CHAPTER VII

EARLY HISTORY OF DUNSTERVILLE'S FORCE

Jealousy and muddle--The dash for the Caspian--Holding on hundreds of miles from anywhere--A 700-mile raid that failed--The cockpit of the Middle East--Some recent politics in Persia--How our way to the Caspian was barred.

Bagdad is not a pleasant place of residence when the Sherki, or south wind, blows, and when at noonday the shade temperature is often 122 degrees Fahr. For Europeans, work is then out of the question, and it is impossible to venture abroad in the scorching air. There is nothing for it but a suit of the thinnest pyjamas and a siesta in the Serdab or underground room which forms part of most Bagdad houses. The local equivalent of a punkah is usually to be found here, and this helps to make life just bearable during the hot season.

At Headquarters and administrative branches there was a welcome cessation of labour from tiffin time until after the great heat of the day. But the late Sir Stanley Maude, when in chief command at Bagdad, demanded a very full day's work from his staff, and suffered no afternoon siesta. He set the example himself, and on even the hottest days was absent from his desk only during meal hours. Maude, {62} splendid soldier and genial gentleman that he was, boasted of an iron constitution which was impervious alike to Mesopotamian heat and Mesopotamian malaria.

The cool weather had already set in when the Bagdad party took up its abode under canvas at Hinaida. We found already there an earlier contingent which had been gathered together from units serving in Mesopotamia and Salonika. No one knew quite what to do with us, and General Headquarters was seemingly divided in mind as to whether we should be treated as interlopers, and interned for the duration of the War, or left severely alone to work out our own salvation, or damnation, as we might see fit. The latter view carried the day, and our welcome in official quarters was therefore distinctly chilling. The difficulty chiefly arose, it appears, because General Dunsterville, the leader of our expedition, had been given a separate command, and was independent of the General commanding-in-chief in Mesopotamia. Jealousy was created in high quarters. There was a spirited exchange of telegrams with the War Office, in which such phrases as "Quite impossible of realization," "Opposed to all military precedent," are said to have figured prominently.

In February, in the middle of the rainy season, and while the snow still lay thick upon the Persian mountain passes, General Dunsterville had collected some motor transports and, taking with him a handful of officers, had made a dash for the Caspian Sea. {63} His intention was to seize and hold Enzeli, the Persian port on the Caspian, in order either to bluff or to beat the Russian Bolsheviks there into submission, and to use it as a base for operations against Baku, which had become a stronghold of German-Turkish-Bolshevik activity.

After untold difficulties, one party crossed the rain-sodden Persian uplands, hewed a road over the snow-covered Assadabad Pass for their Ford cars, and, although severely tried by cold and hunger, succeeded in reaching Hamadan. Leaving a small band of men there to keep the unfriendly Persian population in check, Dunsterville pushed on for Kasvin, and thence to Resht, a few miles from Enzeli, brushing aside the stray bands of armed marauders that sought to bar his progress.

The goal was in sight, but, unsupported, and without supplies, and hundreds of miles from his small party at Hamadan, he found himself unable to hold on. His enemies were numerous and well-armed. Awed at first by the appearance of this handful of British officers who had unconcernedly motored into their midst after a seven-hundred-mile raid across Mesopotamia and Persia, the Bolsheviks and their German-subsidized Persian auxiliaries were for temporizing--nay, they even invited the British General to a conference to discuss the situation; and, in the hope of arriving at the basis of an understanding, Dunsterville accepted the invitation to confer with them.

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In the meantime his enemies had not been idle. Their spies were quick to report that no British reinforcements were arriving. Dunsterville's numerical weakness was apparent, and the drooping spirits of the Bolshevik Council revived. It had been cowed into inaction, but now it grew bold, and its attitude became menacing. The British General was presented with an ultimatum demanding his immediate withdrawal on pain of capture and death.

There was no help for it. Withdraw Dunsterville must, and did. The Ford cars carrying the daring raiders sped away from the Bazaar of Resht and back to Hamadan, and through streets crowded with armed and hostile ruffians ripe for any crime.

This, briefly, was the situation in the early days of March. Dunsterville had leaped and failed. He was back at Hamadan, holding on tenaciously, with a small body of officers and N.C.O.'s, no men, lacking supplies, from which he was separated by hundreds of miles of roadless country made doubly impassable by rain and melting snow, and threatened with extermination by unfriendly tribesmen who, wolf-like, were baying round him, eager yet afraid to strike.

But, one will ask, what were Dunsterville and his force doing in Persia at all? And why had Britain, who had gone to war with Germany because the latter had overrun neutral Belgium, and who had professed so much horror for Germany's aggression, why had she, of all nations, violated Persian neutrality, {65} invaded Persian territory, and ignored Persian protests? The answer is simply that we entered Persia to defend Persian rights as much as to defend our own cause and the cause of the Allies. The territory of the Shah had been devastated by contending armies of Turks and Russians. It had been swept by fire and sword; and now those twin handmaidens of ruthless war, famine and disease, were abroad in the land of Iran, slaying indiscriminately such of the wretched helpless populace as had escaped the fury and the sword of Turk and Muscovite. Persia, by reason of its geographical boundaries--its frontiers being coterminous with those of Russia and Turkey--had in the early part of the great world struggle become the cockpit of the Middle East. The weak, emasculated Government of the Shah, a mere set of marionettes, hopped about on the political stage of a corrupt capital. It had no will of its own; and, even if it had, the constitutional advisers of the "King of Kings" had no means of enforcing it.

Hating Russia politically, and perhaps not without reason, coquetting with Turkey because of the common religious bond of Islamism, Persia herself very early in the War failed to observe the obligations which neutrality imposed upon her. She aided and abetted the emissaries of the Central Powers. Hun gold was the charm at which her gates flew open to admit Prussian drill-instructors, whose business was to organize and train the wild tribes of the south-west for raids against our vulnerable right {66} flank in Mesopotamia. The "Volunteers of Islam," a body of fanatical Mollahs with a leavening of Turkish military officers and of bespectacled professors of German Kultur, were recruited round Lake Van in Turkish Armenia. They had for their object the preaching of a holy war in Afghanistan against Britain, and the setting alight of our Indian north-west territory. The "Volunteers of Islam," moving across the Persian frontier, established their base in Persian Kermanshah preparatory to turning their faces eastward in the long trek to Herat and the scene of their Islamic and anti-British crusade.

They were destined never to behold the mountain passes of their "Promised Land," for, valour outrunning their discretion, these militants of Islam and Potsdam, while engaged in the final preparations for the journey to Afghanistan, were foolish enough to throw in their lot with a Mesopotamian frontier tribe which was thirsting to distinguish itself in battle against the British. The combat duly took place, and the insolent tribesmen were punished for their foolhardiness. In fact, they found extinction, instead of the looked-for distinction; and many "Volunteers of Islam" were also given sepulture by the vultures, the _concessionaires des tombeaux_ in these parts. As for the survivors, they readily abandoned Kermanshah for the greater security offered by the Armenian highlands.

After the Russian military collapse in the winter of 1917, followed by the Bolshevist triumph and the {67} signing of the shameful treaty of Brest Litovsk, the Germans and their infamous allies, the followers of Lenin and Trotsky, lost no time in making themselves masters of the Caucasus. Tiflis fell, and arrayed itself under the Red Banner of National Shame; Armenians, Georgians, and Tartars, all victims of Turkish misrule, but hating each other more cordially than they collectively hated the Osmanli oppressor, wrangling over their respective claims to independent nationhood, varied by the absorbing passion of slitting each other's throats, were all too busy to seek to make common cause against the Bolshevik wolf when it appeared before their fold in the guise of a German lamb.

Would that all these nationless peoples of the Caucasus, who with so much vehemence are always pleading their own inalienable right to self-determination, possessed military gifts commensurate with their brilliant, perfervid, never failing oratory! If they could fight only half as well as they can talk, what unrivalled soldiers they would be!

The Bolsheviks and their German masters and paymasters, coming down the railway line from Tiflis, speedily possessed themselves of Baku and its oil wells. Immediately opposite Baku, and on the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea, is Krasnovodsk, the terminus of the Transcaspian Railway, that important strategic line which links up the khanates of Russian Turkestan, connects, on the one hand, Samarkand with Orenburg and the main _reseau_ of {68} Russian railways, and, on the other, bifurcates and comes to a dead stop--resembling the extended jaws of a pincers--within hailing distance of the Afghan frontier. Once masters of the Caspian littoral and of the Russian gunboats which patrolled its waters, the Bolsheviks and their German allies were free to use the Transcaspian Railway, and to menace India seriously by way of Afghanistan.

At all events, they lost no time in invading Persia from the sea by way of Enzeli. Here they found eager sympathisers and willing auxiliaries in the Persian Democrats, a political party with considerable influence and following in Resht itself and throughout the Persian provinces of Gilan and Mazandaran. The Democrats laid claim to represent the intelligentza of North-Eastern Persia. Their profession of political faith was, broadly, "Persia for the Persians," the abolition of all foreign meddling in Persian affairs, and the ending of the Russian and British spheres of influence. But it was against the British that their virulent hatred and political conspiracies were chiefly directed. While they feared the British, they despised the Russians. As one of the leaders of this "Young Persia Movement" said to me when we had a heart-to-heart talk in Kasvin, "To our sorrow we find that the British are honest and incorruptible, therefore they are dangerous. Should they decide to stay here, we could never hope to turn them out. On the other hand, to our joy we recognize that neither the Russians nor the {69} Turks possess these high moral attributes, consequently there was always the hope that some day we might be able to escort the last of them to the frontier."

The "Young Persia" representative put his case concisely, fairly, and without any tinge of political jaundice. None better than he realized the impotency of the vacillating Teheran Government to enforce its paper protests against the violation of Persian neutrality. Its only military instrument was a ragged, unpaid, undisciplined rabble, which international courtesy has been wont to designate an Army. The Persian Democrats therefore linked up with the Bolsheviks. But it would be erroneous to assume that their ranks were recruited entirely from disinterested patriots, inspired by the highest altruistic ideals, burning to rid their country of the foreigner--be he Briton, Turk, or Russian--in order that Persia might be free to work out her own political salvation in her own way and without interference from anybody. Some there were in the ranks of the Democrats actuated only by love of country, as they conceived it, who, with noble resolve in their hearts, trod the financially unremunerative path which led to the goal of political glory. There was always plenty of elbow-room and never any overcrowding on this road. The great majority of the Democrats, as I found them, put pul (_i.e._, money) before patriotism, and for them a Turkish lira, or a twenty-mark piece, had an irresistible attraction.

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With the downfall of Russia as a military power, her Army, which had pushed down through Persia in order to effect a junction with the British in Mesopotamia, rapidly retreated, and as rapidly disintegrated, smitten by the deadly plague of Bolshevism. Discipline and organization were at an end; obedience was no longer rendered to Army Chief, corps commander, or regimental officer, but to the soldiers' own "Red Committee"--usually with a sergeant at its head--which, besides usurping the functions of Generalissimo, became the Supreme War Council of the Army, giving an irrevocable decision upon everything from high strategy to vulgar plundering. Now two Russian generals, named Bicherakoff and Baratof, appeared on the troubled stage of Persian politics. From the debris of an army they had gathered round them the odds and ends of stray Russian regiments, bands of irregulars from Transcaucasia, and Cossacks from the Don and the Terek--stout fighting men of the mercenary type, whose trade was war and whose only asset was their sword.

Both Bicherakoff and Baratof were loyal to the cause of Imperial Russia and her Allies, and refused to bend the knee to Lenin and Trotsky. They were willing to make war on our side as subsidized auxiliaries. In short, these heterogeneous cohorts were for sale; they possessed a certain military value, and the British taxpayer bought them at an inflated price, and also their right, title, and interest, if any, in the abandoned motor lorries, machine-guns, and {71} military stores of all kinds which littered the track of the retreating, disorganized Russian Army. The British military treasure-chest also honoured a proportion of the Russian requisition notes which had been given to the extent of millions of roubles in exchange for Persian local supplies, and which the Persian holders knew full well would never be liquidated by any Bolshevik Government in Petrograd or elsewhere.

Our friends, the Russians, having sold us their supplies for the common cause, made some difficulty about handing them over. The soldiers, it was said, claimed that war material was national property, and objected to its appropriation unless they, representing so many national shareholders, were each paid on a cash basis a proper proportion of the purchase price. This was a deadlock that was never satisfactorily adjusted. Our new Russian allies also offered to sell us the 160 miles of road from Kasvin to Hamadan which had been constructed by a Russian Company, and was being maintained by a system of tolls levied upon goods and passengers. But the price was so formidable that, if we had closed with the bargain, the British Exchequer would have needed the wealth of Golconda to complete the transaction.

Bicherakoff and his volunteers concentrated at Kasvin, at the junction of the roads leading to Resht and the Caspian in the north, to Tabriz in the north-west, to Teheran in the south-east, and to Hamadan {72} and Kermanshah in the south-west. Here they imposed an effective barrier against the flowing tide of Bolshevism coming from the Caspian, and it was hoped that they might be able to keep open the road from Kasvin to Resht and Enzeli.

The distance from Kasvin to Resht is about eighty miles. Half-way, at Manjil, there is a road bridge over the Kizil Uzun River, and the country beyond is covered with thick jungle, which fringes the roadway on both sides.

About the time the Russians were sitting down in Kasvin awaiting developments, there appeared in the jungle country a redoubtable leader named Kuchik Khan, who was destined to exercise considerable influence on the military situation in the region of the Caspian. Kuchik Khan was a Persian of a certain culture and refinement of manner, endowed with courage, personal magnetism, and great force of character. He possessed, moreover, no little knowledge of European political institutions and of the science of government as practised in the West. The personification of militant "Young Persia," he proclaimed himself an apostle of reform. Preaching the doctrine of Persian Nationalism in the broadest sense, he declared that he was the uncompromising enemy alike of misrule within and interference from without. Recruits, attracted by good pay and the prospects of loot, flocked to his standard from amongst the harassed and overtaxed peasant population, and were soon licked into tolerable military shape by {73} German and Turkish officers. Rifles, machine-guns, ammunition, military equipment, and money were also forthcoming from German sources. His army, which had its own distinctive uniform, grew rapidly, and it was not long before Kuchik Khan found himself strong enough to bid defiance to Teheran and its feeble Government. He set up as a semi-independent ruler, and had his own council of political and military advisers. Kuchik Khan's tax-gatherers collected and appropriated the Shah's revenues in Gilan and in part of Mazandaran, and his power became paramount from Manjil to the Caspian Sea. The Jungalis, as his followers were called, under German instruction became proficient in trench warfare. Selecting a good defensive position, they dug themselves in along the Manjil-Resht road, and their advanced outposts held the bridge head at Manjil itself.

Kuchik Khan, as Persians go, was relatively honest, and was possibly inspired by patriotic zeal; but this did not prevent his becoming a pliant and very useful military asset in the hands of the enemies of the Entente Powers. At their behest he bolted and barred the door giving access to the Caspian and for the British, at all events, labelled it, "On ne passe pas!"

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