Enemy on the Euphrates (46 page)

And among those to whom General Haldane’s order was addressed there were some army officers who would have been equally unhappy with the wording of the order. It contained strong implications – indeed virtually accusations – that one or other senior officer had indeed, been taking ‘risks quite unwarrantable from a military point’ and behaving in a manner ‘not strictly in accordance with sound military principles’. Major General Leslie, for one, would have bitterly resented these words because from the testy encounters with his commanding officer which he had already experienced, he had a strong impression that Haldane was in some way pointing the finger of blame at him for the setbacks of the past few days. For his part, Leslie had taken to referring dismissively to his commander-in-chief as ‘the early-Victorian baronet’.

Meanwhile, official opinion fluctuated wildly as to the advisability of withdrawing from the Mosul vilayet in order to concentrate British
forces in the vilayets of Baghdad and Basra and hopefully forestall any further catastrophes like the Manchester Column debacle. However, in a telegram of 24 July Sir Percy Cox, recently arrived in Britain to brief the cabinet, weighed in with his own views on the matter. ‘I can only contemplate with the greatest dismay the suggestion that we should withdraw from Mosul,’ he stated. Apart from the impact upon ‘our prestige throughout Mesopotamia’,

I regard the maintenance of our position in Mesopotamia as a factor of enormous importance to our general interests in the Middle East and India. From an economic point of view I think it is common knowledge that the possibilities of Mesopotamia in oil, cotton and wheat make it a great country of promise … Oil is of course, an uncertain quantity but the prospect is at any rate sufficient to attract to Mesopotamia the interest and capital of very large concerns.

And he continued by pointing out the key importance of holding on to Basra (control of which would be threatened by any withdrawal from more northern parts of Iraq).

We have previously considered the control of the port of Basra at the head of the Persian Gulf to be most important for the strength of our position in those waters. It is especially so now a days in view of our large vested interested in Abadan and in the oil of Arabistan; but its value would be entirely vitiated were Baghdad in the hands of a hostile Power.
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Looking back on the twelve days which followed the destruction of the Manchester Column, General Haldane would later conclude that in no other period of his lengthy military career had there been an episode of quite such intense anxiety. His capture and imprisonment during the Boer War; his four-year service on the Western Front – for much of it in command of the Ypres salient under ever-present threat of being overrun by a German assault – these were as nothing compared to the mental strain which the general suffered in that last week of July and first week in August 1920 during which, on 6 August, the mujtahidin of Karbela’ had made his task even more difficult by finally declaring the insurgency to be a jihad.
¹

What made matters worse was his sense of the unfairness of it all. Unlike the majority of his fellow senior officers with whom he had served throughout the war, at its end he had no family to return to (except his sister, Alice), no large estate to which he could retire and upon which he could lavish his attention, nor even any close friends with whom he could enjoy the social and recreational pursuits of his class: no, the army was his life, the army was his family – a family for which he had made great personal sacrifices over his many years of faithful service. And now, at a time in his life when he might have expected to be enjoying a comfortable and prestigious posting commensurate with his experience and seniority, instead, he had been handed this poisoned chalice – a thankless assignment in which success would win him few plaudits but failure could mean a shameful and inglorious end to the career to which he had selflessly devoted his whole life.

In his darkest moments, Haldane contemplated a range of miserable outcomes to his present situation. Sometimes his mind dwelt upon the possibility of a steadily increasing number of small-scale defeats in which garrisons up and down the country were wiped out, while in Britain, a furious and vindictive public opinion called for his dismissal and replacement by someone like General Allenby (a bully, whom he detested). In even blacker moods he contemplated the loss of Baghdad itself. Admittedly, he had been flippant about such an eventuality, that day back in June, when he dined with Miss Bell before leaving for Persia; but two months later, when the encirclement and capture of the city by a vast horde of Muslim fanatics – a city for which so much British blood had been spilt during the war – seemed a real possibility, the thought of such a catastrophe brought him to a state of near panic. His only respite from such dismal thoughts was, last thing at night, to take up his Bible and read ‘the psalm for the evening of the day’.
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Not that he blamed Churchill for his present misfortune. Clearly, when he had offered Haldane the post of GOC-in-chief, Mesopotamia, the war minister himself could have had no idea about how events in Iraq were about to unfold. In fact the person upon whom Haldane most frequently vented his spleen in the days following the Manchester Column debacle was not his chief but his immediate subordinate, Major General Leslie. What on earth had possessed the man to allow his troops to go wandering about in the desert with insufficient water supplies and in the presence of overwhelming numbers of hostile tribesmen? Surely he had made it abundantly clear that the column should advance no further than the position at Imam Bakr, within easy reach of its base at Hilla? Had he not impressed this upon Leslie, when the request for authorisation to send out the column had been communicated to him via his staff officer, Stewart, on the morning of 23 July? At all events, there would have to be a committee of inquiry, but of one thing Haldane was absolutely certain –
he
would not be apportioned any blame for the disaster.

But for now, the commander-in-chief had more urgent matters to attend to. After the retreat from Rumaytha, the bulk of the troops belonging to its garrison and those of RUMCOL, which had rescued
them, were still at Diwaniyya, forty-three miles south-east of Hilla, or strung out along the Hilla road, holding small outposts along the line of retreat. In total, this force amounted to two squadrons of cavalry, four batteries of Royal Field Artillery (less two sections), one battery of pack artillery and five Indian infantry battalions plus the elements of four other Indian battalions including some pioneers and sappers. In addition, there were 1,120 civilian railway personnel, 300 cart-loads of ammunition and supplies and 23,000 gallons of water. This brigadesize force under the command of General Coningham, together with the accoutrements, supplies and materiel of a much larger military formation, was now dangerously isolated in overwhelmingly hostile territory with the very real threat of encirclement and destruction.

Haldane decided that extricating Coningham’s troops as rapidly as possible by withdrawing them north, to Hilla, was of the utmost importance. However, the road transport available at Diwaniyya for a march back to Hilla was quite insufficient to carry the six days’ rations it was believed the retreating column would require. The railway would have to be used, but as each day passed, the rebels were becoming increasingly active and proficient in destroying the track. Haldane faced the very real possibility that ‘the Arabs might tear up and damage the railway to such an extent that General Coningham’s force might find itself marooned midway between Hilla and Diwaniyya, possibly at some waterless spot where the difficulty of further progress would, for much of it, be insuperable.’

In fact, an initial attempt to use the railway to move more troops back to Hilla had already failed. On 27 July a train en route from Diwaniyya to Hilla had been derailed and isolated at Guchan station, some twenty-eight miles north of Diwaniyya. And on the following day a relief construction train sent out to assist the earlier one had also been attacked by Arabs and failed to reach Guchan. Meanwhile, Haldane began to fret about the slowness of extricating the force at Diwaniyya, blaming this shortcoming, also, on Major General Leslie. Indeed, from that point on, Haldane began to communicate directly with Brigadier Coningham over the head of Leslie, which understandably resulted in a
further exacerbation of the ill-feeling between the two men.

Meanwhile Coningham was assembling what must have been, at that time, one the most remarkable military formations in the history of the British Empire – a huge armoured column combining both railway and road transport which would eventually stretch for over a mile in length. Along the railway track, truckage was allotted to each unit and department, together with the railway personnel and some thirteen Armenian lady school teachers who happened to be at Diwaniyya. In the centre of the train a portion was set apart for a hospital for the sick and wounded and at the rear a few trucks and an engine were converted into an armoured train carrying two armoured cars and two machine guns. As night began to fall on the evening of 29 July everything was complete; the men were issued with six days’ rations and as much water as could be carried. Then, at 6.30 the following morning, the huge column began to move off.

As this long, snake-like formation slowly trundled northwards, small parties of mounted insurgents followed it at a respectful distance, occasionally loosing off volleys of rifle fire into the column, but without much effect. At the same time, the crew of the train which had been cut off and isolated at Guchan began to re-lay the sleepers and railway tracks in their rear and slowly move south to meet Coningham’s column moving north. By 8.00 a.m. on 2 August the two trains were only a mile apart and a couple of hours later they met, with great cheering and general jubilation. After their reunion the combined force proceeded north to Guchan, which was reached at 4.30 p.m. Here, the railway tanks were refilled and an advance force of railway construction workers, protected by the 45th Sikhs, was sent ahead to repair the railway line as they approached the important Jarbuiyya bridge over the Hilla branch of the Euphrates; but news of a large concentration of Arabs in the vicinity of the bridge compelled Coningham to stop the advance and consolidate his position at Guchan station.

On 4 August, the column, now consisting of six locomotives and 250 railway wagons, once again moved off towards Hilla. It was a crucial race against time. The Arabs knew that by destroying the
track in front of the column and forcing delays to repair it, they were forcing Coningham’s men to use up their food and water supplies. And because the insurgents were now removing the railway sleepers and hiding them in neighbouring villages, the British had to lift the track and sleepers in their rear and carry them forward to replace those which had been removed. All this involved exhausting work for the predominantly Indian labourers upon whom this gruelling task fell and who were toiling in the most excessive heat.

As the force again approached the Jarbuiyya bridge, Arab attackers once more harassed its advance, although a flight of five aircraft from Baghdad helped to drive them off. Still, the advancing column was making only very slow progress and the men were now placed on half-rations, but by 8 August the work of repairing began for the last time and at 9.20 a.m. contact was made by heliograph with a construction train moving south from Hilla to meet them. At 4.45 p.m. the railway line to Hilla was finally restored and by the afternoon of the following day, to Haldane’s great relief, the weary British and Indian troops marched into the town.

In many ways the withdrawal from Diwaniyya was a remarkable success. The possibility of an encirclement and the inevitable military disaster had been avoided. But from the insurgents’ point of view, the British withdrawal from Diwaniyya – the British
retreat
, as they saw it – was a great propaganda coup. Now a second British military base had been abandoned and another great swathe of occupied territory had been liberated. Even more evidence seemed to point to an imminent British withdrawal from Iraq as a whole, and as news of this second Arab ‘victory’ circulated among the tribes more and more waverers were drawn to the banners of Islam and independence. By now around 130,000 Arabs had joined the uprising.

While the British GHQ was greatly relieved at the news of the successful withdrawal from Diwaniyya, another piece of news was less welcome: a few days earlier the insurgents had captured the Hindiyya Barrage, the great dam sixteen miles north-west of Hilla at the point where the Euphrates divides into its two main branches, the Hilla and Hindiyya.

Meanwhile, on 14 July, as the military situation in the Kufa–Diwaniyya–Hilla ‘triangle’ was beginning to deteriorate, the river gunboat HMS
Firefly
arrived at Kufa.
Firefly
was one of sixteen gunboats of the Fly class which had seen active service during the war, mainly on the Tigris, where they had provided valuable flank guards for the British and Indian infantry as they advanced up the river in the campaigns of 1915 and 1917. The gunboats had originally been ordered from the shipbuilders Messrs Yarrow by the Admiralty in February 1915 for the operations in Iraq, but to camouflage their destination they were originally referred to as ‘China gunboats’. After construction, they were dismantled and sent out in parts to be re-assembled on slips at the Anglo-Persian Oil Company’s concession at Abadan.
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HMS
Firefly
had been one of the first to be sent out to Iraq and the first to see serious action. Like the other ships of her class she had a displacement of 98 tons and was 126 feet long and 20 feet in the beam. However, in order to cope with the extreme variations in depth on both the Mesopotamian rivers, her draught was only two feet. Her armament consisted of one 4-inch main gun, one 12-pounder, one 6-pounder, one 3-pounder, one 2-pounder anti-aircraft pom-pom and four Maxim machine guns. The crew consisted of two naval officers and twenty infantrymen.