Chapter V General Aylmer’s Attempt — More Floods — Pressure of the Siege — Preparations for Relief — Failure — Life in a Siege Mess
March 8th.—In the night a terrific explosion from the direction of the Shatt awoke Kut. Someone says it was caused by a floating mine going aground. It had been intended for the bridge some distance up the Shat-el-hai. Not long after dawn we awoke to the sound of intense gun-fire so close to us, that for a time it seemed like our own guns in Kut. At first we surmised this to be Turkish artillery turned on positions won by the Relief Column, but, on climbing on to the roof, we saw the flashes came from what the experts knew as Dujaila Redoubt. Our own guns were preparing on the Turkish position! This in itself seemed difficult to believe, although, no doubt, some good reason existed for it. As the light got better, before eight o’clock, we saw quite clearly hordes of Turks rushing up towards the Shat-el-hai support trenches, and some troops were being ferried over near Megasis from the other bank. General Aylmer’s night march had evidently been a complete success, and the Turks were taken by surprise. Why, then, were we waiting to prepare? The fire grew heavier, the bursts thicker, and all the while the Turks were rushing up troops. Then the fire ceased. We held our breath and waited for news, knowing that the bayonet was busy, and the men at handgrips. No news has come. We have waited hour by hour.
Is anything amiss? Why haven’t they got through? Was our artillery preparation intended to be so deadly as to pulverize the Turks’ whole series of trenches? Could so many heavy guns be got up? If not, why did we wait? We only know that up to 9 a.m. the Turks’ trenches were rows of moving heads, and many went over the open. The fact seems to be that our arrival at the redoubt was absolutely a surprise, and yet, through not pushing on, the benefit of surprise has been lost.
March 9th, 3 p.m.—The relieving force did not get through. We have heard this unofficially. We all have the feeling it is “the big effort,” and not a side show. We are disappointed, but having had little else than disappointments we are accustomed to them.
March 10th.—There is another famous communiqué from General Townshend, our G.O.C. It is interesting to see how “Alphonse” improves every occasion. Here it is:
Communiqué to troops.
“As on a former occasion I take the troops of all ranks into my confidence again, and repeat the two following telegrams from General Aylmer from which they will see that the relieving force has again failed to relieve us.
“First telegram: March 8th.—‘To-day’s operations terminated in a gallant but unsuccessful attempt to storm Dujaila Redoubt. Our troops pushed home the attack and carried out the operations with great gallantry, but the enemy was able to mass great reinforcements which arrived from the left bank at Megasis and Shamran, and we were unable to break through. Unless the enemy retires from his present position on the right bank, which does not seem probable, we shall be unable to maintain ourselves in the present position owing to lack of water, and unless the enemy evacuates the Essin position to-night, we shall be obliged to withdraw to our previous position at Wadi.’
“Second telegram: March 8th.—‘We have been unable to break through to relieve you to-day and may have to withdraw to Wadi to-morrow, but hope to make another attack before long and relieve you at an early date. Please wire movements of enemy, who in any case suffered most severely, as their repeated counter-attacks have been repulsed with heavy loss.’
(End of Telegrams.)
“I know you will all be deeply disappointed to hear this news. We have now stood a three months’ siege in a manner which has called upon you the praise of our beloved King and our fellow countrymen in England, Scotland, Ireland, and India, and all this after your brilliant battles of Kut-el-Amara and Ctesiphon and your retirement to Kut, all of which feats of arms are now famous. Since December 5th you have spent three months of cruel uncertainty, and to all men and all people uncertainty is intolerable; as I say, on the top of it all this comes—the second failure to relieve us. And I ask you also to give a little sympathy to me who have commanded you in these battles referred to and who, having come to you a stranger now love my command with a depth of feeling I have never known in my life before. When I mention myself I would couple the names of the generals under me whose names are distinguished in the army as leaders of men.
“I am speaking to you as I did before, straight from the heart, and as I may ask your sympathy for my feelings having promised you relief on certain dates on the promise of those ordered to relieve us. Not their fault, no doubt—do not think I blame them; they are giving their lives freely and deserve our gratitude and admiration. But I want you to help me again as before. I have asked General Aylmer to bring such numbers as will break down all resistance and leave no doubt of the issue. Large reinforcements are reaching him, including an English division of 17,000 men, the leading brigade of which must have reached Wadi by now—that is to say, General Aylmer’s headquarters. In order, then, to hold out, I am killing a large number of horses so as to reduce the quantities of grain eaten every day, and I have had to further reduce your ration. It is necessary to do this in order to keep our flag flying. I am determined to hold out, and I know you are with me in this heart and soul.
“(Signed) Charles Townshend,
“Major-General,
“Commanding the Garrison in Kut.
“Kut-el-Amara,
“10th March, 1916.”
The rank and file of the garrison, from what one overhears, are all for sympathy with their G.O.C. They are quite sure that “Alphonse would have got through” and have altered the name of the relieving general to Faylmer. Why wasn’t the action delayed until the new division could have taken part? As a matter of fact, one should suspend judgment until all the facts are in, and in the last analysis the blame must rest on Governments rather than on generals. When first besieged we expected to be relieved within a month, and so far as the Government knew we could hold out for about two months. Fortunately we secured various supplies of corn from Woolpress, and from dismantled engines we erected milling facilities which enabled us to turn corn and barley into bread.
But reinforcements have been sent into the country at a slow trickle and the enemy has found no difficulty at all in out-reinforcing us. When one considers the state of Turkey this is most incredible. One would think that the lesson of Ctesiphon was sufficient to chasten the authorities out of the belief that the Mesopotamian campaign could be dallied with. By sheer brilliancy of arms a whole country had been conquered by a single unsupported division. This achievement was not enough, however, and the cheap methods in vogue further required this one division to risk the whole fruits of a campaign in a single doubtful throw, and this against the advice of its generals. Through the same cheap methods of having insufficient forces to follow up a brilliant victory, our army was badly let down and several thousand lives flung away. Then only the same brilliant generalship of General Townshend disengaged the division from a force several times its size, and completed a masterly retirement for ninety miles, with the whole Turkish forces on top of it. Extraordinary success of the rearguard action at Um-al-Tabul enabled the division to reach Kut, where it is intended to hold up the Turkish advance and keep back the enemy tide from reswamping Mesopotamia. The post was surrounded and bombarded at once, but the public evidently does not know this owing to very necessary censorship. The garrison, then, can hold out for a certain time. It can forestall disaster for that time only.
One might imagine that the Indian Government would by this have become awake to this aspect of the crisis, have taken prompt action and sent out three or four divisions at once. Even admitting the difficulties of river transport, six weeks from the date of Ctesiphon, i.e. January 9th, would have allowed ample time for arrival at Basra. But the first reinforcements did not arrive in the country until considerably later, and then only depleted divisions. British divisions, which are really required, were only sent for recently and have hardly started. And now difficulties of transport will delay their transit up river. One cannot help recording these facts in black and white. Every day lost now is piling up tremendous difficulty for the future and swelling the list of lives downstream that, please God, will one day retrieve a disaster that might easily have been avoided. The world knows nothing of the siege of Kut, and the authorities are not being goaded by public opinion. In other words, the Indian Government has played with a serious situation. The price will be disaster. I am not setting this down as my own opinion merely. It is the point of view of every one in Kut. As a soldier one must refuse to believe that the position has been mishandled or that Kut will fall. But if I were a politician, which I am not, then would I add a lot of things here which I will not.
As I write it rains, and with every drop of rain the time within which the garrison, and, more important still, the strategic position at Kut, can be relieved, shortens. Soon come the annual floods, and when the whole country is under water reinforcements will be of no avail. And the time is short. It is the eleventh hour, and unless considerable forces are already on the way it is even now too late. But that is an affair between the authorities and the floods. Our problem is one of food.
The position here is much as it was in the Dardanelles. Excepting for floods and natural conditions we can outgun and outfight the Turk every time here. Moreover, we are tremendously relieving Aylmer of pressure, as the Turkish river communications must stop at Shamrun above us, and then his transport has to go overland. This is the marvellous thing about our enemy. He is daily carrying on a colossal bandobast of transport away from the water.
5 p.m.—Reuter reports the Verdun battle is going satisfactorily. One imagines that the German Kultur Geist must be bilious by this time, according to the numbers they are offering at his shrine. I am wondering how Nietzsche’s Zarathusa would speak now if he saw the Verdun shambles. And what his blonde-haired, pink-limbed Über Mensch would say about it too. Somehow I can see old Rudolf Eucken at Jena with outspread hands invoking “Schicksal” (destiny) as once he used to “Die Unendigkeit, Die Ewigkeit.” Deep down in the German nature is a connative impulse towards the dramatic, and this is fed by a presentiment coloured with all the hues of harmony sweetest to them. It is not unknown for students at Jena and Heidelberg to extract such exquisite juice out of the word “Unendigkeit” (Immortality) or “Ewigkeit” (Eternity) as to become intoxicated therewith and commit suicide shortly after in the pine forest, or near a ruined “Schloss” (castle) what time the sun sets.
He loves the experience of the actor, likes to feel his gamut of emotions considerably twanged. This dramatic tendency showed itself on the occasion of that delicious utterance of the Kaiser on the eve of the Great War: “Now let my ministers put their hands through mine in token of fidelity, and let the nation follow me through Need and Death.” Now, the Roman did this sort of thing rather well, but the German makes an ass of himself. One feels the Kaiser said it to see how it felt to say it.
The Germans tell us they are doing well, but I believe there is a sight becoming more familiar to their eyes, a phenomenon it is their daily delight and wish to behold, and that is the altar of this “Schicksal”—Fate. The Germans think in battalions. They have yet once again to go mad as a nation, as they did on the outbreak of war—absolutely “verrückt,”—and to bolt with competitive haste towards the national funeral pyre. They are not fanatics. They are temperamentalists—and from the spleen of a German musician it is said that in a successful operation you can cut a piece of temperament nine inches long and twenty-five ounces in weight. Apropos of this general digression one may consider their “New Year’s Picture” of “Tod” (Death), of which a copy reached us in the autumn of 1914 in France, and cheered us up considerably. “Tod” (please pronounce “toad”), an awfully unpleasant looking “Death,” a snobbish skeleton with a bad seat, rode a heavy horse through a smitten land, a tremendous scythe over his shoulder and his metacarpal bones holding his reins incorrectly. The scythe flung a gigantic shadow, and as for Tod, his shadow reached almost to the horizon over black, burned villages, sacked cities, and many corpses. The horse had reached a double signpost which showed the way to St. Petersburg and the way to Paris. But, more interesting still, the skeleton had the lantern jaws of a Prussian. Fancy turning such a fellow loose! Truly the “God of Want and Rapine and Death!” and a most excellent subject for the Germans’ accepted New Year’s Picture.
I remember my limber gunners having the same picture, months afterwards, at Aldershot. And Chopin composing the “Marche Funèbre” with a skeleton between his legs while he played wasn’t in it with them. They had stuck the picture on the muzzle of the gun while they cleaned it. I hope every one of them goes untouched through the whole war.
Poor Germany! I have had some happy days there, but when I compare the Kaiser’s words to his nation on the eve of war with those of our own dear King, how I thank God I am an Englishman. And who would not mind being a Pharisee at the price of being an Englishman? I ask you.
It may be suggested that when Germany falls, the same cement that holds that extraordinary nation together will assist it in falling together. In the meantime it will be an interesting spectacle for history to observe—the German nation sprinting on hot foot towards the registered funeral pyre, with all the dramatics of the bolting horse that gathers speed and insanity from its own flight.
Talking of horses, I hear that to-day is the slaughtering day for numbers of them. This is good-bye to any possibility of debouch, for there will be insufficient horses to move the guns. It will eke out our corn and barley that can be made into bread; but what is wanted is sugar or jam for the body, and tea for the spirit.
“You are,” says Townshend, “making a page of history.”
“I would rather,” thinks Tommy, “make some stew.”
March 11th.—We have all been made acquainted with Sir Percy Lake’s condolences on our misfortune, but also promising us relief; but the floods are gradually increasing, and we fear it will be a case of Lake v. Lake, and there will be no appeal.
Sir Percy Lake is the Army Commander in place of Sir John Nixon, and General Aylmer is Army Corps Commander. Before going to bed last night we told fortunes by cards. The results in short were these: Firstly, a climax is to be reached shortly. (I quite agree.) Secondly, March 27th, my birthday, will seal my matrimonial affairs, the marriage to take place before the following March 27th. (Doubtful, unless I marry an Arab or Turk, or get freed for the event.) Thirdly, the star of the Fortune-God is in the ascendant, and his horoscope is wreathed with smiles. Which we two subalterns, and Cockie (a junior married captain), devoutly pray may come true.
Personally, I hold with that excellent fellow Horace that “the gods only laugh if they behold mortals showing an unseemly interest in their destiny.” It is essentially a plebeian instinct, a relic from barbaric days when the world was brimful of curiosities for the twilight intelligence of recently-born man. But many decades taught him that unbridled curiosity ended in burnt fingers. Then he avoided with a fearful dread all that he did not know, and not the least of his tortures was occasioned by the Inexplicable straying upon him across the border from the Great Unknown. Later on he gets more nerve and he pioneers—still later he becomes scientific and investigates. And when the facts are more or less all in, his curiosity instead of his investigativity once again gets the better of him, and he fortune-tells and goes table-rapping, and tries to lassoo his astral body and to open up direct communication with those “not lost but gone before.” It is, one might say with some truth, a mark of spiritual breeding to know how to acquiesce. Somehow one cannot picture the greatest of the gods tremendously excited. Equanimity is at least more dignified and always useful.
Nor should prophecy be confused with fortune-telling, for it is to the latter what investigation is to inquisitiveness. And inquisitiveness was always bad form. The personal factor looms too large.
Ah! how infinitely colossal and strangely beautiful is that great thing the Future, that ever bears down upon us from across the seas of Time. That dark tidal wave bearing great histories in its bosom and pregnant with joys and sorrows for us all. The gymnastics of living philosophers teach us that Time does not exist—but to me here in Kut it is almost the only real thing. O Futura Divina Ignota! thou mighty engulfing wave advancing from horizon to horizon upon us, with Change and Hope lightly treading thy combing crest—how pricelessly excellent a thing art thou, and what could we do without thee? Whence art thou? From what distant regions of Eternity art thou sped, on what strange shores do thy billows break! We know not. It is beautiful not to know. And thus is Faith born. Thou art a beautiful stranger. We dread thee not. We trust thee—for thou art God.
Truly it is a great and wonderful world, and considerably reflected upon before patented. Some day a great man will write a book on “Some Attitudes to the Future”—wherefrom it will be gathered that the happiest is he who trusts but does not seek to know. “If,” writes the prospective Plato, “it were permitted me of God to be the only mortal in the history of the human race to discover the lever that raises the curtain between us and the next world, and even if by so doing we might at once behold the flight of angels, the life of the spirit world, the procedure of heaven, yet would I certainly refuse to reveal the secret or to use it. Because to behold that Ultramontane would be to remove from life the two essential factors of discipline and hope. Moreover, if likewise I only were accorded the power of turning the searchlight on that land of mists we know as the Future so that all might see what is ahead of each, yet again would I not do so.” And on second thoughts, who would? It would indeed be a dreadful ordeal to have to live. And if you don’t believe this, then go and ask a certain gunner subaltern in Kut.
9 p.m.—My hospital acquaintance, Square-Peg of the Oxfords, came along this afternoon for a game of chess, and asked if he might join our mess, as he is convalescent. Square-Peg and we talked ‘Varsity gossip by the pipe-dozen. He is at present doing light duty on patrol of the gardens, technically known as “C.O. Cabbages.”
I managed to best Edmonds later. He conceded me a knight, but then he is a very good player.
I made another acquaintance at the hospital, one Father Tim, the Catholic padre, who called to see me to-day.
A few rounds fell into the town. We did not reply.
We are informed that the English division of which we have heard so much is coming up-river now.
Rations have been still further cut down. We get bread and meat, nothing else, and of the former merely four ounces per diem. The garrison is in a bad way. Men go staggering about, resting every now and then up against a wall. I hear that the number succumbing in the trenches is daily increasing. As for the native hospital, the sight is too appalling for words. Skin-covered skeletons crawl about or turn over to receive their scanty nourishment, but nothing else, not even shell fire, engages their attention. One sees a coma stealing over them, a coma not less relentless than the Arctic Sleep of Death in the snow. The poor devils cover up their faces with blankets or tattered turbans, and dream of Home. One told me the other day that he heard the steps of Kismet.
It is roughly estimated that this further reduction of rations will give us two to three weeks—not more.
There is every confidence in our army below. One thing, however, we dread: that is the floods, which may or may not leave sufficient time.
March 12th.—Rain fell last night and again early this morning. Then we heard the sound of distant artillery, which increased to the subdued throb of gun-fire far away. But this was drowned in the grander music of a thunderstorm. How splendid is the artillery of the gods! How majestic their salvos billowing across the heavens!
Last night we felt what we believed to be an earthquake, but which proved to be the sappers trying to dynamite fish in the river, which experiment was completely unproductive.
5 p.m.—It is still raining, which is bad for the river. I did my rounds and straightened up pay books, etc., in the office, and then played chess. I am a little better, and Amir Bux is an excellent masseur, a distinct improvement on Graoul, who used to treat my shoulders like a punch ball.
The soldiers have re-named this place Scuttle-Amara!
March 13th.—More rain has fallen! The Tigris is almost bank high, and still rising.
I have been around the horses. Every tail is bare, and the jhuls and head ropes disappear as fast as they are put on. They all remain perpetually on the qui vive to prevent their stall-mates from biting them. Some are scarcely horses, but rather half-inflated horse skins.
Father Tim, the worthy Irish padre, who divides his attention between wistful ultramontane meditations and an excellent appetite, played chess with me to-day. He rooked me beautifully once.
March 14th.—Heavy gun-fire has been heard downstream. The irrepressible humours of Tommy inform us that it is our own guns covering Aylmer’s retirement to Basra.
5 p.m.—The rain has stopped. I have been writing to King’s College, Auckland, of many memories, and also to my acquaintance, “the delicious Conservative,” at Corpus—Cambridge.
I find in the latter’s epistle this sentence: “To-night I shall think of you in that delightful room with chairs so easy and cheroots so persuasive, soliloquizing on the eternal destiny of the American Conservative candidate.”
He does not regard all Americans favourably, and I remember well how once when a Southern son of that enterprising nation averred that in the Northern States there were no aristocrats or conservatives, still the South was full of both, that he replied he had always understood it to be merely this way, that the Northern States had neither, and the Southern believed they had both. Which was very severe. But then he had a delightful, disarming smile. Oh, for a disarming smile!!!
March 15th.—The Ides of March! Moreover they are come and gone, for I am making this entry, I find, on the 16th. The river rose eighteen inches, and for some hours lapped over the banks. Then it subsided a little. I had a walk through the palm grove and back via the Gurkha communication trench.
March 16th.—It is a beautiful day, warm and sunny, and the only blur on the silvery brightness is the muddied Tigris winding like a yellow ribbon over this flat desert land. I felt so weak during my walk yesterday that to-day I merely strolled about the “gardens.”
It was a fine sunset. Away over the muddy plain the Western skies were dragon-red, and clouds stirred by the evening breeze sailed in and out of the luminous belt which reflected a soft pink on the face of the rising moon climbing over the Eastern horizon.
I stale-mated a game of chess. Also received a gift of three brace of starlings that are the veriest God-send for the seedy.
March 17th.—We had an extraordinary breakfast of kedjereed tinned salmon Square-Peg brought with him.
Cockie’s temperature is increasing and ought to be diminished.
I played patience a little, which I can’t stick for long. There are not many books circulating.
March 18th.—Another beautiful day! I stale-mated a game of chess with Square-Peg, and then had a walk round the trenches almost up to the Fort. There is an old disused trench skirting the river on the eastern side, where we sat in a hidden nook and let the cool breeze from the river play on our feverish dank foreheads.
Grass is beginning to grow in patches here and there on the maidan; and here and there a truant mule did himself well behind the bund. Presently the Turks or Arabs spotted us, and we reluctantly had to leave the blissful spot.
Rumour says that the Turks have some new 7·5-inch guns coming. If so, the damage done will be ten times what it has been. And if they only had high-explosive shell the smashing up of the fort wall and the town would be a very short affair.
A bombardier of the 76th Battery, an excellent lad, has just died of wounds from the aeroplane’s bomb. I remember upholding him in a matter of duty once.
Every day some one goes, either from wounds or sickness. And so far as we know the end is not yet.
March 19th.—Rheumatics bad again. They remind me I lived in feet of water in my earthy dug-out during the floods, even my bed sopping wet. However, in the heat of the day the aching is less intense. More serious are the increasing cases of enteritis everywhere in Kut. I believe this is essentially a siege malady. The symptoms are violent pains in the intestines and a wish to vomit. It is, I hear, due to bad and insufficient nourishment. I know many who have already succumbed, but so far in my case these pains have been rather stomach than abdominal.
A bombardment started while I was in the gardens, and I hastened back to Cockie’s observation post. It lasted the best part of an hour.
The floods have necessitated removing the 5-inch guns on the river-front, which are now in a dead line for our observation post, so any accurate one will be not far away. Anyway they can scarcely be closer than they have been. One shell we felt certain was making dead for us, but it went by with a fearful swish and burst ten yards off, killing one man and wounding another after penetrating two feet of brick wall. The fumes and filthy gases well-nigh choke one.
Another shell got the Sumana through the funnel and bridge, killing one of her crew. Tudway’s cabin was completely wrecked. Tudway is a deserving, hard-working subaltern, the only R.N. representative in Kut. He always takes it as a personal insult if his gunboat is hit. She is the apple of his eye. H.M.S. Sumana, an improvised gunboat, is of the greatest importance, as she keeps us in touch with Woolpress, our tiny stronghold on the other bank, which prevents the Turks from coming right down to the river-bank and thus rendering our water-front totally unendurable. She takes across a barge with provisions and reliefs, and makes three or four trips a week. This the Turks know full well, and do their best to send her under during the day. However, she is fairly well protected with mahelas and rafts, though by no means completely. It is a difficult problem to know how to protect her, and engages all Tudway’s thoughts. In fact, how she remains afloat at all is a puzzle to every one.
The last trip of the Morane plane was sufficiently disastrous, one bomb dropping into the hospital ward, killing a dozen men and wounding many others. These large bombs are dreadful things, the splinters of the outer case being very thin and sharp as razors. Square-Peg’s servant was among those hit. In the 1907 Convention at the Hague we tried to get all the Powers to agree to refrain from this abominable trick, but it was not to be. Anyway war is now full of abominable tricks.
March 20th.—Cold and windy, an ideal day for a leather chair with book-rest in one’s study before an open fire, or for Grieg’s music, for there is a whip and a whistle in the wind, and Peer Gynt is passing over us.
Another small strafe started, and H.M.S. Sumana stopped quite a few. She received five direct hits from 9-pounders, and one from the 18-pounder field-gun the enemy captured from us at Ahwaz.
To be shelled by one’s own gun and ammunition adds humour to injury. And we have learned to respect the fearful rip of this weapon. She hits ten times harder than any other gun they have got of the same size. But as Cockie says, “If British workmanship will be so thorough——”
The Morane flew over us last night in the moonlight and dropped several bombs, one of which cut through an ammunition wagon, setting off several shells. We give every credit to this intrepid flyer. He came quite close.
For dinner we had a very excellent roast joint of horse and some rice. I find that first-class horse is better than second-class mule, and only second to second-rate young donkey. It beats camel and eclipses buffalo altogether. The horses decrease most sadly. Poor Don Juan! No insurance company on earth would look at him.
We smoked lime-leaves and talked rose-leaves, which means Omar Khayyam and Hafiz. But it lacked much—for we had no drinks more Khayyamnian than water.
March 21st.—To-day it is a world of brightness. One has in one’s self a feeling of joy and rejuvenescence, and outside there are the strong lines of a matter-of-fact morning, bright with the spangled beauties of ten thousand sheets of sunlight. They are the banners of approaching summer, and beneath the palm trees one hears the sweet voice of that ardent goddess and the elfish cadence of her myrmidons.
Gorringe, promoted to lieut.-general, has succeeded General Aylmer in the command of the relieving force, and has wired that he is making his final plans.
The river has fallen three feet, and so to-day the whole garrison is keen with expectancy and buoyant with hope.
A few details are to hand with regard to the recent unsuccessful dash by General Aylmer up the right bank. From all accounts it was an excellent scheme, and came very near being a brilliant success. The Turks were completely hoodwinked, expecting the attack on the left bank, but Aylmer’s flying column, by a commendable night march, got up to the main line of the enemy, and struck Dujaila Redoubt. The British troops got into this, but the story goes that General Aylmer then chose to wait for his guns and prepared before pushing through. This took two or three hours, and the Turks, who had scanty troops on that side, immediately rushed over every available man from the other bank, and Aylmer, in attacking again, found the position too strong, and had to cut his way back. If he had shoved on at dawn he must have carried it easily.
Another version is that he had to go back for water, which is almost incredible, the show not having miscarried at all in length of time, and the river lay before him. One thing is certain: if he had got through, the Essin position would have had to be abandoned by the Turks, and, incidentally to the relief of Kut, our debouch would have brought about a heavy capture of the enemy. The difficulty now is that the floods are daily rendering more and more of this table country impassable. The soil is such that a shower of rain makes it a quagmire, and stagnant water turns it into the stickiest paste. Guns cannot be moved a yard, and it is almost equally impossible for man or horse to move. This means that the enemy’s line downstream is shortened considerably, as they have to depend mainly on the dry land for transport.
To-day there is artillery fire below. Our guns exchanged a few rounds with his, and then Square-Peg and I strolled to the middle line and managed to procure some saccharine. We are spending every available sovereign to buy anything that can be got to see us over the last days of the siege.
It is needless to remark that the only foodstuffs now for secret sale are those that have been stolen or illicitly concealed. But even these have long since been purchased, and it is only by secret-service methods that an Arab is fossicked out who will sell a tin of milk for fifteen rupees, a pound of rice for five rupees, or atta for ten rupees. Officers and men, we are all on the same footing, and the extra that one can buy is, after all, such a very small supplement. There are many besides myself who have to starve completely if eggs or milk are not obtainable. Of the latter I have had one on issue per day when they are available. This just keeps one going, and after a few days of it one can manage with potato meal and a small portion of horse.
Tudway has joined our mess altogether on account of the Sumana being untenable. One shell has completely smashed his cabin, luckily during his absence. Her 12-pounders are ashore and he has a little nook which enables him to see a fair zone on the right bank which he periodically shoots over like a luxurious lord his pheasant coverts.
March 22nd.—During the night the enemy’s plane visited us and the sharp staccato notes of our anti-air maxims rapped out a brisk warning to the sleeping garrison. The others took shelter downstairs, but my bed was so very comfortable that I waited for the music of the first bomb before jumping out. It didn’t come. At 5.30 a.m. we were awakened by a sudden and intense bombardment. This building is not far from the mosque and quite close to the anti-air maxims, so-called because they never hit anything but air.
The bombardment seemed concentrated a good deal on this part of the town. Cockie went to observe. Then the plane came back and bombed us, circling across the town, after which the bombardment again opened. Square-Peg developed a spasmodic sprint of extraordinary alacrity every time anything happened or the plane gong rang out, and dressed downstairs. This proved such a nerve-racking ordeal that I proposed to have my tea in my room and then go below. The shells were thumping on the houses just behind us, and I took the precaution to shift over the thick wall side of the room which left just space enough for my servant Amir Bux to miss the doorway. Shell after shell struck the adjoining buildings, shaking our house considerably. Then suddenly there was an awful roar and splitting crash. The room was filled with smoke and dust and plaster, and a terrific thud shook the wall just behind my head. Two segments of shell had flown through the doorway and embedded themselves in the opposite wall. That excellent fellow Amir Bux suddenly asked, “Master thik hai?” And on my assuring him I was all right he pointed to the embedded segment and smiled, muttering “Kismet!” On inspection I found that a Windy Lizzie had crashed through the slender wall of the upper enclosure around the roof on which my room opened (there was no door), and about half the fore-end of the shell had struck the thick wall of my room a few inches behind my head and had gone halfway through the plaster. Another foot and it would have got my scalp precisely.
The show kept on intermittently until 8.30 a.m. The horse lines and hospital have again caught it rather badly. One shell passed under a patient’s bed in the General Hospital and exploded on the far wall without hurting anybody. There is not any backward zone worth mentioning in some of these shells. High explosive would have been a different story.
9 p.m.—A few more shells fell this evening. We hear that after all the plane did bomb last night and altogether made a most daring raid. We must give Fritz full marks for excellent bombing. He attended chiefly to Woolpress village over the river. More serious was the damage done by the same plane to the 4·7-inch guns in the horse boats—a very small target. One barge was almost sunk, being suspended by her cables only, and the other gun was jerked out of its socket by the force of the explosion. It appears the bomb touched the edge of the horse boat and fell into the river, exploding under the water. The result was a deluge that heaved the gun out of its pedestal. Reports from Woolpress say he flew within thirty yards of the barges, which for a night performance was highly commendable. Fritz is a German. He had hard luck in not getting one gun at least. We contemplate painting in large letters on the roof of the Serai, our condolences over his bad luck. Tudway is busy towing the barge to the Sumana shelter where it is to be repaired.
Cockie is a first-rate chess player, at least so he has repeatedly informed us. He knows the whole history of Ruy Lopez even to his private affairs, and can at any stage of any game tell you the exact measurement of the sphere for evil of any piece on the board. He does not finger his piece and wave it in mid-air before moving as do smaller fry at the game. Neither does he hesitate for four minutes ever. Attacks, counter-attacks, demonstrations, feints, holding and flanking—he is an artist at them all. At every exchange he gets an advantage in pieces—or position. “Position,” he assures us, “is the all in all.” He can even nominate the moves without looking at the board. In short, if he did not invariably get beaten, he would be a perfect player, and even Lasker would have to look out. Square-Peg once brilliantly remarked that this tendency to get beaten was the tragedy of it all, but with infinitely more tact, at least to my mind, I added that Cockie was merely a great player and not infallible; in other words, that there were limitations in us all. This Cockie said he denied. And I agreed.
That may seem illogical. But it was necessary. If to beat Cockie is a misdemeanour, then to allude to the fact is certainly a crime—in his eyes. Besides, he isn’t invariably beaten, as I have said. That was a mis-statement. For when he has made a bad slip or, let us say, paid too big a price for “position,” such as losing his queen for a bishop or maybe a pawn, he frequently goes very red in the face and knocks all the pieces from the board on to the floor, which shows he has the foreseeing eye, a faculty absolutely necessary to a first-rate chess player. Maeterlinck, we are told, has the seeing eye. How much greater, then, is Cockie, who has the foreseeing eye? If, thinks Cockie, it is not always the province of man to anticipate disaster, he can at least forestall it.
“I had the game on my head,” Cockie usually bursts out as he sweeps the board. “And it wasn’t lost either, don’t forget—but the interest in it had all gone.”
He did the same the first time he played me when he showed me a new opening—about three moves. He got a piece or two ahead, when after an hour or so I evened things up. Then he made his invariable slip, and before one could strike a match Cockie had the board clean as a skating rink, remarking hotly, “When I play against myself I’m always beaten.”
“Thank your God, Cockie,” I retorted, “then you admit some one can beat you.” Which remark somehow or other he didn’t appreciate.
However, since then I’m more awake, and when, which is not often, I bag his queen, or when, which is very often, he makes a slip, my arms are around the board before you could smile. It’s the only way to keep the men on. If we were in America I should practise “getting the drop on him with a Colt’s revolver” at each crisis.
Poor Square-Peg came to me in trouble on this point the other day.
“We have to be thankful, S.-P.,” said I, “that Cockie has not yet commented on our morality.”
“But it’s coming. He’s saving it up. I’m sure of it. Why, this morning I had a certain mate in two moves, but my dread of what he would say in another explosion was such that I thought it necessary to extend the check to six times before finally checkmating him. It was a hard job and might have cost me the game. But then, since that last show, my nerves are none too good.”
“Well, you got off lightly! I heard him merely knock his chair over and say that your playing was only better than mine. Did he not?”
“Yes! he’s a blank, ten to one.”
Whereat we both laughed as only subalterns can. At this point Cockie, who wanted my field-glasses, looked in at the mess. Now, if one thing annoys him more than another it is to see two people laughing and not to be in the joke. He always presumes he is in it. This time he was correct. Turning to me venomously Cockie said, “I suppose you’d like a game?”
“Rather not, thanks awfully, I might get beaten.”
Cockie snorted in disgust, and I had to give him a last cigarette I had just made for myself.
“The truth is, Cockie, that Square-Peg and I are hopelessly deficient in this chess business, and we have to fluke to win as they say in ‘pills.’ That churns you up and you can’t see the pieces, and consequently move the wrong one. Don’t swear. I’ve a proposition. ‘Nellie’ is coming to lunch and will give you a game. He’s very hot stuff.”
So it was settled. Square-Peg and I made our plans and fixed it all right with Nellie, who tries to be a very dignified and silent person of the cutting variety, and dislikes Cockie.
After our lunch of stewed horse and horse-beans and rice the game began. After a few moves Cockie had a slight advantage, and I took this opportunity to whisper to him that Nellie had a weak heart and it was dangerous to shout at him. Cockie nodded approvingly and the game went on. Half an hour later Cockie lost a bishop which he could only retrieve by uncovering check.
His face went red and he took a breath. “Don’t forget,” I sang out, and I and S.-P. each seized a glass of water and an almost empty rum bottle for any emergency.
Cockie glared at me in a cannibalistic fashion, and eyeing Nellie carefully the while, addressed some superlatives to us, saying that the interruption had spoilt his move. Nellie sat with steady countenance while I replied that the interruption came after the move. But Cockie played brilliantly and recovered a piece, whereupon he got quite genial and addressed conciliatory remarks to me.
Twice Cockie forced exchanges, and as in both instances he got “position,” which means that he was a pawn to the bad each time, we quietly stood up with the water in a first-aid attitude. But Cockie was playing as he never played before, and was nodding his head in a queer way. I thought he was so blind with annoyance that he was counting the pieces, but Square-Peg assured me that his engine had got hot and was running free. Cockie went on serenely for about another half-hour when, after a pause of several minutes, he suddenly discovered himself to be mated, for Nellie had said only the word “check” and now added “mate” in the most matter-of-fact voice.
“Damned fluke,” screamed Cockie, forgetting himself, and springing up he banged the chessboard down fiercely on the table with an awful smash.
Poor Nellie gasped and said “Oh-o-o-o,” and apparently stopped breathing and reeled in his chair. Not having brandy we gave him the last of Cockie’s rum, which he managed to negotiate, and then, as usually happens, felt better. We three preserved a frigid silence towards Cockie, who said he was damned if he knew what was the use of people on service with weak hearts, and then strode off, Nellie in the meantime pulling hard at the bottle for an extra drip or so. How we laughed. For Cockie was really scared. It’s not the sort of story to make you popular if it gets about—wilfully startling a fellow to death with a weak heart merely for beating you in a game of chess.
Later on Square-Peg and I joined Cockie on the observation post and a battle royal ensued.
“I tell you,” said Cockie to me, “it’s fearfully difficult to give the whole of one’s attention to the game when one is playing an absolute novice. So things are missed. But if you will back me for five rupees against Square-Peg to win ten games out of ten I’ll do it, you see. That will supply the interest.”
I complied at once, offering one game in, which he proudly refused. With a vicious jab to Cockie to please remember it was “my money and not his” that was concerned, and to have no nonsense, he grew demonstrative, and I fled to pay a visit to Tudway on the Sumana.
“I tell you I can’t lose,” he had said. When I returned to the mess, there I found Square-Peg, who announced that he had left Cockie in a fury, he having lost the first three games. I insisted on Square-Peg’s taking the five dibs. It appears that during the first game Fritz passed him and said “Good afternoon,” to which interruption Cockie stormily attributed his subsequent beating....
Later.—This very morning the other half of the shell that crashed outside my doorway (there isn’t a door) went through the roof of Cockie’s bedroom and simply smashed most things in it. A foot of débris from the roof lay on the floor. It was lucky for Cockie that he was on duty. And luckier for me that I did not accept Cockie’s many invitations to share his room. Only yesterday he asked me again to do so. But Cockie generally has two or more rounds with Curra Mirali and pursues him round the yard, leaving the door open—every morning about 6 a.m. when I am doing my best to have one other dream.
To-night after dinner Fritz, Cockie, Square-Peg, and I discussed the proposition that the hole a shell makes is the safest place, as no two shells ever fall in exactly the same spot. One recalled that very good Tommy story from France when, on being asked why he hadn’t taken cover in a Jack Johnson crater as he had been ordered, replied, “Unsafe, sir. I’d rather try another spot and chance it.”
“But you know that the same gun never shoots into exactly the same spot twice?”
“Yes, sir. But another gun might.”
Fritz and I upheld the theory of probabilities as being against a second shell getting into Cockie’s room. For that meant a very precise elevation just clearing the back houses and wall, and meant also the range to a foot or it would get the yard.
Cockie and Square-Peg, on the contrary, held that because one shell has got there and so proved that a shell can get there, another might get there also. I remember painfully suggesting that Cockie ought not to sleep in the room if he thought that another shell might come in, especially as he had no doubt offended the gods over the Nellie incident. This is altogether an extraordinary affair and I am recording it in detail. Well, Cockie went to bed, taking the precaution from my incident of the morning to sleep with his head to the door instead of his feet. We were half undressed when the bombardment reopened. It became so hot that we all took shelter in the mess, the safest place. Indeed the back wall was stopping dozens of them. Later it slackened and we went to bed, whereon it gradually increased. After I had tossed restlessly for half an hour it exceeded the limit, and the plaster and dust were being flung through the doorway of my bedroom. On my way down I inspected the whole of the wall and found the roof all around pulverized. Five minutes later Square-Peg and I were smoking half undressed in the mess when the stunning noise of a splitting crash seemed to burst the world in halves. Débris came into the mess. We thought the shell had entered the tiny yard, but Cockie’s voice in unearthly yells quickly disillusioned us.
I shot into the room, which was stifling with fumes and dense yellow gas and smoke. The lamp went out. I told Square-Peg to fetch a doctor and tried to strike a light, but nothing would burn in the thick fumes. I felt for the ruined bed and managed to get him out of the room into the mess. There was a nasty deep gash over the tendon of Achilles, but no bones were broken, although the ligaments were gone and it was bleeding freely, so I applied a first field dressing, as I had so often done in France, and assured him it was not at all serious and that now he was sure to get downstream. Nevertheless poor Cockie’s many nerves had been badly shaken. Fritz came and said:
“Let me see. That’s good—no bones. Bleeding stopped. Move your foot. Nothing much really. Where else?”
After a fresh spasm Cockie complained that his back seemed cut in two, and this proved a nasty bruise, although the skin wasn’t gone. It was a black bruise, and he must have got a pretty hefty knock from a piece of the bed. How he escaped goodness knows. The room was two feet deep in rubbish—topees, uniforms, cameras, bed, everything was wrecked.
We got him to the hospital, and on the way he invented extraordinary futures for each of the stretcher bearers.
Arrived at the hospital I am afraid the whole place was awakened, and some poor fellows whose dying was only a matter of hours or days turned from their fitful sleep on the ground floor to ask who was hit.
He wanted me to sit up with him, but General Smith insisted that I went back to bed, assuring me I was far too ill, and he kindly gave me an excellent cigarette.
Cockie is intrepid under fire even to the point of recklessness, but is also of the kind that feels pain tremendously. It is, I suppose, a matter of temperament and nerves.
This has released me from the river-front and I succeed to the command of the ammunition column, and am now running our mess.
Tudway, Square-Peg, and I are now alone here. We have a little potato meal and rice, and I have procured a tin of jam. I could not have two more generous companions with whom to share our last food.
March 23rd.—The servants won’t sleep in that part of the building where the shells came, so we have vacated a room for them, and Square-Peg and I have moved below into the basement.
I saw Cockie this morning and heard him from afar.
Near him is an officer lying very still and white and quiet with his whole leg shattered, silent with the paralysis of extreme pain.
I assisted Cockie with letters and other things, and got away as quickly as I could, as I felt this other sufferer wanted silence.
March 24th.—Some shells fell in the town during the night, and once again the horses got it badly.
The 4·7-inch gun which was bombed by the plane is now under-water, as the river has risen five feet, the highest level during the siege.
It is a clear, beautiful day and appreciably warmer. Already the flies are dreadful and swarm everywhere in billions. The Kut fly is a pronounced cannibal.
I walked through the palm woods to the 4-inch guns, where I found Parsnip alone in his glory. There he has been the whole siege with a very comfortable tent under the trees, and his only job is to repeat orders from the telephone to his two antediluvian guns. As a field gunner I am not enamoured of his monotonous and stationary job. Parsnip is a subaltern also and has two characteristics. In playing chess he seizes the pieces by the head, and after describing an artistic parabola, sets them down. He is a Radical, as you would expect of any fellow so handling a pawn, let alone a queen. His second claim to notoriety is said to be as author of a future publication entitled, “Important People I intend to meet.” As a hobby he kills mosquitos with a horse flick.
For over an hour beneath those biblical palms Parsnip, or Pas Nip, and I stood by his guns and smoked and looked out over the darkening plain where shadow chased shadow under the capricious moon, and where, like will o’ the wisps of an extravagant dream, tiny flashes tempted us still to hope on. For what? Well, there were the flashes. They were the flashes of our guns. And I longed for tobacco and wine. Parsnip, on the contrary, was a married man!
March 25th.—This morning I had a thorough inspection of the horse and wagon lines and inspected shelters previous to my visit to headquarters to report on ammunition. Orders are out for all ranks to prepare to receive heavy bombardment. I am having the ammunition shelter even further reinforced against shell or bomb. The present scheme is to have two thick roofs each topped by kerosene tins packed close and filled with soil. One of these shelters will explode the shell or bomb, and the other receive the burst. The horse-lines have been changed and pits dug for all drivers and detachments and traversed for possible enfilade bursts. The men are working on a shelter for our basement room with tins of earth piled up. Tins are fearfully scarce, as hundreds have been requisitioned for the defence of H.M.S. Sumana and other things. We have, we believe, sheltered the probable zones with what tins we have. Thus the doorway and window are unprotected because the upper back room would stop all except howitzer fire, and the enemy’s howitzer is south of Kut. Similarly to prevent a lucky shell bursting through the wall of the first-floor room and roof of our present one, we have had three rows of tins—all we could get—arranged in front of the wall upstairs. I have calculated that any burst entering higher than this would get the opposite upstairs wall and pass out into the street.
Tudway and Square-Peg have accused me of being cold-blooded over the affair. But I intended to be nothing if not practical, and the next morning discovered that any shell of average intentions, in fact one falling ten feet shorter than the very one that had plugged into my bedroom wall up above, would have no difficulty in going through the mess roof and so through the mess cupboard—a large receptacle into the wall—into our so-called impregnable bedroom which was to be the emergency shelter for all hands. My bed was just beyond the cupboard the other side of the three-foot wall. So this evening when Tudway went to the cupboard for the jam and meat and bread he found a solid wall of tins filled with earth. This he considered a master-stroke. The provisions, as he explained, would have been directly in the line of fire!
Moreover, I have had removed a score or two of loose bricks which were wedged in the best Damocletian style between the joists and the ceiling. For last night I dreamed one fell on my head. Why my head is always in the line of trouble I can’t say.
Talking of dreams, that is the second nasty one in a few days. The previous time I dreamed I was being hung. That was probably due to a button that I had sewn on to the neck of my pyjama jacket by the uncertain light of dubbin oil!
10 p.m.—There is heavy and continuous firing downstream. I respectfully suggest a variation of Watts’s “Hope”—that popular picture. A junior sub asleep in a barricaded corner of a room in Kut beside a four-ounce slice of bread, listening in his dreams to distant guns.
I must now make one of the most important entries of the whole siege. General Smith gave me a Punch. I mean that having finished with a copy of Punch, sent to him by aeroplane, he has passed it on to me.
Shakespeare, Thackeray, and Punch. In the flesh, what friends those three would have been!
“If,” writes an unborn Teufeldrockh, “I were not a German, I would like to be Punch.”
“If,” replies Punch, with a dignified bow, “you were not a German, you could aspire.”
For what duellist but that great English gentleman Punch has the seeing eye, the delicate wrist, the merciful smile?
March 26th.—I am in Indian khaki again, for summer has come to Kut. It is even getting unpleasantly warm.
The massaging has decreased the rheumatics if anything, although I am very much weaker and can’t walk 400 yards without getting blown. It is worth while to avoid the chaff bread, and I stick to an occasional egg and rice-husk and soup.
How fit I was when I started on this front! Square-Peg was seedy yesterday and in pain. I gave him some essence of ginger tabloids, and later on opium, which relieved him somewhat.
It is rumoured that the 6-inch guns from home have at last reached Gorringe. The enemy is now completely outclassed in artillery.
Tudway took me with him on board the Sumana to see the effects of the recent bombardment. By a miracle one shell missed the main steam-pipes and carried away part of the bridge and cabin and funnel. Tudway is a keen officer, and has all the delightful insouciance of his service. We went over the whole boat and the barges. He was all on the alert, in his quiet way, to gather any suggestions for further protecting his alumnus. We sat in his dismantled cabin and talked of the sea, or rather he did, and I mentally annotated him with my own dreams. The sea, the sea, so vast, so great, so deep, so far away! As the hart panteth after the water-brooks so pant we Englishmen after thee, O Sea, even after thee, wild and lonely as thou art, and after thy waters briny as tears. Mighty, untamed, eternal! We, thy children, love thee. Alone, thou art free!
Turkish snipers followed us up, and we had to run the gauntlet on the way to the shore over the waters of the flood. I bought three small fish yesterday here, but some one’s native servant was killed last evening by a stray shell while fishing, so for the future it’s all off. On one occasion, Tudway and I tried to net some, but both the Turks and the fish were against us.
This siege is a perfect device for leaving a man to his own plaguings. A book is now almost as great a luxury as bread. I am even driven to re-robing and criticizing some of our early endeared legacies. Let us begin with the poet’s notion of service—admittedly of a bygone day.
The Soldier’s Dream.
By the other Campbell.
Our bugles sang truce for the night-cloud had lowered—
Delightful arrangement that, one must admit. A truce is, after all, more fun than a night attack. And perhaps the cloud was a big one and it looked like rain!
And the Sentinel stars set their watch in the sky—
Much better! But that does away with the rain theory.
And thousands had sunk on the ground overpowered—
Bad-fitting word. Sounds like avoirdupois. But it must have referred to gas fumes, otherwise the line certainly reflects on the condition of the men. This climate could be called “overpowering.”
The weary to sleep and the wounded to die—
That scouts the gas theory! As a matter of fact it’s the last thing the weary have a chance to do, and the wounded certainly take weeks to die. Look at Cockie!
While reposing one night on my pallet of straw—
Fancy Tommy “reposing”! Campbell, may I inform you that Thomas neither poses nor reposes, which suggests the soft, rounded limbs of a Grecian maiden on a bed of rose-leaves. Tommy likes his mouth open, and often prefers to lie on his stomach with his legs wide apart. Reposing! My hat! What an awful swank the man was with his knocking off work because of the night-cloud, and what with his reposing on a pallet of straw. Why he didn’t go in for a convertible four-legged wheelbarrow bedstead puzzles me. Tommy lies on the “good ’ole dirt” if it’s hot, and otherwise screws himself up into his blanket, head and all. I hear Graoul asking his pal, “O, Halgie, koindly porse erlong may pallet hof straarw hat wance.”
“Roight yer hare! ’Ere, Toenails, pallit-er strore is forwerd—hand the quilt halso.”
At the dead of night a sweet vision I saw,
And thrice ere the morning I dreamed it again—
Kindly eliminate “dreamed” and substitute “saw,” then re-read it. Don’t laugh! Why shouldn’t he “see” it the second and even the third time also? Tommy sees lots of things—at times.
I dreamed from the battlefield’s dreadful array
Far, far, I had roamed on a desolate track.
It was springtime and summer arose on the way—
To the home of my fathers that welcomed me back—
Tommy wouldn’t dream of dreaming such a thing. As for the “home of my fathers,” the shape of the idea would give him a fit. “Bit o’ skirt more like it.”
Stay, stay with us, thou art weary and worn;
And fain was the war beaten soldier to stay—
But sorrow returned with the dawning of morn
And the voice in my dreaming ear melted away—
“D’ye ’ear this, Spud?” says Tommy Toenails. “The voice in ’is dreeamin’ hear melted.”
“Bit o’ wax, more like,” says Spud.
“I say a flea an’ charnce it,” adds Tooting Tom.
“Hand,” says Spud, “wen ’e hawoke ’e got anuther stomikful o’ sorrer. Marrid man, too. Gawd ’elp ’im.”
We pass on. Let us take that dear little hymn lots of us learned at our mother’s knee—
“There is a green hill far away
Without a city wall.”
How I used to wonder what a green hill could possibly want with a city wall. Ah! the dear doubts of childhood! I shall be told that “without” meant “beyond.” Another doubt was about “Llewellyn and his Dog.” How the siege has helped us to join hands with childhood once more. Surely I haven’t thought of the lines for many years. They run—
“The gallant hound the wolf had slain,
To save Llewellyn’s heir.”
I remember we had to write a composition on the poem, and having decided that it was the wolf that had killed the hound—just as one says, “The scanty bone the beggar picked”—I had to square matters so as to explain how the hound died a second time at the hands of Llewellyn. It’s all misty now, but I at least remember propounding the theory that the Welsh chieftain, in his terror, must have mistaken the wolf for the hound, and consequently did him in for murdering the lost child. It was this incident, I believe, that induced my parents to select for me a career at the Bar.
That incident recalls another one later on. At school we had a delightful master who hated using chalk. He informed us that we were to write an essay on—
“Beneath the rule of men entirely great
The pen is mightier than the sword.”
One promising fellow misheard the last word as “saw.” He was rather an authority on saws, and treated us to a delightful treatise on saws in general, band-saws, hand-saws, rip-saws, fret-saws, and circular saws. As far as I remember, the drift of his argument was that a pen could merely write, whereas a saw could cut a piece of wood.
Once more, “Eheu! Fugaces postumi——”
I wonder where that lad is now. I should think he must be a large saw-miller somewhere—possibly asleep on a “pallet of straw” in France, and seeing “visions” of his beloved saws. Why not! God bless him. I’ve forgotten his name and even what he was like.
Well, well, these frivolities must come to an end for it’s ten o’clock. I had intended to set out more details of our starvation methods, but we talk enough of it and I’m sick of the subject. Besides, what is happiness but a big digression?
March 27th.—The day’s bulletin is that the Churches in England are praying for us. How we hope they pray hard. There is, we understand, to be a last forward movement of all arms to the relief of Kut. The position down below seems to have developed into something like that in France, as the Turkish forces are dug deep and well flanked with impassable swamps. It is difficult to force such a position against the clock, but we easily outnumber the enemy, so it is said, and then our heavy guns may do a great deal.
The water of the floods is now all over the maidan around our old first line, in fact in front of our present first line is a great lake some feet deep, and possibly eight feet above the dry base of our trench. The large bund or wall we have made is excellent. The enemy has had to withdraw still further back, and in places he is 1500 yards off. In this way the floods have saved us. There is little chance of an attack through the water. It may be doubted whether our men could have stood the strain in their present condition if the enemy had maintained his original proximity of from 50 to 150 yards. I remember a listening post at C Redoubt something like ten yards from the first line of the enemy.
Over the river all around Woolpress and beyond, and also reaching southward, are shining sheets of water with ever-diminishing green patches between. During the last flood of a few days back the water percolated into Woolpress, which, of course, is on the bank of the river, and wrought great havoc in the trenches and among the men there.
It must be an awfully lonely and desolated existence over there at Woolpress, a siege within a siege. The post is a mere sequence of mud houses, all adjoined, five yards or so from the water and forming a segment of a circle on the river about 250 yards frontage, its first line being the arc extending 150 yards inland at its farthest. They have first and second line trenches, and barbed wire, and since the heavy floods, a bund. So that it is now practically an island. The Turkish lines reach all round it in larger arcs also resting on the river-bank. They have not even the chance of buying stores as we have, and never come over, nor is it permitted for any to cross. The communication is by motor-boat or almost always by the Sumana. Tudway has the nerve of Beelzebub, and delights most of all in his moonlight trips. It would, of course, be certain destruction for him to cross in the daytime. At the beginning of the siege there was telephonic communication, but the wire was rotten and broke continually. We have helio now, and some sort of understanding for emergency signalling by lights. Our river-front guns are all registered on the enemy’s lines around the place, and on one or two occasions we have gone to gun-fire, thus preventing any Turkish reserves getting up. From this side of the river a section of the 82nd R.F.A.’s guns can enfilade the enemy’s northern lines around Woolpress.
We get news of the place by the drafts that now and then reinforce the post on relief. The story goes that the other day a party of Turks peered over their trenches and cried aloud to our Mussulman soldiers not to fight against their brother followers of Mahomet, but to go over to them who had plenty of food. This sort of thing had gone on quite a time when the officer on picket duty got about a dozen sepoys to fire a volley at the Turks just by way of exchanging compliments. The Turks replied, and general fire ensued. That highly intuitional body over here, Headquarters, believing that Woolpress was being attacked by all the spare Turks in the Ottoman Empire, gave our artillery enthusiastic orders, and Woolpress began to think they took some part in the siege after all, in fact that they belonged to us. And although it was a storm in a teapot, no doubt for those in the teapot it was highly interesting. It is even said that senior officers struggled out from beneath spider-webbed blankets where they had hoped to complete their hibernation until the siege was over, to see the reason for this turn of events. Woolpress are a gallant little band, no doubt, and there have been times when no insurance company on earth would have looked twice at any one of them, although a philanthropic society might have stretched a point for those certified able to swim; for a red Turkish crescent ringed them in and grew ever closer to them, and once the river took sides and offered to drown them. But that was months ago.
Woolpress, too, has its advantages. They have been practically never shelled and rarely bombed. On the contrary, when we are getting bombarded or any particular show is on, they all take front seats on their river-bank in absolute security and observe our emotions. I well remember that gala day of March 1st, when enemy guns of both sides took part in that very well conducted “command matinée” performance for the entertainment of the gods. The whole crowd of Woolpress was seated early, orchestral stalls for field officers, subalterns in specially erected boxes, and the rank and file everywhere else. I was, of course, very much on the stage, being stuck up there shooting my guns, while the Turks cut patterns round me with all the artistry of Turkish artillery. The heavy gunners on the observation post farther along, that well-battered remnant that is the despair of the Sultan’s artillery observers, also attracted considerable attention from an audience particularly sporting. I felt that the Woolpressers were making and taking huge bets as to what time my wee sandbag arrangement with contents would go by the board. Opera glasses were there by the dozen. But Jove, Trenchion, and Shraptune, the sporting gods that had decreed the performance, naturally objected to such small fry sharing the entertainment, and sent Fritz along with bombs. This considerably thinned the box plan, from which many adjourned for afternoon tea, while those more deeply in debt remained taking still larger bets on their own immediate existence.
This is my birthday. We have raised a small quantity of rum with which we three shall notch the year to-night. Why doesn’t one feel older? Life lies immediately behind us like the wake of a ship, but we don’t change—only the distance behind us changes (and a few of us are a stone lighter!).
9.30 p.m.—I returned from my round with a copy of The Field from General Smith. There was an excellent article on Pan-Germanism, and another that brought to Kut the brown wintry heather, the smell of the peat streams, the pheasants, and the free rolling moors of Yorkshire. And that led me to contrast the present flooded aspect of this dreary stretch of God’s ancient mud with the frilled hedges and those gay wild banners of English springtime.
Speaking for myself on this my thirtieth birthday, I never felt so restful and free from the gnawings of ambition. For better fellows have fallen, and promising careers have closed, and disastrous ones terminated before amends could be made; while I have lots of credit in hand, for I have had many lucky narrow shaves.