Too Close to the Sun (20 page)

THE OTTOMAN PROVINCE
of Mesopotamia, Land of the Two Rivers, was a region of yearning plains traced by the sinuous writhings of the Tigris and the Euphrates. It was also strategically vital. First, it was on the all-important route to India. Second, its gulf port, Basra, lay close to the refinery that processed British oil supplies pumped from South Persia, and, then as now, government policy was directed by hunger for oil. In fact, much of the territory consisted of inhospitable desert where bands of Arab robbers marauded unchecked in temperatures in excess of 120 degrees. But oil was oil. Once Turkey entered the war on the side of the Germans in October 1914, it was only a matter of time before the Allies invaded Mesopotamia in an attempt to seal off the Persian Gulf. The Germans, for their part, were fixated on the idea of establishing an eastern empire and had been stoking local support. Their agents had even spread rumors, widely repeated in the bazaars, that the kaiser had converted to Islam.

Until February 1916, the Mesopotamia campaign had been directed from India. But Indian high command had never handled a major overseas expedition before, and its army was already buckling under the commitments war had imposed. Communication between London and Delhi was poor, British policy was inconsistent, and military planners catastrophically underestimated the problems of a 550-mile riverine supply line. (There were no roads to speak of in the whole of Mesopotamia.) The river system, difficult in the dry season, turned into a lake by mid-May, when ten thousand square miles of land lay underwater—the flood, perhaps, described in Genesis. The first eighteen months of the campaign had been fought by inadequately trained troops and an eclectic fleet of requisitioned Calcutta-built river steamers, Royal Navy shallow-draft gunboats, and ambulance paddle steamers. The climate did nothing to improve rations that were second-rate when they started their journey. When the soldiers pierced their tins of bully beef, the contents shot out in a liquid jet. Their ammunition was labeled
MADE IN THE USA. FOR PRACTICE ONLY
.

Medical facilities were deplorable at best, and, in addition to the usual roster of tropical diseases, the swollen sick list now included cases of sand-fly fever and smallpox. Despite all this, the Anglo-Indian force beat the Turks back when they met on and around the delta, and their successes led British newspapers to refer to “the Mesopotamian picnic.” The victories were little short of miraculous, and it was almost inevitable that they would culminate in one of the most spectacular failures in British military history. In December 1915, close to thirteen thousand British and Indian soldiers were besieged at Kut al-Amara, in the curve of a loop in the Tigris south of Baghdad. Of all the infernos of the First World War, of all the crucifying battlefields, entrenchments, and prisons, the former licorice factory at Kut was among the worst.
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In April 1916, the starving survivors surrendered, only to be force-marched through the desert and horse-whipped in prison camps in Asia Minor. Between January and April, the Tigris Corps lost twenty-three thousand men.

Hoskins, who was to command the Third (Lahore) Division, had served in the Egyptian army for four years and had experience of the Arab world. But Mespot, as it was known, was by now an unpopular posting, and there was no more talk of picnics. The fall of Kut had shocked the British public. Ugly rumors circulated about the plight of the wounded and the scandalous absence of medical facilities. A commission of public inquiry was established, and in the ensuing hurricane of righteous indignation Secretary of State for India Austen Chamberlain, who had correctly come in for censure, resigned his post.

THE TROOPS TRANSSHIPPED
at the Gulf. An entire Bengali regiment squeezed into the barges lashed to the sides of Denys’s steamer before it proceeded through the Shatt-al-Arab, a series of muddy channels in which men maneuvered gondola-like
mashoof
while women ran along the banks carrying baskets of eggs and chickens, robes flying. Everyone disembarked at Basra, where hundreds of uniformed Indians thronged the vaulted passageways of the bazaars. Continuing north by paddle steamer, Kermit and Denys went ashore at Amara and met an armed sentry. “I slipped behind my companion to give him a chance to explain us,” Kermit wrote. At Sunnaiyat, on the old Babylonian plain near Kut, they inspected the remains of looters who had been tampering with unexploded grenades abandoned in 1915. “The trenches were a veritable Golgotha with skulls everywhere and dismembered legs still clad with puttees and boots,” Kermit concluded.

They finally disembarked at Kut, covering the remaining hundred miles to Baghdad by train. The railway followed the old caravan route past the remaining arch of the great hall of Ctesiphon, the ancient city buried under mountains of sand. The scattered settlements in the drab tableland were shabby after years of neglect, the minarets decaying and the people dulled to a stupor by heat and hunger. It had been an exceptionally punishing summer; fetid smells seemed to emanate from the sand itself. Some said Mesopotamia was the original Garden of Eden, but it didn’t look like it.
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In the major post-Kut reorganization, the War Office had taken control of the campaign. The whole enterprise had begun as an effort to protect oil supplies, but as it unfolded, the prize of Baghdad—and the Berlin-to-Baghdad railway—became an end in itself. By the end of 1916, nearly two hundred thousand fresh British and Indian troops had arrived to launch an offensive under Major General Stanley Maude. The new force was supported by a flotilla of modified paddle steamers, thousands of horses, mules and carts, a fleet of Ford vans, and twenty-four specially adapted planes with aerial cameras and the latest bombing equipment. High command was gradually waking up to the fact that mechanical transport was more suitable than the four-legged kind in Arabia, because oil was produced locally whereas fodder had to be imported from India. Sappers beefed up the primitive port facilities and built a series of narrow-gauge railways as well as ordnance depots and clinics. When the offensive began, it went almost without a hitch. Baghdad fell in March 1917. It was a devastating setback for the Ottoman Empire, which was still reeling from the Arab Revolt, and certainly marked the end of the German dream of a new India in Arabia. But the campaign was not over. Intelligence sources reported that there was a new Turko-German force assembling at Aleppo, and Enver Pasha, the Turkish war minister, was obsessed with the idea of recapturing Baghdad. The Germans had invested heavily in a new force,
Yilderim
(“Thunderbolt”), and preparations were under way to deploy it in Mesopotamia, though in fact it never was. Whitehall decided that the army in Palestine was better placed than Maude and his troops to go into Upper Mesopotamia. Maude was therefore ordered not to move but, instead, to consolidate his position and tighten his grip on the region.

Baghdad itself had changed little in appearance since the days of the caliphs, except for the pontoon bridge that Maude had thrown across the Tigris. The milky waters below teemed with the cauldron-shaped
gufahs
that Herodotus describes carrying merchandise from Nineveh to Babylon. Armenian refugees, red-fezzed Muslims, and Persians in silk coats streamed through the Southern Gate to mill around the peacock-blue mosques and mud-brick slums, unperturbed by the presence of another invading army. Denys sat in coffeehouses drinking clear, bitter coffee, smoking a narghile, and watching Kurdish porters with sacks of dates on their backs and women haggling for bracelets with babies on theirs. The smell of unleavened bread and lamb spitting over charcoal pervaded the bazaar, but back at headquarters rations were monotonous, the only treats an occasional consignment of condensed milk or tinned salmon. Dust storms plagued everyone everywhere, and the south wind left a thick sandy deposit in teacups and canteens. Denys focused on playing bridge, and saw a lot of Kermit. “Dear K,” he wrote in a note attached to a check for seven pounds ten shillings to pay off a gambling debt. “Your tie herewith, and your ill-gotten gains. I may be station-wards about ten—if so I’ll bring a pack and rubi you properly in the break—you perfectly priceless old thing. DFH.” When they grew tired of bridge, they ate salted watermelon seeds in the riparian garden of the Persian consul, or climbed down the banks of the Tigris and dug out bricks eighteen inches square on which they could make out the seal of Nebuchadnezzar.

News from the north was good. British forces closed in on the Turks throughout the autumn and into the spring, as did Russians advancing from the north and east. Meinertzhagen was partially responsible. He had been shipped out of East Africa after a funny turn in November 1916 and subsequently resurfaced as the intelligence chief of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force, in which capacity he was busy tricking Turks in Palestine—at one point dropping them cigarettes laced with opium grains. Then, on November 18, after a run of British victories, Maude died of cholera. He had acquired the status of Kitchener to the army in Mesopotamia and his death was a disaster. But early in December reports came in that British troops had entered Jerusalem, and church bells were ringing there for the first time since the war began. This was the end of Turkish hopes of recapturing Baghdad, and it foreshadowed the close of a campaign that had cost thirty thousand British and Indian lives. Elsewhere, however, the censors could not disguise the fact that news was not encouraging. Reports came in of the catastrophe at Caporetto, where the Italian army had collapsed at the end of October, and of a Bolshevik coup in Petrograd, the latter creating anxiety among the Allies that the new leaders might pull Russia out of the war, allowing the Germans to shift large numbers of men to the western front. By December, the Russian army had more or less disintegrated, and on the twenty-second the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk did bring Russia out of the war. General Sir W. R. Marshall, who had taken over from Maude, was asked to reduce numbers in Mesopotamia. This was excellent news for Denys. He wanted to get out—the campaign had shifted to Upper Mesopotamia before he even arrived, and down south there wasn’t enough to do. He had accompanied Hoskins on motor sorties up the Tigris to the bitumen wells around Hit and through the pretty villages along the Euphrates, where wooden wheels looped through the sky to irrigate gardens buzzing with arsenic-green birds. But he was frustrated, and so was Kermit, who was about to request a transfer from the British Expeditionary Force to the American army in France.

Denys had been thinking of learning to fly. Military airplanes had been deployed in substantial numbers for the first time around Ypres in August 1917, and the potential of airpower in battle had suddenly burst on the consciousness of War Office mandarins. “Ministers are quite off their heads as to the future possibilities of aeronautics for ending the war,” announced Lord Trenchard, the new chief of air staff. (In recognition of the importance of planes in war, on April 1, 1918, the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Navy Air Service were to be merged into a new institution called the Royal Air Force.) The life expectancy of a British pilot at the front was eleven days, and the War Office was now desperate for pilots. It was the perfect moment for a man addicted to risk to begin his flying career. Training courses were hastily being established where military units were already embedded, among them one at a base near Cairo, which appealed to Denys, as he did not want to spend the winter in Europe. He hated cold weather, and it was bad for his heart, so he had the idea that, once qualified, he would fly on a European front in the summer months and then get moved out East for the winter. A short time into his Mesopotamian tour he therefore applied, with Hoskins’s approval, to train as a pilot with the Royal Flying Corps. When he learned that he had been accepted, he found Hoskins a replacement aide-de-camp and, after the first rains had softened the plains into brackish pools, traveled by train down to Basra. He had been ordered to proceed at once for Egypt. But before he could start his flying course he heard that Pixley, the old charmer with whom he had first trekked over the Laikipia escarpment, had been killed at Houthulst Forest in France.

Denys’s business relationship with Pixley was at the center of his complex network of Kenyan projects. The pair jointly owned the Naivasha farm, the chain of
dukas,
and other property. It was therefore essential for Denys to return to Kenya to untangle arrangements, and he was due a long leave anyway. He applied for permission to return, and deferred the start of his flying course until June. Back in Nairobi, he rented a bachelor room at Muthaiga; the Parklands house had been converted into a military convalescent home. The club had itself been taken over as a hospital for most of 1916, but was now operational once more, selling Virginia cigarettes and holding dances at which Goan stewards served sandwiches and fruit. It was usually a convivial place to stay, as members dined at one long table, but now most male settlers were away fighting, or dead.