Vox Meditantis

30th September 1921

The Lewis guns lie in their cases this evening, cleaned and oiled, their mechanisms still warm from this morning’s drill. I have examined each breech, each feed system, with the same care a surgeon might bring to his instruments – though these devices serve not to preserve life but to order it, to discipline it, to end it when the King’s peace demands such extremity. Three years since the Armistice, and still we find ourselves custodians of these implements, shepherds armed not with crooks but with the machinery of industrial slaughter.

The earth here remains stained. One observes it particularly after the rains – how the soil darkens in certain patches where men fell in July’s disturbances. The locals speak of it as cursed ground, invoke their saints and prophets, but I see in it merely the residue of iron and flesh, the chemical consequence of what war requires. Yet I confess the symbolism troubles me in ways I had not anticipated. Scripture speaks much of blood crying out from the ground, of Abel’s sacrifice and Cain’s punishment, and I wonder if there be not some eternal truth in these old stories that our modern warfare has merely amplified beyond all decent proportion.

The wireless apparatus arrived yesterday – a Mark III set that shall, it is hoped, improve our communications with the garrison at Basra. I spent two hours this afternoon with the subaltern responsible for its maintenance, reviewing the valve replacements and aerial configurations. Such marvels we possess now. A man might speak across fifty miles as clearly as across a room, and yet we remain as opaque to one another as ever Babel’s builders were. The machinery advances; the soul does not keep pace.

It occurs to me, reading again tonight the Epistle of James – that passage concerning faith and works – that I have attended overmuch to the mechanical particulars of duty and perhaps insufficiently to its moral architecture. What details of my charge here have I neglected? The men’s spiritual welfare, certainly. There is no chaplain attached to this column, and I have been remiss in organising even basic observances. Sunday last passed with nought but a perfunctory reading from the Psalms. The troops deserve better. They have given their blood – some have given all – and I have offered them in return only efficiency, discipline, the cold comfort of properly maintained equipment.

I think too of the local population, whose lands these conflicts have ravaged. We speak of bringing order, civilisation, the benefits of modern governance. Yet what do they see but armoured cars and machine guns, soldiers who understand neither their tongue nor their customs? Perhaps I ought to study their language more seriously, to comprehend their grievances not merely as military intelligence but as human complaint. This too would be a detail worth attending.

The Vickers gun that jammed during Tuesday’s action has been stripped and reassembled. A fault in the feed block mechanism – corrected now. I make careful notation of such things. But who shall make notation of the cost in lives when such mechanisms fail? Who shall record the price of inattention, not to machinery, but to the souls of those who operate it?

The Book of Common Prayer speaks of our “manifold sins and wickedness,” of things done and left undone. I wonder if our great sin in this age be not merely the violence we commit but the manner in which we have made violence so terribly efficient, so divorced from its consequences. We pull a trigger or press a button, and men die at distances that spare us the sight of their suffering. This too is a form of neglect – perhaps the most damning form.

Tomorrow I shall inspect the motor lorries and review the ammunition stores. But I shall also gather the men for evening prayers, and speak to them of duty not merely to King and Country but to one another, and to the God who sees all that we do in this scorched land. If I am to be a custodian of destruction, let me at least remember that I am first a man, and answerable to laws older than any parliament’s statutes.

The lamps burn low. Another day concluded in this necessary but wretched business of empire.

The late First World War and its aftermath in Mesopotamia saw British forces occupy Ottoman provinces, culminating in the 1917 capture of Baghdad and the 1918 Armistice of Mudros, which enabled a British mandate over Iraq. In 1920 widespread Iraqi resistance erupted against direct British rule, combining tribal, clerical, and urban actors, and was suppressed with significant force, including extensive Royal Air Force operations and high financial cost to Britain. The Cairo Conference of 1921 then advanced indirect rule, installing Faisal I as king under British oversight and reshaping administration toward a nominally autonomous monarchy. Disputes over Mosul persisted into the mid-1920s, resolved through the League of Nations in favour of Iraq, while the mandate itself ended with formal independence in 1932, though British influence endured.

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