Patrick Cockburn writes about an almost forgotten episode during the First World War: the Mesopotamia campaign.[1] He visits the British North Gate cemetery in Baghdad. He tells a tale of present-day witchcraft and sorcery and of an arrogant ruling class a century ago, its gung-ho militarism, its lies and selective memory, and notes the complete failure of its successors, a century later, to learn lessons.

For me, he says,

the chief fascination of these cemeteries – whether in Baghdad, Kut, Amara or Basra – is the sheer immensity of the disaster they commemorate, and the extent to which it has been forgotten. Unlike the defeat at Gallipoli and the slaughter on the Somme, the Mesopotamian campaign has faded from British memory, despite the national obsession with the First World War.

There were at least 85,000 British and Indian soldiers “killed, wounded or captured”. But according to the War Graves Commission

the cemetery in Amara on the lower Tigris “commemorates some five thousand servicemen of the Indian Army, of whom only nine are identified as no comprehensive records of the burials were kept by the military authorities”.

Cockburn then tells the story:

The Mesopotamia campaign was grotesquely mismanaged, even by the low standards of the First World War, and those responsible had no wish to recall it. After the publication of a damning official report in 1917, Lord Curzon, a member of the war cabinet, suggested that ‘a more shocking exposure of official blundering and incompetence has not in my opinion been made, at any rate since the Crimean War.’ The intervention began on a small scale in 1914, initially intended to protect the oilfields in south-west Iran from attack by the Ottoman Turks. By 1918, the campaign had ballooned into the biggest British military action outside Europe. In 1915, an overambitious advance, which underestimated the Turks’ fighting strength, aimed at capturing Baghdad to counterbalance the failure at Gallipoli earlier that year. Heavy casualties in a battle at Salman Pak led to a precipitate retreat to Kut, a ramshackle Shia city on a bend in the Tigris a hundred miles south-east of Baghdad. Commanded by Sir Charles Townshend, an insanely egocentric general, 13,000 British and Indian soldiers were besieged there for 147 days between December 1915 and 29 April 1916. Townshend appears deliberately to have allowed his troops to be surrounded: he wanted to make his reputation through a heroic and successful defence of Kut even though he knew his forces were far from their supply base in Basra while the Turks were close to theirs in Baghdad. In order to accelerate the arrival of the British-led forces coming to relieve him he sent misleading information about how long he could hold out, forcing them to attack prematurely and suffer 23,000 casualties while failing to dislodge the well-entrenched Turks. Injured soldiers, their wounds gangrenous and filled with maggots, were crammed into slow-moving river boats and lay in their own excreta for the two weeks it took to reach Basra.

Inside Kut, Townshend became increasingly unbalanced, refusing to visit the hospital where many of his men were lying. He spent much of his time in his house, emerging only occasionally to walk his dog, Spot. He banned his soldiers from sending messages to their families via wireless but dispatched frequent messages of his own asking for promotion. He made no attempt to break out of Kut and, after the surrender, showed little interest in what happened to his men. He and most of his officers were placed by the Turks in comfortable imprisonment, but the other ranks were dispatched on a 700-mile forced march to Turkey during which many died from starvation, beatings, execution, or typhus and cholera. Survivors of the death marches were set to work digging a railway tunnel in the Taurus mountains alongside a few Armenian survivors of the genocide. By the end of the war 70 per cent of the British and 50 per cent of the Indian troops captured at Kut were dead. Released from captivity, Townshend presented himself as a hero of the siege who deserved a senior job. When his promotion was denied, he resigned from the army and became a Conservative MP. Kipling, in his poem ‘Mesopotamia’, which the Daily Telegraph refused to publish (it appeared in the Morning Post instead), furiously denounced the generals who had left the soldiers ‘to die in their own dung’ and predicted that, once the furore had died down, those responsible for the disaster would find a way of keeping their positions:

“When the storm is ended shall we find

How softly but how swiftly they have sidled back to power

By the favour and contrivance of their kind.”

Kipling’s poem was useful reading as the US and British invasion ran into ever deeper trouble a century later, the line about ‘the slothfulness that wasted and the arrogance that slew’ seeming particularly appropriate.

It may be too much to hope for but perhaps, if Labour wins the next election, the corrupt old guard in all parties will lose its influence and never get the chance to “sidle back to power” again. As I wrote that, it seemed to turn into an impossible dream – even a fantasy. But I’ll say it anyway. And here’s another poet to express it, Ben Okri, in the poem he sent to Corbyn in the heady days of 2015:

“Can we still seek the lost angels
Of our better natures?
Can we still wish and will
For poverty’s death and a newer way
To undo war, and find peace in the labyrinth
Of the Middle East, and prosperity
In Africa as the true way
To end the feared tide of immigration?

“We dream of a new politics
That will renew the world
Under their weary suspicious gaze.
There’s always a new way,
A better way that’s not been tried before.”

[1] Read the whole article: “At the North Gate”, Patrick Cockburn, London Review of Books, Vol. 40, No. 19, 11 October 2018: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n19/patrick-cockburn/at-the-north-gate