The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. Robert Fisk
wind was picking up and the trees in the orchard were moving. A far belt of smog moved down the horizon. Somewhere near Kahak, more than a quarter of a century earlier, ‘Monty’ Woodhouse must have buried his guns. Did any of the villagers support the Shah? I asked Khalaj. ‘None,’ he said firmly. ‘At least I never knew any who did.’ Savak never came to the village. It was too small to capture anyone’s attention. So whose picture hung above the blackboard in class seven before the Ayatollah returned to Iran? Mr Khalaj shrugged. ‘They had to put a picture there. Of course, it was the Shah’s.’
In March 1917, 22-year-old Private 11072 Charles Dickens of the Cheshire Regiment carefully peeled a poster off a wall in the newly captured city of Baghdad. It was a turning point in his life. He had survived the hopeless Gallipoli campaign, attacking the Ottoman empire only 250 kilometres from its capital of Constantinople. He had then marched the length of Mesopotamia, fighting the Turks yet again for possession of the ancient caliphate and enduring the ‘grim battle’ for Baghdad. The British invasion army of 600,000 soldiers was led by Lieutenant General Sir Stanley Maude and the sheet of paper that caught Private Dickens’s attention was Maude’s official ‘Proclamation’ to the people of Baghdad, printed in both English and Arabic.
That same 11 by 18 inch poster – now framed in black and gold – hangs on the wall a few feet from my desk as I write this chapter. Long ago, it was stained with damp – ‘foxed’, as booksellers say – which may have been Dickens’s perspiration in the long hot Iraqi summer of 1917. It has been folded many times, witness, as his daughter Hilda would recall eighty-six years later, ‘to having travelled in his knapsack for a length of time’. She called it ‘his precious document’ and I can see why. It is filled with noble aspirations and presentiments of future tragedy, of the false promises of the world’s greatest empire, commitments and good intentions and words of honour that were to be repeated in the same city of Baghdad by the next great empire more than two decades after Dickens’s death. They read now like a funeral dirge:
PROCLAMATION
… Our military operations have as their object the defeat of the enemy and the driving of him from these territories. In order to complete this task I am charged with absolute and supreme control of all regions in which British troops operate; but our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators. Since the days of Hulagu* your citizens have been subject to the tyranny of strangers … and your fathers and yourselves have groaned in bondage. Your sons have been carried off to wars not of your seeking, your wealth has been stripped from you by unjust men and squandered in different places. It is the wish not only of my King and his peoples, but it is also the wish of the great Nations with whom he is in alliance, that you should prosper even as in the past when your lands were fertile … But you, people of Baghdad … are not to understand that it is the wish of the British government to impose upon you alien institutions. It is the hope of the British Government that the aspirations of your philosophers and writers shall be realised once again, that the people of Baghdad shall flourish, and shall enjoy their wealth and substance under institutions which are in consonance with their sacred laws and with their racial ideals … It is the hope and desire of the British people … that the Arab race may rise once more to greatness and renown amongst the peoples of the Earth … Therefore I am commanded to invite you, through your Nobles and Elders and Representatives, to participate in the management of your civil affairs in collaboration with the Political Representative of Great Britain … so that you may unite with your kinsmen in the North, East, South and West, in realising the aspirations of your Race.
(sd.) F. S. Maude, Lieutenant General,
Commanding the British Forces in Iraq
Private Dickens spent the First World War fighting Muslims, first the Turks at Suvla Bay at Gallipoli and then the Turkish army – which included Arab soldiers – in Mesopotamia. My father Bill was originally in the Cheshire Regiment but was serving in Ireland the year Charles Dickens entered Baghdad, and would be sent to the Western Front in 1918. Dickens had a longer war. He ‘spoke, often & admirably’, his daughter Hilda would recall, of one of his commanders, General Sir Charles Munro, who at fifty-five had fought in the last months of the Gallipoli campaign and then landed at Basra in southern Iraq at the start of the British invasion. But Munro’s leadership did not save Dickens’s married sister’s nephew, Samuel Martin, who was killed by the Turks at Basra. Hilda remembers ‘my father told of how killing a Turk, he thought it was in revenge for the death of his “nephew”. I don’t know if they were in the same battalion, but they were a similar age, 22 years.’*
The British had been proud of their initial occupation of Basra. More than eighty years later, a British Muslim whose family came from Pakistan sent me an amused letter along with a series of twelve very old postcards which were printed by the Times of India in Bombay on behalf of the Indian YMCA. One of them showed British artillery amid the Basra date palms, another a soldier in a pith helmet, turning towards the camera as his comrades tether horses behind him, others the crew of a British gunboat on the Shatt al-Arab river and the Turkish-held town of Kurna, a building shattered by British shellfire, shortly before its surrender. As long ago as 1914, a senior British official was told by ‘local [Arab] notables’ that ‘we should be received in Baghdad with the same cordiality [as in southern Iraq] and that the Turkish troops would offer little if any opposition’. But the British invasion of Iraq had originally failed. When Major-General Charles Townshend took 13,000 men up the banks of the Tigris towards Baghdad, he was surrounded and defeated by Turkish forces at Kut al-Amara. His surrender was the most comprehensive of military disasters and ended in a death march to Turkey for those British troops who had not been killed in battle. The graves of 500 of them in the Kut War Cemetery sank into sewage during the period of UN sanctions that followed Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait when spare parts for pumps needed to keep sewage from the graves were not supplied to Iraq. Visiting the cemetery in 1998, my colleague at the Independent, Patrick Cockburn, found ‘tombstones … still just visible above the slimy green water. A broken cement cross sticks out of a reed bed … a quagmire in which thousands of little green frogs swarm like cockroaches as they feed on garbage.’ In all, Britain lost 40,000 men in the Mesopotamian campaign.
Baghdad looked much the same when Private Dickens arrived. Less than two years earlier, a visitor had described a city whose streets
gaped emptily, the shops were mostly closed … In the Christian cemetery east of the high road leading to Persia coffins and half mouldering skeletons were floating. On account of the Cholera which was ravaging the town (three hundred people were dying of it every day) the Christian dead were now being buried on the new embankment of the high road, so that people walking and riding not only had to pass by but even to make their way among and over the graves … There was no longer any life in the town …
The British held out wildly optimistic hopes for a ‘new’ Iraq that would be regenerated by Western enterprise, not unlike America’s own pipedreams of 2003. ‘There is no doubt,’ The Sphere told its readers in 1915, ‘that with the aid of European science and energy it can again become the garden of Asia … and under British rule everything may be hoped.’
The British occupation was dark with historical precedent. Iraqi troops who had been serving with