TRANSFORMED MESOPOTAMIA

Auckland Star, Volume XLIX, Issue 148, 22 June 1918, Page 13

TRANSFORMED MESOPOTAMIA

According to Eleanor Franklin Egan, < writing in the "Saturday Evening Post," < the business of war has been very effi- 1 ciently organised. She says: — , "On the way up the River Tigris I ( I went ashore at one point after another, ' following the course of the long-drawn-out struggle for Kut and of the subse- '■ quent operations which culminated in the capture of Bagdad. "The lines of communication from the ' base at Basra to the furthest outpost on the wide circle of defence round Bagdad are now so thoroughly organised that it is difficult to visualise conditions as they once were, hut one has a record of the j facts —unbelievable as they are. To-day there are more than sixteen hundred boats — paddle-wheelers, stern-wheelers, barges, tugs, hospital ships, launches, and steam craft of every description — plying .in an . almost unbroken double line up and down the River Tigris, but when the first advance -was made there ■ ■A-ere, less than a dozen bottoms all told, ! I and none of them of the best. Moreover, j the great unruly river is now patrolled,! , j its channel is buoyed and its narrows j • are under lock-signal control, whereas in I , those days it was a constantly changing puzzle to" be solved with varying degrees of success and not infrequent disaster 1 i by each man at a boat's wheel on each trip up or down, > "Where now there arc railways along 1 the banks of both the Tigris and the '■ Euphrates and branch lines spreading " fanwise from fully stocked rear bases of " supply to advanced bases at points be- > hind the furthest battle lines, there were - then no rails at all, and the armies at the front, depending solely upon the iniquitously inadequate river transport, 3 were living literally from hand to mouth: 3 "Now every town and military station " between the gulf and. Bagdad is ablaze D with electric lights, where before all- was " in absolute darkness; and whereas now V the overland routes for troops and animals and wheeled convoys are marked, protected from floods by bunds along the r : river hanks and broken at intervals by t strongly stockaded and defended marchy ing posts, then all was practically an i- unmapped straightaway into the desert n and the treacherous marshes."