CHAPTER XIII

THE RACE FOR TABRIZ

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 were {141} to 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 the {142} main 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 vicinity {143} of 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 lives {144} and 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 pattern {145} army 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. {146} 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 little _affaire 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.

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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 less {148} ravaged 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.

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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 north {150} in 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 its {151} attack 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.

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