The City of the Caliphs

In August 1942 I welcomed a posting to Baghdad, because I could not live in Cairo on my pay as a staff-captain at GHQ. Cairo was distractingly full of attractive females, but the proportion of males to females was 55 to one and a man in his middle forties, to enter the arena hopefully, needed the rank of colonel with a car at his disposal. Baghdad, on the other hand, was Moslem and monastic. My friends commiserated. “Baghdad is ugly, dirty, smelly. For half the year the temperature does not drop below 100°. In July it is too hot even for the flies. There is no hill station for weekends. It is an island in the desert. You’ll soon be applying for a transfer.” Only one voice was encouraging. Its owner had worked in oil there, before the war. “If you can stand it for three months,” he said, “it’s yours.”

Then as now, no city in the world makes a worse first impression, and it was at its worst when I arrived in mid-September. The broad, brown Tigris was flanked by low dun-colored buildings—Iraq is called le pays beige. Dust lay everywhere, on roofs, on window sills, on the date palms of the stunted oleanders. Water had been flung down to lay it and the streets were puddled. The pavements were thronged with shabby Arabs in long, dirty robes, with black-veiled shuffling women, with porters low-bent under cumbersome burdens of furniture and brushwood, with bare-legged urchins, with beggars and dogs and shoeshine boys. The shops were in keeping with the streets they lined. They were, nearly all of them, one-windowed cabins, appropriate to a bazaar but not a thoroughfare, displaying behind clouded glass cheap-looking, exorbitantly expensive wares. The main street, El Rashid, which ran parallel with the river and had been cut through the city by the Germans during the First War, was partly protected against the sun by a colonnade. The air under its roof was fetid. Only the narrow side streets with their shuttered balconies were picturesque, and they were very dirty. “Moon-dream city of delight” indeed.

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Alec Waugh

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In August 1942 I welcomed a posting to Baghdad, because I could not live in Cairo on my pay as a staff-captain at GHQ. Cairo was distractingly full of attractive females, but the proportion of males to females was 55 to one and a man in his middle forties, to enter the arena hopefully, needed the rank of colonel with a car at his disposal. Baghdad, on the other hand, was Moslem and monastic. My friends commiserated. “Baghdad is ugly, dirty, smelly. For half the year the temperature does not drop below 100°. In July it is too hot even for the flies. There is no hill station for weekends. It is an island in the desert. You’ll soon be applying for a transfer.” Only one voice was encouraging. Its owner had worked in oil there, before the war. “If you can stand it for three months,” he said, “it’s yours.”

Then as now, no city in the world makes a worse first impression, and it was at its worst when I arrived in mid-September. The broad, brown Tigris was flanked by low dun-colored buildings—Iraq is called le pays beige. Dust lay everywhere, on roofs, on window sills, on the date palms of the stunted oleanders. Water had been flung down to lay it and the streets were puddled. The pavements were thronged with shabby Arabs in long, dirty robes, with black-veiled shuffling women, with porters low-bent under cumbersome burdens of furniture and brushwood, with bare-legged urchins, with beggars and dogs and shoeshine boys. The shops were in keeping with the streets they lined. They were, nearly all of them, one-windowed cabins, appropriate to a bazaar but not a thoroughfare, displaying behind clouded glass cheap-looking, exorbitantly expensive wares. The main street, El Rashid, which ran parallel with the river and had been cut through the city by the Germans during the First War, was partly protected against the sun by a colonnade. The air under its roof was fetid. Only the narrow side streets with their shuttered balconies were picturesque, and they were very dirty. “Moon-dream city of delight” indeed.