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Article Excerpt
The scene, one might say, was surreal. A square in occupied Baghdad transformed for one night into an outdoor theater for a staging of Hamlet, in Arabic, by a Jewish school. On a platform erected "in the centre of the first row of seats directly in front of the stage" sat Lieutenant-General Sir Stanley Maude, Commander in Chief of British Forces in the war zone (Wartime in Baghdad 284). Next to him sat a middle-aged American woman, correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post, Eleanor Franklin Egan. Between them, on a small table, were "two cups, a pot of coffee, a bowl of sugar, and a jug of milk" (285). It was November 1917; four days later the general would be dead of cholera, apparently contracted from that very jug of milk.
Egan, who fortunately for us, did not take milk in her coffee, was once again, improbably, at the center of things, one of the few journalists, and perhaps the only woman journalist to gain access to what was then known as the Mesopotamian front during the First World War. With characteristic self-reference, and uncharacteristic modesty, she describes her reaction: "To me it seems very strange that I should be writing all this. It was by the merest chance that I was there--his guest when he died--and through it all I felt, as I feel now, curiously like an intruder upon the scene of a great historic event with which, if there be an eternal fitness of things, I could have no possible connection" (296).
It was, however, precisely her connections, social, professional, national, and in the old-fashioned sense of the word, racial, that accounted for Egan's presence in Baghdad that night and that provided the underlying ethos for the book which recorded her journey, War in the Cradle of the World. (1) For the British general and the American reporter are essentially the center of the story. Through the lens she holds up, the American readership, newly committed to war, sees its fate joined to the British Empire. The performers and the rest of the audience that night, "Jews, Persians, Arabs, Kurds, Syrians, Chaldeans, and representatives of a dozen Eastern races" (284), were merely an exotic kind of scenery against which the real drama is played out. And when General Maude succumbs to the milk (which the Arabs whisper was intentionally tainted) we who have come to know him in the pages of the book sense an almost Shakespearean loss, complete with theatrical backdrop. Consider this description of his funeral procession: "A deep silence lay upon the town. The street through which his body was carded to the North Gate was banked on either side to the very roofs with a dark-robed multitude of men and women, who seemed not to move at all and who spoke in whispers" (296).
Locating War in the Cradle of the World in the context of the literature of war, and particularly the Great War, one is struck immediately by its ability to point both forward and backwards. In its almost abject posture toward the British Empire and in its treatment (or non-treatment) of indigenous people as individuals, the book seems to mark the last gasp of an attenuated era. The gritty narratives of wartime combatants, in their turn replaced by the "school of disillusionment" writers of the late '20s and early '30s, will make an earnest, sometimes euphemistic book like Egan's seem impossibly dated in just a few short years. On the other hand, Egan's ability to turn her outsider status to advantage (as a woman, as an American) and her ability to portray the personalities of military leaders connect her to a new kind of politics and a new kind of journalism. Finally, the recurring theme of Anglo-Saxon Anglo-Americanism captures a movement approaching its high-water mark. That the English-speaking peoples of the world had been marked out for a special role in word affairs was, at one time, an intoxicating and useful political idea. Its repercussions, in fact, had a profound effect on twentieth-century history and are still being felt today (most relevantly in present-day Mesopotamia, Iraq). (2)
When Egan set off from San Francisco in 1917 the success of her journey to Baghdad was far from assured. For one thing, she had...
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