Scorpion Sunset (46 page)

Georgiana and David are waiting until you to return so you can all sail home together. Georgiana is trying to persuade Michael to sail with you but at the moment he is most insistent that he wants to remain in Basra.

I send you my special love and also Mariam's love and gratitude because you cared for her sister.

Your friend,

Angela

August 1918

Dear Angela,

Your letters have kept me sane, simply because you recognised my pain as mirroring yours. You know all too well the impotent feeling of emptiness that is perhaps the worse aspect of bereavement. How life loses all meaning and there seems little point in struggling to live another day. I'm not ashamed to admit that I dread the future. I am not a man who ever wanted to live alone. When I married Maud this war was only a rumour of ‘what might happen', and I dreamed of a large house with an even larger garden in the English countryside where I could live with my wife, children, and animals surrounded by love, warmth, and a peace that bordered on boredom.

You say you don't want to leave Robin and Mariam. Don't, Angela. Marry me, we'll sail to England with David and Georgie, and move into the family home I've inherited. I'll work in the clinic my father founded and come home every night to you.

The one thing I envied Peter was not you, that would have been mean and petty of me, but his close and loving relationship with you. You're a special woman, Angela. Good, kind, charming, and beautiful, and I promise I'll bring up young Peter, Robin, and Mariam as if they were my own children. Major Crabbe is going to buy a house close by and I'm sure Georgie and David will visit often, so we won't lack for friends.

What do you say, Angela? I know I'll never replace Peter in your affections, but I am confident that in time we could – like the Bedouin who marry ‘unseen' as Harry did with Furja – learn to love one another – after a fashion.

If it seems too convenient a proposal to you, then perhaps it is, but I'm tired. Tired of war, tired of fighting, tired of doctoring dying young men who should have died in their own beds of old age.

What do you say? Could you marry a man, damaged but not entirely broken by war? A man who yearns for peace and a family life who promises to cherish you and our children all the days of our lives? I accept that our relationship will never have the passion of first love, but what I can promise you, Angela, is that I will care for you and respect you as long as I live.

If you are no longer in Basra when I arrive, I'll take it your answer is no. Or if you haven't been able to leave because of a shortage of ships, just say ‘no' when I see you.

You mentioned money; I have enough for both of us and the children I hope to be able to call my own.

John Mason, who has always admired you, and begs to be given the opportunity to learn to love you as you deserved to be loved.

September 1918

Dear John,

The war must be as close to an end as everyone here in Basra insists, as letters are not taking as long to travel between here and Turkey. I even allowed myself the luxury of thinking about your proposal for three days before writing this in answer your letter.

Aside from Peter I cannot think of a man I admire or respect more than you, John. You say you are damaged but not entirely broken by war. Before I received your letter I felt broken. So much so I never wanted to leave my bed. If I hadn't had the children to care for I believe I would have curled into a corner and wished for death.

You letter has given me hope. For the first time since Theo brought the telegram to tell me that Peter had died I can envisage a future, not only for myself but my three children. Thank you, John. It would be an honour to become your wife.

I send you love from all of us, and if it is not yet the love of a wife for her husband I trust in God that when we are together I will be able to make it so. I will not tell anyone of our plans, not even Georgie or Theo. I will leave that task to you when you return to Basra. If possible I would like to marry as soon as you arrive so we can sail to England as man and wife and make the journey a new beginning for us both.

Angela

October 1918

Dear Angela,

We all know the Armistice is imminent so our Turkish captors, admitting defeat, have released us early. Major Crabbe, Crabbe's wife Yana, their adopted daughter Hasmik, and I will be travelling to Basra tomorrow morning. In fact we may reach the town before this letter.

I received the letter you sent me accepting my proposal. I thank you sincerely for the trust you have placed in me. As soon as I arrive in Basra I will speak to the padre and arrange a swift and quiet wedding ceremony. Just us and a few friends. One person who will be especially pleased to welcome you to England is my aunt, Harry, Michael, and Georgie's mother. She has been the only American in our quiet corner of England for many years.

I send you and our children love,

Your fiancé, John

Abdul's

November 1918

The last goodbyes had been said the previous day in Ibn Shalan's house. Neither John nor Georgie had expected to see Michael, Hasan, or Mitkhal again before they sailed, but the three of them had turned up unexpectedly in Abdul's where they were waiting for the boat to carry them downstream to the Gulf and the ocean-going liners.

As soon as the boat arrived, David, Angela, and Major and Mrs Crabbe took the children on board to give John and Georgiana a few last private moments with Hasan and Michael, but while Hasan and Georgiana embraced for the last time, Michael took the opportunity to explain – yet again – to John just why he was staying in Mesopotamia.

‘If the Arabs don't get a mandate to rule themselves after helping us to win the war against the Turks, there will be a revolt …'

‘And you want to be here to see it?' John interrupted.

‘I do,' Michael conceded.

‘It's hard losing both of you to the Bedouin.'

‘You haven't lost us, John. You can write to us care of Abdul. He always knows where to find us.' Hasan turned away from Georgiana and hugged him.

‘My Arab cousin. Or is that now cousins?' John turned from Hasan and Michael to Mitkhal.

Abdul knocked and opened the door. ‘The boat's ready, sir.'

‘Thank you, Abdul. Georgie? Time we left.' John offered her his arm.

They walked downstairs and on to the boat. David and Crabbe were leaning on the rail.

‘After all the sacrifice, all the killing, all the death, this is this how it ends?' David asked. ‘With a boat trip down the Shatt al-Arab?'

‘We're the lucky ones. For us, it ends with a journey home.' John watched Georgie take Robin from David. Mariam and Hasmik were running up and down the deck, under the eagle eyes of Yana Crabbe, who was watching every move they made.

John walked over to where Angela was sitting with Peter. He knew that they were all thinking of the ones who wouldn't be going home. Peter, Charles, Stephen Amey, Boris Bell – faces swirled in his mind's eye. Men he'd loved, men he'd cared for, even men he'd disliked, but above all, men he'd never forget.

John wrapped his arm around Angela. He looked up at the three robed Bedouin who stood side by side at an upstairs window in Abdul's and tipped his hat to them.

‘Shall we walk to the prow, Mrs Mason?'

‘To take a last look at Basra? Yes, please.'

He slipped his arm around her waist. Angela smiled up at him, then turned to look ahead towards the horizon, a shawl covering her head and that of her child. John watched and felt an overwhelming love for both of them.

He remembered the recurring dream that had begun in Kut.

The sky was blue, the breeze fresh. He was surrounded by light. It danced and shimmered, clear, beautiful and blinding above and around him. Below him the river glistened with reflected sunbeams that tipped the surface of the waves with winking gold and silver flashes. The wind carried the taste of fresh salt air blowing up from the Gulf. The vessel moved out from the river banks and glided, slow and stately, past the anchored boats into mid-stream.

HISTORICAL NOTES

Most scholars outside of Turkey now accept the genocide of the Armenians in 1915-16 by the Turks as fact. Possibly two of the best accounts are Henry H. Riggs'
Days of Tragedy in Armenia
and Tacy Atkinson's
The German, the Turk and the Devil made a Triple Alliance
. Both authors were American missionaries and both had first-hand knowledge of the atrocities. British POWs marched into Turkey after the surrender of Kut al Amara mentioned seeing abandoned Armenian villages and the bones of massacred Armenian men, women, and children in the desert. The report of the US Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Henry Morgenthau, Sr., is recognized as one of the main eyewitness accounts of the genocide. Morgenthau published his memoirs in a 1918 book,
Ambassador Morgenthau's Story
.

The Mesopotamian campaign in the First World War has been called ‘The Sideshow War' and ‘The Forgotten War.' It's certain that the surrender of Kut al Amara by General Townshend was an embarrassment the British would rather forget. The British Relief Force suffered heavy casualties both inside and outside Kut: in the effort to relieve the town between January and April 1916, 14,814 were killed or died of wounds, 12,807 died from disease, and 13,494 ended up in captivity or were posted missing. The treatment British POWs received at the hands of the Turks was savage and brutal, and classified as torture. Thousands died on forced marches or in captivity. There was talk of reprisals; some of the guilty Turks were arrested, but freed after the Treaty of Lausanne was signed in 1923.

Scorpion Sunset
is the end of a journey I began in 1985 when I met Christopher Marley, a Welsh volunteer and survivor of the Mesopotamian Campaign, who at the age of eighty-nine showed me his death certificate. It stated that he'd died of typhoid fever in Baghdad in 1918. His corpse didn't look ‘quite right' to the burial party, who put it aside. Four days later he woke up in the temporary mortuary. By then the army had declared him officially dead, notified his family, and refused him rations or a replacement uniform on the grounds that he was deceased. It took six months of arguing while begging for food and clothes from his companions before he was eventually restored to the strength of his battalion.

To my shame I hadn't heard of the First World War fought by the British against the Ottoman Turks in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) until Christopher told me about it. His tales inspired me to write
Long Road to Baghdad
,
Winds of Eden
, and
Scorpion Sunset
. It's been a long road!
Long Road to Baghdad
lay unpublished in a drawer for over 25 years. Editors who read it offered me contracts to write other books while insisting no one wanted to know about the First World War in Iraq. Fortunately Accent Press invited me to complete the trilogy in 2013, and readers have since proved otherwise! I am indebted to everyone at Accent for their continued faith in me, especially my editor Greg Rees.

Hasan Mahmoud/Harry Downe is based on Lt Col Gerard Leachman, Officer Commanding the Desert, who remained in Iraq at the end of the war in 1918. He, like so many, both Arab and British, had hoped that the Arabs would be given the opportunity to rule themselves. It was denied them at Versailles when the peace treaties were signed and the Allies carved up the Middle East. In 1920 the Arabs made a bid for freedom when they orchestrated the Arab Revolt. But that's another story …

In 1928 William Seabrook published his
Adventures in Arabia
. In it, he mentions seeing European men living in the black tents of the Bedouin in both the Arabian and Mesopotamian Deserts. They had invoked the hospitality of the desert and as such no questions were asked of them regarding their origins or motives for seeking a life among the Arabs. Were some surviving British POWs?

Finally, there is a plaque in the crypt of St Paul's Cathedral in London:

KUT EL-AMARA
5
^TH
DECEMBER 1915 TO 29
^TH
APRIL 1916
TO THE MEMORY OF
5746 OF THE GARRISON WHO DIED IN THE SIEGE
OR AFTERWARDS IN CAPTIVITY.
ERECTED BY THEIR SURVIVING COMRADES.

Catrin Collier, 2015

The
Long Road to Baghdad
series

by

Catrin Collier