Death of General Maude

On 18 November 1917 at 6.25 p.m. Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Stanley Maude, Commander-in-Chief of the British forces in Mesopotamia, died in Baghdad. He was 53. He was killed by cholera after only two days of illness. Less than two weeks earlier his troops had won another victory at Tikrit. The British official history of the campaign writes that his name had become so much a synonym for success that his death was regarded throughout the Empire as a national misfortune.

Coffee with milk

Maude’s biographer, General Charles Callwell, reconstructed the general’s last days from the accounts of doctors and witnesses. On 11 November the American journalist Eleanor Franklin Egan, who wrote for major newspapers in the United States, arrived in Baghdad. Maude personally made sure that she saw the city under British rule. On the evening of 14 November he took her to a performance put on by one of the Jewish schools, which, as it turned out, had been organised in his honour. Coffee was served. Maude drank his with milk, Egan without. On the morning of 16 November the general felt unwell, and in the evening came a violent attack of the illness. The doctors diagnosed a severe form of cholera. Maude had ordered his entire staff to be inoculated against cholera, but he himself had refused inoculation, convinced that at his age he was immune.

The army’s medical consultant, Colonel William Willcox, considered it very probable that the general had been infected by the milk he drank at the performance. Cholera was present in that part of the city at the time, and the water there was under grave suspicion. In Baghdad, and reportedly in England too, rumours circulated, however, that Maude had been poisoned. Willcox firmly denied them: bacteriological tests at the central laboratory in Baghdad confirmed a severe cholera infection, and he regarded the contamination of the milk as accidental. To this day the story of the coffee with milk is told in various versions. According to an often repeated account, Maude died in the same house in which, a year and a half earlier, Field Marshal Colmar von der Goltz had died of typhus.

A victorious commander

Maude had taken command in Mesopotamia at the end of August 1916, after the surrender of Kut al-Amara, when the British troops were tired, sick and poorly supplied. Through the autumn he put the rear in order, and in December he went on the offensive. In February 1917 his soldiers recaptured Kut, and on 11 March they took Baghdad. In the autumn they routed the Turks at Ramadi on the Euphrates and took Tikrit on the Tigris. The British official history stresses that the soldiers valued him for his care for their conditions and his generous recognition of their work. It also notes, however, that he had a habit of personally attending to details that are usually left to subordinates, and that he rarely revealed his plans to anyone. After his death no notes on his intentions for the future were found.

Maude’s successor was Lieutenant-General William Marshall, commander of III Corps and the senior general on the spot. Summoned in haste to general headquarters, on 19 November he issued an order of the day announcing the death of the commander. The same day King George V sent a telegram in which he wrote that Maude had rendered invaluable services to India, the Empire and the Allies. In the afternoon of 19 November the general was buried in the military cemetery outside the North Gate of Baghdad. The coffin was carried by the commanders who had led soldiers to victory under his orders, and crowds of the city’s inhabitants came to the funeral.