on British resources, and on the personal courage and endur- ance of the men employed. There were no battles on the scale of those in France; but the qualities of the British and Indian troops in Europe can be matched by those shown by their comrades in arms in Mesopotamia in such operations as the capture of Nasiriya in the middle of the hot weather, in the defence of Kut, in the gallant attempts to relieve Kut, and in the stoical endurance by British and Indian prisoners of the cal- culated barbarities of the prisoner-of-war camps.
Whether to attack the Turks in Mesopotamia was wise or not has been the subject of much discussion. Why the expedi- tionary force went to Basra is clear enough. The Turks were threatening the friends of Great Britain in the Persian Gulf; and there was good ground for the belief that the supply of oil from the Persian oil fields essential for the navy might be cut off by the Turks on some pretext or other. But was there any necessity to go farther than Basra? Was the occupation conducted as part of a carefully thought-out policy, or was it carried out, as the British Empire is said to have been built up, in a fit of absence of mind? It is claimed that the successive advances were forced on the British Government in the first place by military necessity. The battle at Shu'aiba, only 12 m. from the British base at Basra, and the successful raid (insti- gated by the Turks) on the oil pipe-line in Persia, showed that it was essential to push the Turks farther back. Once Basra and the pipe-line were secured by the capture of ' Amara and Nasiriya, it might have been thought sufficient to consolidate the position; but as often as Turkish armies re-formed it was necessary, according to the military authorities, to go forward and destroy them, and, having destroyed them, the British forces stayed in the area captured.
There were not wanting critics who attributed the campaign in Mesopotamia to a desire to control the oil supplies of the country, but such critics ignore the considerations set forth in the preceding paragraph and the whole history of British rela- tions with the Persian Gulf. Moreover, the oil supplies of Mesopotamia were already in British hands.
It was repeatedly announced, in the course of the campaign, that Great Britain had come to fight the Turk, not the Arab, and on the whole the Arabs (and the non-Arab inhabitants, too, Kurds and even Turks) reciprocated by not fighting against the British. The Turkish authorities in Mesopotamia got little help from the local people. Of those called up for military service many fled, and those who were actually brought into the fighting line fought without heart. Large bodies of Arab and Kurdish tribesmen came down with the Turks early in 1915 to fight at Shu'aiba, but they held aloof during the battle and after the defeat of the Turks they scattered, never to re-form. It is true that the most prominent member of the Sa'dun family, 'Ajaimi, joined the Turks (after negotiating unsuccessfully with the British authorities) and remained their ally until the end of the war, but he never once joined battle with the British forces, or, indeed, did anything else to earn the monthly subsidy the Turks paid him.
But it must not be thought, because they gave the Turks no help, that the Arabs eschewed violence. They hung on the skirts of both armies, and after a battle murdered the wounded and stragglers and robbed living and dead on both sides. The beaten side suffered most, and it was fortunate that it was usually the Turks who were beaten. Nevertheless, once an area was definitely occupied, the country usually became quiet enough. The sheikhs maintained order among their tribes, and native police were formed to help keep the peace in the towns and along the lines of communication.
It is a proof of the strength of the Turkish hold over Mesopo- tamia that when the Turks withdrew the whole administration collapsed. The mere departure of the Turkish officials was enough to ensure this, for they held nearly all the highest execu- tive positions; but to make doubly sure the Turks sometimes compelled the few Arab officials occupying posts of importance to go with them, and they always, if there was time, carried away or destroyed the official records, in order to embarrass the
invader and it would appear to spite the Arabs for the luke- warmness of their support.
Thus it happened that the occupying forces found that the whole framework of civil government had fallen to pieces, and the political officers accompanying the troops had no easy task to put it together. The task would have been impossible but for the retention and extension of the system of using tribal sheikhs as if one may use the expression sub-contractors in the work of government. The sheikh was made responsible for law and order in his own tribal area, and was often used as the medium for revenue collection. The defect of this system is that it puts wealth and power into the hands of sheikhs who may at any time use them against the Government which has made them a defect which the Turks remedied by setting one sheikh against another and by various other devices which could not be copied by a British administration. But, good or bad, the sys- tem was inevitable during the occupation.
With each successive advance the task of the administration became more difficult, not merely because of the difficulty of finding officials of experience to take over an area constantly growing, but also because, as the war went on, the country in the Turks' hands fell into greater destitution. Thousands of people at Khaniqin were found to have died of starvation; and at Kifri, when the British forces entered the town, starving women and children the men had nearly all fled to avoid conscription were eating grass, and the only food in the whole of the bazaar was a few handfuls of dates. For the last eighteen months of the war, almost the first work of a political officer in a newly occupied district was to get food from Bagdad for the civil population. The country, however, showed great vitality: in a few weeks the bazaar would be. busy, in a few months more busy than ever.
On the whole the Turkish system of administration was con- tinued with little change. To effect economy the work of col- lecting the taxes allotted to the Public Debt and the Tobacco Regie was handed over to the Government revenue officials, and the appointment of British officials as heads of districts made it possible to abolish the clumsy division of executive and revenue functions which provided the Turks with a necessary counter-check on corruption. In the sphere of law two conces- sions were made to local requirements. The first was the officia recognition of the impossibility of treating wild tribesmen by the ordinary processes of law, and the introduction of a regulation, adapted from a regulation in force on the Indian Frontier, pro- viding that civil and criminal cases in which a tribesman was concerned might be settled according to tribal custom.
The second was the institution of recognized Shiah Qadhis to deal with questions of personal status, inheritance, etc., among Shiahs, so that Shiahs might not be forced, as they were under the Turkish regime, either to accept the ruling of a Sunni Qadhi, or to settle their difficulties by private arrangements which might afterwards be questioned in a court of law.
Apart from a few changes of which these are perhaps the most important, the British administration rests its claim to superiority over the Turkish mainly on the greater care and honesty shown in working the existing system. The Depart- ment of Waqf (Pious Endowments), for instance, was penniless, the mosque employees were paid ludicrously small stipends, and the mosques and religious schools were tumbling into ruin; yet every year considerable sums were remitted to Constantinople, where they were absorbed to a very large extent in overhead charges. Now salaries were raised in some cases hundreds per cent, a large number of Waqf buildings were repaired, and i substantial balance was built up. Then, whereas the Crov lands were being rapidly bled to death before the occupation a system of agricultural loans, combined with irrigation work and skilled advice, and applied to private as well as to Govern- ment lands, contributed greatly to the prosperity of the country. And so on in each department of Government activity.
The inquiry is naturally made: Why was it, if the British administration studied the interests of the local population more than the Turkish, and the Arabs showed no hostility to the British during the war, that a widespread rising broke out when
