ARTICLE: Surrender at Kut, 1916

If you haven’t heard of Aubrey Herbert, you should have. He’s one of those infinitely colourful characters who comes swathed in anecdotes and adventures. The half-brother of the Earl of Carnarvon, the one who funded the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb, his eyesight was so terrible that he needed a permanent aide to read his schoolbooks to him at Eton. None of this stopped him from clambering about from rooftop to rooftop in his university days in Oxford for the lols. John Buchan allegedly used him as the inspiration for Greenmantle, in his books. As well as serving as an MP, he also travelled extensively in his youth, and was one of those people who picked up languages with ease. So much so that apparently one military department apparently remarked on seeing the list that only an immoral man would need to know so many foreign tongues. Immoral, no, but he almost, inadvertently, caused a diplomatic incident when he was more than once offered the throne of Albania; but was not sorry when the Foreign Secretary pointed out that he very much shouldn’t accept.

Herbert tried to serve in the Boer War, and that didn’t go well, and so when the First World War began in 1914, he took no chances at being left out. He bought himself a uniform, and slipped out to France with the Irish Guards as an interpreter. He was wounded on the retreat, and saw action in particular at Villers Cotterets, where he was briefly captured. Next, he managed to get himself attached to the New Zealand division, and had a front row seat as Anzac troops attempted to land on the Gallipoli peninsula. As he flitted back and forth across the Middle East, his path crossed not infrequently with that of T.E. Lawrence.

At the beginning of 1916, he found himself en route to Mesopotamia, and here, both he and Lawrence, with their local knowledge and linguistic ability, would be involved in the unfolding tragedy of the garrison stranded at Kut. Today, I thought it might be interesting to hear, in Aubrey Herbert’s words, exactly what transpired as they tried to negotiate Britain out of the complete mess that General Charles Townshend had got himself and his men embroiled in…