Far from Flanders Fields...In the killing fields of Mesopotamia
O Death, where is thy Sting & Grave thy Victory?
— Tombstone of Pte. C. Stanley, Royal West Kent Regt. Died July 12, 1917, age 25
From dust to dust are returned the mouldering bones of another generation's war in Iraq. A Great War, with casualties in their multitudes; a profusion of death in a distant and pitiless land.
It has always been thus in the killing fields Mesopotamia — the land between the rivers.
Invaded, conquered, occupied, but taking its pound of flesh and its bucket of blood in return.
At the British Cemetery in Baghdad, near the North Gate of the Old City, lie row upon row of graves, some 4,000 of them, most of the headstones inscribed with a cross, but some with a crescent, because Christians were not alone in laying down their lives for King and Country and Empire.
It's what men — some merely boys — have always done, at the behest of sovereigns or sultans, in defence or on the attack, because war-making is bred in the bone, in this part of the world arguably more than any other, certainly for a whole lot longer.
In this latest war, which probably will not be the last, 32 British troops have been killed and 133 Americans, according to the British and U.S. governments.
Mercifully few, as wars go.
During World War I, 80,000 British troops lost their lives in Iraq, not including those killed during the British Mandate that followed, after London and Paris carved up the carcass of the vanquished Ottoman Empire.
Gertrude Bell, the British Empire's indefatigable Orientalist and Mother of Iraq (Khatun, they called her) — she essentially diagrammed the new nation's borders, calling upon her vast first-hand knowledge of unmapped spaces — wrote to her father from a Red Cross hospital in France, relating the grisly fragments of battle news obtained from wounded soldiers evacuated from Mesopotamia:
"They are knee-deep in water in the trenches, the mud impassable. They sink in it up to the knee, up to the thigh. When they lie down in the open to shoot, they cannot fire because their elbows are buried in it to the wrist."
It rains in the crescent valleys of this desert country.
Death divides, but memory clings.
— Gunner S.W. Routledge. Died July 13, 1917, age 19
From the perspective of a four-week war, as this one just past effectively was, it is incomprehensible to think of a distant conflagration that raged for years, across most of the globe, involving all the world powers.
On the Eastern Front, the war against the Turks extended from Gallipoli, that benighted start of the campaign, to Mesopotamia. It was, to a great extent, the British-brokered Arab revolt — think Lawrence of Arabia and 600,000 Bedouin on horseback from western Arabia and the Hejaz — that won the East for the West, but not without tremendous sacrifice.
In Mesopotamia, it was hoped, the British would stave off the Turks by setting the Arabs against the detested Ottoman army.
Christians and their Muslim allies, and Hindus and Sikhs from the Indian Forces, fighting side by side, fell in the campaign, their blood seeping into the sand of the desert.
The nadir of the war for British troops — facing a Turkish force of equal size, marching through unmapped territory of desert and swamps on their way to Baghdad — came in 1916 at the peninsular town of Kut al Amara.
Numerous command mistakes had forced them to retreat from Ctesiphon, only 60 kilometres from the capital, where they were besieged, trapped without enough food, medicine or ammunition to fight their way out.
For three months the soldiers — many of them wounded, others suffering from dysentery and malaria — waited for reinforcements. But relief was blockaded by the Turkish army and their Arabs. Wave after wave of British reinforcements was re repelled, the casualties' bodies paddled back downstream on wooded barges.
Sleep on Dear Son & Take thy Rest, They Miss you most That Loved you Best.
— Pte. H.C. Turnbull, Scottish Borderers. Died April 15, 1916, age 23
Finally, T. E. Lawrence was dispatched to offer a bribe to the Turkish army commander for safe evacuation of the troops; Whitehall had approved as much as £1 million for the purpose. By that time, 23,000 British relief soldiers had been killed trying to break out their cornered comrades.
The offer was flatly rejected by Gen. Khalil Pasha, who insisted the British soldiers immediately abandon Kut and surrender. This was done on April 29, 1916. More than 13,000 British and Indian troops were taken prisoner and sent on a death march.
The fall of Kut was one of the worst defeats in British history, though the town would be secured the following year.
Those who fell in battle there are interred at another British burial ground. The vandalized Kut cemetery had long been neglected until U.S. Marines arrived last week and worked with rakes and shovels to restore the grounds.
In the Baghdad cemetery, a stone monument stands in memory of the surrendered soldiers who trudged to their death. It reads:
"Here have been recovered and interred the bodies of British officers and men who, after the fall of Kut, being prisoners in the hands of the Turks, perished during the march from Kut or in the prison camps of Anatalia. These are they who came out of great tribulation."
Other monuments pay tribute to the Hindu forces and Sikh forces and Arab forces.
And the places they all breathed their last: Hannam, Falahiyah, Bait-'Issa, Hai-Salient, D'Ahra Bend, Sheikh Jaad, Passage of the Diyalah, Marl Plain, Shiyalah, Passage of the Adhaim, Dahuba, Baud-I-Adhaim, Jabul, Hamrin, Qarah Tappan, Tuz Khurmatli, Kirkuk, Baghdad.
At the very centre of the cemetery is the tomb of the British commanderof Mesopotamia, Gen. Sir Frederick Maude. An imperious and arrogant man with a low opinion of Arabs, albeit a great commanding officer, he died not in battle with his men but as a victim of cholera on Nov. 18, 1917, "whilst commanding the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force."
The unloved general's grave reads: "He fought a good fight. He kept the faith."
Alas, the dying did not end with the Armistice. More soldiers would be buried here, only a generation later, in World War II, mourned from afar.
If it were mine, I'd give the world to see my dear son's face and hear his voice once more.
— Gunner P.A. Jarvis, 144th Surrey and Sussex Yeomen. Died Oct. 21, 1942, age 24
This British cemetery, maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, has been largely undisturbed by the passing of another, modern war through the city of Baghdad.
Its custodian, jangling keys, says fighting took place nearby but never spilled into the extensive graveyard.
Not far from the cemetery gates, a stack of new headstones recently arrived from England — just before Desert Storm II began, in fact — to replace markers that have crumbled with time.
Barely a kilometre away, at an intersection where U.S. forces and Iraqi Republican Guards had blasted away at each other, three dead Iraqis have been buried where they fell, just on the side of the road.
Their collective headstone is an American cardboard rations box — Meal Ready to Eat — with the names of the dead written on the back in Arabic script.
Perhaps, eventually, their names will be added to the thousands upon thousands of Iraqis — hundreds of thousands — whose names are inscribed inside the gargantuan blue-tiled war memorial in Baghdad.
Shaped like a huge broken egg, it's called the Monument of Saddam's Qadissiya Martyrs, invoking the 7th-century battle in which Muhammad's general, Khalid ibn al-Walid — nicknamed "Sword of Islam" — drove the elephant-riding Persians out of Mesopotamia.
Beneath the war monument had been, until barely two weeks ago, a museum devoted to Saddam's life, including a family tree that (fancifully) traced his ancestry back to the Prophet Muhammad himself.
Also in the museum were Saddam's birth certificate, his Grade 5 report card (a score of 89 in history, the future president's best subject) and a photograph of the car Saddam filled with bullets when he unsuccessfully tried to assassinate Abd al-Karim Qasim in 1959.
All of that has since been looted, along with military badges and other relics of Iraq's many wars of folly.
Last week, the subterranean museum was being used as a command post for the Marine platoon tasked with securing the war monument.
"When we got here, it was being used as a chop-shop," said Lt. Steve Eastin, pointing to the stripped-down chassis of what had been a brand new Mercedes.
Dead Iraqi soldiers get their names on a wall few read. Dead British soldiers get their names on eroding tombstones in a burial place far from home.
And for some, too many, not even that:
A Soldier of the Great War
Known Unto God.
ROSIE DIMANNO, Toronto Star
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