Letters from Mesopotamia Part 12

_P.S._--You must think me brutal not to have mentioned my poor men. I have written so many letters this morning, I didn't notice it in this one. They are still being bombarded and have had 21 casualties out of 180: 5 killed, one of my draft, 2 officers slightly wounded. I hope to see them about Twelfth Night--no, say second Sunday after Epiphany!

CAMP.

_January 3_, 1916.

TO P.C.

... That afternoon the new draft arrived, headed by Jack Stillwell and Lester Garland. They arrived only 45 strong, having reached Basra over 100. Basra is a nest of military harpies who seize men for obscure duties and make them local sergts. Only 68 escaped from it; and of these 23 fell out on the march--another specimen of R.A.M.C.

efficiency. The M.O. at Quetta had merely pa.s.sed down the line asking each man "Are you fit?" and taking his answer.

In this letter A. stands for Amarah, C. for Kut, B. for Ali Gherbi.

B.

_Sunday_, January 2, 1916.

TO HIS FATHER.

As I shan't be able to mention places in connection with our movements, I shall call the station we left on December 31st A., this place B. and so on; and I think you ought to be able to follow, as I will make the lettering consistent.

We left A. at 2 p.m. on Friday. The men were on barges slung on either side of the river-boat, on which various details, our officers and the General and his staff were.

I brought my gun and 150 cartridges, and was unexpectedly soon rewarded: for one of the A.C.C's staff came along after lunch and asked for someone to come with him in the motor-boat and shoot partridges. As I was the only one with a gun handy I went. We raced ahead in the motor-boat for half-an-hour and then landed on the right bank and walked up the river for two-and-a-half hours, not deviating even to follow up coveys. There were a lot of birds, but it was windy and they were wild and difficult. Also with only two guns and three sepoys we walked over as many as we put up. Craik (the A.D.C's name, he is an Australian parson in peace-time) was a poor performer and only accounted for three. I got thirteen, a quail, a plover and a hare. I missed three or four sitters and lost two runners, but on the whole shot quite decently, as the extreme roughness of the hard-baked ploughed (or rather mattocked) land is almost more of an obstacle to good shooting than the behaviour of the birds. Craik was a stayer, and as the wind dropped at sunset and the birds grew tamer he persevered till it was dark. Then we had to walk three-quarters-of-a-mile before we could find a place where the boat could get in near the bank: so we had a longer and colder chase to catch up the ship than I had bargained for, especially as I had foolishly forgotten to bring a coat. However, when I got too cold I snuggled up against the engine and so kept parts of me warm. Luckily the ship had to halt at the camp of a marching column, so we caught her up in one-and-a-quarter hours.

I pitched my bed on deck up against the boiler, and so was as warm as toast all night.

Yesterday morning we steamed steadily along through absolutely bare country. The chief feature was the extraordinary abundance of sand-grouse. I told Mamma of the astonishing clouds of them which pa.s.sed over A. Here they were in small parties or in flocks up to 200: but the whole landscape is dotted with them from 8 a.m. till 11 and again from 3 to 4: so that any random spot would give one much the same shooting as we had at the Kimberley dams. An officer on board told me that when he was here two months ago, a brother officer had killed fifty to his own gun: and a Punjabi subaltern got twenty-one with five shots.

We reached here about 2 p.m. This place is only about forty-five miles from A. as the crow flies, but by river it takes sixteen hours, and with various halts and delays it took us just twenty-four. We only ran on to one mud-bank. The effect was curious. The ship and the port barge stopped dead though without any shock. The starboard barge missed the mud and went on, snapping the hawsers and iron cables uniting us. The only visible sign of the bank was an eddying of the current over it: it was right in midstream.

This is a most desolate place. Apart from the village with its few palms and gardens there seems not to be a blade of vegetation within sight. To the N.E. the Persian hills are only fifteen miles away. They have still a little snow (did I mention that the storm which gave us rain at A. had capped these hills with a fine snow mantle?)

Here we found "D" Co., which got stranded here when "A" Co. got stuck in C. We are about forty-five or fifty miles from C. as the crow flies, and the guns can be heard quite plainly: but things have been very quiet the last few days. There is an enemy force of 2,000 about ten miles from here, but how long they and the ones at C. will wait remains to be seen.

We know nothing of our own movements yet and I couldn't mention them if we did. We have been put into a different brigade, but the brigadier has not been appointed yet. The number of the brigade equals that of the ungrateful lepers or the bean-rows which Yeats intended to plant at Innisfree. We are independent of any division.

A mysterious Reuter has come through about conscription. As it quotes the _Westminster_ as saying Asquith has decided on it, I'm inclined to believe it: but it goes on to talk obscurely of possible resignations and a general election.

This may catch the same mail as my letter to Mamma from A.

_P.S._ Please tell Mamma that just as we were embarking, the S. and T.

delivered me two packages, which turned out to be the long-lost blue jerseys. So there is hope for the fishing rods yet.

_Monday_, January 10, 1915.

TO HIS MOTHER.

I will use a spare hour to begin an account of our doings since I last wrote, but I don't know when I shall be able to finish it, still less when post it.

We left B. last Thursday morning and were told we should march sixteen miles: we marched up the right bank, so our left flank was exposed to the desert, and "D" Company did flank guard. My platoon formed the outer screen and we marched strung out in single file. There were cavalry patrols beyond us again, and anyway no Arab could come within five miles without our seeing him, so our guarding was a sinecure.

We paraded as soon as it was light, at 7.15 a.m., but owing to the transport delays, the column did not start till after 9.0. The transport consists of: (a) ships and barges; (b) carts, mules and camels. Each has its limitations. Ships tie you to the river-bank, so every column must have some land transport. Camels can hardly move after rain: they slip and split themselves. The carts are fearfully held up by the innumerable ditches which are for draining the floods back to the river. There are not nearly enough mules to go round and they only carry 160lbs. each. So you can imagine our transport difficulties. The country supplies neither food, fodder nor fuel. Our firewood comes from India. If you leave the river you must carry every drop of drinking water. So the transport line was three times as long as the column itself, and moved more slowly.

Our new Brigadier turned up and proved to be a pleasant, sensible kind of man, looking rather like Lord Derby. Having just come from France, he keeps quite cool whatever we encounter. (P.S. We have had a new Brigadier since this one, I haven't yet seen the present one.)

The march was slow and rough, as most of the ground was hard-baked plough. The country was as level and bare as a table, bar the ditches, and we hardly saw a human being all day. It took us till after 4 p.m.

to do our sixteen miles. About 2 p.m. we began to hear firing and see shrapnel in the distance, and it soon became clear that we were approaching a big battle. Consequently we had to push on beyond our sixteen miles, and went on till Sunset. By this time we were all very footsore and exhausted. The men had had no food since the night before, the ration-cart having stuck in a ditch; and many of the inexperienced ones had brought nothing with them. My leg held out wonderfully well, and in fact has given me no trouble worth speaking of.

We had to wait an hour for orders, the Brigadier knowing nothing of the General's intentions. By six it was quite dark, and the firing had ceased: and we got orders to retrace our steps to a certain camping place (marked _I_ on sketch). This meant an extra mile, and immense trouble and confusion in finding our way over ditches and then sorting kits in the dark: but finally we did it, ate a meal, and turned in about 9.30 p.m. pretty well tired out, as we had been on the move fourteen hours and had marched about twenty-one miles. To put the lid on it, a sharp shower of exceedingly frigid rain surprised us all in our beauty sleep, about 11 p.m. and soaked the men's blankets and clothes. Luckily I had everything covered up, and I spread my overcoat over my head and slept on, breathing through the pocket-holes.

(I will continue this in diary form and post it if and when I get a chance.)

_Friday 7th._ Started at 8.30 and marched quietly about five miles.

This brought us within view of the large village of D., which is roughly half-way between B. and C. Between us and it the battle was in full swing. We halted by a pontoon bridge (2 on sketch), just out of range of the enemy's guns, and watched it for several hours. Owing to the utter flatness of the ground, we could see very little of the infantry. It was hot and the mirage blurred everything. Our artillery was clearly very superior to theirs, both in quant.i.ty (quite five to one it seemed) and in the possession of high explosive sh.e.l.l, of which the enemy had none: but we were cruelly handicapped (_a_) by the fact that their men and guns were entrenched and ours exposed; and (_b_) by the mirage, which made the location of their trenches and emplacements almost impossible.

I had better not say much about the battle yet, but I will give a rough sketch and describe our own experiences. I will only say this, that the two great difficulties our side had to contend with were: (1) the inability of the artillery to locate anything with certainly in the mists and mirage, and (2) the difficulty of finding and getting round the enemy's flanks. Either they had a far larger force than we expected, or they were very skilfully spread out--for they covered an amazingly wide front, quite eight miles, I should say, or more.

The battle was interesting to watch, but not exciting. The noise of the sh.e.l.ls from field guns is exactly like that of a rocket going up.

When the sh.e.l.l is coming towards you, there is a sharper hiss in it, like a whip. It gives you a second or two to get under cover and then crack-whizz as the shrapnel whizzes out. The heavy sh.e.l.ls from the monitors, etc., make a noise more like a landslide of pebbles down a beach, only blurred as if echoed. Bobbety's "silk dress swishing through the air" does his imagination credit, but is not quite accurate, nor does it express the spirit of the things quite!

About 3.30 we had orders to cross to the left bank. As we pa.s.sed over the bridge, we put up two duck, who had been swimming there peacefully with the sh.e.l.ls flying over their heads every half minute for hours.

When we reached the left bank we marched as if to reinforce our right flank. Presently the Brigadier made us line out into echelon of companies in line in single rank, so that from a distance we looked like a brigade, instead of three companies. About 4 we came up to a howitzer battery and lay down about 200 yards from it, thus:

[Ill.u.s.tration]

We had lain there about ten minutes when a hiss, crack, whizz, and sh.e.l.ls began to arrive, invariably in pairs, about where I've put the 1 and 2. We had a fine view. The first notice we had of each sh.e.l.l was the sudden appearance of a white puff, about thirty feet above ground, then a spatter of dust about thirty yards to the right, then the hiss-crack-whizz. They were ranging on the battery, but after a minute or two they spotted the ammunition column, and a pair of sh.e.l.ls burst at 3, then a pair at 4. So the column retreated in a hurry along the dotted arrow, and the sh.e.l.ls following them began to catch us in enfilade. So Foster made us rise and move to the left in file. Just as we were up, a pair burst right over my platoon. I can't conceive why n.o.body was. .h.i.t. I noticed six bullets strike the ground in a semi-circle between me and the nearest man three paces away, and everyone else noticed the same kind of thing, but n.o.body was touched.

I don't suppose the enemy saw us at all: anyway, the next pair pitched 100 yards beyond us, following the mules, and wounded three men in C.

Company: and the next got two men of B.--all flesh wounds and not severe. They never touched the ammunition column.

We lay down in a convenient ditch, and only one more pair came our way, as the enemy was ranging back to the battery. Of this pair, one hit the edge of the ditch and buried itself without exploding, and the other missed with its bullets, while the case bounced along and hit a sergeant on the backside, not even bruising it.

Just before 5 we got orders to advance in artillery formation. My platoon led, and we followed a course shown by the dotted line. We went through the battery and about 300 yards beyond, and then had orders to return to camp. On this trip (which was mere window-dressing) no sh.e.l.l came nearer than fifty yards: in fact our own battery made us jump much more.

The whole episode was much more interesting than alarming. Fear is seated in the imagination, I think, and vanishes once the mind can a.s.sert itself. One feels very funky in the cold nights when nothing is happening: but if one has to handle men under fire, one is braced up and one's attention is occupied. I expect rifle fire is much more trying: but the fact that sh.e.l.l-fire is more or less unaimed at one individually, and also the warning swish, gives one a feeling of great security.

We got back to camp near the river (4 on sketch) about 6, and dug a perimeter, hoping to settle down for the night. But at 7.30 orders came to move at 9.30. We were told that an enemy force had worked round our right flank, and that our brigade had to do a night march eastward down the river and attack it at dawn. So at 10 p.m. we marched with just a blanket apiece, leaving our kits in the camp.

After we had gone, the Q.M. made up a big fire and got in no fewer than fifty-two wounded, who were trying to struggle back to the field dressing station from the firing line four or five miles away.

The fire attracted them and parties went out to help them in. I think it is very unsatisfactory that beyond the regimental stretcher-bearers there is no ambulance to bring the wounded back: and how can a dozen stretchers convey 300 casualties five miles? It is a case of _sauve qui peut_ for the wounded: and when they get to the dressing station the congestion is very bad, thirty men in a tent, and only three or four doctors to deal with 3,000 or 4,000 wounded. I mention this as confirming my previous criticism of the medical service here.