Enemy on the Euphrates by Rutledge Ian

Author:Rutledge, Ian
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780863567674
Publisher: Saqi

PART TWO

Revolution and Suppression

21

The Drift to Violence

On 9 June 1920 Wilson flew back to Baghdad from Mosul in the observer’s seat of an RE8. He had been conferring with the civil and military authorities as to the state of security on the northern border in the aftermath of the Tel ‘Afar attack. Usually he enjoyed flying – the feeling of freedom and ascendancy: the desert stretched out below him dotted with tiny mud-walled villages; the chequerboard of criss-crossing canals in the cultivated areas; and here and there the turquoise-tiled roof of a Shi‘i shrine – but on this particular day these anticipated pleasures escaped him. Wilson was morose and angry: and the object of that anger was the British Army of Occupation and its commander-in-chief.

So far, Wilson had lost six of his political officers. APO Captain Marshall had been murdered at Najaf in 1918, In April 1919 APO Captain Pearson had been ambushed and killed by pro-Turkish tribesmen in the north of Mosul Division followed by the deaths of PO Mr Bill and APO Captain Scott in October 1919 at the hands of rebel Kurds. And now APO Captain Barlow had been murdered at Tel ‘Afar. Wilson felt all these deaths keenly. Many of the POs and APOs under his command were in their twenties; they were ‘A.T.’s Young Men’ and he felt a deep affection for them. ‘They are practically all my nominees,’ he informed Hirtzel at the India Office, adding touchingly, ‘Almost all the friends I have in the world are included in their ranks and I regard Political Officers and Assistant Political Officers as being with the same family as my own brothers.’ And what was the army doing to protect these brave young men as they carried out their onerous duties in faraway isolated districts guarded by a handful of regular troops and unreliable Arab levies? Absolutely nothing!

A few weeks earlier he had already complained to Hirtzel that ‘the army is growing steadily weaker’, that ‘it exists apparently almost entirely for the purpose of taking in its own washing’ and that at some stations ‘all available troops are needed for guarding the married families’. He also complained that, in Baghdad,

the streets are still crowded at all times of the day with motor vehicles containing officers and wives … We have an effective strength of about one and half divisions, divided up into two divisions … all of which have large Staffs and an enormous GHQ on top. It is this which is spoiling my Budget, for it keeps up prices without being of the slightest assistance to us. Any single branch of the army contains more officers than the whole of my HQ.

And now, to cap it all, the GHQ had gone off on holiday to the Persian highlands.

So on his arrival back in Baghdad he fired off a long, rambling and bitter telegram to the India Office. ‘Recent developments’, Wilson declared, had caused him to ‘review the whole situation in Mesopotamia arising out of the grant of the Mandate’.

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