mass across the open countryside, to be decimated by machine-gun fire, or thrown back in hand-to-hand fighting. Once two brave young officers dashed out of town and blew up a bridge of boats. Sometimes aeroplanes flew over and dropped small bundles of supplies. The King-Emperor sent a message—‘I‚ together with your fellow countrymen, continue to follow with admiration the gallant fighting of the troops under your command against great odds, and every effort is being made to support your splendid resistance’: the knowledge that the garrison was serving the Crown, Townshend gallantly replied, was ‘the sheet-anchor of our defence’. Sometimes, as the months passed, they heard distantly from the south the gunfire of the relieving force, and saw its flashes in the sky, far away over the wastes and marshes.

Mostly, though, it was boredom, and dirt, and hunger, and sickness. Morale began to sag. A few Indians tried to desert. A trace of self-pity entered the general’s thoughts. ‘What worries, what trials, what anxieties!’ he wrote in his diary, and in one of his
communiqués to his troops he even blamed the higher command for their troubles—‘I speak straight from the heart‚’ he told them, ‘and you see I have thrown all officialdom overboard.’ By February, 1916, the garrison was on half rations, and five or six men were dying every day from sickness and debilitation. In March an aircraft dropped a letter from General Aylmer‚ not very encouragingly letting the garrison know that he had been removed from his command—‘Goodbye and God bless you all,’ concluded this comfortless communication, ‘and may you be more fortunate than myself.’ By mid-March people were talking of surrender. Townshend himself decided that April 17 was the longest he could hold out, and now General Khalil Bey, the Turkish commander, sent him a courteous but chill suggestion. ‘You have heroically fulfilled your military duty,’ it said. ‘From henceforth I see no likelihood that you will be relieved…. You are free to continue your resistance at Kut or to surrender to my forces, which are growing larger and larger. Receive, General, the assurance of our highest consideration.’

By mid-April life at Kut had reached its limit, so Townshend reported to Basra, but there was one last tantalizing excitement. A Royal Navy gunboat, the commandeered Lynch paddle-steamer
Julnar,
tried to break through to the town with 250 tons of supplies. She was navigated by a former pilot of the Euphrates and Tigris Navigation Company, and she set off on her desperate voyage in bright moonlight on the night of April 24. There was no hope of surprise, and as she sailed upstream she was greeted by continuous blasts of fire from both banks. On she went nevertheless, probing her way through the shallows, until only a few miles from Kut she struck a steel hawser stretched diagonally across the stream, and floundering there under a storm of machine-gun fire, was swept across the river and run aground. The Kut garrison had heard all the noise with gathering hope, but when dawn came, and they looked eagerly downstream, they could see the silent shape of the gunboat stranded on the bank, a last broken pledge of their hopes.
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