CHAPTER XV

LIFE IN MIANEH

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, {162} 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 divided {163} by 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. {164} 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 and _opéra 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 they {165} were 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 an {166} attempt 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 the {167} sword 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 a {168} shortage 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 marching {169} south 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 a {170} forced 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.

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