Читать книгу Many Fronts - Lewis R. Freeman - Страница 7

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My next, and what proved to be my last, letter from F—— reached me in London:—

“Our general advance has begun, and we have attained our first important objective in the occupation of the ‘Garden of Eden.’ Not the greater ‘Garden of Eden,’ which name Sir William Willcocks applies to all of Mesopotamia south of Hitt and Samara, but the traditional site of the Garden at the meeting of the Tigris and Euphrates. This was surely one of the strangest engagements in history. The country was under water for miles around, and the Turks had fortified and elected to make their stand on the only dry ground in the whole region, a series of low rises—hardly to be called hills—in the rear of Kurna. Fortunately, their available artillery was not powerful. We had prepared for the assault by emplacing batteries of heavy howitzers at every point sufficiently solid to support them, while lighter guns were mounted on the river-steamers and on barges.

“After a heavy shelling of the Turkish positions our troops, in everything from balems and gufas to kaleks and gunboats, were rowed, paddled, poled, and steamed forward to the limit of the draught of their respective craft. Then over they went into the water, and the assault commenced. Luckily the Turkish guns had been pretty well put out of action by our howitzers, else that half-mile or more through mud and water would have been a very costly business for us. As it was, some barges and kaleks with machine-guns on them were brought up close to the enemies’ lines, and, the fire of these and the gunboats having made the Turkish positions practically untenable, the troops had to do little more than go and round up a very sizeable bunch of prisoners who had been cut off by a swift flanking movement of a column of Sepoys. Some of our men, in their eagerness, went overboard into deep water, and, as a consequence, had to chuck their accoutrements and swim for it. A number of them, in fact, lost more than their arms; and a bevy whom I saw later helping to shepherd some Turkish prisoners aboard a gunboat had little to differentiate them, sartorially, from Father Adam in the earliest days of this same ‘Garden of Eden.’

“I had a rather interesting job a few days ago. This was to lead a small picked force across country and destroy a bridge of boats which the Turks were endeavouring to maintain across the Tigris at the Tomb of Ezra, for the use of any stragglers who might still be drifting back from the south.

“You recall the Bible story of this famous structure. The Prophet Ezra, faring about this region in his old age, feeling the hand of Death upon him, directed his followers to bind his body to a camel, drive the animal into the desert, and where it finally lay down to rest, there to make the holy man’s burial-place. The camel headed straight for the nearest reach of the Tigris, and there the brilliantly-tiled tomb which was reared above the Prophet’s remains stands to this day, a mecca for Jews and Mohammedans alike.

“I didn’t make a very brilliant success of my job with the bridge of boats. We got into a marsh in the darkness and waded about in it until too late to make the night surprise I had counted upon at Ezra’s Tomb. We did get there at dawn, however, and, principally because the Turks must have thought we had strong support coming up, managed to induce the latter to evacuate his very good position about the Tomb and retire to the east bank of the river. We established ourselves in one of the Tomb gardens, but could go no farther for the moment on account of the brisk and accurate fire of the enemy from the other side.

“Most of the day I lay on my back in a bed of petunias under the garden wall, and gorged myself on the ripe pomegranates which the Turkish bullets cut down from the trees above. But about mid-afternoon they knocked a couple of bee-hives off the wall into the very midst of us, and, as we were wearing ‘shorts,’ with nothing to protect the leg from calf to knee, the sequel was a very unpleasant one. So dead sure were those bees that our inoffensive little party was responsible for upsetting their homes that they divided themselves into just as many bands as we were men, and started, impartially and systematically, to sting us to death. My men were out of hand in an instant, and I really believe that, had not a modern miracle been wrought, another minute would have seen the whole pack of us, careless of such trifles as Turkish rifle and machine-gun fire, wallowing in the fifty-yard-distant Tigris.

“The miracle was performed by a little pink-cheeked, bare-footed angel of a Jewess, evidently the ‘shepherd of the bees.’ Unconcernedly tripping out among the writhing ‘casualties,’ oblivious alike to the threat of Turkish bullets and the roaring masses of bees, she set up the punctured hives in a safe place under the wall, and then began to beat sharply with a stick upon an old bronze gong which was suspended from her neck by a thong. Instantly the bees stopped stinging, and inside of five minutes the last of them was settling back with a contented buzz into its hive. I could have kissed the stubby brown toes of the pink-cheeked little angel of mercy. And here again let me record to the credit of the Turks that, although her head and shoulders must have been visible to them above the low wall, they made no attempt to stop with a bullet the work which, had they only known it, was all that prevented the whole lot of us from falling into their hands.

“Every man of us was, of course, in beastly shape from the stings. My own agony from this source was infinitely worse than that from a bullet which ploughed up my scalp when we cut the bridge of boats after darkness had fallen; in fact, if the truth were known, I think the desperate pain all of the boys were in had a good deal to do with the absolute recklessness they displayed when the time came for us to try to fulfil our mission. I heard one chap tell another he was afraid that he wasn’t going to get shot, and the whole bunch acted as if they felt the same way. Luckily, the Turks had no searchlight, and it is probable their own fire helped not a little in breaking up the bridge. At any rate, it went off down the yellow Tigris in a score of sections, and we—or what was left of us—with it. A half-dozen impetuous Turks who, in their eagerness to get at close quarters, had come out to welcome us half-way, were also carried along when the bridge broke up. After that it was a case of sauve qui peut for all of us, and I’m sorry to say that only about a third of the force I started out with has, so far, straggled back to Kurna.”