EXPLAINING THE BAGHDAD WAR.

Pukekohe & Waiuku Times, Volume 5, Issue 141, 4 February 1916, Page 2 (Supplement)

EXPLAINING THE BAGHDAD WAR.

By LOYAT FRASRR j n "Daily Mail

A British and Indian force of horse and foot and Runs, Hacked by monitors and armoured motor-cars and airplanes, has fought its way to within eighteen miles of Baghdad. Last week it won a fierce little battle beside the immense vaulted hall at Ctesiphon, the only vestige left of the huge palace of the Sassanian kings. Soon, if all goes well, it should sight the domes and minarets and date groves of the City of the Caliphs. I find that many people are very puzzled about the campaign in Mesopotamia. They want to know why we British arc marching on Baghdad. There are many contributory reasons, but the true and all-embracing reason is that we are fighting Turkey, and through her Germany for the mastery of the Persian Gulf. We have been masters of the Persian Gulf for 300 years. Our warships had sailed the Gulf is undisputed lordship for fifty years when the Turk first marched down from Baghdad and sighted its blue waters. We went to the Persian Gulf to protect our growing trade with India from attack from the sea. We stayed there because when our Indian Empire grew we quickly realised that other Powers established on the shores of the Gulf would first disturb and might eventually menace India. We

sought no selfish privileges, and we held no teritory, but we brooked no . rival. We suppressed slavery and piracy. We kept the peace and we kept all others out. We did these things for the sake of India. The men who fought at Ctesiphon last week were fighting to maintain British rule in India. Our supremacy in the Gulf has been challenged time and again. From the day when we laid low the fabled glories of golden Hormuz we have had to be vigilant sentinels. The latest, the steaithiest. and the most subtle of our foes has been Germany, with her agents disguised as peaceful traders, her Baghdad Railway, her cozening of British statesmen, and her Agreements which would assuredly have led to our undoing.

The Persian Gu'f is the Mediterranean of Asia, from the point of view of its political problems. Yet while all Englishmen arc tolerably familiar with Mediterranean questions, very few are closely acquainted with tlit Persian Gulf and the issue* it presents. This is not surprising, for the Gulf is still almost an unknown sea. Parts of its coasts are still uncharted. There are dead cities near its shores where no European has ever set foot. The volcano peninsula of Muscndam, which lies athwart its entrance, is still unexplored. But Englishmen have got to learn something about the Persian Gulf, whether they want to or not, for the destinies of the East may lie decided around its shallow waters in the vears that are to come.

LAND OF MAGIC -VXD ROMAXCE. I wish I could get right away from this interminable war to gossip about the Persian Gulf. 1 know no more fascinating region. Behind its desolate and barren shores, one-half giant cliffs, the other half golden sands, you may trace the mystery and romance of all the ages. The world as we know it began there. Are you interested in that most absorbing of studies, the contemplation of the beginnings of things? Go to the Persian Gulf and you are amid the scenes of the very dawn of civilisation. Xot for nothing does Biblical tradition place the site of the Garden of Eden near its upper end.

!n the heart of the Pearl Islands, whose very name is magical, lies a desert filled with mound tombs, some of them two stories high, stretching as far as the eye can reach. They bear no inscription, and their origin has never iieen ascertained. They may be, and 1 like to think they are, the oldest of man-created structures.

i'Yom these islands probably came the mysterious be'ng. perhaps the source of the fish-god myth, who taught letter* and agriculture to the dwellcs in the swampy delta of the Tigr.s and the Euphrates, where the British fought their first battles a year ago. Thence came the "black-headed islanders" who founded the great nations which preceded Babylon. From the northern end of the Gulf, perchance, came the "black-haired race" which conquered the aborigines of Cathay and developed into the Chinese as we know them. The Mediterranean and Egyptian civilisations were the work of races moving outwards across Arabia and the Euphrates Valley from this mysterious inland sea. The archaeologists in Crete and on the Nile have been grubbing in the wrong places.

Do you seek romance? Away from the steamer routes m the Gulf lies a land which you will find marked on any map as "The Pirate Coast." There, beivnd lagoons bluer than Mr. Stacpoo'e ever dreamed of, are the old p rate iowns, and great square castles, and ancient forts, and a rabble of Arab mariners under falcon-eyed chieftains, who would probably raid the seas tomorrow if the strong band of Great Britain d sappearcd. Do strange peoples allure you? I'liere are immense tropical lionls of almost unfathomable depth, and on their mountainous sides you will meet, 1 ving in eaves and shyly, bringing eggs as an offering, tribes who more closely resemble the aborig lies of Cential Australia than any 1 have ever seen.

WHKX TJi!•; GKHMAXS CAMK. Wiei'd yon step hack to the Middle .'t ;e-,'i (In to Kuweit, whore tlx l af£t*d S/M-ilili Muli;ir:ik ->! *r«':i•!s liis influence deitly over li:ill Arabia, and hoar stories of battles in the interior between armies oi' horsemen in chain armour. who worn nilo-. ;iikl sin to with ti:<- hattlo-axo. Aro you very modern!" 11.id von • to I he I', r-iaii Gulf only yoai yon *1::lt!11 have -eeii at work (ierman " '.vi.. i i-policy," the ry latest product of twentieth-century civilisation. It i.~ a tale that liol'HK with a couple of trader>, who slept on a Persian l.'iieh and prnlV-ssod to liny pear! oyster shells, and t ended with a I no f ii German steamers, imposing consulate buildings, and the stacks of sto ■! rails tor the last sty-tain oi the Haididid Hallway, which we v.or.' oli!i»iii'_; iiioiieh 1,1 smile upon. 1 lie -lay ol the Germans in the (<iilt went through many pha-es. Once they trie<! to seize an on the pivtext ot workau; :t-> red oxide de-|mt-.its. ! hey t r:ed. t hro'!"!i t heir tr:end 'he Sultan of Turk; \. t.> uet i ''it tnil ei the I'ea i'l liatlks. v. I, h he iad no power to "rant. I hey tried lo |, i -11 all e Sheikh .Mubarak to UlVe tliein twenty -ipiaro mile, on the >1 aires of tl.' line-t harhour ill tli" (lull'. One of the last i pKnde, happened jll .1 a V ll' II a little Main! town. A I»• it ■ -)i 'iliicer \\ allied into an ofliee and i lapped his hand on the .-.'nimhler of a stout and grubby (lerman who ca'led h:niseit a mother-ot-pearl merchant. ii • was illt s-.-ai n _c a letter giving detads of the in -1 p >r: inn ol t lie l.ritish fo.'.e now neariiia !i-iu !> lad.

POINTS YOU OUGHT TO UNDERSTAND.

We are all familiar with war now, but if you wanted to see wars coming you had to go to places like these at the Back of Beyond. In the Yellow Sea I once encountered a short, squarebuilt, kecn-evcd mariner, commanding a tramp steamer. He was exactly like Cimtain Cable, in Merrnnan's novel " The Vultures."' He had on board four hundred Muscovite lumbermen. The Russo-Japanese War, now happily thrust in the background by new and strong ties, sprang from the clash of mighty interests; but its immediate germ lay in that dingy steamer an:l its human freight, transerrcd to junks next morning. The story of the veiled quarrel between Russia and Japan about the Yalu timber concession is now history, and not long afterwards Japanese destroyers were tearing through tifce rrght towards Port Arthur. The Persian Gulf was long a breed-ing-ground of International Incidents. 1 often wondered whether, when chancelleries were humming, and newspapers were publishing tremendous articles, and Parliaments were angrily debating, any of the people thus writing and speaking had any notion what an Internat onal Incident actually looked like on the spot. I recall one such, which worried secretaries till their hair turned grey and produced files of correspondence many feet high. On the verge of the sea at sunset I came upon an amiable gentleman seated before a small tent. His background was a big violet mountain, before him across the water Hormuz flamed like a jewel in the dying light. He was the Man in Possession, the embodiment of the majesty of Great Britain, and lie hospitably dispensed whisky and soda to the parched stranger. Near him were a couple of tattered soldiers, the symbols of Hostile Military Force. They were there to check and resist the .Man in Possession, but their Government had not sent them any pay; so one fetched wood and water for the foe, and the other cooked his dinner. The odd trio had been there for exactly four months. They had been heard of in the House of Commons, Potrograd was very worried about them, Berlin was inquisitive, Paris wanted to know more, the telegraph wires were strained to breaking point; but though the reverberations shook the a r thousands of miles away, nothing beyond this comical little group was visible on the spot.

PERSIA IX THE MELTIXG-POT. Many such recollections make nie inclined to laugh whenever I look at the Foreign Office; but in truth they are no laugh ng matter. Such seemingly trivial things are the harbingers of war. You can all see the war when it comes; I am trying to show you howit looks when it is coming, for war is mostly bred in these remote places. And though that beach seen.ed lonely and peaceful enough, yet I had parsed a watchful Cossack guard ill sheepskin cap and high top-boots a few miles back ; and up the innocent channel on the right a German was sitting on n packing-case beside a heap of oystershells writing letters which never went to any pearl merchant.

Bemember what is now the outcome of the atmosphere 1 have tried to describe. Consider the latest phase of this keen and little-known struggle for the Persian Gulf. While our Army has been marching on Baghdad. German agents, with stacks of rifles and sacks of gold, have been pouring into Persia from Turkish territory along a route just north of Baghdad. They are raising bands of irregulars all over Persia nor purposes which are still rather obscure. We sent troops to occupy the Persian port of Bushire this summer, for the preservation of order. We withdraw our forces afterwards, apparently as a p'oof to the Persian Government of our good faith.

Observe now the extraordinary sequel. The Persian gendarmerie and its Swed'sh officers have just risen on their own account at Germany's bidding. Sweden disowns her officers and says, in effect, that they have become adventurers. At the city of Shiraz, beyond the coastal ranges, the gendarmerie has seized the British Consul, Major O'Connor, and the other male English residents, arid carried tliem into captivity. The leading spirit of this rising is the German Consul, Herr Wassmuss, a notorious firebrand. When Major O'Connor was starting for Shiraz he sa d lie feared he should "vegetate" there. 1 wonder what he thinks to-dav.

Persia is in the melting-pot at last. Russia has sent troops to Teheran. We can hardly avoid taking some further action in the south. All the German and Austrian Consular and other agents in Persia seem to be making war on their own account, and they have either bought or grossly deceived the few Swedes left wicli the gendarmerie.

OUR EASTERN RESPONSIBILITY. Perhaps it will now be understood why, when the papers are full of articles about the city of Baghdad, I have preferred to write this week about the Persian Gulf, to explain what it is like, and try to make clear the central position it occup'es in the struggle which is stead'lv enlarging : n the Middle hast. Baghdad s an episode, though a great and historic episode, and the goal of an extremely brilliant campa gn. .My personal view is that we should, a> a matter of policy, have contented ourselves with seizing the Euphra'i's ami Tigris delta ; but tho-e omniscient and n:a-fer m nds who control the war doubtless have good reasons for their course of action which are concealed fimil humbler men. Presumably they recognise, 'u any case, that they cannot, while striking at Baghdad, ignore Persia, now in chaos under German supervls on. Though our commitim ills now ext' lei a full live hundred miles beyond I he Persian (Jul!, we mist tint forget thai oar chief inten 4s -till lie ill the Gu'l 11sel!. It may be argued that wli le v. e ale supreme at sea we can alv. ay.s control the Gulf, but that is n.i: wholly the case, especially ill these day, of submarines. The late Admiral M ilian warned us long ago that if »e let air, ho.tile Power get a foothold ill the Gulf we choiil I " imperil Great Britain', nu\al situation in the farther fa -t, her pi.lit e.d posit ion in India, her commercial interisfs in both, and t lie I in j; ria i I ie bet \\ ee.l hersell and A ii -t ralasia." I h'lie t r i d to d' aw a lit t "e pie! ore of the Persian Gulf, but let Uie .Mini up the thought., that really lie at Ikhack of it : I la- Gull. and our undisputed -outre] o, it. is our predominant interest in th s region. Wiierev; r v... may march in t he .M .1d'e l'.a~t »e niii-%t impose no permanent exe. s,jve sj|;,m upon our strength. W h f' striking at Turkey, we c in7ioi pr.'p -s to be indifferent tn ; |. • nlaimiiig c ind t a .ii isf Persia. e mi:-t always rciii"inbi r that -.'!•• !>e: in; :j ',:t ''imwu-ibdit'e- in the lvi,t

arc already enormous, that no campaigns in tlio Middle East can be decisive, and that this war will probably he settled in France.