Part 2 (1/2)
Don hates camels, and was rearing up in fine style. Therein he showed judgment more correct than did the General, for, in answer to my spur, he had no sooner drawn level with the beast than the ”dead” camel swung its long snaky neck round upon us and opened eyes and mouth simultaneously.
Don jumped the bank and the whole staff of telephonists and landed almost on top of General Smith, whose horse objected considerably. I laughed until the general restrained my humour.
The horses were awfully done, and in the batteries could just move the guns at the slowest walk. We did about a mile an hour. About 3 p.m. General Townshend shouted to General Smith that one of our batteries was sh.e.l.ling our own transport which appeared round the head of the river, miles ahead. My general apparently forgot me, and went off on his old charger. The transport could not have been saved by the time he got up to the guns. I put Don at a ditch and, racing up a knoll close by, blew on my long sounding whistle ”cease fire,” and held up my hand. The battery commander saw it, and when I galloped up I apologized for interrupting his shooting, and explained. They had bracketed the transport and a shot was in the breech of the gun, so my whistle had just got them in time. A splendid fellow is the commander of that battery, Major Broke-Smith, an excellent soldier and cheerful friend. Unperturbed, he said, ”Well, if I'm to sh.e.l.l all Arab bodies, and the river will wind so----”
And when I got back General Townshend thanked me, at which I was much elated.
In the afternoon we halted for two and a half hours to enable the straggling crowds to catch up. I rode miles trying to find our transport cart with the stores, but it had got somewhere in the front several miles off. Some one produced a cube of Oxo, and we had that divided and a whisky peg each.
”G. B.” slept, and I saw the horses watered and unsaddled.
The general had some biscuits given him, and some signalling officer--whom the G.o.ds preserve!--gave me a sausage, which I ate before considering whether it would divide or not.
Then on again, on, on, for hours. Mules fell down and were helped up only to fall again a hundred yards further on.
Then word came by aeroplane that we might have to fight our way into Kut through an Arab and Turkish force. Later, to every one's dismay, we heard that we were not to reach Kut that night after all, but to bivouac five miles from it. In the last light of December 2nd, we saw the sun on the distant roofs of the village we had legged it so strenuously to reach.
The brisk and prolonged marching of yesterday, and of last night, had reduced the present possible pace to a mile an hour.
We found a ruined _serai_, a four-walled enclosure of ground thirty yards square. Headquarters came here. A heap of dust and trampled chaff I selected as a sleeping place for the General, Captain Garnett, and me. It was colder than ever and a biting wind blew through our very souls. No one who has not sampled it for himself can credit the intense cold of such a Mesopotamian night. I have registered the cold of Oberhof, where twenty feet of snow and icicles forty feet high rendered every wood impa.s.sable. I have boated on the west coast of Scotland, where the wind from Satan's antipodes cuts through coat and flesh and bone. I have felt the cold from the glaciers of New Zealand. But I have never felt cold to equal that of December 2nd of the Retreat. Perhaps hunger and extreme exhaustion help the cold.
We lay close together for warmth. Late in the night some bread arrived from Kut. I had an awful pa.s.sage of a mile, falling over ruts and into nullahs, and once very nearly into the river. We could not show lights as the opposite bank swarmed with Arabs. I walked with General Hamilton to the supply column. While we waited he told me of the battle of Ctesiphon. I got five stale loaves, two of which I gave Don Juan, who was s.h.i.+vering violently. Then I picketed the horses close together for warmth and we three ate our loaves.
General Townshend occupied the far corner of the _serai_, and he spoke very cheerily to me for a minute or two. It was very extraordinary how well I had got to know some of the Staff during the last two days. Our acquaintances.h.i.+p seemed of years. But then the retirement itself seemed that long.
CHAPTER III
WE REACH KUT--BEGINNING OF THE SIEGE--THE CHRISTMAS a.s.sAULT
We left at 5 a.m. and trotted over the _maidan_ to Kut.
The horses knew that there food and rest awaited them. We got in at 730 a.m., but the column took hours. I found Headquarters on the river front of the town and our ill-omened transport already arrived there. I rode on ahead to get things ready. First, I quieted my stomach with some whisky and warm water, and then had a remarkable breakfast of bacon and eggs, cold ham, cold fowl, toast and marmalade and coffee.
But there was no chance of rest yet awhile. A siege was impending. No reinforcements were in the country and Townshend's plan was to hold up the Turkish advance at Kut.
While we defended this strategical junction of the Tigris and Shat-al-Hai, the enemy could neither get to Nasireyeh nor down to Amarah. The river is the means of transport. And so there was much to be done--wounded and ineffectives to be moved downstream, trenches and gun-pits and redoubts to be made, defences erected, and everywhere communication trenches miles long to be dug and a thousand other things arranged for. It was a race of parapet building against the Turk. The army could not be spared much rest. I had to collect the B.G.R.A.'s stores from _mahelas_ and elsewhere, get a secure place for ourselves and our horses, and buy stuff for the possible siege, although it might be for only three weeks.
The river-front then became too hot for the Staff, so we adjourned to dug-outs in the construction of which hangs a story. In the meantime one learned that we had lost a barge of wounded, several _mahelas_ of supplies, supply barge, H.M.S. _Firefly_, _Comet_, and _Shaitan_ in the retirement. The _Firefly_ was an unfortunate affair, the sh.e.l.l striking her boiler.
There might have been time to blow her up, but it appears that there was a wounded man down below. The breech-blocks of her guns were thrown overboard and the crew escaped.
An excellent range-finder was captured on her. At the moment of writing she is pelting sh.e.l.ls at us into Kut.
We also heard that two cavalry officers who had ridden through the Arabs' lines to General Melliss' brigade with orders to join in the Um-al-Tabul engagement on the night of December 1st, had been recommended for the V.C.
On December 4th, the day after we entered Kut, the last boat left for down the river. On the 5th the Cavalry Brigade and S Battery left Kut for down below, as they would not be of so much importance in a siege. Before they went Major Rennie-Taylor, commanding S Battery, had lunch with us.
A day later the aeroplanes flew away. Then we were decidedly alone. Bullets fell from the north. Soon they came from every direction.
The dug-out for the B.G.R.A.'s Staff was to be made out on the _maidan_ near the brick-kilns. The General added to the plans of the Pioneers for its construction, and so the thing was built like a long grave and the poles laid cross-wise. As a traveller of some experience myself I saw that trouble was obviously ahead. I hinted that as three poles were bearing on the centre one, that was insufficient to carry the total weight. My suggestion was dispersed by an eloquent explosion on the part of my General. So it was built; and somewhere in high heaven a humorous Fate looked down and smiled. At midnight the roof that carried tons of bricks and soil collapsed without warning. It was the greatest luck we escaped without awful accident. I occupied the end farther from the entrance where General Smith slept, Garnett sleeping underneath beneath the ledge.
Luckily I was awake and, hearing the beam snap, I was out of my sleeping bag like a bullet, accidentally upsetting the General on top of Garnett. As I moved it fell in. I had taken the precaution to sleep with my head towards the entrance, else I had never escaped. For the rest of the night I s.h.i.+vered in the cold alongside the cook, without blankets, sleeping bag, or even jacket. All these were pinned down.
In the morning when the working party came, we found that the central beam had broken and the two broken ends were forced a foot into the hard bas.e.m.e.nt of my bed, just where my chest would have been. My General offered the remark: ”An orderly officer is responsible for the health of his General.” And remembering the mental curses I had manufactured at the time of the occurrence, and extracting further humour from having accidentally omitted to remove a stone from the part of the trench where the general had been compelled to lie, I proffered embrocation, and, being a dutiful subaltern, hid my smile. In the teeth of Turkish opposition the West Kents remade the dug-out that day. It has not collapsed yet.
To get from the dug-out to the town we had to cross a sh.e.l.l-swept zone. Every few yards was a splash of smoke and flame. That was, of course, at the beginning of the siege.
Our dug-outs were near several brick-kilns, themselves sufficient target without our gun flashes. We had a battery of 18-pounders on one side, 5-inch on the other, and howitzers behind. So we came in for all the ranging. It was out of the question to leave any cooking utensils above ground, for they were certain to be perforated within a few moments.
A most wretched existence it was in that abominable little dug-out, but the balancing feature was our proximity to Colonel Courtenay of the 5-inch. A fountain of good-humour, ever flowing, an excellent story-teller, and a very human person. I delighted in his company. He was a very brave man, not of the defiant sort, but rather as one who has learned not to fear the inevitable. I saw him observing one day and a burst described a complete zone around him, but he went on stuffing tobacco into his pipe as if it was all November fireworks.
One evening I stood at the mouth of the dug-out giving orders. Some snipers from over the river must have seen me.