CHAPTER XVII

EVACUATION OF MIANEH

We have a chilly reception--Our popularity wanes--Preparation for further retirement--Back to the Kuflan Kuh Pass--Our defensive position--Turks make a frontal attack--Our line overrun--Gallantry of Hants and Worcesters--Pursuit by Turks--Armoured cars save the situation--Prisoners escape from Turks--Persians as fighters.

Mianeh, pampered, spoon-fed Mianeh, which had grown fat on British bread and comparatively wealthy on British money, gave the retreating column a chilly reception.

The bazaar looked at us askance, and the Democrats spat meaningly in our direction and muttered a malediction upon our heads. There was joy in the eyes of the people which they took no pains to conceal.

The news of the Turkish success, much magnified in passing from mouth to mouth and village to village, had preceded our arrival, and the barometer of bazaar sentiment, always a sure gauge of Persian public opinion, had veered round to "stormy."

And "stormy" it was to be. It was felt that the sands of the British glass had run out. The attitude of the people underwent a sudden change {188} from cringing supplication to one of thinly veiled hostility. Fawning officials, who had battened upon our liberality and profited by our largesse, now fell over themselves in their efforts to sponge the slate clean and write upon it a Persian improvised version of the "Hymn of Hate." They threw the full weight of their mean souls into the job. In the bazaar they buzzed about like so many poisonous gadflies, and in order to curry favour with their new masters-to-be they incited the people to anti-British demonstrations, and beat and imprisoned humble folk whose friendship for our nation was disinterested and had not been offered on the local commercial basis of so many krans per pound. With one exception, all the district notables--who had always been reiterating their professions of friendship, and to whom we had paid large sums as subsidies for faithless, turn-tail levies, or as purchase price for grain--went over to the enemy. Our Mianeh police, my own command, or those of them who were Persians, followed the general example and ran off to join the Turks.

There was one notable exception. Four Kurds who belonged to the police and who could not be intimidated or cajoled, stood firm and refused to be carried off by the wave of desertion, and they remained to guard the Mission premises.

After Turkmanchai we did not tarry long in Mianeh. Preparations were at once made for a further retirement. The Turks were coming on {189} slowly and methodically, and apparently in no immediate hurry to hustle us out of Mianeh. The long and, in a sense, rapid marches of the previous five days during hot weather had told upon the Turkish infantry, and now the advancing enemy had cried a halt in order that his tired troops might enjoy a brief repose.

Our next defensive position was the Kuflan Kuh or Qaplan Kuh (the panthers' hill) Pass, which lies five miles south-east of Mianeh. The main range of the Kuflan Kuh runs roughly from east to west, and the Tabriz-Zinjan road passes over its crest at a height of about five thousand feet. At the end of the Mianeh plain, and some two miles from the village itself, there is a solid brick bridge over the Karangu River. Once the river is crossed, coming from Mianeh, the rise begins gradually, and the foothills of the Pass are met with a mile or so from the river bank. The ascent from the northern or Mianeh end is very difficult, and the road mounts between two perpendicular walls of rock. The gradient is steep, and the outer edge of the roadway was wholly unprotected until a British labour corps took the job on hand and interposed a coping-stone barrier between the exposed side of the road and the abyss below. The same workers also plugged up some of the gaping holes in the roadway which had existed from time immemorial.

On Sunday, September 8th, the whole of Major Wagstaff's force bade farewell without regret to {190} Mianeh, marched across the Karangu, and placed the formidable barrier of the Kuflan Kuh between itself and the advancing enemy. Wagstaff established his headquarters in a ruined caravanserai near the stone bridge which spans the Kizil Uzun River at the southern entrance to the Pass. All the stores of wheat and barley which had been accumulating in Mianeh were destroyed before evacuation, and the rearguard crossed the Karangu without molestation either from the Turks or from their new allies, the Mianehites, who were hourly showing themselves more hostile to the retiring British.

Headquarters at Kasvin now began to be alarmed at the uninterrupted southward advance of the Turks, for, if Zinjan fell, Kasvin might be expected to follow, and our line of communications from Hamadan towards the Caspian would be cut. General Dunsterville himself was away in Baku, fighting Bolsheviks and Turks. Some weeks earlier, with the help of Bicherakoff and his Russians, he had rooted out Kuchik Khan from his jungle fastness, and opened the road from Manjil to Resht and the Caspian Sea.

Wagstaff was accordingly ordered to hold the Kuflan Kuh at all costs, but what he was to hold it with was not quite clear, inasmuch as his total dependable fighting strength of Hants, Ghurkas, and 14th Hussars did not exceed 250 bayonets and 50 sabres, the few remaining levies being a negligible quantity. He had been given a machine-gun detachment, a {191} mountain battery section, two field guns, and a howitzer. His main position was on a line of low hills extending for about three miles below the northern face of the Pass, and commanding the approaches from the Mianeh plain and the brick bridge across the Karangu. The guns were on the reverse or southern slope of the Pass, whence by indirect fire they could make it unpleasant for an enemy crossing the Karangu bridge or fording the shallow river itself.

A platoon of the Worcesters arrived to reinforce our attenuated line, and Colonel Matthews of the 14th Hants took over command on the 9th. The Turks had now occupied Mianeh in force, and during the ensuing two days were busy preparing for an offensive movement. They pushed a considerable body of infantry down to the cultivated fields bordering the north bank of the Karangu. Here, amongst the boundary ditches, topped with low bushes, they found a certain amount of ready-made cover, and they subjected our advanced posts on the right to a harassing fire. These were held by levies with a stiffening of British officers and British N.C.O's. The Persians, as usual, became "jumpy" whenever Turkish bullets hummed in their immediate vicinity, and as they were utterly lacking in elementary fire-control they were a source of vexatious perplexity to their British officers and sergeants. One officer, in despair at their utter unreliability under fire, pleadingly suggested that they might be withdrawn {192} altogether, and himself left with two British sergeants to hold the post.

Even after making due allowance for the complete worthlessness of our Persian auxiliaries, we hesitated to believe that the Turks would commit themselves to a frontal attack on the Kuflan Kuh. Given a sufficiency of reliable troops, it would have been an admirably strong defensive position, and any enemy who came "butting" against it with lowered head would have found the experiment a costly one.

But the Turks had seemingly gauged the measure of our strength and our weakness more accurately than we had ourselves, for, eschewing anything in the nature of new-fangled turning movements, they came at us in the good old-fashioned way, and by the most direct route.

The attack was delivered after breakfast on September 12th, and on the part of the enemy there was no sign of hurry or confusion. Two thousand infantry, highly trained and admirably handled, belonging to one of their crack Caucasian divisions, crossed the river in extended order and flung themselves against our line. The shock of contact was first felt on the right, where the Persians were in position. These latter promptly broke and fled in utter disorder, all attempts to rally them proving futile. Our line was now in the air, so to speak, with the Persians scuttling like rabbits up towards the entrance to the Pass. It was short and bloody work.

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The Hants and the Ghurkas had now to bear the brunt of the attack. The Turks, reinforced, came on in surging waves and flowed over their trenches. Both units made a gallant but ineffectual fight, and were forced back up the Pass, suffering considerable losses. The enemy followed up his advantage and stormed the Pass itself. A last stand was made at the summit to cover the retreat of the guns. Here Hants and Turks fought hand to hand with bayonet and clubbed rifle, until the sadly diminished remnant of this brave battalion, after losing their gallant sergeant-major, were literally pushed over the crest and down the reverse slope. But they had stood their ground long enough to save the guns from capture.

The Worcesters, who had been in reserve on the southern slope, now came doubling into action to the assistance of the hard-pressed Hants. Taking shelter behind the boulders which are plentiful on both sides of the roadway, they covered the retirement, driving the Turkish snipers off the summit of the Pass and arresting any immediate pursuit on the part of the enemy.

The caravanserai at the Kizil Uzun Bridge, where Colonel Matthews had his headquarters, being now untenable, he withdrew with his remaining force across the Baleshkent Pass to Jamalabad on the road to Zinjan. As for the runaway levies, some of them did not halt until they had placed a good twenty miles between themselves and the scene of the Kuflan Kuh fighting.

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The Turks pursued us to Jamalabad, but it was the last kick. Their offensive spent itself here, thanks to a new factor which had entered into the game. This was the armoured car sections, light and heavy, under Colonel Crawford and Lieutenant-Colonel Smiles, which, when our position was indeed precarious, had been rushed up from Kasvin and Zinjan in support of our retiring column. The Turks got a bad peppering at Jamalabad, and a few miles farther south at Sarcham where the cars were in action. The enemy had no liking for this sort of fighting, and troubled us no more. They withdrew from Jamalabad and, in anticipation of a counter-offensive on our part, proceeded to fortify themselves on the Kuflan Kuh.

A week after the fight at the Kuflan Kuh two men of the Hants who had been captured by the Turks arrived in our lines, clothed in nothing save a handkerchief apiece. While their captors were squabbling amongst themselves as to the distribution of the worldly possessions of the prisoners, the latter had slipped away unperceived and gained Jamalabad. There they were waylaid by Persian thieves, badly beaten, stripped of their clothing, and left for dead on the roadside. Still, they were a plucky pair, for, recovering, they set out afresh, and, completing a fifty-mile tramp in the blazing sun without food or raiment, rejoined their unit.

The Crawford armoured cars and the Matthews column slowly fell back on Zinjan, and there {195} ended the military activities of the Tabriz expedition.

My strictures on the fighting value of the Persian may appear unduly severe. I fully realize that one had no right to expect very much from a mass of raw, undisciplined material. The men were hastily recruited, and their training, necessarily circumscribed by the exigencies of time, could not have been anything but perfunctory and imperfect in the circumstances. But I am tilting rather at the theory prevalent in certain quarters at the inception of the Tabriz Expedition that one had only to send British officers into the highways and byways of Azerbaijan and that they would find there "ready-made" soldiers endowed with a fine fighting spirit, hardly inferior in quality to our own superb infantry, men who would stand up to trained and efficient soldiers like the Turks. Having once got the half-trained levies into the trenches, their British officers were expected to hold them by sheer force of will-power, and to hypnotize them into taking aim at an enemy without shutting both eyes. Now the bubble of Persian fighting efficiency has been pricked, and we have a more just appreciation of the virtues and shortcomings of the Persians as a unit in a modern army.

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