THE RIVER WAR.

Taranaki Daily News, 2 May 1919, Page 5

THE RIVER WAR.

OR "THE LONU ROAD TO BAGDAD.I MR. CANDLER'S BOOK OF JIEVELATIOXS. Mr. Edmund Candler, the official "eyewitness" of the British operations In Mesopotamia during the war, hog jusl published his book, "The Long Road t< Bagdad." The Morning Post reviawei thus refers to the vagaries of the censor-, 6hip as demonstrated in Mr. Candler'* experiences:—

In an early chapter of this story of ~'ijj the war in Mesopotamia Mr, Candler fl | deals drastically with the vagaries of ,jj the censorship, which, primarily designed j to prevent intelligence of military value «;J clipping through to the enemy, was used . _.'j to conceal official and political fallibility. '!| It was not the'censors on the spot, Mr. '.'J Candler admits, who were to blame. 1 They were loyal to the system imposed;. • "Telegraphic dispatches from Meflopo- ■ '>{ tamia were censored at the Tigris Corps '-' Headquarters, released at Basra, censor: ■ cd there again by General Headquarters, \ forwarded to Karachi, whence one copy went to Army Headquarters, Delhi. On orders from AJH.Q., Delhi, Bombay for- ■ warded the dispatch to the Press Association, London, by whom it was submitted for final censorship to the Press Bureau, . London. But in each "bureau do passage" different heads, military and poll- - tical, had to be consulted; diverse, and sometimes conflicting, notions of expejU- '• ency had to be reconciled; and thug it i sometimes happened that very little of the original communication saw the light. In effect, the result was to render '-' the official eye-witness' dispatches Utterly useless, except to protect the shrinking sensibilities of politicians at Simla and St. Stephens, and to prevent the < British public from guessing that, thanks to the systematic starring of the Indian Army in the years preceding the war, and the calculated parsimony of the Financial Membw during the eastdkr stages of the Mesopotamian operations, we were carrying on a twentieth century campaign with the medical equipment of an Eighteenth century war, to say nothing of other shocking inadequacies. - A little wholesome publicity, such as was achieved in the Crimean War by a famous war correspondent, might have arrested the evils accruing from a policy of bloodthirsty niggardliness, the fatal fruition of which was first fully revealed in the report of the Mesopotamian Commission. No such publicity was possible for Mr. Chandler. Even his picture* of the actual fighting were reduced to ft smug absurdity by the censor's sense of . verbal propriety—to the intense amusement of his officer companions, who were ■ • amazed at the censorial ingenuity which actually succeeded in making capital (for politicians and officials) out of the privations of the wounded at Sheikh Saad, where we had 4282 men killed and, wounded in an attack which, had it been *, pressed home, might have been success-' ful. Mr. Chandler illustrates this sense, l of verbal propriety from his experiences in Tibet. In describing the dirt and discomfort and cold of the ancient fort at Phari he had written about a group of ruffianly-looking officers, their beards covered with grime, "seated over a yakdu;ig fire and drinking rum." The rum was cut out lest it should offend the teetotal interest at home and the yakdung eliminated as indelicate—and the censored sentence, "officers seated over fire drinking tea," gave people at home the impression of a cosy tea party. It is well to pay attention to these complaints of an honest and experienced journalist, who would not think of resenting the suppression of anything that might give information to the' enemy. A military precaution was, in fact, turned into a protection for weak and hesitating " civilians. The censorship i 3 now a politieal fig-leaf, nothing more nor less. Mr. Chandler, however, in these two spacious volumes, speaks without fear or favor of what he has seen with his own eyea or heard from competent witnesses in regard to matters—e.g., the operations on tho Tigris and the Shatt-el-Adheim, immediately after the capture of Bagdad, which he missed owing to illness—that were beyond his personal observation. He has not, nor does he claim the authority of a military expert. As regards all problems of strategy and tactics he has consulted soldiers whose judgment can bo trusted. His general criticisms, which are based on authoritative guidance, are both interesting and instructive. The preliminary failure which culminated in the Kut surrender was due, as we know, not to any lack of moral, hut to a gross inadequacy of personal and material means, having regard to the ends in view, for which the politicians and officials, not the military leadership, were chiefly responsible. Miscalculation as to the enemy's resistancepower was also a factor. Easy victories over the Turks originally in Mesopotamia caused the value of reinforcements, victorious from Gallipoli, to be greatly underrated. Afterwards the Turkish command fell into the very same error. Gallipoli and Kat had bred a contempt for the British and Indian troops in the Turkish mind, and a penalty was duly paid for tho folly, so often recurring in the world's history, of under-estimating our tenacity of purpose, and the fact that the fighting power of our soldiers, both those of our own race and those who havo eaten our salt, is never dimmed ■ by defeat. Townshend and Maude, in Mr. Candler's opinion, were the two great generals of the Mesopotamian warfare. .Of the latter he gives a striking personality sketch, which would deepen the national sense of his untimely loss if that were possible. "Don't congratulate me," he would sav in a tone of injured brnsquerie and good-natured impatience, "it was the mon who did it." It is a memorable appreciation of a great soldier and a great gentleman.

Mr. Candler s pithy, ye t picturesque. style enables him to bring home to the reader the dangers and discomforts, above all the bludgeoning of the sun's stroke, of the sinister land which hag destroyed its own empire, which slew Alexander the Great and Julian. But he shows ns also the character of its native inhabitants, their bad and good qualities, and that rebuilding of its longlost fertility which has proceeded pari passu with the victorious march of our armies. Time was when Babylon of the hanging gardens nvu& have liad close, on a million inhabitants. Only if we remain between the historic rivers to finish the task thus well begnn and to do there what we have done j a Egypt can this derehot and be made to bLsom again to full fruition.