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.
{64}
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.
[Illustration: HOTEL D'EUROPE AT RESHT.]
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.
{70}
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.
[Illustration: STONE BRIDGE AT SIAH RUD WHICH IS THE PROBABLE PLACE
OF ATTACK FROM ANY OF THE JUNGLE TRIBES. IT WAS AT THIS POINT THAT
THE HANTS SUFFERED CASUALTIES.]
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!"
{74}