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Chapter 3 — The Middle East
First of all we must cross the Suez and this we did by means of army pontoon bridge and so on to the desert road with nothing in view but sand, sand and more sand. This is a good macadam road linking Ismailia and Jerusalem and really there's not much that I can say about it for when I've said sand and heat that's about all there is to say. For hours we slipped along this road with nothing in sight but sand and sand came whipping over the tailboards to dry us up insight though our sweat wetted us outside. Just before nightfall we were running through Bethlehem, but our speed and restricted view gave us only time to think that here was just another wog village apparently hundreds of years old. Shortly afterwards we were running round the hills and into Jerusalem the golden. The road approaching the city runs along the face of a hill and one looks across a small valley onto the city itself straggling out on hill faces. It was then too dark for us to see very much of it but we gained the impression that here was a very modern city. When we left in the early morning we saw that it was indeed a fine modern city covering a large area of hillside and were sorry not to have had time to look around.

Most of the next day we were on a good road and made good time round through Jericho, skirted the Dead sea and so to Amman in the transJordan. To reach Amman we had first to toil up the very steep hills of the seven sisters and in this country we saw plenty of green grass on which ragged goatherds tended their herds of unkempt skinny looking goats and we drove down through valleys full of pomegranate trees. The fruit was not ripe unfortunately.

At Amman we had a lovely Tiffen and again filled up with oil and water also taking aboard a few oranges. It was now that our troubles really began for immediately we left Amman we left the road and ran straight on to the sand. Before we thought we had been having it bad with only the wind blown sand on the road to bother us, but it came swirling up to us in great thick waves now and we were absolutely covered in it and had it in our eyes ears nose and mouth. It seemed to us as if we had half the desert inside us and our water bottles were boiling hot so that we could only use it as a gargle. I have never been able to wash the sand from my shirt I was wearing at the time. That night after a most tiring day bumping over ruts in the sand and jolting through sudden gullies, we were put up at a desert post and most surprisingly it became very cold immediately the sun went out of the sky and darkness closed in on us. We found our two blankets quite inadequate. Next day was a torture of burning heat and sheer monotony. Most of it was spent travelling through the great Trans-Jordan rock desert, an immense area of desert thickly sown with black rocks for all the world as if some giant hammer had come down and shattered a great rock plateau or as if a million convicts had been breaking rocks for a thousand years and laying them out almost edge to edge. A most monotonous and deadly country with not a living thing to be seen on it. That night we stopped at a fort on the oil line which looked as if it had been brought straight from the set of a foreign legion film. So sudden and intense was the cold that night that it broke the spring of my wrist watch which I had wound up tightly while it was expanded in the heat of the sun. By this time we were on the edge of the great Syrian sand desert which is, if anything worse than the rock desert. Here the heat was even more intense and the deeper we went into it the hotter it became until we were virtually roasting in jackets of sand, caked on us by our own sweat. Even the wind did not bring relief for it was scorching hot. We could hardly sit still, for the metal work of the gharry was almost too hot to touch. All Thursday we saw beautiful but entirely non-existent trees lined lakes and all sorts of other common mirages. Gradually we left the sand and came into the dirty grey Iraqi desert, which is neither sand nor soil but a mixture of sand and a fine alluvial deposit entirely depressing to look upon. We began to pass little rough tented villages or villages of primitive mud buildings. From these, if we passed near enough the ragged dirty children came running and yelling for 'backshish'. Our eyes were so tired that when we reached the Euphrates and, swerving down towards Habbaniya, we thought that they were playing a wild trick on us. We turned into Habbaniya in the late evening having covered the thousand miles in just four days. We were very pleased but very tired.

Habbaniya is a wonderful station which must have cost the government millions of pounds to build. It covers a huge area and is an entirely or almost entirely self contained little town. There is in fact a small town attached for the native population permanently employed on the station. The whole place is divided of into separate camps each with its own HQ, its own block of billets, its own NAAFI and its own social club. A marvellous system of irrigation ditches and pumps brings water from the Euphrates and the lake and induces it to run all over the station. Along the ditches trees are grown and round the billets themselves the ground is flooded regularly so that each billet has its own lawn with its border of flowers. There is a magnificent swimming pool much better than most of our coastal towns possess.

Flight Sergeant Browning at Habbaniya 1941
There are three beautiful churches, one R.C, one C of E and one O D, two cinemas, one open air for the hot season and one indoor for the cold, show the best films available in this part of the world. There are soccer pitches, rugby pitches, cricket pitches, a golf course not in use at the moment and a race course and polo ground also not in use at the moment and there are literally dozens of tennis courts and a boating club on the adjacent lake. Horses are cheap in this country and in peace time the lads used to buy them and keep them in the station stables. In those days too Baghdad was a regular haunt of the lads and they used too to get invitations from the local Sheikhs for a few days shooting. The billets are good brick billets with fans for the summer and radiators for the winter. Adjacent are wash basins and cold showers and for the winter hot baths. Surely this is the finest organised station in the world, a little man made oasis in a filthy desert. With all that I have no great desire to be there at least during the duration for one is all the time within walls as in a prison. I was only there a fortnight and then I was posted to S.H.Q Mosul.

We travelled by gharri to Baghdad station and there entrained, by a stroke of good luck in second class for Mosul. It was dark most of the way up, which was a blessing for we slept most of the way instead of tiring our eyes staring at the monotony of dirty scrubby desert. Mosul is on the river Tigris and so in a few days I had been on the banks of two famous rivers at whose junction is supposed to be the garden of Eden. Changed days, indeed for now everything has almost got to be squeezed from the land. The only amusing thing about the journey up was the tragedy at the dining table. I hadn't very much money at the time, just short of pay-day, and I had worked it out that I would have just as much as cover the cost of dinner. But I had reckoned without thinking of the water which we ordered as we took our places. This one bottle of water cost us 150 fils (three bob) and after making explanations and excuses in halting French to the waiter, I was obliged to nip smartly back and borrow it from one of the lads. It was the first and last time I had had to borrow. Appropriately enough, I was sunk by a bottle of water.

At Mosul we found things rather different from Habbaniya. This drome had only just been taken over from the enemy and it was pretty rough and disorganised, some lads were in billets and some in tents. I was in a tent and in it I had my first and, fingers crossed, only dose of sand fly fever. Sand fly is a queer fever with symptoms similar to a bad dose of flu except that is no shivering and cold. But there is a splitting headache which catches the backs of the eyes, an ache in every bone and absolute lassitude due to the fever. I hate hospitals and determined not to go inside if I could help it, so I got a couple of sweat powders and borrowed the blankets from other lads in the tent, we were not using them anyway, and lay down to sweat it out as fast as I could. With the temperature already at 115c in the shade and six or seven blankets over me you can guess how much and how quickly I did sweat. When I arose on the third morning the blankets, my groundsheet and even the ground underneath were damp with it. I felt and looked a wreck and I could not eat for two or three days afterwards. From then on it was mostly just work getting the place organised.

In our off time we were allowed into town where we could mix with the Iraqi's, in certain areas only of course, and we thought that we might even make a few friends. Mosul, like almost any other eastern town looks very picturesque from a little distance with its towers and minarets and its domed and flat roofed buildings huddled together. But at first hand, it resolves into a collection of filthy looking crude buildings, filthy, stinking streets and a mixtures of people who are either incredibly filthy and ragged or incredibly clean and smart. There's only one street which may be called the main street, the rest of the town is composed of back alleys and narrow winding streets. The main street smells filthy so you can imagine what the rest of the place was like.

The first street we came to from the camp we knew was Silversmith Street for here the Amara workers had their shops and workshops. These 'shops' were nothing more or less than deep recesses in the wall with an iron shutter as a front. There they sat over their tiny charcoal forges, sometimes as many a half a dozen in a recess, making their broaches and bangles and odds and ends and there we spent a lot of time haggling with them about prices of stuff we seldom intended to buy. Dirty unshaven beggars they were squatting in the dirt in their long night gowns as we called them their name for the garment is 'thithasher', turning out stuff for the most part extremely crude and rough and charging ridiculous prices for it. Its only recommendation was that it was a souvenir and my passion for souvenirs will never be strong enough to make me throw away good money for utter trash, though I never failed to stop and have some fun haggling with them. I went to the market once, only once and that was too often. The smell was absolutely overpowering. Old and rotten meat hung check by jowl with any old junk and dirt and lay alongside days old fish. Flies swarmed, all over it and filthy diseased old men and women pawed it as they passed, afterwards taking their now even filthier paws away to handle some other meat or stinking fish or paw and prod the flat scone - like bread, looking for a piece which was sufficiently stale. In the recesses from which fruit and nuts were sold, bearded old filth sat cross - legged smoking their long pipes and lazily waving fans in a vain attempt at keeping off some of the millions of flies. Incidentally, those people eat a terrific amount of nuts, the favourite being simply the dried seeds of the melon and one seldom sees a wog without his handful of nuts. The smell and filth in the market almost made me sick and I vowed never to go into it again.
There are one or two good shops in the town but in these the prices were so high that we preferred to take our chance bargaining with the small shopkeepers though often we paid more for an article than we would have done in the big shops. Nothing is cheap out here, it is a country of high smells and exceedingly high prices.

The cinemas were a scream. There were three of them and each had only one projector so that we had to have regular intervals while the reels were mixed which was a good thing in a dull film, creating a diversion, but a bind in a good film. The funniest one that I saw was a 'Tarzan' film which had been meant to be shown as a serial. The reels had been hopelessly mixed and even the continuation pieces had been left in. It was impossible to follow the story but you've no idea funny it was. All the time down below in the 'stalls' there was a continued hum of conversation broken every now and again by a loud yell as the hero did something particularly heroic, and by the almost continual cries of the wog vendors calling their wares, nuts, chai, mai baried , cashes, lemonade, etc, so that for the most part it was a strain to follow the dialogue of the film. Later on we had a cinema built or rather shoved into one of the hangers on the camp and we seldom went to those in town except to have a laugh.

In the town there were a few men who dressed in European clothes and the youthful townsmen were so dressed for the main part, but the majority of the male population wore their long night-gowns or to give them their correct name 'thethashers' of plain or striped materials. Some of these thithashers are very nice, being made of good material and often finely embroidered. Instead of a hat they wore on the head a white cloth which also covered and protected the neck. This cloth generally had embroidered or tasselled borders and it is called the 'rutra'. It was held in position by a coil of thick hide rope called the egal. Although, they were a very people, their whites are really white (without perish) and some of the men are rather striking in appearance with their spotless headresses and creamy thithashers showing off their brown features. Often we would see bands of Turks in from the hills wearing their wide gaily coloured pantaloons and little jackets and heavily ornamented belts, never without a knife or two, which were also generally ornamentive though not purely so. We would always be sure of finding these Turks at one or another of finding the Turks at one or another of the numerous street photographers. The majority of the male population seemed to do little or nothing and spent most of its time in tea shops or 'chai-khanas' as they are called and sip tea, without milk, from little glasses between sips, getting on with their game of backgammon or 'trick-a-track'. This is their favourite game, and they play it with great gusto and unusual vigour, slapping their pieces about the board quite violently and adding to the already deafening din. From every chai-khana a radio blares its cacophony of sound endeavouring to drown the hum of conversation, the calls of street vendors and the continual blare of motor car horns trying to force a right of way through the changing of arabaniya bells.

The women we saw little of and those we did see were heavily veiled in thick black veils covering the head and reaching the ground. These 'abbaks' together with the face veil or 'pecha' are always worn out of doors. Some of the more modern women and girls discarded the pecha and one or two even the abbak, but I can't see that it was any improvement. It is so uncommon sight to see a woman, young, or old, walking along the street carrying on her head a four gallon petrol tin full of water. The petrol tin is indispensable out here both to the native and the troops, almost everywhere you can see something which has been a petrol tin.

The young boys of a family are the respected members of it. There is little respect for elderly people save they be holy men or members of old high class families. For a woman there is practically no respect except she be of marrying age. When she marries she becomes more or less one of her husband's household goods and nothing more or less than a convenience. In short a woman is nothing, more than a female form, her worth depending perhaps on that form. There is of course a small Christian community who think and act according to different standards and there is also a small band of educated people who act more in accordance with civilised standards.

The population as in all Arab countries is sharply divided into two classes, the rich and the poor. The rich strive desperately to hold and increase their riches meanwhile stamping further into the mud the poor who seem to be too indolent to do anything for themselves beyond keeping themselves from actually starving. At least half of a town's population follows the begging profession in some form or another with the ever-present cry of 'backsheesh'.

In the country villages, ideas seem to be much more communistic and the people much more independent within their own circles. They live in tight little walled villages of mud lovels and they pool their goats and sheep into one flock looked after by the same goatherds who somehow or other find enough vegetation to keep their flocks alive, though they may move them many miles from one grazing point to another. For an acre or so around, their water point they crudely plough the land and grow a few vegetables for their own use. The surplus goats with an ass or two they may have reared, are taken to town every so often and sold, the men trusted with the selling bring back commodities required in the village especially tea for the Arab is a great and inveterate chai drinker. The tea leaves he puts in a little strainer and holding it over a little glass already at least a quarter full of sugar, he pours the boiling water through it. Second in popularity to tea is Turkish coffee, which they make by boiling a little water in a small metal jug which has a long handle for holding it over the flame. When the water boils enormous quantities of coffee grinds and sugar are added and the whole kept boiling for a few minutes. When it is served in tiny cups there are only a couple of sips above the sediment which half fills the cup. Even with plenty of sugar it is slightly bitter and I am sure that a few cups of this coffee would leave one in quite a drugged condition.

On the whole we found that the people generally, regarded us only with a thinly veiled contempt looking on us as softies since we paid so much for their cheap goods and treated them so lightly. They have only one law, the law of the jungle, which is every man for himself and the survival only of the fittest. Such being the case they don't understand kindness and the brotherhood of man and take advantage of every person who tends towards 'softness'.

Summer dragged on its weary way and I was fortunate to have moved into a stone billet with a fan. What a difference. In town the people had got used to us and a few restaurants had been opened up wherein we could get more or less English meals though at extravagant prices. These restaurants had fancy names like the Savoy, Carlton, Willington, Victory, etc, and therein too we could buy the cheap local wines. 'Irak' made from date juice and 'Hadba' made from the local grape juice. Both of these drinks are deadly in taste and are best left alone.

Quite suddenly it began to grow cold at nights and we had to move our beds indoors and put the fan off at nights, it was still welcome through the day yet. Soon the rains came and after them the snows and we were glad to remove the fans and have an issue of another two blankets making four in all. Soon the road to town was being blocked or alternatively washed away, so we took to staying more and more in camp. Football was in full swing, when the ground was playable, and we had some really good games. We had a fine team and played some really first class matches. We played a local team whose speed and agility was amazing but our steady play and fair positioning play wore them down and we beat them on both occasions on which we played them. Their temperament doesn't allow for steadiness in anything but rather for brilliant flashes and sporadic bursts.

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