Scorpion Sunset
Page 36
I received the letter you sent me accepting my proposal. I thank you sincerely for the trust you have placed in me. As soon as I arrive in Basra I will speak to the padre and arrange a swift and quiet wedding ceremony. Just us and a few friends. One person who will be especially pleased to welcome you to England is my aunt, Harry, Michael, and Georgie’s mother. She has been the only American in our quiet corner of England for many years.
I send you and our children love,
Your fiancé, John
Abdul’s
November 1918
The last goodbyes had been said the previous day in Ibn Shalan’s house. Neither John nor Georgie had expected to see Michael, Hasan, or Mitkhal again before they sailed, but the three of them had turned up unexpectedly in Abdul’s where they were waiting for the boat to carry them downstream to the Gulf and the ocean-going liners.
As soon as the boat arrived, David, Angela, and Major and Mrs Crabbe took the children on board to give John and Georgiana a few last private moments with Hasan and Michael, but while Hasan and Georgiana embraced for the last time, Michael took the opportunity to explain – yet again – to John just why he was staying in Mesopotamia.
‘If the Arabs don’t get a mandate to rule themselves after helping us to win the war against the Turks, there will be a revolt …’
‘And you want to be here to see it?’ John interrupted.
‘I do,’ Michael conceded.
‘It’s hard losing both of you to the Bedouin.’
‘You haven’t lost us, John. You can write to us care of Abdul. He always knows where to find us.’ Hasan turned away from Georgiana and hugged him.
‘My Arab cousin. Or is that now cousins?’ John turned from Hasan and Michael to Mitkhal.
Abdul knocked and opened the door. ‘The boat’s ready, sir.’
‘Thank you, Abdul. Georgie? Time we left.’ John offered her his arm.
They walked downstairs and on to the boat. David and Crabbe were leaning on the rail.
‘After all the sacrifice, all the killing, all the death, this is this how it ends?’ David asked. ‘With a boat trip down the Shatt al-Arab?’
‘We’re the lucky ones. For us, it ends with a journey home.’ John watched Georgie take Robin from David. Mariam and Hasmik were running up and down the deck, under the eagle eyes of Yana Crabbe, who was watching every move they made.
John walked over to where Angela was sitting with Peter. He knew that they were all thinking of the ones who wouldn’t be going home. Peter, Charles, Stephen Amey, Boris Bell – faces swirled in his mind’s eye. Men he’d loved, men he’d cared for, even men he’d disliked, but above all, men he’d never forget.
John wrapped his arm around Angela. He looked up at the three robed Bedouin who stood side by side at an upstairs window in Abdul’s and tipped his hat to them.
‘Shall we walk to the prow, Mrs Mason?’
‘To take a last look at Basra? Yes, please.’
He slipped his arm around her waist. Angela smiled up at him, then turned to look ahead towards the horizon, a shawl covering her head and that of her child. John watched and felt an overwhelming love for both of them.
He remembered the recurring dream that had begun in Kut.
The sky was blue, the breeze fresh. He was surrounded by light. It danced and shimmered, clear, beautiful and blinding above and around him. Below him the river glistened with reflected sunbeams that tipped the surface of the waves with winking gold and silver flashes. The wind carried the taste of fresh salt air blowing up from the Gulf. The vessel moved out from the river banks and glided, slow and stately, past the anchored boats into mid-stream.
HISTORICAL NOTES
Most scholars outside of Turkey now accept the genocide of the Armenians in 1915-16 by the Turks as fact. Possibly two of the best accounts are Henry H. Riggs’ Days of Tragedy in Armenia and Tacy Atkinson’s The German, the Turk and the Devil made a Triple Alliance. Both authors were American missionaries and both had first-hand knowledge of the atrocities. British POWs marched into Turkey after the surrender of Kut al Amara mentioned seeing abandoned Armenian villages and the bones of massacred Armenian men, women, and children in the desert. The report of the US Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Henry Morgenthau, Sr., is recognized as one of the main eyewitness accounts of the genocide. Morgenthau published his memoirs in a 1918 book, Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story.
The Mesopotamian campaign in the First World War has been called ‘The Sideshow War’ and ‘The Forgotten War.’ It’s certain that the surrender of Kut al Amara by General Townshend was an embarrassment the British would rather forget. The British Relief Force suffered heavy casualties both inside and outside Kut: in the effort to relieve the town between January and April 1916, 14,814 were killed or died of wounds, 12,807 died from disease, and 13,494 ended up in captivity or were posted missing. The treatment British POWs received at the hands of the Turks was savage and brutal, and classified as torture. Thousands died on forced marches or in captivity. There was talk of reprisals; some of the guilty Turks were arrested, but freed after the Treaty of Lausanne was signed in 1923.
Scorpion Sunset is the end of a journey I began in 1985 when I met Christopher Marley, a Welsh volunteer and survivor of the Mesopotamian Campaign, who at the age of eighty-nine showed me his death certificate. It stated that he’d died of typhoid fever in Baghdad in 1918. His corpse didn’t look ‘quite right’ to the burial party, who put it aside. Four days later he woke up in the temporary mortuary. By then the army had declared him officially dead, notified his family, and refused him rations or a replacement uniform on the grounds that he was deceased. It took six months of arguing while begging for food and clothes from his companions before he was eventually restored to the strength of his battalion.
To my shame I hadn’t heard of the First World War fought by the British against the Ottoman Turks in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) until Christopher told me about it. His tales inspired me to write Long Road to Baghdad, Winds of Eden, and Scorpion Sunset. It’s been a long road! Long Road to Baghdad lay unpublished in a drawer for over 25 years. Editors who read it offered me contracts to write other books while insisting no one wanted to know about the First World War in Iraq. Fortunately Accent Press invited me to complete the trilogy in 2013, and readers have since proved otherwise! I am indebted to everyone at Accent for their continued faith in me, especially my editor Greg Rees.
Hasan Mahmoud/Harry Downe is based on Lt Col Gerard Leachman, Officer Commanding the Desert, who remained in Iraq at the end of the war in 1918. He, like so many, both Arab and British, had hoped that the Arabs would be given the opportunity to rule themselves. It was denied them at Versailles when the peace treaties were signed and the Allies carved up the Middle East. In 1920 the Arabs made a bid for freedom when they orchestrated the Arab Revolt. But that’s another story …
In 1928 William Seabrook published his Adventures in Arabia. In it, he mentions seeing European men living in the black tents of the Bedouin in both the Arabian and Mesopotamian Deserts. They had invoked the hospitality of the desert and as such no questions were asked of them regarding their origins or motives for seeking a life among the Arabs. Were some surviving British POWs?
Finally, there is a plaque in the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral in London:
KUT EL-AMARA
5TH DECEMBER 1915 TO 29TH APRIL 1916
TO THE MEMORY OF
5746 OF THE GARRISON WHO DIED IN THE SIEGE
OR AFTERWARDS IN CAPTIVITY.
ERECTED BY THEIR SURVIVING COMRADES.
Catrin Collier, 2015
The Long Road to Baghdad series
by
Catrin Collier
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Published by Accent Press Ltd 2015
ISBN 9781783753758
Copyright © Catrin Collier 2015
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers: Accent Press Ltd, Ty Cynon House, Navigation Park, Abercynon, CF45 4SN
This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.