Part 4 (1/2)
At the water's edge, as it recedes, patches of millet had been and were being planted. The river is falling rapidly and navigation becomes more difficult every week.
Kurna is aesthetically disappointing. The junction of the rivers is unimpressive, and the place itself a mere quayside and row of mud houses among thin and measly palms. It is of course the traditional site of Eden.
Above Kurna the river is not only halved in width, as one would expect, but narrows rapidly. Most of the day it was only a hundred yards wide and by evening only 60; and of the sixty only a narrow channel is navigable and that has a deep strong current which makes the handling of the boat very difficult.
In the afternoon we pa.s.sed Ezra's Tomb, which has a beautiful dome of blue tiles, which in India one would date Seventeenth Century.
Otherwise it looked rather ”kachcha” and out of repair, but it makes an extremely picturesque group, having two clumps of palms on either side of an otherwise open stretch of river.
Soon afterwards we came to a large Bedouin Village, or rather camp, running up a little creek and covering quite fifteen acres. They can't have been there long, as the whole area was under water two months ago. Their dwellings are made of reeds, a framework of stiff and pliant reeds and a covering of reed-matting; the whole being like the cover of a van stuck into the ground and one end closed; but smaller, about 5ft. 4ft. 7ft. There were about 100 of these and I should put the population at 700.
A whole crowd of boys and some men came out and ran along with us, and dived in for anything we threw overboard. They swam like ducks of course. All the boys and most of the men were quite naked, which is a thing you never see in India. Any boy over twelve there has a loin-cloth. There seemed to be very few men about: a lot of women came to the doors of their huts. They made no attempt to veil their faces, which even the beggar women in Basra did. Only one girl and one woman ran with the boat; the girl dived with the best; the woman was dressed and her function was to carry the spoils. Incidentally our men discovered a better use for their ration biscuits than attempting to eat them. They made excellent ducks and drakes on the water and the swimmers were quite keen on them. I must say they tasted rather musty besides being very hard, but I think the men chiefly objected to a very small brown beetle which was abundant in them.
When the sun got low we tied up to the bank for twenty minutes and a good many of the men had a bathe; but owing to the current we had to make them keep within a yard or two of the bank.
Next morning, Wednesday, a half-gale was blowing against us and progress was slower than ever. The river got wider again, nearly 200 yards in places, and the wind lashed it into waves. It was a great bore, because you couldn't put anything down for a second. Also three days confined to a minute deck-s.p.a.ce made me rather bilious.
In the afternoon the wind blew us ash.o.r.e when we were in sight of Amara, and it took nearly half an hour to get us off again. Finally, we arrived here about 5 p.m.
This is a town of about 10,000 inhabitants, on the left bank of the Tigris. On the river front is a quay about a mile long, and an equally long row of continental-looking houses. It almost reminds one of Dieppe at moments. The river is about 150 yards wide, and on the other side there are hardly any houses, just a narrow fringe of dates and some fields. All the inhabitants of the river-front have been turned out and it is occupied with offices, stores, hospitals and billets. We occupy a block of four houses, which have a common courtyard behind them, a great cloistered yard, which makes an admirable billet for the men.
We officers live in two of the houses, the third is Orderly Room, etc., and the fourth is used by some Native Regiment Officers. There is no furniture whatever, so it is like camping with a house for a tent. We sleep on the roof and live on the verandahs of the little inner courts. It is decidedly cooler than Basra, and last night I wanted a blanket before dawn for the first time since April (excluding the Hills, of course). In my room now (2.45 p.m.) it is 96 but there is plenty of breeze about.
It seems to be just a chance when the mail goes out: I hope to write to Papa later on in the week and give him the news of this place and the regiment. If I spell names of places without a capital letter it will be for an obvious reason. Also note that the place which is marked on the map Kut-al-Amara is always referred to here as Kut.
_P.S_.--In regard to what you say about the ducks, I'm told that teal are common in Turkey and snipe in Arabia, but not so common as mallard in England or pintail in India. The bitterns here boom just like guns.
ATT. 1/4 HANTS, I.E.F. ”D,”
C/o INDIA OFFICE, S.W.
AMARAH, _September 4th_,1915.
To R.K.
Yours from Albemarle Street reached me just before we left Basra. It gave me the first news of Charles Lister's second wound. We get almost no news here. Potted _Reuter_ is circulated most days, but each unit may only keep it half an hour, so its two to one against one's seeing it. My only resource is the _Times_ which laboriously dogs my steps from England: but it has already been pinched en route four times, so I can't rely on seeing even that: therefore in the matter of casualties, please be as informative as you can, regardless of originality.
As I told you in my last letter that I was going to Nasiriyah, it won't surprise you to find I've got here instead. We reached Basra (it would be much nicer to spell it Ba.s.sorah, but I can't be bothered to) on the feast of St. Bartholomew, which the Military call 24/8/15.
Considering what places are like out here, B. is wonderfully attractive and picturesque. At least Ashar is, which is the port; Beroea: Corinth:: Ashar: Basra. To begin with it stands between six and eight feet above the river level, an almost unique eminence. Then lots of major and minor creeks branch out from the river and from the main streets. All round and in every unbuilt on s.p.a.ce are endless groves of date palms, with ma.s.ses of yellow dates. The creeks are embanked with brick and lined with popular cafe's where incredible numbers of Arabs squat and eat or drink huggas and hacs.h.i.+sh and the like. The creeks and river swarm with bh.e.l.lums and mahilas. A bh.e.l.lum is a cross between a gondola and a Canada canoe: and a mahila is a barge like the ones used by King Arthur, Elaine or the Lady of Shallott: and its course and destination are generally equally vague.
We stayed six days at B. mainly on a captured Turkish pilgrim s.h.i.+p. I suggest a Turkish pilgrimage as a suitable outlet for the ascetic tendencies of your more earnest spikelets. It was hot, but nothing fabulous. My faithful thermometer never got beyond 104 in my cabin. The disadvantage of any temperature over 100 indoors is that the fan makes you hotter instead of cooler. There are only two ways of dealing with this difficulty. One is to drink a.s.siduously and keep an evaporation bath automatically going: but on this s.h.i.+p the drinks used to give out about 4 p.m. and when it comes to neat Tigris-c.u.m-Euphrates, I prefer it applied externally. So I used to undress at intervals and sponge all over and then stand in front of the fan. While you're wet it's deliciously cool: as soon as you feel the draught getting warm, you dress again and carry on. This plan can't be done here as there are no fans. I suppose you realised that Austen Chamberlain was only indulging his irrepressible sense of humour when he announced in the H. of C. that in Mesopotamia ”The health of troops has on the whole been good. Ice and fans are installed wherever possible,” _i.e._ nowhere beyond Basra. The hot weather sickness casualties have been just over 30% of the total force: but as they were nearly all heat-stroke and malaria, it ought to be much better now. Already the nights are cool enough for a blanket to be needed just before dawn. Of course they run up the sick list by insane folly. When we moved to our Turkish s.h.i.+p there was every hour of the day or night to choose from to do it in, and plenty of covered barges to do it in. So they selected 10 a.m., put 150 men into an open barge, gave them no breakfast, and left them in the barge two hours to move them 600 yards, and an hour unloading baggage afterwards! Result, out of my forty-nine, three heat-strokes on the spot, and four more sick the next day.
We left Basra on the 30th. It took us two-and-a-half days to do the 130 miles up here, against a strong wind and current. The Regiment has moved here from Nasiriyah. This place is 130 miles North of Basra and 120 South of Kut-el-Amarah (always known as Kut). As to our movements, the only kind of information I can give you would be something like this. There are fifteen thousand blanks, according to trustworthy reports, at blank. We have blank brigades and our troops are blanking at blank which is two-thirds of the way from here to blank; and I think our intention is to blank with all our three blanks as soon as possible, but this blank is remaining on lines of communications here for the present. Not very interesting is it? So I won't reel off any more.
From the little sc.r.a.ps of news that have come through, it looks as if the Balkans were going to be the centre of excitement. If Bulgaria has agreed to let the Germans through as I suspect she has, I'd bet on both Greece and Roumania joining the Allies.
AMARAH.
_September 4th_, 1915.