War Post

"22898 Ptv. B. Hobson
London, March 12/17

Dear Cousin Norman,
    I hardly know how to write to you yet I suppose I must come to the point and although it seems terribly hard tell you the worst and that is of your Dear brother’s death in action on the night of the 19th."

This is the beginning of a letter of a British private from the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force writing home to England in 1917. Private Benny Hobson was not with his cousin when he died, "not far away but from information gathered from the comrades of his platoon it seems he was at this time on sentry and met his death at the hands of a sniper who got him in the head." At the time the MEP ‘Force D’ was moving up the Tigris toward Baghdad, three years into their campaign to take Ottoman ‘Iraq.’

"His end Dear cousin I believe was quite short and painless as he fell to the ground without murmuring. I did not hear of this till the day following and and then my coy. or what remained of it, where our orders to get back across the river. Now I will give you an idea of what we had to face and the glorious deeds which some day sooner or later will come to light."

Private Benny Hobson describes an Ottoman ambush at a canal 12 miles south of Baghdad after his division "had been on the heels of the retreating Turks since of the fall of Kut" — the major British surrender the previous year. Hobson’s division is about to cross in a pontoon boat before "Johnnie’s artillary fire soon put an end to this idea."

The British are outnumbered by the advancing Ottoman ranks. "God only knows we held on like grim death every hour brought depletion in our ranks," Hobson writes to his cousin, "men fell wounded and killed, our rifles blazed and became too hot to handle and ammunition began to run out." For Hobson "it was Hell. "

"Some day Dear Cousin if God spares me I will tell you it all. I do not know how I escaped Death as pals around me fell and I had my helmet knocked off by a piece of Turkish shell. Help came just as day broke on the 10th and under the devastating fire of our own artillary the Turks began to retire, many coming in to our lines and giving themselves up."

Help did not come for the other cousin, fighting along the Tigris, and Hobson survived the two-night battle only to "mourn the loss of one who could not have been more to me if he had been my brother."

The British adventure to create Iraq claimed some 90,000 soldiers, many of them Indian, and over 20,000 were lost in the 1915-16 siege of Kut alone. British soldiers filled the officer ranks as the regular infantry was dominated by Indians enlisted under the Raj.

Read the rest of the letter here, which is from the Imperial War Museum’s Department of Documents (04/19/1, Doc. 456).

 

War Post has lagged a little since August - I’ve moved to Cairo for the year to study at AUC, mostly Middle Eastern history, improving my fu’usa and learning Egyptian colloquial. I’m taking three history classes: State & Society, the Ottoman Empire: 1699-1914; After Empire: Nationalism and Social Movements in the ME, 1914-present; and a seminar focused on Jordan and the Palestinians, which is so far a history of tribes in what became Transjordan. We’re reading conflicting accounts of the creation of Transjordan — Abdullah was a miracle from the Hijaz; Abdulla was just lucky; Abdullah was a dolt and a spendthrift — which opens the class to the field of Jordanian history-making. Much of the class ethos, perhaps, centers around Andrew Shryock’s Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination, a book that seek to bring oral histories out from under their textual authoritities. Specifically, Shyrock wants to recognize the oral histories of the Adwan and the Bani Sakhr tribes alongside the written-down, national narrative of Hashemite Jordan to form a new understanding of the modern state and a new model of how we measure histories as accurate, "authentic" and influential.

I’m waiting on the Imperial War Museum to see if I can post some of their archived sources here. Andrew Carroll gratiously passed along information on a few Mesopotamian letters at the museum as he tours America for Operation Homecoming. In the meantime, I continue to record bits of life in Egypt on my other blog, while still keeping War Post updated.

The photo is an aerial shot of the Giza Plateau during World War I. I don’t know the date, but if it’s after 1920, maybe we can see Winston Churchill below, sketching the Pyramids between treaties. Here is an except of a British soldier’s stop-over in Cairo, before joining General Allenby’s army to take Palestine.  

In my new unit, U.U. Cable Section, I found a couple of enquiringly minded fellows, and we spent many evenings exploring native Cairo. We met with far more courtesy than hostility.

One evening we found ourselves in a kind of courtyard where men were sitting smoking, and where children were playing.  In a corner were three or four not-too-fat cats.  Dusty - so called because his name was Miller - bought a piastre worth of meat at a little shop and we cut this up with jack-knives and fed the cats.

This caused quite a stir.  The men made friendly noises, and a number of them offered us sweetmeats.  Afterwards in that quarter we were always greeted as "The askaris who fed pussini".

Sapper H. P. Bonser, Royal Engineers (Signals), February 1916 to July 1919.  Foreign service units: 74th Divisional Signal Company, Egypt, Southern Palestine; Detached Duty, Fayoum Area; U.U. Cable Section.  Royal Engineers, Egypt, Palestine, Syria.

First published in Everyman at War (1930), edited by C. B. Purdom. Via First World War.com