LITMIR.BIZ

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out empty husks and mouldy news.

      But to return to Cairo. We netted a good deal of small fry, but only landed one big fish during the time I was attached. He was a Mesopotamian and a very respectable old gentleman, who followed the calling of astrologer and peripatetic quack – a common combination and admirably adapted for distributing propaganda. He came from Stamboul through Athens with exemplary credentials, and might have got through to India, which was the landfall he proposed to make, if his propagandist energy had not led him to deviate on a small side-tour in Egypt. Here we got on his track, and I boarded the Port Said express at short notice while he and the "ferret" who had picked him up got into a third-class compartment lower down. As the agent made no signal after the train had pulled out, I knew our man had not got the bulk of his propaganda with him, otherwise I had powers to hold up the express, for it was more important to get his stuff than the man himself. At Port Said he had a chance of seeing me, thanks to the agent's clumsiness, and I had to shave my beard off and buy a sun-helmet in consequence, for I was travelling in the same ship along the Canal to see that he did not communicate with troops on either side of the bank, and on the slightest suspicion he would have put his stuff over the side. All went smoothly and he was arrested in Suez roads by plain-clothes men with a sackful of seditious literature for printing broadcast in India. Of course they arrested the "ferret" too, as is usual in these cases. I went ashore with them in the police-launch as a casual traveller and was amused to hear the agent rating the old man for not having prophesied this mishap when telling his fortune the night before.

      The propagandist was merely interned in a place of security – it was not our policy to make martyrs of such men, especially when they were bona fide Ottoman subjects.

      I was rather out of touch with the pan-Islamic movement during the summer of 1915, as my lungs had become seriously affected on the Canal, and the trouble became so acute that I had to spend two or three months in the hills of Cyprus. Before I had been there a week the G.O.C. troops in Egypt cabled for me to return and proceed to Aden as political officer with troops.

      I was too ill then to move and had to cable to that effect. My chagrin at missing a "show" was much alleviated when I heard what the show was. As it had a marked effect on the pan-Islamic campaign by enhancing Turkish prestige, it is not out of place to give some account of it here.

      While I was still on the Canal in February (1915) a "memo" was sent for my information from Headquarters at Cairo to say that the Turks had invaded the Aden protectorate at Dhala, where I once served on a boundary commission.

      I noted the fact and presumed that Aden was quite able to cope with the situation, as the Turks had a most difficult terrain to traverse before they could get clear of the hills and reach the littoral, while the hinterland tribes are noted for their combatant instincts and efficiency in guerilla warfare, besides being anti-Turk. I had, however, in spite of many years' experience, failed to reckon with Aden apathy. True to the policy of laissez faire which was inaugurated when our Boundary Commission withdrew some twelve years ago, Aden had been depending for news of her own protectorate on office files and native report, especially on that much overrated friend and ally the Lahej sultanate. The Turks knew all about this, for the leakage of Aden affairs which trickles through Lahej and over the Yamen border is, and has been for years, a flagrant scandal.

      The invasion at Dhala was a feint just to test the soundness of official slumber at Aden; the obvious route for a large force was down the Tiban valley, owing to the easier going and the permanent water-supply.

      Our border-sultan (the Haushabi) was suborned with leisurely thoroughness all unknown to his next-door neighbour, that purblind sultanate at Lahej, unless the latter refrained from breaking Aden's holy calm with such unpleasant news.

      In May Aden stirred in her sleep and sent out the Aden troop to reconnoitre. This fine body of Indian cavalry and camelry reported that affairs seemed serious up the Tiban valley; then inertia reasserted itself and they were recalled. Also the Lahej sultanate, in a spasm of economy, started disbanding the Arab levies collected for the emergency from the tribes of the remoter hinterland which have supplied fine mercenaries to many oriental sultanates for many centuries.

      The watchful Turk, with his unmolested spy system, had noted every move of these pitiful blunders, and, at the psychological moment, came pouring down the Tiban valley some 3,000 strong with another 5,000 Arab levies. They picked up the Haushabi on the way, whose main idea was to get a free kick at Lahej, just as an ordinary human boy will serve some sneak and prig to whom a slack schoolmaster has relegated his own obvious duty of supervision. To do that inadequate sultanate justice, it tried to bar the way with its own trencher-fed troops and such levies as it had, but was brushed aside contemptuously by the hardier levies opposed to it and the overwhelming fire of the Turkish field batteries. Then a distraught and frantic palace emitted mounted messengers to Aden for assistance like minute-guns from a sinking ship.

      Aden behaved exactly like a startled hen. She ran about clucking and collecting motor-cars, camel transport, anything. The authorities dared not leave their pet sultan in the lurch – questions might be asked in the House. On the other hand they had made no adequate arrangements to protect him. Just as a demented hen will leave her brood at the mercy of a hovering kite to round up one stray chick instead of sitting tight and calling it in under her wing, so Aden made a belated and insane attempt to save Lahej.

      The Aden Movable Column, a weak brigade of Indians, young Territorials, and guns, marched out at 2 p.m. on July 4, i. e. at the hottest time of day, in the hottest season of the year and the hottest part of the world. Motor-cars were used to convey the infantry of the advanced guard, but the main body had to march in full equipment with ammunition. The casualties from sunstroke were appalling. The late G.O.C. troops in Egypt mentioned them to me in hundreds, and one of the Aden "politicals" told me that not a dozen of the territorial battalion remained effective at the end of the day. Many were bowled over by the heat before they had gone two miles.

      Most of the native camel transport, carrying water, ammunition and supplies, – and yet unescorted and not even attended by a responsible officer – sauntered off into the desert and vanished from the ken of that ill-fated column.

      Meanwhile the advanced guard of 250 men (mostly Indians) and two 10-pounder mountain-guns pushed on with all speed to Lahej, which was being attacked by several thousand Turks and Turco-Arabs with 15-pounder field batteries and machine-guns. They found the palace and part of the town on fire when they arrived, and fought the Turks hand-to-hand in the streets. They held on all through that sweltering night, and only retired when dawn showed them the hopeless nature of their task and the fact that they were being outflanked. They fell back on the main body, which had stuck halfway at a wayside well (Bir Nasir) marked so obviously by ruins that even Aden guides could not miss it. Shortage of water was the natural result of sitting over a well that does not even supply a settlement, but merely the ordinary needs of wayfarers.

      This well is marked on the Aden protectorate survey map (which is procurable by the general public) as Bir Muhammad, its full name being Bir Muhammad Nasir. There are five wells supplying settlements within half an hour's walk of it on either side of the track, but when we remember that the column's field-guns got no further owing to heavy sand, and that the aforesaid track is frequently traversed by ordinary tikkagharries, we realise the local knowledge available.

      The column straggled back to the frontier town of Sheikh Othman, which they prepared to defend, but Simla, by this time thoroughly alarmed, ordered them back for the defence of Aden, and they returned without definite achievement other than the accidental shooting of the Lahej sultan. This was hardly the fault of the heroic little band which reached Lahej; that ill-starred potentate was escaping with his mounted retinue before dawn and cantered on top of an Indian outpost without the formality of answering their challenge. He was brought away in a motor-car and died at Aden a few days later – another victim to this deplorable blunder. Any intelligent and timely grasp of the enemy's strength and intention would have given the poor man ample time to pack his inlaid hookahs, Persian carpets, and other palace treasures and withdraw in safety to Aden while our troops made good the Sheikh Othman line along the British frontier. I am presuming that Aden was too much taken by surprise to have met the Turks in a position of her own choosing while they were still entangled in hilly country where levies of the right sort could

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