Urumia is the centre of a thickly populated Christian district, and the headquarters of French, Armenian, American, Russian, and British religious missions to the Nestorian Christians. These latter, with few exceptions, inhabit the plains and lowlands; but in the bleak, almost inaccessible mountain regions, live and thrive some brave and warlike tribes who are also Nestorian Christians, and who are generically known as Jelus. They had suffered much from religious persecution at the hands of Kurd, Persian, and Turk, and over and over again in their mountain eyries, with rifles in their hands, they had put up a brave fight against the Moslem oppressor in defence of hearth and home and the temples of their faith.
Nestorians and Jelus once more made common cause against the common Turkish enemy. Already warned by the fate of the hapless Armenians, they were under no delusion as to what would befall them should the Osmanli triumph—it meant extermination, root and branch.
Badly equipped and badly armed, but heroically led, the combined Jelu Army took the field under Agre Petros, generalissimo, and Mar Shimon, the Nestorian Patriarch. With the latter went his sister, Surma Khanin, who fought in the ranks of the Christian army, and whose lion-like bravery and devotion under enemy fire speedily led to her being known as the Nestorian Jeanne d'Arc.
A force of Turkish regulars belonging to the 6th Division, plundering and burning as it went, on May 17th was surprised by the Jelus on the River Barandoz, south of Urumia, and cut to pieces, the victors capturing the guns and greater part of the supplies. Thus came to naught the Turkish plan for the taking of Urumia by means of a combined attack from the south and from Salmas in the north! The captured artillery and supplies gave the Jelus a new lease of military life, and they were able for some time afterwards to keep the Turk at bay. Everyone realized that, without military help from the British, the Urumia Christians must be overwhelmed by the Turks sooner or later.
This, then, was briefly the situation towards the middle of May. The Turk, battered and bruised after his encounter with the Jelus, was pulling himself together for another and more carefully prepared spring. He hung around Khoi, whence he threatened Urumia on the western shore of the lake, and Sharaf Khane and its rich booty of Russian guns and military stores on the eastern shore.
While the Turk was probably inwardly debating whether he should not bring matters to a climax by descending on Tabriz to possess himself of the Persian end of the Trans-Caucasian Railway and the Russian military stores at Sharaf Khane all at one swoop, some official folk in remote Bagdad and remoter London were discussing between themselves with great earnestness and energy whether it would not be possible and practicable to forestall him by marching a column from Hamadan to occupy Tabriz, seize the railhead, establish a base for operations against Tiflis and the Caucasus generally, and stretch out a helping hand to the sorely pressed Nestorian-Jelu Army on the other side of Lake Urumia.
DRILLING JELUS AT HAMADAN.DRILLING JELUS AT HAMADAN.
The British Minister in Teheran got wind of the project and jumped upon it heavily. The Persians would not like it; it would offend their susceptibilities; they were almost certain to be annoyed, and diplomatic complications, etc., etc., were sure to follow. It is a little way British Ministers sometimes have. They become over-zealous and over-cautious, ever dreading a hair-breadth departure from the narrow limits of the conventional protocol. There followed a good deal of official wobbling and indecision. First the "Ayes" had it, then the "Noes," and meanwhile much precious time was wasted. Ultimately, some strong man somewhere—it is rumoured that he lives down Whitehall way—got a firm grip of the problem, and flung his weight into the scale on the side of the "Ayes"; and the"Noes," including the far-seeing Minister, were routed.
The word "go" was given in Hamadan, and then began the great Olympian race—the goal Tabriz, with Turk and Briton pitted one against the other.
A scratch pack for a great adventure—Wagstaff of Persia—Among the Afshars—Guests of the chief—Capture of Zinjan—Peace and profiteering.
On May 21st a small British column left Hamadan for the north-west of Persia. It was anything but a formidable fighting force as far as numerical strength was concerned. It comprised fifteen British officers, one French officer, and about thirty-five British N.C.O's. The whole party was armed with rifles and some also carried swords, infantry or cavalry pattern, which had been dug out of the Ordnance Store at the last moment.
Even as our equipment was varied, so was there certainly something distinctly Quixotic about our saddlery and our chargers. Of the latter, some were a fresh issue by the Remount Department, and ranged from heavy limber horses to light 'Walers. Then there were Persian "Rosinantes," bare-boned and razor-backed. The humble Persian mule and humbler donkey were also impressed into the service of carrying some British officer or sergeant forward on the great adventure.
For adventure it certainly was. Our orders wereto march on Zinjan, where a few hundred Turks were said to be holding a post, defeat or disperse them, raise and train Persian levies, and, with these auxiliaries to aid us in the fighting line, push on to Tabriz, and, if possible, dispose of any Turks who might be inclined to dispute our entry into the capital of Azarbaijan. We had a Lewis gun, but no artillery. We had a medical officer, but scant medical and surgical stores; no ambulance or stretchers, but a couple of dhoolies, to each of which a mule was harnessed fore and aft. Baggage and supplies were cut down to a minimum, for the column, if such it could be termed, was to be self-supporting, and to live on the country, not always an easy task in the starving land of Persia.
This British forlorn hope was led by Major Wagstaff of the Indian Army, an officer who had spent years in Persia attached to the South Persia Rifles, and had an intimate knowledge of the Persian as a fighter and as an intriguer. Wagstaff spoke the language of the country with great fluency, and knew all the tribes from Fars to Azarbaijan with the intimacy of an ethnological connoisseur. I remember that he held the Persian in high esteem, believed him to be courageous to a certain extent, honest according to his lights, and altogether possessing the makings of a soldier. But then Wagstaff was born an optimist!
Our route lay due north from Hamadan to Zinjan, where it was intended that we should cut in on themain Tabriz road that runs from Teheran by way of Kasvin. The Turks, too, had been active in this district lately. Small reconnoitring parties of them were said to have made their way down through Azarbaijan to the neighbourhood of Mianeh and Zinjan, in quest of supplies and military information. In a sense they were operating on favourable ground, for a large proportion of the inhabitants of Azarbaijan are of Turkish origin. They belong to the same race as the Turks on the north side of the Araxes (Russian-Persian frontier) who occupy the valley from Julfa to Erivan, and with whom those in Azarbaijan have blood ties.
The Afshari is one of the powerful Turkish tribes known as Kizil Bashis, which settled in Persia in the seventeenth century, and at the present day more than a quarter of the descendants of the Afshari live in Azarbaijan. It was to smash the growing power of these newcomers from across the Persian border that Shah Abbas organized the tribesmen in north-eastern Azarbaijan, who were known as Shahsavans—"Shah loving." But their loyalty did not last long. They soon turned their arms against their royal master, and joined the Russians in the campaign of 1826, forming an enduring alliance with their tribal enemies, whom they ultimately absorbed into their bosom. The Shahsavans are a turbulent crew, well aware of their strength and fighting value, and have from time to time terrorized the Persian Government. In 1912 they revolted in the vicinityof Ardabil, and it took a combined Persian-Russian force of five thousand men and a four months' campaign to suppress them.
After six days' march we were in the country of the Afshar tribe, one of the five main branches of Shahsavans, which is credited with being able to put a thousand mounted and armed men in the field. The chief of the Afshars, Jahan, Shah Jahan, we found sojourning in one of his villages called Karasf. A day's march from this village we were met by a messenger from the Amir Afshar, as he is generally called, who invited us to make a detour and break our journey at Karasf.
It was at the close of a hot, dusty afternoon that we reached the Amir's abode, very tired after a long march. The Amir's headman bade us welcome, and announced that we were to be the guests of his master during our stay. The customary sacrificial offering of sheep was made in our honour, and our horses were led away by native mihtaran or syces. As for ourselves, we were installed in a spacious caravanserai with a retinue of servants to wait upon us. The Amir Afshar proved an admirable host, and supplies were forthcoming in abundance from the many villages in his domains.
Ascertaining that several members of the party were poorly mounted, he sent us six horses, the very best of his blood stock. The Amir lives in semi-regal style, and, as paramount chief of the Afshar tribe, is lord of his people and the arbiter of the livesand fortunes of about five thousand tribal families, who render him unswerving, unquestioning obedience. Here was ancient feudalism in the heart of the twentieth-century Persian Empire! Although owing a nominal allegiance to the "King of Kings" in Teheran, the Amir apparently did not bother his head very much about party intrigues or the trend of national politics at the Court of the Shah. He did his own intriguing, and did it exceptionally well. A man of extraordinary ability and political shrewdness, he first coquetted with the Turks and then with the British, adroitly playing one off against the other in the great game of politics. Too careful to commit himself irrevocably to one side or the other while the Great World War was still undecided, this Oriental Vicar of Bray nevertheless contrived to maintain a cordial and unbroken friendship with both Turk and Briton. If a Turkish emissary, backing up his persuasive pleadings with a bag of gold, besought him to put an end to neutrality and to place his resources and his small army of irregulars at the service of his blood relatives, the Amir always accepted the gold cheerfully, and fervently wished success to the Turkish arms. Then the British, not to be outdone by the Turk, would ask, as a guarantee of his good faith, for fifty or a hundred armed levies from amongst his tribesmen. The Amir invariably agreed in principle, but he would point out that no self-respecting Afshari could fight at his best unless equipped with a British rifle. The latest patternarmy rifle would be forthcoming to the number required, but then a border foray would always be staged about the same time, and the wily Amir would plead, and with some show of reason, that he needed every sowar he had to prevent his territory being overrun by his powerful and unscrupulous tribal neighbours. Still, for all that, during the darkest of the famine days, he kept the British commissariat well supplied with grain, and that, too, at a reasonable price.
Our host was usually "at home" to distinguished visitors from four to five a.m. He sent to say that the state of his health forbade his receiving us at the more conventional hour of noon. The Amir, I learned afterwards, was a confirmed opium-eater, his daily dose of the drug being far in excess of the quantity consumed by our own candid de Quincey. He was an old man, verging on eighty, but although his physical health was indifferent, his mental energies were unimpaired. He rarely ventured abroad, and spent his days and nights in the privacy of his apartment, abandoning himself to the full enjoyment of his enthralling passion of opium-eating. At daylight he was usually recovering from his latest dose of the drug. Then he would partake of a little food, see callers, read his letters, and depart for dreamland again, carried thither on the wings of the insidious and baneful poppy extract.
One morning at dawn the members of the Wagstaff Mission paid a ceremonial call on the Amir.Fortunately we were accustomed to early rising. We were conducted to his presence with considerable ceremony, and found him reclining on the floor of a large apartment covered with rare Persian rugs. There was little else in the way of furniture in the place. I saw before me an old man with shrivelled, sunken features, piercing black eyes, and a grey beard growing on a face the colour of yellow parchment. A long, thin, bony hand was held out for us to shake in turn, the Amir excusing himself from rising on account of physical weakness. He bade us welcome in a quavering, piping voice.
Whatever else may have been his infirmities, it soon became clear that he had a remarkably alert brain. The most recent phases of the European War, the varying fortunes of the participants engaged therein, the latest tit-bit of scandal from Teheran, and the pretensions of the Turks to territorial occupation of Azarbaijan and possible aggrandizement at the expense of Persia, all these topics drew from the aged but mentally virile potentate pungent and sagacious criticism. He talked high strategy with all the assurance of a Field-Marshal, and gleefully told how he had politically out-manoeuvred the wily, calculating Turk in a recent littleaffaire à deux. While he spoke he ran his hand idly through a pile of correspondence, read and unread, opened and unopened, which littered the floor beside him. Letter-filing has evidently not reached any high standard at Karasf.
I think we all fell under the spell of our host's well-informed mind and his world-wide interests, and when he asked if there had been any Cabinet changes recently in London, and whether Lloyd George was still Chief Minister of our King, we felt that the march of contemporary events, rapid indeed as they can be sometimes, had failed to outstrip the keen alertness of the overlord of Karasf.
On May 29th, having previously exchanged adieux with our kindly host, we set out from Karasf. The weather was now oppressively hot, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to march during the noon-day heat. We accordingly moved off earlier, and usually contrived to take the road about sunrise daily, halted at noon for an hour or so, and then on again, finishing the day's march early in the afternoon in the welcome shade of some garden on the outskirts of a village and close to a good water-supply.
A day's trek from Karasf took us beyond the confines of the Amir's territory. Couriers whom he had despatched in advance of us warned his local headmen of our coming, and we lacked nothing in the way of supplies. We crossed rough, broken country, wound over mountain passes, and down into pleasant valleys beyond. Our advent, it was clear, caused much excitement in the countryside, but the people, while they sometimes held aloof, were never unfriendly. We were passing through a country lessravaged by starvation than the region close to Hamadan. Food was more plentiful, and the "hunger battalion," with its suffering members, was not to be seen in the Persian North-West.
We were also gradually losing touch with Persian as a spoken language. It was being supplanted by Turki, the dialect of Turkish-Persian spoken by the peasant classes in the province of Azarbaijan. As we rode north we were sensible of this linguistic change. First the peasants we met in the village spoke Persian and understood Turki; farther north Persian was understood, but not spoken with any fluency; until, north and north-west of Zinjan, Turki entirely ousts the native Persian, the latter as a spoken language in many cases being quite unknown to the villagers.
So far we had seen nothing of any hostile Turks. A body of their cavalry and a few infantry were reported to be at Zinjan, but the villagers told us they had not come farther south, or anywhere in the neighbourhood of our own line of march. A few robber bands occasionally quitted their mountain lairs and descended into the plain, taking us for some peaceful merchant caravan, probably unarmed, and therefore an easy prey for these wild freebooters of the hills. But, on reconnoitring closer and discovering their mistake, they did not tarry, and turning about, went off into the hills as fast as their wiry ponies could carry them.
On the afternoon of May 30th we arrived within ten miles of Zinjan, and camped on a bare and desolate sand tract close to the main road. A Persian tea-house, with its walls crumbling to ruins, stood by the wayside. Tea there was none, and the occupier had disappeared, leaving his establishment to the care of the wild dogs and prowling hill robbers that nightly infested it. It was empty now, and abominably filthy, so I sat outside under the lee of the tea-house wall which afforded a little protection from the scorching heat, holding a very tired horse, and waiting for the sun to take himself from off the hot plain in order that we might seek both rest and refreshment.
At daylight on May 31st we broke camp early and moved cautiously forward in the hope of surprising the Turkish force in Zinjan, leaving the baggage and stores behind under a guard. Our total striking force was thirty all told, half of which was under Major Wagstaff and the remainder under Captain Osborne, 2nd King Edward's Horse.
Zinjan is a town of 24,000 inhabitants, shut in by high hills on the east and west, between which lies an immense plain traversed by the Zinjaneh Rud. On both banks of this river are beautiful gardens enclosed by walls of baked brick. If the Turks meant to make a stand here, they had found an admirable defensive position, and one from which it would take a couple of battalions to dislodge them. Osborne's party worked round to the west and northin order to threaten the retreat of the enemy, while Wagstaff and his small band, including myself, halted under cover of a garden wall to the south of the town.
Some Persian Charvadars coming out of the town volunteered the information that the Turks holding Zinjan, whose numbers were variously estimated at from two to three hundred, were already in flight, and galloping away northwards as hard as they could go. The news of our approach must have reached them early. No doubt our numerical strength had been magnified tenfold by the imaginative native spy who had carried the intelligence of our advance.
This information decided Wagstaff. In a moment we had flung ourselves into the saddles and, with a wild British cheer that shook sleepy folk out of their beds, we dashed across the stone bridge spanning the river and so into Zinjan. We rode first for the bazaars, hoping to round up in that quarter some stray Turks who had overstayed their leave when the town was being evacuated. But we found none.
If our sudden arrival failed to surprise the Turks, it certainly alarmed the inhabitants of Zinjan. Panic seized them. In the bazaars the women and children fled at our approach, and the shopkeepers, trembling in every limb, made frantic efforts to bolt and bar their premises. Finding that the new-comers neither robbed nor maltreated anyone, the bazaar lost itsattack of "nerves," and recovered its habitual calm. Business instincts got the better of physical fear. Shutters came down with a run, and as a slight token of local appreciation, and in honour of our coming, all bazaar prices were immediately, and by universal consent, increased one hundred per cent.
Armoured car causes consternation—Reconnoitring the road—Flying column sets out—An easy capture at the gates of Tabriz—Tribesmen raid the armoured car—And have a thin time—Turks get the wind up.
Zinjan having thus passed into our hands without the firing of a shot, the Wagstaff column established its headquarters in a garden villa a mile north of the town, near the junction of the road to Mianeh. The Indo-European Telegraph Company had an office in Zinjan, and we were speedily in communication with Kasvin, eighty miles to the south-east.
Osborne's small party soon turned up, having failed to round up any Turks. Indeed, the latter bolted from Zinjan with amazing celerity, so much so that their commandant, Major Ghalib Bey, left behind some of his papers and personal effects.
During our march on Zinjan, Dunsterville headquarters had moved up from Hamadan to Kasvin in order the more effectively to co-operate with Bicherakoff and his Russian volunteers in the impending operations against Kuchik Khan and his Jungalis, who were holding the Manjil-Resht road.
A few hours after we had taken peaceable possessionof Zinjan, Lieutenant Pierpont, with a light armoured car mounting a machine-gun and a Ford convoy bringing supplies for our force, arrived from Kasvin. The car, as it lumbered through the narrow bazaar streets, scraping its way round sharp corners where there was scarcely room to swing a cat, visibly impressed the susceptible native mind, and damped the pro-Turkish enthusiasm of the militant local Democrats. Its presence exercised a salutary moral influence, and although there were mutterings of discontent at our unceremonious seizure of the town, the stodgy barrel of the machine-gun peeping from the turret of the armoured car was in itself sufficient to overawe all the anti-British hotheads of Zinjan.
On the morning following our arrival in Zinjan Major Wagstaff sent me off with the armoured car to reconnoitre the road towards Mianeh. I had with me Lieutenant Pierpont, who was in charge of the car and its crew of three, and Lieutenant Poidebard of the French Army, who was attached to our column. In addition to the car there were a couple of Ford vans carrying spare petrol and stores for the journey. Official road reports in our possession covering the section of the route between Zinjan and Mianeh were indefinite and even conflicting. The road ahead was in places reputed to be "good for wheeled transport," but whether it was passable for an armoured car was highly problematical.
Our first day's journey was devoid of thrill. We forded the shallow waters of the Zinjan Rud and oneof its tributary streams, towed the car in places with the two Fords as tugs, and at others built a plank bridge to carry it over deep mud holes.
At the village of Nik Be, or Nikhbeg, which is about thirty miles from our starting-point, the inhabitants fled in terror at the sight of the strange iron-clad monster moving down the village high street. The very dogs took fright and set out for some remote part of Azerbaijan with their tails between their legs. Even the usually placid transport donkey was not proof against the prevailing infection of fear, and kicking his load free, he betook himself elsewhere. The general impression appeared to be that the Evil One himself had dropped in for a morning call. In five minutes from our entry into the village not a human face was to be seen, and a silence as of death itself reigned everywhere. Presently we dug out some of the terrified villagers from various subterranean hiding-places and prevailed upon them to inspect the "monster" at close range. Finding it now stood the test well, and that it behaved in a rational way, they grew bolder, and patted its khaki-painted sides affectionately, as one would stroke a dog of dubious friendliness.
On the succeeding day, by dint of a good deal of spade work, we reached Jamalabad, about fifteen miles from Mianeh, where the road approaches the Baleshkent Pass. The ascent to the pass from the Jamalabad side is about three miles from the village, and the road mounts abruptly at a very sharp angle.On the reverse slope it zigzags down the side of a gorge which made one giddy to look at. It required the united efforts of fifty sturdy villagers from Jamalabad to push the car to the top of the pass, but, even if we could have negotiated the descent in safety, it was doubtful if we should ever have been able to climb back by the precipitous corkscrew ascent.
To be caught by the Turks at the bottom of the Pass unsupported would mean disaster for the expedition, so very reluctantly we turned the armoured car's head for Zinjan. We learned that there were Turks in Mianeh, but none of those who had quitted Zinjan in such haste before the advance of the Wagstaff column had come along the Jamalabad road.
Pierpont, who was in charge of the car, was a mild-mannered youth, but of a very warlike disposition, and was much disappointed that we had not had a brush with his old enemy, the Turk. Down Mesopotamia way he once charged an infantry position and engaged in "close action" by laying his armoured car alongside a front-line trench, where he speedily closed the account of its defenders with machine-gun fire.
Another swift stroke now placed us in possession of Mianeh and brought us eighty miles nearer Tabriz.
Captain Osborne, taking with him a small detachment from Wagstaff's force, as well as a contingent of hastily recruited Persian irregulars, was despatched from Zinjan over the recently reconnoitredroute. He had a convoy of Ford vans, took with him the armoured car under Lieutenant Pierpont, and pushed forward rapidly, negotiating the difficult Baleshkent and the still more difficult Kuflan Kuh Passes. The Kuflan Kuh at its highest point is 5,750 feet, and the ascent on the south side and descent on the north side are very difficult for ordinary wheeled transport. This is especially so on the south slope, which, in a series of short, sharp gradients rises 2,000 feet in two miles.
By the aid of a good deal of native labour the armoured car was safely taken over the formidable Kuflan Kuh, and duly made its appearance in Mianeh. The Turks were reported to have had a small post here, but when Osborne's party entered Mianeh the enemy had already withdrawn towards the north-west.
The premises of the Indo-European Telegraph Company, which had a stout wall and a compound, were selected as British headquarters. Leaving a part of his slender command here to hold the place until Wagstaff and his main body could come up, Osborne with the armoured-car patrol and a few British N.C.O's pushed along the Tabriz road, crossed the Shibley Pass twenty miles south-east of Tabriz, and reconnoitred up to the gates of the city itself. It was a hazardous and daring undertaking, but it would have succeeded, and we could easily have won the race to Tabriz and so checkmated the less enterprising Turks, had a few companies ofBritish troops been available to hurry to the support of Osborne. But one cannot very well expect the equivalent of a sergeant's guard to perform the work of a battalion, and to hold a city of 200,000 inhabitants whose attitude was doubtful from the point of view of friendship. So Osborne had to fall back slowly towards Mianeh.
The armoured car had by this time used up all the spare tyres and inner tubes, and, when the retirement over the Shibley Pass began, it was going on bare rims. Its mobility was impaired, and, while it could still fight, it certainly could not run, and its tyreless progress over the mud and boulders which pass for a road in Azerbaijan was slow and painful.
The limping car looked an easy prey to Turk or prowling robber hordes. So thought a band of two hundred Shahsavan tribesmen, as they rode down from the hills one morning on one of their periodical forays. They had watched the car from afar, and noted its limping gait and its helplessness.
In that corner of upper Azerbaijan, from the Tabriz road east to Ardabil and the Caspian Sea, and north towards the Russian frontier, there roam free and unhampered a score or so of sub-tribes of the Shahsavan Clan, wild and lawless rascals for the most part, but not wanting in courage or in that rude chivalry common to the Asiatic hillmen. The Shahsavani handle a rifle skilfully. Pillaging is for them both a livelihood and a distraction. They are the recognized tax-gatherers of the Tabriz road, andwill rob a fat caravan, or disarm and strip the Shah's Cossacks, with equal impunity.
And now the tribesmen got their lesson. The car stood on the roadside while Lieutenant Pierpont and his men were preparing breakfast. Approaching to within eight hundred yards, the raiders opened out, and charged to the accompaniment of wild yells. Then the machine-gun in the turret of the immobile car spoke up in reply. It sprayed the charging horsemen with lead; they broke and fled; but, reforming, came on anew. The gun spat more leaden hail, and this time the tribesmen had had enough; they fled in disorder, and ever afterwards gave a very wide berth to all such devilish contrivances as armoured cars and machine-guns.
The Turks now grew seriously alarmed at our temerity in threatening to snatch Tabriz from their impending grasp. It was the door to the Caucasus and to one of the Turkish main theatres of military operations. It was a prize worth having, and for the Turks the possession of the capital of Azerbaijan was of scarcely less vital importance than it was for the British themselves. Kuchik Khan had already effectively barred the gate to Resht and shut us off from the Caspian on the east; now the Turk was completing the "bottling-up" process, for he was closing the door of Tabriz in our face and getting in the way of our reaching Tiflis in the north.
ROAD NEAR RUDBAR. THE TWO LARGE ROCKS IN THE FOREGROUND REPRESENT ONE ATTEMPT OF THE JUNGALIES TO BLOCK THE ROAD.ROAD NEAR RUDBAR. THE TWO LARGE ROCKS IN THE FOREGROUNDREPRESENT ONE ATTEMPT OF THE JUNGALIES TO BLOCK THE ROAD.
During the first week in June the Turks bestirred themselves and began their campaign of close andactive co-operation with Kuchik Khan. Turkish troops hurriedly moved on Tabriz from the neighbourhood of Khoi and the direction of Julfa. Ali Elizan Pasha, who designated himself "Commander of the Ottoman Army in the province of Azerbaijan," issued a flamboyant proclamation addressed to his dear Persian brethren and co-religionists asking them to rally to his standard and to make common cause with his Army of Liberation which was pledged to free Persia from the thraldom of the Infidel. So the Turks moved in, and were welcomed by the Persian officials and by the Valiahd or heir-presumptive with manifestations of joy, and the Entente consuls and citizens of the Entente countries moved out as fast as slow-moving Persian transport could carry them.
Once in Tabriz, the Turks did not let the grass grow under their feet. They were bent on giving us a Roland for our Oliver. They assiduously cultivated the good graces of the local Persian Democrats, actively identified themselves with the Ittahad-i-Islam, or Pan-Islamic movement, and set about the recruiting and training of local levies with which to harry us in Azerbaijan. The Turks also formally notified the Teheran Government that it was their intention to extend their occupation to the Persian capital, so as to complete the spiritual and political resurrection of the Shah's Empire.
Mahmud Mukhtar Pasha, a Turkish military leader of some renown, entered Tabriz on June 15th, gavehis blessing to the Pan-Islamic propagandist movement, and promised the militants amongst the Democrats that there would soon be no British left in Azerbaijan or elsewhere in Persia to trouble the peace of mind of those patriots. The good work was furthered by such zealous Democrats and Turkophiles as Hadji Bilouri, Mirza Ismael Noberi, and the Sheikh Mehamet Biabari, who contrived to combine piety with politics for a cash consideration.
The Turks, while lavish with oratory, were niggardly with money. In short, they were bad paymasters, happily for the British; otherwise the latter would not have been in Azerbaijan as long as they were. They enrolled fedais or native levies, but forgot to pay them, whereupon the levies deserted and took service with the British down Mianeh way, arguing, logically enough, if crudely, that Turkish promises would not buy bread, and that the money of the Infidel was better than none at all.
The Turks, too, by their rapacity early estranged popular feeling. They commandeered right and left without payment, and in the bazaar, at the point of the pistol, they compelled merchants and money-changers to accept their depreciated paper currency at an inflated rate of exchange as against Persian krans.
Training local levies—A city of parasites and rogues—A knave turns philanthropist—Turks getting active—Osborne's comic opera force—Jelus appeal for help—An aeroplane to the rescue—The Democrats impressed—Women worried by aviator's "shorts"—Skirmishes on the Tabriz road—Reinforcements at last.
When the Wagstaff Mission finally reached Mianeh from Zinjan it began to collect grain supplies, by purchase, and set to work to raise and train irregulars. Although the Persian hates drill and discipline, there was no dearth of recruits for the local army. The pay was good, about £2 a month with rations and uniform, which meant affluence to the average Persian villager, who was usually too poor to buy enough bread to keep himself alive.
Mianeh, which is rightfully credited with being the most unhealthy spot in North-Western Persia, has a population of about 7,000. It is the chosen home of a poisonous bug (Argas Persicus) whose bite produces severe fever and occasionally death. There is also a set of parasites, human this time, whose sting is very deadly in a financial sense. They are the Merchants' and Grain-Growers' Guilds,and they were always attempting to dip deep and dishonestly into the British treasure chest. It would be doing this delectable spot no injustice to say that, in proportion to its population, it can boast a greater percentage of unchained rogues than any other town in the whole province of Azerbaijan.
One of these knaves turned "philanthropist" once. He begged the Mission to start relief works to help the starving poor of Mianeh, and offered to supply the British with spades for excavation work at cost price. The spades were paid for and the relief work started—and about a week later it was accidentally discovered that the "philanthropist" was collecting two krans a day as spade hire from the dole of the starving peasants! On another occasion he induced a too-confiding officer to sanction the payment of a sum of money for rendering less malodorous the streets of this pestiferous town. The money was drawn, and then its recipient discovered that the people were partial to noxious vapours, and had conscientious objections to any interfering and misguided foreigner meddling with their pet manure heap. So nothing was done, but the money disappeared. Such is morality as practised in this corner of the Shah's dominions!
The Telegraph Compound which, during our occupation of Mianeh, served as Wagstaff's headquarters, stood on the brink of a knoll overlooking the main street leading to the Bazaar Quarter. On the face of a corresponding eminence opposite, and dividedby a bend of the road, was the local Potter's Field, where friendless peasants and penniless wanderers from afar who had paid the great debt of Nature within the inhospitable walls of Mianeh were interred (when the lazy townsfolk found time to give them sepulture) in a hastily dug and shallow grave. In the meantime the defunct ones were wont to be dumped down on a rude bier and left there, sometimes for a whole day, under the fierce rays of a mid-June sun. Mianeh was as uncomfortable for the dead as it was unhealthy for the living. Truly, few Persians seem to possess any olfactory sensitiveness. They would pass the Potter's Field hourly, showing no concern at the repulsiveness that must have assailed their eyes and noses.
News filtered down the road from Tabriz that the Turks there were displaying great activity. They were daily being reinforced, and made no secret of their intention to attempt, when sufficiently strong, the task of chasing the British from Azerbaijan. They established posts on the Tabriz road southwards as far as Haji Agha, about sixty miles from Mianeh.
The answer to all these Turkish preparations for breaking our slender hold upon Azerbaijan was for Wagstaff urgently to ask for reinforcements and especially mountain guns. In the meantime he sent Osborne back up the Tabriz road, with all the fighting men that could be spared, to watch the enemy and to attempt to prevent his breaking farther south.Osborne's chief reliance was placed on the few British N.C.O.'s who accompanied him. Beyond these, all he had to stem any Turkish advance was about half a squadron of newly enrolled irregular horse and a couple of platoons of native levies who had been taught the rudiments of musketry and elementary drill.
Their appearance, at all events, was very warlike, not to say terror-inspiring, and, like some of the wild tribes of Polynesia, they relied chiefly on the effectiveness of their make-up when on the "war-path" to bring about the discomfiture of their enemies. The Sowars were unusually awe-inspiring, hung about as each was with two or three bandoliers studded with cartridges. Each carried a rifle, a sword of antique design, and a short stabbing blade.
The Naib, or Lieutenant, who commanded them, was equally formidable from the point of view of arms and equipment. He had a Tulwar shaped like a reaping-hook, and a Mauser pistol, the butt of which was inlaid with silver.
The tactics of the Sowar levies were something in the nature of a compromise between a "Wild West" show andopéra bouffe. They would gallop at full speed up a steep hill, brandishing their rifles over their heads and yelling fiercely the while. It was always a fine spectacular display with a dash of Earl's Court realism thrown in. The rifles of the Sowars had a habit of going off indiscriminately during these moments of tense excitement when theywere riding down an imaginary and fleeing enemy, and the British officers who watched their antics found it expedient in the interests of a whole skin to remain at a respectful distance from the manoeuvring, or—should one say, performing?—Sowars.
Swagger and braggadocio were the principal fighting stock-in-trade of the levies and their Persian officers. They were always clamouring to be led without delay against the Turks in order that we might have an opportunity of witnessing what deeds of valour they would perform under enemy fire. The time did come, and our brave auxiliaries found themselves in the front line with a Turkish battalion about to pay them a morning call—and we realized more fully than ever that the hundred-years-old dictum of that incomparable humorist, Hadji Baba, still held good, "O Allah, Allah, if there were no dying in the case, how the Persians would fight!"
The Turks having outstripped us in the race to Tabriz, a belated attempt was made early in July to get in touch with the sorely pressed Jelus in Urumia and stretch out to them a succouring hand. They had sent us a despairing appeal for help. Their ammunition was running out; their available supplies were nearly exhausted; and they were on the verge of a military collapse. The Turks threatening Urumia had offered terms if the Jelus laid down their arms, but, fearing treachery if they accepted, the War Council of the Jelus refused the enemy offer, advising unabated resistance, and urging that anattempt should be made by the whole army to break out towards the south and march in the direction of Bijar and Hamadan, in order that they might find safety behind the British lines.
Lieutenant Pennington, a youthful Afrikander airman who was noted for his coolness and daring, was despatched from Kasvin on July 7th. He was to fly to Urumia carrying a written assurance of speedy British aid for the beleaguered garrison there. Pennington made a rapid non-stop flight to Mianeh, covering the distance from Kasvin in a little over two hours. He spent a day at Mianeh, where he carried out a series of useful demonstrations intended to impress the local Democrats. They had never seen an aeroplane before, and were rather vague as to its offensive potentialities. Moreover, they had been inclined to be scornful of our want of military strength so glaringly revealed at Mianeh. But now, at all events, the Democrats were duly impressed by Pennington and his machine. They argued that, if one aeroplane could come from Kasvin in a couple of hours, so could a whole flotilla, and armed with death-dealing bombs. Not altogether ignorant of the doctrine of consequences, the Democrats realized the value of oratorical discretion; so for a while they put a curb on their poisonously anti-British tongues.
Meanwhile Pennington continued his aerial journey to Turkish-menaced Urumia, the city by the lake shore, where a Christian army was sheltering and wondering anxiously whether it was succour or thesword that awaited it. Within two hours of leaving Mianeh, the intrepid airman was crossing over Lake Urumia heading for the western shore. He dropped low on approaching the city itself, and his unexpected appearance brought consternation to the inhabitants. Aeroplanes were unknown in those parts. They felt that this visitor from the clouds could hardly be a friend; therefore he was presumably a foe. Reasoning thus, the Jelus lost no time in blazing away a portion of their already slender stock of ammunition in the hope of bringing him down. The aviator had many narrow escapes, and so had his machine. He landed with a few bullet holes through his clothing, but his aeroplane, happily, had not been "hulled," or he would have been immobilized at Urumia.
As he alighted, the Jelus rushed up to finish him off, for they were not noted for being over-merciful to Turks falling into their hands. But seeing that he was English, they embraced him as a preliminary, and then carried him shoulder-high into the city. He was the hero of the hour. The people were delirious with joy, and women crowded round and insisted on kissing the much-embarrassed aviator. As the weather was very hot, Pennington was wearing the regulation khaki shorts. One Nestorian woman, after gazing compassionately at the airman's bare, sunburnt legs, and noting the brevity of his nether garment, shook her head sadly and said she had not realized till then that the British, too, were feeling the effects of the War and were suffering from ashortage of clothing material. There was a whispered consultation with some sister-Nestorians, and a committee was formed to remedy the shortcomings of Pennington's kit. The women ripped loose their own skirts and, arming themselves with needles and cotton, pleaded to be allowed to fashion complete trousers for the aviator, or at least to be permitted to elongate by a yard or so the pair of unmentionables he was wearing. The youth blushed furiously, and was at great pains to explain that there was still khaki in England, and that it was convenience, and not any scarcity of material, that had caused the ends of his trousers to shrink well above his knees.
Pennington flew back from Urumia, and it was arranged that the Jelus with their women and children were to march south by way of Ushnu and Sain Kaleh to meet a British relieving force moving up from Hamadan and Bijar.
Early in August Osborne had several brushes with the Turks on the Tabriz road. The enemy flooded our lines with spies, chiefly Persians from Tabriz, and pushed reconnoitring patrols as far south as Haji Agha, forty miles from Tabriz. In these road skirmishes our Persian levies behaved with their characteristic unsteadiness. Once they were fired upon by hidden infantry at seven hundred yards, they forgot their promised display of valour, their courage oozed out at their boots, and they promptly bolted. An aerial reconnaissance revealed detachments of cavalry, artillery, and infantry marchingsouth along the Tabriz road, but Headquarters in Bagdad refused to attach any importance to this concentration, and for the moment were deaf to Wagstaff's reiterated demand for reinforcements, and especially for a mountain gun or two.
Captain Osborne and his party now dug themselves in at Tikmadash, about fifty miles from Mianeh and a corresponding distance from Tabriz, and fixed his headquarters in a serai close to the village which commanded the Tabriz road. There was a supporting British post at Karachaman not far from the main Tabriz road and fourteen miles to the south-east.
Wagstaff's repeated pleadings with "high authority" at last began to bear fruit. It was a generally accepted military axiom out in Mesopotamia and Persia that, if you were insistent enough in your demands for an extra platoon or two, with a gun or an aeroplane thrown in, you were either given the goods, or dubbed a "flannel-footed fool" and relegated to the cold shades of official oblivion. It was generally the latter. When Wagstaff, therefore, heard that he had been given a whole squadron of 14th Hussars, a platoon of the 14th Hants, and a platoon of Ghurkas, as well as a section of a howitzer battery and a couple of mountain guns, his habitual soldierly calm deserted him, and he almost wept for joy on the neck of his adjutant, debonair "Bobby" Roberts of the 4th Devons.
"C" squadron of the 14th Hussars had made aforced march from Kasvin. Its ranks had been thinned by fever, and it barely mustered eighty sabres when it rode over the Kuflan Kuh Pass to Mianeh. It had but two officers, Lieutenants Jones and Sweeney, fit for service. But there was no respite. Fever-racked troopers and leg-weary horses, after a night's halt at Mianeh, started on a fifty-mile march to Tikmadash, where a handful of British were holding up a Turkish force already numbering nearly a thousand and growing daily. The tired infantry who had "legged it" all the way from Kasvin were also pushed north in the wake of the cavalry.
Treachery of our irregulars—Turkish machine-gun in the village—Headquarters under fire—Native levies break and bolt—British force withdrawn—Turks proclaim a Holy War—Cochrane's demonstration—In search of the missing force—Natives mutiny—A quick cure for "cholera"—A Turkish patrol captured—Meeting with Cochrane—A forced retreat—Our natives desert—A difficult night march—Arrival at Turkmanchai—Turks encircling us—A fresh retirement.
The Turks came against Osborne at Tikmadash on September 5th. For days previously they had been carefully preparing for the attack.
Overnight they sent into the village, unperceived by the British, an infantry detachment which fraternized with the inhabitants and also with a small party of our irregulars who were on observation duty there. The treacherous irregulars said nothing of the presence of the Turks in their midst, and made common cause with them at once. Towards midnight the Turks smuggled in a machine-gun, which they subsequently mounted on the flat roof of the dwelling of a Persian official. At daylight the Turks, from cover of the village itself, opened a violent machine-gun fire on the headquarters of Osborne, which were in a serai a short distance onthe Mianeh side of Tikmadash village. All the officers, some eight or ten in number, lived here. There were two doors to the serai on two different sides of the building. Both these exits were sprayed with machine-gun fire. There was nothing for it but to open the door and run the gauntlet. It was like coming within the vortex of a hail-storm, yet, surprising to relate, few were hit.
Beyond the weak units of the 14th Hussars, the Hants, and the Ghurkas, Osborne had nothing to depend upon in this critical hour save levies recruited in Mianeh and elsewhere who, in spite of their boastings, were always fire-shy. They took up a position this morning at Tikmadash, but it was clear from the beginning that their hearts were not in the business.
After firing some shrapnel into the position, the Turks stormed it with two thousand infantry. The shell fire had already stampeded the Persians, but their British officers, Captains Heathcote, Amory, and Trott of the Devons, and Hooper of the Royal West Kents, by dint of persuasion and threats, temporarily stopped the disorderly flight, and induced the wavering men to follow them back into the line. But a few more shells from the Turkish gun, which burst with telling accuracy, finished the resistance of the levies. Osborne had no artillery, the mountain battery section from Mianeh not having yet arrived.
This time the portion of the line held by the leviesdoubled up like a piece of paper. Panic seized them, and they fled with all the swiftness of hunted animals, throwing away their rifles as they ran. The Hants, Ghurkas, and Hussars were now all that was left to cover the retirement. The Turks were working round both flanks and, had the British hung on, the whole force would have been surrounded and killed or captured. Some of the British soldiers were so incensed at the cowardice of the Persians that they turned their rifles against the fugitives and shot them in their tracks.
When a retirement was seen to be inevitable, the charvadars were ordered to load up the stores and medical supplies at the serai. In the midst of their preparations the levies broke and fled. This decided the charvadars, who showed themselves to be as arrant cowards as the rest of their race. Cutting away the lashings securing the loads on the transport mules, they jumped on the animals' backs and galloped panic-stricken to the rear.
Captain John, of the Indian Medical Service, who had worked like a Trojan attending to the wounded under fire, now collected three or four British N.C.O's. and sought to rally the runaway charvadars, or at least to recapture some of the transport mules. As well might Dame Partington have tried to mop back the waves of the Atlantic. John, however, did succeed in moving the British wounded, but all the officers' kits, medical supplies, and ammunition fell into the hands of the enemy.
The sadly diminished and battered British force withdrew to Karachaman, preceded by the fleeing native levies, who magnified the extent of our reverse, and as they ran spread panic amongst the villages on our line of retreat.
Eight days before the Turks hit us at Tikmadash, news had filtered through to Mianeh that the enemy was becoming active in Eastern Azerbaijan. Raiding parties of Turkish cavalry had penetrated to Sarab, eighty miles east of Tabriz, and stray bands of tribal levies who had taken service under the Turkish flag were reported farther east towards Ardabil and the Caspian littoral. They distributed proclamations broadcast announcing a Jehad or Holy War against the British, and calling upon the people to rally to the banner of the Ittahad-i-Islam, or Pan-Islamic movement, and so make an end of the Infidel occupation of Persia. The hapless villagers themselves had little choice in the matter; compulsion was drastically applied, and a village that showed hesitation, or evinced any apathy in embracing the tenets of the political-cum-religious and Turkish-controlled Ittahad-i-Islam, was laid waste, its inhabitants maltreated, or sometimes put to the sword.
The Turks further showed their contempt for Persian authority by seizing the telegraph office at Sarab and kicking out the detachment of Persian Cossacks who held the place in the name of the Shah and did police duty in the district. These Cossacks, in common with the rest of their brigade, were underthe command of a Russian officer. He evidently harboured some extraordinary view as to his duty towards the Shah's Government, for he accepted with meek submissiveness the imperative orders of the Turks to take himself and his command out of Eastern Azerbaijan without any unnecessary delay. The Persian Cossacks, the "paid protectors of the poor," to give them one of their official designations, rarely "protected" anybody unless as a financial investment, and their brutality and greed for illicit gain caused them to be as much dreaded by the Persian peasant and bazaar shopkeeper as were those brutal, plundering ruffians, the Turkish Bashi-bazouks whom the senior partner in the Pan-Islamic firm had let loose in upper Azerbaijan.
To counteract enemy activity round Sarab and Ardabil a small mounted force was despatched from our post at Karachaman under Captain Basil Cochrane of the 13th Hussars. Cochrane had with him about forty British enlisted Sowars of Khalkhal Shahsavans. Moving across the mountains, he boldly rode into Sarab. The Turks, assuming his to be but the advance guard of a large British force, scattered at his approach. The Governor and the townsfolk welcomed him effusively, and promised him military support. But Persian promises are not always redeemable, as we had already found to our cost. Turkish cavalry were advancing afresh and threatening his rear, so Cochrane, who was fifty miles as the crow flies from the nearest British post,had to let go his hold on Sarab, and retire towards the south. Then a veil of silence enshrouded his movements; and at Mianeh headquarters it was feared that he had been cut off and killed with his whole party.
I had just come back from a long trek, and had stretched my weary self out on a camp bed and gone fast to sleep, booted and spurred, when someone shook me vigorously. I awoke and found it was Wagstaff, chief of the Mission, with orders for me to take out a mounted party and go in search of Cochrane. I mustered the available Sowars of the station, about fifty in all. They were recruited from the Shahsavan tribesmen, and we had had hitherto no reason to suspect their fidelity. But immediately they divined that trouble was brewing and that they might get a "dusting" from the Turk, they decided that Mianeh was a healthier place than Sarab, and mutinied to a man. Neither threats nor persuasion could move them. Having, so to speak, thrown in their hands, they dismounted from their shaggy, fleet-footed hill ponies, and stood sullenly with folded arms, refusing obedience to all orders.
Leaving Wagstaff to deal with the mutinous Sowars, I collected about a dozen of my own Persian police, and with these and two British N.C.O's., Sergeants Calthorpe, R.F.A., and Saunders of the 13th Hussars, set off on my mission.
We marched the greater part of the night, and early next day reached Turkmanchai on the Tabrizroad, twenty-five miles north-west of Mianeh. Here I impressed ten Sowars of ours who, feigning illness and suffering from "fire-shyness," had stolen out of the trenches at Tikmadash. Our route from Turkmanchai lay nearly due north towards the foothills of the lofty Bazgush Range and the country of the Khalkhal sub-tribe of Shahsavans. We bivouacked for the night in the prosperous village called Benik Suma, which stands in the middle of an arboreal-cloistered dale watered by a shallow but swift-running mountain stream. Supplies were plentiful, and the hand of famine had not touched this secluded Persian hamlet, which nestled so cosily beneath the glorious foliage of oak and chestnut.
When the march was resumed in the morning, it was found that four of the "malingerers" from Turkmanchai had deserted overnight. My little command did not seem at all easy in its mind at the prospect of having a brush with the enemy, and every hour that brought us nearer to the hill country an increasing number of Sowars reported sick and begged to be allowed to fall out.
At first I was puzzled by the spread of this sudden malady, for the symptoms were identical in each case—severe abdominal pains; but presently the mystery was explained. I encountered on the road a Persian Cossack who had ridden in from the Sarab district, and had come across the mountains that lay ahead of us. He volunteered the information that in a village about twenty miles distant he hadseen a Turkish cavalry patrol. Our Sowars on hearing this looked very glum, and four of them at once complained of violent illness. They rolled on the ground in pretended agony, artfully simulating an acute cholera seizure. This time, and without much difficulty, I diagnosed the disease as being that of pure funk, or what is commonly known in military parlance as "cold feet." While sympathizing with the sufferers, I gravely told them that I had instructions to shoot off-hand any of my command who became cholera-stricken, and to burn their bodies in order to prevent the disease spreading. The result was little short of magical. The "severe pains" disappeared, and the patients made such a wonderful recovery that within half an hour they were able to mount their horses and turn their faces towards Sarab once more. And the "epidemic" did not reappear.
We entered the mouth of the gloomy Chachagli Pass in the Bazgush Range. Horsemen afar off had hovered on our flanks and reconnoitred us carefully, but the distance was too great to tell whether they were enemy irregulars or simply roving Shahsavans in search of plunder, who would impartially despoil, provided the chances were equal, Briton, Turk, or Persian.
The Chachagli Pass, a trifle over 8,000 feet, must surely be the most difficult to negotiate in the whole of the Middle East. The road or track from the southern entrance of the Pass follows a narrowvalley shut in by a high gorge. A huge mass of limestone rock, parting company with some parent outcrop several thousand feet above our heads, has fallen bodily into the shallow stream which rushes down the Pass, damming up its waters momentarily. The stream is angry, but not baffled, at this clumsy effort to bar its path. Gathering volume and strength, and mounting on the back of the impeding boulder, it dives off its smooth surface with all the energy and vim of a miniature Niagara, and goes on its way humming a merry note of rejoicing.
After traversing the stream repeatedly, the road tilts its nose in the air and mounts sharply. With just enough room for sober-going mules to pass in single file, it skirts the brink of a precipice until the top is reached. The rocks radiated a torrid heat that September morning, and the sun struck across our upward path. It was difficult climbing, for there is not in all the Chachagli Pass enough tree shade to screen a mountain goat.
On the north side of the summit the road descends just as abruptly; the track is narrow and rugged, and it requires careful going to avoid toppling over the unramped side and down into the rock-studded bed of the stream.
It was nearing sunset on the evening of September 2nd, and my small force was preparing to bivouac for the night, when two Sowars who had been foraging in a village to the west came galloping with news of the enemy. They had learned that a party ofTurkish irregulars had halted in a hamlet three miles away.
We moved in the direction indicated and found the information was correct. The enemy horsemen, believing themselves secure, had neglected to mount a guard. They had off-saddled and were sleeping peacefully in the shade of a mud-walled compound when we burst into the place and surprised them. They were ten in all. Rudely disturbed in their siesta, they surrendered without firing a shot. The prisoners comprised two Turkish N.C.O's., six Sowars, and two agents of the Ittahad-i-Islam. They had evidently been "billposting" and recruiting, for their saddlebags contained letters addressed to Turkish sympathizers in the district and also the red armlets worn as a distinguishing badge by the newly enrolled fedais who undertook to fight under the crescent-flag of the Osmanli.
My own Sowars were greatly elated over this minor success. Their spirits rose accordingly, and they now professed to regard the fighting Turk with disdain, and to be prepared to match themselves single-handed against a whole troop of the enemy.
But it was all mere bombast. The prisoners were sent down to Mianeh with an escort of six of these "valorous" levies. On the way they, though, of course, unarmed, overpowered the guard, took the arms and horses, and escaped.
At daylight next morning, September 3rd, the march northwards was resumed. Our advancedguard was fired upon by some armed horsemen, who retired. Following them up, we found that they were some of Cochrane's scouts who had mistaken us for Turks. Cochrane himself I came across two hours later. With his little force he had retreated without loss from Sarab, and had taken up a snug defensive position on the brow of a wooded eminence, where he placidly awaited whatever fate might send him first—the attacking Turk, or the succouring British.
The tribesmen were friendly towards us, and, attracted by the prospect of good pay, were offering themselves freely as recruits. Making due allowance for the fighting instability of our levies, we felt we were strong enough to hold on, and if the worst came to the worst, and we were outnumbered, capable of putting up a running fight with the enemy.
But the end bordered on the dramatic, and came with an abruptness that neither of us had foreseen. As related in a previous chapter, Osborne was heavily attacked at Tikmadash on the morning of September 5th, and the news of his retreat and the advance of the Turks along the Tabriz road did not reach Cochrane and myself until 2 a.m. on the morning of the 6th. It was a ticklish situation. Go forward we could not, and our only way back was over the gloomy fastness of the Chachagli Pass. The Turks, we knew, were advancing rapidly, and we mentally saw them already astride our one line of retreat and ourselves trapped at the south exit of the Pass.
There was no time to be lost. So, destroying our surplus stores, and with grim faces, we set off in the darkness of the night. Our levies surmised that something had gone wrong with the British, and fear gripped their hearts. They deserted wholesale and without waiting to bid us adieu. There was a picket of fifteen Persians and a British sergeant in a village a mile to our front. The sergeant alone reported back. His command had "hopped it" when they realized that danger threatened. Five miles behind us on the crest of the ridge there was an observation post of thirty irregulars with a Naib or native lieutenant and two British N.C.O's. The Naib had the previous evening vaunted his personal prowess, and assured Cochrane and myself that no Turks would pass that way except over his lifeless body. But when we reached his post in the blackness of the night, we discovered that the gallant Naib had fled none knew whither, and taken all his men with him. We never saw him again. The two N.C.O's. had mounted guard alternately, and we found them cursing Persian irregulars and Persian perfidy with a degree of vigour and a candour that did adequate justice to their own private view of the situation.
Cochrane is an Afrikander born, and as resourceful and plucky a soldier as ever donned khaki. Used to night marching on the veldt, he led the advanced guard of our party through the intricate, labyrinthian windings of the Chachagli Pass where a single false step meant death. It was nerve-straining work, thisnight march in the darkness, with men, horses, and transport mules following each other in blind procession and groping for a foothold on the narrow causeway. That mysterious dread of the unseen and the unknown, ever present on such occasions as these, clutched with a tenfold force the timorous hearts of the native levies who had survived the earlier stampede at the beginning of the retreat. Their teeth chattered, and their trembling fingers were always inadvertently pressing triggers of loaded rifles, which kept popping off and heightening the nerve tension.
We got clear of the Pass shortly after daylight. Fortunately the Turks were not there to intercept our march. With the passing of the long night vigil, and the coming of the dawn, gloom was dispelled; life assumed a rosier tint, and the levies recovered some of their lost spirits and waning courage. Once free of the imprisoning hills, and out on the broad plateau that dipped southwards to intersect the Tabriz road, we headed straight for Turkmanchai. Once we rode into a village as fifty well-mounted horsemen, disturbed like a covey of frightened birds, bolted out at the other end. We found that they were Shahsavan robbers, who looked upon our party as potential enemies. Turkish cavalry in extended order were visible on the skyline as we gained the shelter of Turkmanchai.
We reached this spot in the nick of time. Osborne's force had been compelled to evacuate Karachaman,the position occupied after Tikmadash, and his sorely pressed command was now trickling into Turkmanchai with the Turks at their heels. Turkmanchai village is at the base of a steep hill. At its summit the road from Tabriz squeezes through a narrow-necked pass. Here the Hants and the Ghurkas took up a position in order to arrest the Turkish advance. A section of a mountain battery had arrived overnight. The Turkish cavalry appeared in column of route, out of rifle fire as yet, and blissfully ignorant of our possession of artillery. The cavalry made an admirable target. Two well-directed shells burst in the midst of the astonished horsemen. Their surprise was complete, and wheeling they opened out and galloped wildly for cover. The impromptu salvo of artillery set them thinking, and they did not trouble us again that day.
To hold Turkmanchai was impossible. We had stopped the Turks in front, but they were working round our flanks, and it was only a question of hours when we should be isolated and cut off from Mianeh. We were outnumbered by fully ten to one, and the flanking parties of cavalry which the enemy threw out were alone larger than the British combined force of regulars and irregulars.
A fresh retirement was decided upon, and on the morning of September 7th we evacuated Turkmanchai. The wounded and the sick were removed in transport carts, and two hours after midnight the head of the column moved slowly off in the darkness.I was in charge of the advanced guard, and found myself in command of a varied assortment of Persian irregulars, some of whom had "distinguished" themselves at Tikmadash and Karachaman and had been "rounded up" by British troops during the retreat. They were a motley crew, and what infinitesimal amount of pluck they ever possessed had long ago evaporated. In the advanced guard it was difficult to restrain their impetuosity. They dashed off at top speed as if they were riding a fifty-mile Derby race to Mianeh. But their one impelling motive was to place as many miles as possible of dusty road between themselves and the oncoming Turks before daylight.
By dint of threats of summary punishment they were brought to heel and ultimately held in leash. Silence it was impossible to impose, short of some form of gagging, and they chattered like a cageful of monkeys, utterly heedless of the danger of betraying our presence to the enemy. Then, too, their superheated imagination saw Turks growing on every bush. "Osmani anja!" "Osmani anja!" (The Turks are there!) they would cry, indicating some village donkey or goat taking a hillside stroll. Fortunately for us, the Turks showed themselves to be singularly lacking in energy, and were not keen on risking a night attack in unknown country, or they might have ambushed the advanced guard half a dozen times before it got clear of the danger zone. With our Persian "braves" to rely upon, therewould surely have been a "regrettable incident" to record officially.
The Turks waited for daylight, and then they attacked the main body and the rearguard, but were beaten off, and the column extricating itself reached Mianeh in safety.