Текст книги "Lawrence: The Uncrowned King of Arabia"

Автор книги: Michael Asher

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In February 1915 Lawrence’s racing bicycle arrived from England, and he would cycle to work every morning from the Continental to GHQ, in the Old Savoy Hotel, which stood in what is today Talaat Harb Square, on a site now occupied by a department store. The Intelligence Department to which he had been posted was directed by his friend Stewart Newcombe, and consisted to begin with of only three other officers: Leonard Woolley and two Unionist MPs recently drafted in, George Lloyd and Aubrey Herbert. Despite congenial stories which later emerged about ‘The Five Musketeers’, there were two factions in the office from the start, for Newcombe, Lawrence and Woolley knew each other well from the Negev survey, while Lloyd and Herbert were both Welshmen, both old Etonians, and had both served as Honorary Attachйs to the British Embassy in Constantinople. They were Oriental dabblers of the Hogarth stamp, speaking a dozen languages between them, and Herbert already had a reputation as an adventurer, having fought alongside the Turks in the Balkans and in Yemen. A younger son of the Earl of Carnarvon, he was later immortalized as John Buchan’s Sandy Arbuthnot in Greenmantle:‘You will hear of him at little forgotten fishing ports where the Albanian mountains dip to the Adriatic. If you struck a Meccan pilgrimage the odds are you would meet a dozen of Sandy’s friends in it. In shepherd’s huts in the Caucasus you will find bits of his cast off clothing, for he has a knack of shedding garments as he goes.’ ⁶Lawrence was both attracted and repelled by the self-assured, dilettantish aristocrat, and thought him ‘quaint’ and ‘a joke, but a very nice one’. ⁷Herbert reciprocated Lawrence’s half-admiring, half-deprecating attitude, calling him ‘gnomish’ and ‘half-cad’, but admitting that he had a touch of genius. Lloyd, who divided his time between his constituents, the East, and his work as director of a bank, was another upper-class Welshman whom Lawrence found ‘exceedingly noisy’ but valued for his knowledge of trade and politics, and his air of confidence. He remained in touch with Lloyd after he and Herbert left for Gallipoli and travelled with him later in the campaign. Both Lloyd and Herbert were uncomfortable with Newcombe, however, and objected to taking orders from this highly intelligent and able, but sadly ‘underbred’ Sapper. Lawrence’s view was different: ‘Newcombe is… a most heavenly person,’ he wrote. ‘He runs all the spies, & curses all the subordinates who don’t do their duty and takes the raw edges off generals and things. Without that I should have gone mad, I think.’ ⁸Newcombe’s immediate superior was the й minence griseof Middle East intelligence, Lieutenant-Colonel Gilbert ‘Bertie’ Clayton, a veteran of the Egyptian army, who had fought the Dervishes at Omdurman beside Lord Kitchener. Clayton was the archetypal grey man: quiet and unassuming, he was, as Lawrence discovered, ‘far bigger …than [he] appeared at first sight’. Before the war he had served as Sudan Agent in Cairo, and Intelligence Director to the Sirdar or C-in-C of the Egyptian Army, Sir Reginald Wingate – who doubled as Governor-General of the Sudan. In 1914, he had been brought back into the army by General Sir John Maxwell, the General Officer Commanding British Forces in Egypt, who had given him carte blancheto run intelligence operations. Clayton’s position was all-powerful, and he took it upon himself not only to gather intelligence but also to nudge policy judiciously where he felt it was required. Even before war with Turkey had been declared, Clayton had received Storrs’s suggestion of raising an Arab Revolt with enthusiasm, and was an early supporter of the Hashemites. He had sent a letter to Kitchener early in 1914 urging an immediate approach to Hussain. Lawrence later confessed admiration for Clayton’s far-sightedness and detachment and particularly for the free hand he gave to his subordinates, yet his description of his influence, ‘like water or permeating oil, creeping silently and insistently through everything’, is not entirely flattering. ⁹Lawrence also got to know Storrs well, and the two men found each other convivial company. They shared literary tastes, and Storrs would often return to his flat to find Lawrence already there, curled up in an armchair reading Latin or Greek: ‘I found him from the beginning an arresting and intentionally provocative talker,’ Storrs recalled, ‘liking nonsense to be treated as nonsense and not casually or dully accepted or dismissed. He could flare into sudden anger at a story of pettiness, particularly official pettiness or injustice.’ ¹⁰Lawrence later admitted that he thought Storrs the most brilliant Englishman in the Middle East, but commented that his influence would have been even greater had he been more single-minded. Storrs was sometimes irritated by Lawrence’s lack of social etiquette, recalling that he had once arranged a special dinner party of four guests for Lawrence, who had failed to turn up without offering any excuse: ‘He only told me long afterwards,’ Storrs wrote, ‘that I had more than “got back at him” by explaining that I shouldn’t have minded if he had warned me in time to get someone else.’ ¹¹

Lawrence referred to himself as ‘bottle washer and office boy pencil sharpener and pen wiper’ of the department, but in fact, though the most junior officer in rank, he shared fully in the work. The raison d ’к trefor the British presence in Egypt was the defence of the Suez Canal, and opinion was divided as to how this should best be accomplished. There were those ‘Westerners’ who believed that the Western Front in Europe was the ‘real’ war, and an active campaign in any other theatre merely a ‘sideshow’. They lobbied for a purely defensive policy in Egypt, a policy which Lawrence, like the rest of the Intelligence Department, actively contested. They were ‘Easterners’, who believed that attack was the best means of defence and pushed for a British invasion of the Ottoman Empire, specifically a landing at Alexandretta on the coast of Syria. Lawrence, who was later to claim falsely that the Alexandretta scheme was his idea, was certainly one of its most passionate advocates. He believed that the moment the British landed in Syria, the Syrians would revolt against the Turks, and Arab elements in the Ottoman armies would mutiny, establishing an Arab government there before the French, who had designs in Syria, could prevent them. Lawrence had scented revolution in the air while at Carchemish in 1913, and well knew that the ordinary Syrians were not prepared to get rid of one foreign master merely to make way for another and even more alien one. Though the Alexandretta landing proposal was well received by the cabinet, it was vetoed by the French, who recognized as well as Lawrence the dangers it entailed for their colonial policy. Soon it was eclipsed by plans for a mass landing at Gallipoli, and Lawrence turned his attention to the Assir, the mountainous and fertile region of Arabia which lay immediately south of the Hejaz. The Porte held little sway in this remote corner of Arabia, and the Assir’s ruler, al-Idrisi, was a notorious opponent of the Turks. In February, the Anglo-Indian Government concluded a treaty with al-Idrisi, paying him a stipend of Ј7,000 per year, and for a while Lawrence nurtured high hopes that his followers would revolt against the Turks and carry the revolution north in the name of the Emir of Mecca: ‘I think Newcombe & myself are going down to [Qunfidhdha – in the Assir] as his advisers,’ he wrote. ‘If Idrisi is anything like as good as we hope we can rush right up to Damascus, & biff the French out of all hope of Syria. It’s a big game and at last one worth playing.’ ¹²Al-Idrisi proved a damp squib, however, and as for the Emir of Mecca himself, throughout the first part of 1915 he had maintained an ominous silence.

In late 1914, an Indian youth had been arrested by the British authorities while attempting to cross the North West Frontier from Afghanistan and India. Sewn into the seams of his clothing were pieces of linen which carried the details of a world-wide plot to raise an Islamic Jihad or Holy War against Britain, France and Russia, the powers of the Triple Entente. The youth was the emissary of an Indian renegade called Barakat Allah, an agent of the Turkish government in Kabul, and had been on his way to meet contacts in India, who were to encourage Indian troops in the British army to mutiny, assassinate their foreign leaders and attack their quarters. He was, it turned out, just one of thousands of agents, preachers, scholars, holy men, spies and agitators being dispatched by the Committee of Union and Progress to infiltrate India, Persia, Egypt, Afghanistan, Arabia, Mesopotamia, the Libyan desert and the Sudan. The Jihad plot was intended to set the Islamic world ablaze. On 7 November, only a week after the declaration of war, the Sheikh al-Islam – the highest religious official in the Ottoman Empire – had declared the fatwa,making it the personal duty of every Muslim to take up arms against the Allies. A central tenet of the Jihad, though, was the protection of the Holy Cities, Mecca and Medina, and without the blessing of their steward, Sharif Hussain, the fatwawas a worthless scrap of paper.

His blessing Hussain had refused staunchly to give. In November he had written to Enver Pasha, Ottoman Minister of War, that he would support the Jihad with all his heart and pray for its success, but he could not endorse it openly for fear that the British Red Sea fleet would immediately launch a blockade. The population of the Hejaz was dependent on grain imported from British India, and its people would eventually be faced with famine, and might even – he suggested – revolt against Ottoman rule. He paid lip service to the Porte to the extent of raising a force of mujahidiyyin –Islamic volunteers – but simultaneously contacted the great chiefs of the Arabian Peninsula: Ibn Sa’ud of the Nejd, Ibn Rashid of the Shammar, the Imam Yahya of Yemen, and al-Idrisi of the Assir, in great secrecy, explaining why he had failed to support the Jihad, and eliciting their attitude towards the Turks. Of these, Ibn Sa’ud, who was receiving a substantial stipend from the Anglo-Indian Government, resolved to stay neutral and watch the outcome. His rival Ibn Rashid – who feared him – decided consequently to throw in his lot with the Turks. The Imam Yahya, facing the British in Aden, did the same, and al-Idrisi, now receiving a cash incentive from Britain, had always been implacably anti-Turk. Jamal Pasha, Military Governor of Syria as well as Commander-in-Chief of Turkish forces there, was preparing the Ottoman 4th Army for an assault on the Suez Canal. The attack was scheduled for February 1915, and the CUP hoped it would spark off a revolt by the Egyptians against their infidel masters, the British. That Hussain refused to play his part in stirring up his co-religionists infuriated them, and although they were powerless but to accept his refusal officially, they decided to get rid of him secretly by assassination or arrest. Unfortunately, the principal of the plot, Vehib Pasha – Governor of the Hejaz – mysteriously lost a trunk containing compromising documents, which was handed to ‘Ali, Hussain’s eldest son. The Sharif now had first-hand proof of the Machiavellian duplicity which lay beneath the Porte’s assurances that the Hejaz railway was the only bone of contention between them. He decided to send his third son, Feisal, to Istanbul to confront the CUP with the evidence of its own calumny. Meanwhile, he was able to take some comfort from the fact that the Hashemites were not entirely alone.

In January, an Arab officer who was to be attached to his personal bodyguard, Fawzi al-Bakri, a young member of a prominent merchant clan of Damascus which had long enjoyed cordial relations with the Hashemites, had brought a verbal message from al-Fatat, a secret Arab nationalist society in Syria. The message, which Fawzi had whispered into the Sharif’s ear as he sat gazing imperturbably out of the window of his palace in Mecca, was that nationalist leaders in Syria and Iraq, including certain Arab officers in the Turkish army, were in favour of a revolt against the Turks for Arab independence, and invited Hussain to be its leader. The cautious Sharif, secretly gratified, made no immediate reply, but, on Feisal’s departure for Istanbul, charged him to halt in Damascus for the purpose of hearing the proposals of al-Fatat. Feisal arrived in Damascus later that month and courteously turned down an invitation from Jamal Pasha, staying instead at the al-Bakri clan’s farmhouse outside the city. It was here, under the watchful eye of Nasib al-Bakri, Fawzi’s elder brother, that Feisal was initiated into the secrets of the Syrian Nationalist Societies, al-Fatat and al-‘Ahd. The result, which Feisal collected the following month on his way back to the Hejaz, was the famous ‘Damascus Protocol’, a document specifying the frontiers of a possible independent Arab state after the war, proposing the abolition of all privileges granted to foreigners, but advocating a defensive alliance with Great Britain and the future independent Arab state. ¹³In mid-July, having discussed the Damascus Protocol with his sons and advisers, Hussain felt strong enough to act. His terms for Arab intervention in the war against Turkey reached the High Commissioner in Cairo, Sir Hugh McMahon, by secret emissary, on 18 August.

1915 had been a bad year for the British Empire and for Lawrence personally. In January, twelve British and four French capital ships led by H M S Queen Elizabeth– the biggest warship ever seen in Mediterranean waters – had attempted to force the straits of the Dardanelles. After only a day’s battle, the entire fleet had been sent packing by 176 Turkish guns dug in on the peninsula, only four of which had been put out of action. It was the swansong of the myth of British naval supremacy: Britannia no longer ruled the waves. At the end of April, the British had launched a massive amphibious landing at Gallipoli, where Medforce – the first of almost 200,000 Allied troops to be landed on its beaches – was cut to ribbons by Turkish artillery and machine-gun fire. Medforce had been expected to reach its objectives by the third day, but three months later it was still fighting desperately just to remain where it was. The failure of the Gallipoli landings was an appalling indictment of the inefficiency of British Intelligence, for, as even Lawrence admitted, Medforce was ‘beastly ill-prepared, with no knowledge of where it was going, or what it would meet, or what it was going to do’. ¹⁴Indeed, its maps were archaic, inaccurate, and of considerably less value than a copy of Baedeker: Lawrence recorded that the expedition ‘came out with two copies of some quarter-inch maps of European Turkey as their sole supply’. ¹⁵The element of surprise was completely missing, since security was non-existent, and as for assessment of enemy forces, no one even knew how many Turkish troops opposed it. In the end, no one believed it really mattered. Lawrence himself expressed the general air of complacency when, just before the landings, he wrote, ‘Poor old Turkey is hanging together … Everything about her is very sick.’ ¹⁶The largest amphibious operation ever mounted in the history of war thus took place on the basis of virtually zero intelligence, and a vain belief in the superiority of the ‘white man’: after all, as one Australian infantryman wrote before the landing, ‘Who was going to stop us? Not the bloody Turks!’ ¹⁷But the ‘bloody Turks’ did stop them, and not even the repulse of Jamal Pasha’s assault on the Suez Canal in February could easily redeem that fact.

On the Western Front there was stalemate, and in May Lawrence received the distressing news that Frank had been killed by shellfire while leading his platoon. He wrote soothing letters to his parents, and to his brother Will maintained the appropriate ‘stiff upper lip’: ‘Frank’s death was as you say a shock, because it was so unexpected,’ he wrote. ‘I don’t think one can regret it overmuch, because it was a very good way to take after all. The hugeness of this war has made one change one’s perspective, I think, for one can hardly see details at all.’ ¹⁸He told his mother to keep a brave face to the world: ‘…we cannot all go fighting,’ he wrote, ‘but we can do that, which is in the same kind.’ ¹⁹Secretly, though, his conscience was pricked. Not for the first time, perhaps, he asked himself if it was right to go on enjoying a comfortable desk job, far from the fighting, when his peers were risking their lives at the front. Newcombe and Woolley had already served on the Western Front, and now Lloyd and Herbert were at Gallipoli. He valued his contribution to the war effort, and knew that his specialized knowledge would be wasted if he became mere ‘cannon fodder’, but he also knew at a deeper level that it was his lifelong terror of being hurt which was really keeping him from the front. Lawrence was far from being a hero by nature, and though his self-imposed ordeals had given him a certain nodding acquaintance with physical suffering, he still feared it more than anything. His life had been spent in escaping from conformity rather than in seeking action, and he found danger almost physically crippling: ‘one reason that taught me I wasn’t a man of action,’ he wrote later, ‘was [the] routine melting of bowels before a crisis.’ ²⁰After the war, his brother Arnie would write that he was not a ‘natural hero or naturally brave …and knowing this… he put himself through severe tests and overcame his natural weaknesses’. ²¹George Lloyd thought him ‘not in the least fearless like some who do brave things’. ²²In the summer of 1915, there seemed little to justify his existence. His plans for the Alexandretta landing and for the al-Idrisi revolt had fallen though: ‘Arabian affairs have gone all to pot,’ he wrote. ‘I’ve never seen a more despicable mess made of a show. It makes one howl with fury – for we had a ripping chance there.’ ²³All efforts were bent towards success at Gallipoli, in which he could play little part, and he kept himself busy in writing geographical digests and reports for the High Command, tracking the movements of Turkish forces, and periodically interviewing Syrian prisoners of war. Though he prided himself on being able to pinpoint the districts they came from merely by their dialects, hard intelligence on Syria and Palestine remained poor. He rumbled periodically on a borrowed motorbike between the Savoy and Bulaq, where the Survey offices were situated. He wandered disconsolately in the bazaar, buying the occasional carpet for his family and the odd Hittite seal for Hogarth, who was still struggling to find a war job. He had dinner with Lady Evelyn Cobbold, who had lent him money at Petra. He enciphered and deciphered telegrams, supervised the printing, packing and dispatch of maps, and made more abortive and inappropriate plans for attacks on Syria. He read The Greek Anthology,Hйrйdia and William Morris. Woolley was sent to provide liaison with the French navy at Port Sa’id, and the Department was augmented by Philip Graves, a former correspondent of The Times: other personnel came and went like passing ghosts. Lawrence went on a brief excursion to improve liaison with the Intelligence office in Athens, but on his return he felt even more weighed down by what he called ‘official inertia’. He began to toy with the idea of going up to Gallipoli: he wondered, even, if life would be better in a trench. Cairo was hot, dusty and squalid, and Lawrence summed up his feelings when he told Hogarth: ‘Everything is going to sleep …’ ²⁴

Into this atmosphere of almost palpable lethargy, Sharif Hussain’s letter dropped like a bombshell. Storrs, who went over the missive line by line, was astonished to see that the Sharif was demanding virtually the whole of the Arab dominions of the Ottoman Empire in return for Arab help: he could hardly believe Hussain’s effrontery, and found himself murmuring as he read it:

In matters of commerce the fault of the Dutch

Is offering too little and asking too much. ²⁵

For all Kitchener’s flaunting of a Caliphate, Sharif Hussain was actually regarded by the British as a minor Arab chieftain, who represented no one but his own family, the Hashemites, and should, in their view, have been well pleased with independence and autonomy for the Hejaz. Storrs was highly amused by the message, whose pretensions, he felt, ‘bordered on the tragic-comic’ – he could only believe it was a preposterous opening gambit in a process of bargaining such as one might hear in the bazaar: ‘…it may be regarded as certain,’ he wrote, ‘that [the Sharif] has no sort of mandate from other potentates …and that he knows he is demanding, possibly as a basis for negotiation, far more than he has the right, the hope, or the power to expect.’ ²⁶As a result, McMahon’s reply – composed by Storrs and dispatched on 30 August – was non-committal. He merely confirmed Kitchener’s original assurances, but refused to be drawn on the issue of frontiers, stating that it was a waste of time to discuss such things under the stress of war. Hussain answered almost immediately, expressing amazement at British hesitation: the negotiations, he wrote, depended solely and fundamentally on whether or not they accepted the proposed borders.

By the time this second note reached Cairo in September, however, the situation had changed. In that month a young Arab officer called Mohammad Sharif al-Faruqi had slipped through the Turkish lines at Gallipoli under the pretext of leading a burial party, and defected to the British. Sent to Cairo, he was interrogated by Lawrence among others, and what he had to say astonished them. Al-Faruqi was an Arab from Iraq, and claimed to be a descendant of the third ‘Right Minded’ Khalif of the Muslims, Omar, whose nickname had been al-Faruq– ‘The Divider’. He was, he said, a member of al-‘Ahd, the secret society of Arab officers in the Turkish army, which with its sister society, al-Fatat, had devised the Damascus Protocol on which Hussain’s demands were based. Although al-Faruqi was not the official spokesman for al-‘Ahd the British at first believed him to be, he revealed a great deal about the aims and organization of the nationalist secret societies in Syria that neither Lawrence nor his colleagues had been aware of. To the delight of Clayton and Lawrence, he confirmed that the Sharif did, indeed, speak for more than just the Hashemites.

Nevertheless, McMahon was unable to concede all that the Sharif asked, since the French, with whom his government were about to enter an agreement over the fate of Syria, already considered the western portion of the country to be rightfully theirs. In his next letter he agreed to Hussain’s proposals with certain exceptions, including the districts west of Aleppo, Hama, Homs and Damascus which he claimed – almost certainly with Lawrence’s prompting – were not ‘purely Arab’. These areas – the Syrian littoral and its hinterland, which formed parts of the Ottoman Sanjaq of Lebanon and Vilayet of Beirut – were claimed by Britain’s French allies and had been earmarked as regions of possible French interest in a report made by Lawrence himself earlier that year. Hussain replied that he could not accept that these districts were not wholly Arab, and once again the negotiations faltered over French demands. It was, Lawrence commented, not the Turks but the French who were the real enemy in Syria.

The nights grew cooler in Cairo, but there appeared no light at the end of the tunnel. At the same time, it was becoming horribly clear that the Gallipoli operation had failed: ‘I don’t like the look of things up there,’ Lawrence wrote, ‘and the worst is, it was such an easy business till we blundered.’ ²⁷He was brightened temporarily when Hogarth arrived, still looking for a job, but after his friend went off to Athens he became feverish with malaria for the first time in a year. ‘Official inertia’ had set in once more, and Lawrence confessed that he had ‘the nausea of it’. ²⁸Though his days were full, they were monotonously similar. Newcombe was posted to Gallipoli and replaced by Colonel A. C. Parker, a nephew of Kitchener’s, who had once been Governor of Sinai. Parker was highly regarded by the Bedu, who knew him as Barkal– the absence of a title such as ‘Bey’ or ‘Pasha’ denoting their affection. He had a reputation for being a tireless camel-rider and an indefatigable walker, who would track sand-grouse through impossible country as nimbly as an ibex. Lawrence, who may have found himself slightly jealous of Parker’s reputation, thought him knowledgeable about Sinai, and very little else, and threatened to ‘murder’ him one day. His despondency increased when, at the end of October, he received the news that Will, an observer in the Royal Flying Corps, had been shot down and lost on the Western Front: ‘I’m rather low,’ he wrote Edward Leeds, ‘because first one, and now another of my brothers has been killed …they were both younger than I am and it doesn’t seem right, somehow, that I should go on living peacefully in Cairo… I wish one might have an end sometime.’ ²⁹All winter the negotiations with Hussain staggered on interminably, while the situation at Gallipoli went from bad to worse. Finally, in January 1916, the shattered remains of Medforce was evacuated from the Dardanelles. This was a dangerous moment for the British Empire. Not only had she been humiliated by ‘the bloody Turks’ before the eyes of the world, but thousands of Ottoman troops were now free to launch an invasion of Egypt with renewed brio. Already the Arabs were wavering, and the inconclusive bargaining between McMahon and Sharif Hussain had only exacerbated the situation. Both the Sharif and the Syrian Nationalists were suspicious of European encroachment in the East, and now it was beginning to look as if the Allies were less than a match – in military terms even – for the Ottoman Turks. In the Libyan Desert an Islamic Fundamentalist group, the Senussi brotherhood, were gathering silently, awaiting only the opportunity to strike at Egypt from the west. On the frontiers of the Sudan there was trouble from the pro-Turkish Sultan, ‘Ali Dinar. If the Arabs in Syria and the Hejaz joined the Turks instead of rebelling against them, British ambitions in the Middle East might well be lost.

Then, on New Year’s Day 1916, Sharif Hussain made a supreme gesture of his faith in British ‘decency’, and informed McMahon that he would waive a full discussion of the frontier until after the hostilities. It was a courageous but politically fatal act, which would later lead to accusations that he had ‘sold out’ to the Allies. Near the end of his life, he would tell historian George Antonius that his experience of British straightness in international affairs had impressed him deeply as a young man, and he had developed a ‘solid belief in English standards of honourable dealing’. Having received McMahon’s promise on the fundamental question of the area of Arab independence, he was willing to let secondary considerations ride for the time being, trusting implicitly that the British government’s word was its bond. ³⁰His faith was sadly misplaced. A few weeks after McMahon had concluded his agreement with the Hashemites in February 1916, the British government signed the Sykes-Picot agreement with France and Russia, cynically carving up the Middle East between them in the event of a victory to the Triple Entente. By then, however, the General Staff in Cairo were already deeply distracted by another disaster in the making. In Mesopotamia, the 6th Indian Division under Major-General Sir Charles Townshend lay stranded and starving on a loop in the Tigris river at the village of Kut, where the British Empire faced the most humiliating surrender in the entire history of its arms.

It might almost have been a scene from the glorious annals of Pax Britannica– of redcoats, jammed Gatling guns and broken squares and the desert running with blood. Certainly, Townshend had been remembering the valiant days of his defence of Chitral, when he had told his men: ‘It is our duty to our Empire, to our beloved King and Country to stand here and hold the Turkish advance… we will make this a defence to be remembered in history as a glorious one.’ But Imperial glory was in short ration by that spring. Indeed, it was the ineptitude of Townshend himself and two other British commanders which had led to the impasse in the first place. His Division had originally been ordered only to protect the British oil refinery at Abadan and to prevent any threat to British shipping in the Gulf. In the event, goaded on by his superiors, Generals Beauchamp Duff in India and Sir John Nixon in Basra, Sir Charles had found himself euphorically chasing Turkish battalions up the Tigris. The enemy units had simply melted away, until, at Ctesiphon, he had met his nemesis in the form of 20,000 well-trained and determined Osmanli veterans. The Division had sustained 4,000 casualties before being forced to retire. If Townshend had then withdrawn tactically all the way back to the British HQ in Basra, the bulk of his men might still have been saved. Incredibly, he had chosen instead to make a ‘heroic’ stand at Kut, where he had immediately been surrounded by the Turks.

For five months they held out against the 20,000 troops who daily bombarded the town, sniping at any soldier unwise enough to show himself, and lobbing bombs from an old howitzer which the Tommies, with characteristic gallows-humour, christened ‘Fanny’. Three times a relief column of the British Tigris Corps from Basra tried to smash its way through the Turkish blockade, and three times the Turks threw it back with appalling losses. Almost daily, aircraft of the Royal Flying Corps droned over the grid of streets in a vain attempt to drop supplies of flour and sugar, most of which either splashed into the Tigris or fell to the Turks. By April even the dogs and cats had been eaten, and the troops were being issued with opium pills to relieve the effects of hunger. The men, lethargic, dispirited and famished, had begun to give up hope.

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