War in the Garden of Eden | Page 3

from dawn till dark. It is a game of the lotto
variety. Each man has a paper with numbers written on squares; one of
them draws from a bag slips of paper also marked with numbers, calls
them out, and those having the number he calls cover it, until all the
numbers on their paper have been covered. The first one to finish wins,
and collects a penny from each of the losers. The caller drones out the
numbers with a monotony only equalled by the brain-fever bird, and
quite as disastrous to the nerves. There are certain conventional
nicknames: number one is always "Kelley's eye," eleven is "legs
eleven," sixty-six is "clickety click," and the highest number is "top o'
the 'ouse." There is another game that would be much in vogue were it

not for the vigilance of the officers. It is known as "crown and anchor,"
and the advantage lies so strongly in favor of the banker that he cannot
fail to make a good income, and therefore the game is forbidden under
the severest penalties.
As we passed through the Strait of Ormuz memories of the early days
of European supremacy in the East crowded back, for I had read many
a vellum-covered volume in Portuguese about the early struggles for
supremacy in the gulf. One in particular interested me. The Portuguese
were hemmed in at Ormuz by a greatly superior English force. The
expected reinforcements never arrived, and at length their resources
sank so low, and they suffered in addition, or in consequence, so
greatly from disease that they decided to sail forth and give battle. This
they did, but before they joined in fight the ships of the two admirals
sailed up near each other--the Portuguese commander sent the British a
gorgeous scarlet ceremonial cloak, the British responded by sending
him a handsomely embossed sword. The British admiral donned the
cloak, the Portuguese grasped the sword; a page brought each a cup of
wine; they pledged each other, threw the goblets into the sea, and fell to.
The British were victorious. Times indeed have sadly changed in the
last three hundred years!
I was much struck with the accuracy of the geographical descriptions in
Camoens' letters and odes. He is the greatest of the Portuguese poets
and wrote the larger part of his master-epic, "The Lusiad," while exiled
in India. For seventeen years he led an adventurous life in the East; and
it is easy to recognize many harbors and stretches of coast line from his
inimitable portrayal.
Busra, our destination, lies about sixty miles from the mouth of the
Shatt el Arab, which is the name given to the combined Tigris and
Euphrates after their junction at Kurna, another fifty or sixty miles
above. At the entrance to the river lies a sand-bar, effectively blocking
access to boats of as great draft as the Saxon. We therefore transshipped
to some British India vessels, and exceedingly comfortable we found
them, designed as they were for tropic runs. We steamed up past the
Island of Abadan, where stand the refineries of the Anglo-Persian Oil

Company. It is hard to overestimate the important part that company
has played in the conduct of the Mesopotamian campaign. Motor
transport was nowhere else a greater necessity. There was no possibility
of living on the country; at first, at all events. General Dickson, the
director of local resources, later set in to so build up and encourage
agriculture that the army should eventually be supported, in the staples
of life, by local produce. Transportation was ever a hard nut to crack.
Railroads were built, but though the nature of the country called for
little grading, obtaining rails, except in small quantities, was impossible.
The ones brought were chiefly secured by taking up the double track of
Indian railways. This process naturally had a limit, and only lines of
prime importance could be laid down. Thus you could go by rail from
Busra to Amara, and from Kut to Baghdad, but the stretch between
Amara and Kut had never been built, up to the time I left the country.
General Maude once told me that pressure was being continually
brought by the high command in England or India to have that
connecting-link built, but that he was convinced that the rails would be
far more essential elsewhere, and had no intention of yielding.
I don't know the total number of motor vehicles, but there were more
than five thousand Fords alone. On several occasions small columns of
infantry were transported in Fords, five men and the driver to a car.
Indians of every caste and religion were turned into drivers, and
although it seemed sufficiently out of place to come across wizened,
khaki-clad Indo-Chinese driving lorries in France, the incongruity was
even more