Carry On! A Story of the Fight for Bagdad
9781465674869
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
Mesopotamia, "the land between the rivers," has been brought by Time's revolution once more into the foreground of the history of the world. The plains where Abraham, Isaac and Jacob tended their flocks and herds; where the hosts of Sennacherib, Shalmaneser and Alexander contended for "world-power" in their day; where the Arabs, heirs of ancient civilisations, reared a civilisation of their own until it fell under the blight of Turkish dominion: have become once more the battle-ground of opposing armies, the representatives of conflicting spirits and ideals. This fertile land, whose history dates back many thousands of years, has long lain desolate. Swamps and marshes and the floods of the Tigris and the Euphrates cover immense tracts that were once the granary of the middle East. The old canals and irrigation works constructed by Babylonians and Assyrians are now obliterated by sand. Where once large populations throve and cultivated literature and the arts, now roam only a few tribes of Arabs, degenerate descendants of the race that at one time led the world in the things of the mind. Mesopotamia is the "abomination of desolation." Here and there a mound—known to archæologists as a tell—marks the site of a buried city, and excavation has brought to light the remains of palaces and monumental tombs, and temples where "pale-eyed priests" chanted incantations to Assur and Ishtar and Merodach—the Baalim and Ashtoreth of the Bible. It was at one such tell that the story to be unfolded in the following pages had its beginning. Early one morning in the autumn of 1916, any one who had chanced to be standing on this tell would have noticed, far in the eastern sky, a moving speck. It might have been a gigantic bird, but that, as it approached, its flight was swifter, more direct, more noisy. As it came nearer, it swept round in an immense circle, then descended in a spiral course, skimmed the surface of the tell, and finally alighted on a clear and level stretch of ground on the western side. Through all its ages of solitude the tell had never known so strange a visitant. The shades of ancient priests and soothsayers might be imagined to shrink away from this intruder upon their haunts. What had remotest antiquity to do with this symbol of modernity, the last word in scientific invention in a world of scientific marvels? Some such thoughts as these seemed to grip one of the two young men who disengaged themselves from the aeroplane. "So this is your tell!" cried the elder of the two, in the loud tones that bespeak a cheerful soul. He looked with an air of mockery at the rugged contours of the mound. "Hush, Ellingford!" said the other, in a stage whisper. "We are trespassers—on a spot where Assyrians worshipped when Rome was still a village." "Well, they can't hear us. What's more to the point, the Arabs can, if they're about; so hurry up." "Hopelessly matter-of-fact; everlastingly practical! Here are we, in the very nursery and cradle of mankind; yet you can't spare half a thought for the past! You live altogether in the present——" "Look here, Burnet," said the other, cutting him short; "if you don't stop gassing we shall neither of us live in the future. Before you can say Jack Robinson—or Beelzebub, if you prefer it—we may have a swarm of Arabs round us with Mauser rifles and explosive bullets. I'm responsible for this machine. So buck up. You can commune with the spirits of the past when I am gone."
