A CITY OF FAMINE
In ancient Hamadan--With Dunsterville at last--His precarious
position--"Patriots" as profiteers--Victims of famine--Driven to
cannibalism--Women kill their children for food--Trial and
execution--Famine relief schemes--Death blow to the
Democrats--"Stalky."
Hamadan stands at a height of six thousand feet at the foot of the
Alvand range, which is covered with snow for ten months in the year.
In summer, when the tender shoots of the growing corn are pushing
above the earth, and the trees are blossom-laden, "every prospect
pleases." The reverse of the medal is presented after a brief
acquaintance with Hamadan's people, and one sadly recalls that "only
man is vile."
It is said that modern Hamadan occupies the site of one of the
ancient Ecbatanas of the Greeks, of which there were seven, and that
it was the treasure city of the Achæmenian Kings, the place taken and
plundered by Alexander the Great when he was "strafing" the Eastern
World. However that may be, very few ancient remains have been
brought to light. On a hill outside the town are the ruins of a
{114} citadel, and a carved stone lion of venerable aspect and crude
workmanship crouches by the roadside not far from the British
Hospital Compound. This lion may once have adorned the façade of an
Achæmenian palace, but he has fallen from royal greatness to plebeian
utility; for it is popularly believed that he exercises a protective
influence against cholera, smallpox, plague, and kindred ills; and
Persian mothers bring their children and seat them on his stone back
to obtain immunity from disease. Famine is evidently not included,
or so many children would not have succumbed during the hunger days
of the spring and early summer of 1918, before that never-failing
talisman, the British Commissariat, exorcised the famine fiend.
In Hamadan, too, is buried the celebrated philosopher and physician
of Bokhara, Abu ali ibn Sina, better known as Avicenna, the legend of
whose fondness for eleventh-century wine and women has come down
through all the ages, obscuring whatever reputation he may have
possessed as a healer or thinker.
The Jews of Hamadan, and they are numerous, point with pride to the
site of the tombs of Esther and Mordecai. It is very uncertain
whether either of these personages who figure so prominently in the
Book of Esther is buried here. Within an insignificant-looking,
weather-worn, stucco-covered shrine in the grip of decay, are two
wooden sarcophagi covered with faded paint and bearing gilt
inscriptions in Hebrew of verses from the Book of Esther.
{115}
The Rabbi in charge, a sallow-faced man with a long white beard, who
had seen generations of Gentiles come and go while he kept watch and
ward here, assured me that the tomb of this heroine of the Jewish
race, who stooped to amatory conquest that her people might live, as
well as that of her shrewd relative, the opportunist Mordecai, were
of unquestionable authenticity. I will leave it at that.
The arrival of our small party in Hamadan at the beginning of May
added a hundred or so additional rifles to the unwelcome and
uninvited skeleton force already there. As I related in a previous
chapter, General Dunsterville, after falling back from Resht,
established himself in Hamadan, his available fighting force being a
handful of officers and a baker's dozen of N.C.O's. He was in the
midst of a more or less hostile population of about 70,000,
one-fourth of whom were Turks or of Turkish origin and sympathies,
the remainder being Persian, with a small sprinkling of Jews and
Armenians.
Yet he sat there unharmed while the Asiatic world wondered. His
position was precariousness itself. The full virulence of political
animosity was focussed upon him and his dangerously thin khaki line.
I am convinced that no Assurance Company, however speculative, would
have considered him a "safe life" during those dark and doubtful
days, when he was barricaded within the British Compound, alternately
waiting for the inglorious but picturesque death so fervently
promised him by the local Democrats, or {116} watching for the
reinforcements which dribbled fitfully from Bagdad and over Persian
plain and mountain.
Hamadan was at once the foyer of Turkish espionage and of Persian
intrigue. The moribund association of local Democrats, merchants and
grain-growers, had been largely galvanized into anti-British activity
by Kuchik Khan, whose army of Jungalis still barred the road from
Manjil to the Caspian Sea. The Hamadan Democrats were "pure
patriots," who talked glibly in the local tea-houses of the blessing
of political freedom, cursed the British as mischievous, evil-minded
interlopers, and called upon Allah to bless their deliberations and
rid them of the British oppressor. Incidentally, they would meet in
secret conclave and decree a further increase in grain prices, which
meant a substantial gain to themselves. Supplies were refused to the
British except at very exorbitant rates; the profiteers waxed fat and
became more insolent; and the poor of Hamadan were left to die of
hunger, victims of Persian cupidity and Persian indifference.
Pamphlets, inflammatory in tone, and bearing the imprimatur of the
principal democratic club, were distributed broadcast in the streets,
and from these the victims of famine had at all events the
ante-mortem satisfaction of learning that it was the British who were
deliberately starving them to death in order that these beardless
intruders might the more easily overrun the whole land of Persia.
{117}
If a Persian Democrat be valorous in speech, he is fortunately
discreet in deeds. An ukase would go forth from Kuchik Khan that
there was to be a truce to temporizing, and that the Dunsterforce
must be sent without delay to the Jehannam of Unbelievers. "By
Allah, it will be accomplished!" would be the prompt reply. Then the
fearless Democrats, always careful never to risk their own skins
unduly, would hire some half-starved fedais or irregulars, who for a
kran or two would fire a few shots into British Headquarters, or,
under cover of dusk and a sand-bank, snipe some solitary officer or
soldier of our force. Whereat there would be much rejoicing in
democratic circles, and the club would sit up late drinking arak.
Meanwhile the hunger mortality in Hamadan was increasing. Bread, the
chief, indeed the only, article of diet of the poor, was at 14 krans
a batman (roughly, the equivalent of ten shillings for 7 lbs.), and
the wheat combine saw to it that the price increased rather than
decreased. On May 6th Mr. McDouell, the British Consul, officially
computed that the daily deaths from starvation were two hundred.
Hamadan was a city of horrors. The unburied victims of famine--men,
women, and children--were lying in the streets and in the fields
adjoining British Headquarters. The Kashish or priest of the Shi'ite
mosque, who received a fee of about twopence for officiating at the
funerals of those buried in _forma pauperis_, admitted that the daily
interment-roll was {118} one hundred and sixty during the first
fortnight of May. The hunger-enfeebled survivors became herbivorous,
eating the grass in the fields like so many animals. A short course
of this diet proved as fatal as the want of bread, for it invariably
caused peritonitis and a lingering, agonizing death.
But there was worse to come. The foodless people, driven crazy by
their sufferings, now resorted to eating human flesh. Cannibalism
was a crime hitherto unknown in Persia, and no punishment exists for
it under Persian law. The offenders were chiefly women, and the
victims children stolen from the doorsteps of their homes, or
snatched up haphazard in the bazaar purlieus. Mothers of young
children were afraid to leave them while they went to beg for bread,
lest in their absence they should be kidnapped and eaten. I never
went into the Bazaar or through the narrow, ill-paved streets without
a feeling of sickly horror at the sight of the human misery revealed
there. Children who were little better than human skeletons would
crowd round to beg for bread or the wherewithal to purchase it, and
in parting with a few coppers to them, one could not help shuddering
and wondering if they, too, were destined, sooner or later, to find
their way into the cooking-pot.
The Persian Governor one day awoke from his habitual lethargy and
roused the local police, who set out on the track of the
child-eaters. A series of domiciliary visits brought to light
fragments of human bones and rags of clothing. They arrested {119}
eight women, who confessed that they had kidnapped, killed, and eaten
a number of children, pleading that hunger had driven them to these
terrible crimes.
On the following day, May 8th, a yet more horrifying case of
cannibalism was discovered. Two women, mother and daughter, were
caught red-handed. They had killed the daughter's eight-year-old
child, and were cooking the body, when the police interrupted the
preparations for this horrible feast. The half-cooked remains were
removed in a basket, and an indignant crowd of well-fed Democrats
followed the wretched offenders to the police-station, threatening
them with death.
Some of the people, who did not share the noble view of the Democrats
that the poor should starve rather than that cornered wheat should be
released, went to the telegraph office with the intention of
informing the weak and incapable Teheran Government of the true state
of affairs.
But the Democrats would have none of that; it might upset their
carefully laid schemes for enrichment at the expense of the flesh and
blood of their fellows. There was no telling what effect a
telegraphed protest might have upon the supineness of the Shah's
Cabinet Ministers. Those administrative sluggards might be goaded
into some action bordering on interference with the policy of the
Hamadan Democrats, which Heaven forbid! So Democrat emissaries
picketed the Persian telegraph office, and pitched into the street
any of their adversaries who {120} questioned their right to impose
an arbitrary censorship. Thus was made manifest the "benign rule" of
the "friends of Persia" in all its callous disregard for the first
principles of humanity.
On the following day there was the sequel to the case of child murder
by mother and daughter, when these two unfortunates paid the cruel
penalty imposed by Persian law for killing one's own offspring--that
of being stoned to death. The "execution" took place in front of the
Hamadan telegraph office. The condemned women, already on the
borderland of death from hunger, were staked down in two shallow pits
near where heavy stones were plentiful. Then the police, reinforced
by a willing mob, armed themselves with heavy boulders and pounded
the flickering life out of their emaciated frames, silencing for ever
their unavailing cries for pity and mercy. It was a revolting
spectacle, and although their crime was an abominable one, no one not
a Persian could repress a feeling of compassion for the wretched
creatures who, made desperate by hunger, had become so dead to all
human instinct as to kill and be prepared to eat their own flesh and
blood.
Other women were apprehended and executed for child murder. It was
reported that there was plenty of wheat stored in private houses, and
it was urged that severe measures should be taken against the
hoarders. The men were still eating their evening meal of grass,
flavoured with a little salt. One of the favourite trysting-places
of the Democrat {121} stalwarts was the football-ground near the
Hospital Compound. Nearly every afternoon in fine weather, when the
ground was not being used for play, they sat there cross-legged--in
their brown and black loose-fitting robes, resembling so many
clucking hens on a roost--discussing and planning the overthrow of
the British, while hundreds of their own people lay dying around them
of starvation.
In Hamadan, to add to our other difficulties, we were greatly
troubled with professional mendicants, whose ages varied from six to
sixty, and whose energy and begging zeal were unbounded. In time we
got to know them, chiefly, I think, because of their physical
fitness. They were always in the pink of condition, sound in wind
and limb, and could run a mile in pursuit of a likely dole without
turning a hair, while their vigorous lung power would have done
credit to a "cheap jack" auctioneer.
I always did, and always shall, admire the wonderful patience and
clemency exercised by Dunsterville when faced with the Democratic
organization, which aimed at nothing short of wiping out both himself
and his force in Hamadan, if not by a _tour de force_, then by
starvation. They were always inciting the populace to rise and
finish us. But hungry men have little stomach for blood-letting, and
although those in Hamadan found it difficult enough to exist owing to
the food shortage, they were in no hurry to abridge their unhappy
days by flinging themselves on British bayonets.
{122}
The Hun or the Turk would have ended this intolerable situation long
ago by decorating Hamadan lamp-posts with the dangling bodies of
local Democrats; but Dunsterville was forbidden to embark upon any
strong measures. Our own Minister in Teheran, Sir Charles Marling,
kept warning us that we were neutrality-breakers, and wondering
whether the Persian Government, even by the exercise of all his (the
Minister's) diplomatic skill, could ever be induced to forgive us.
Sir Charles, who has since been transferred to some other sphere of
usefulness, was always quick to grasp and expound the Persian
official point of view. I often wonder if he ever busied himself
with attempting to understand that of the British concerning the
occupation of Hamadan and Kasvin.
One of the contributory causes of the Hamadan famine was the insane
behaviour of the Russian Army when in occupation of the town and
district. They destroyed the growing crops of wheat and barley, and
wantonly wasted the grain they were unable to consume or carry off.
The Hamadan harvest is not ripe for gathering until about the first
week in July, so the British, in May, were faced with the problem of
feeding a starving population for some sixty days. It was not
incumbent upon them to do so, but both pity and policy coincided in
indicating the necessity for combating the evil of food shortage that
was so rapidly thinning out the population.
With the approval of the British Government a {123} scheme of famine
relief was inaugurated by General Dunsterville. Labour gangs were
formed, and under the supervision of our officers the starving
multitude was set to work road-making. In about the first week three
thousand offered themselves for employment, and were enrolled.
Nominally, only the able-bodied were supposed to be eligible, but
judging by the human wrecks that one saw in the Labour Corps few of
this category existed in Hamadan. The road-makers, at the beginning,
were paid four krans per diem (a kran is, at war-exchange, the
equivalent of a franc), and it was stipulated that they should
provide themselves with a spade or mattock and a basket in which to
carry away the loosened earth. A number, it is true, did present
themselves armed with the narrow-bladed bilm or spade of the Persian
agricultural labourer, but there were hundreds who heroically tackled
the job equipped with nothing more efficacious than wooden
rice-spoons. Still, no one kicked at this, and the rice-spoon
wielders did their "bit," or attempted to do it to the best of their
enfeebled ability. Our object was rather to be content with some
colourable imitation of a _quid pro quo_ for cash disbursements, than
to exact a stiff day's labour from people wholly incapable of
performing it.
In our blissful ignorance of Persian psychology, we fondly imagined
at first that the equivalent of £400 a day paid out in wages to
roadmakers would sensibly alleviate the prevailing distress. But we
{124} did not reckon upon Persian avarice, selfishness, and
untrustworthiness of character. The price of bread, somewhat to our
surprise, did not fall. In fact it became dearer than ever. The
bakers saw to that. Money was beginning to circulate more freely;
the very poor were no longer empty-fisted; so up went the price of
bread with a bound! In short, it was found that the more we
distributed in famine relief the lower fell the purchasing power of
the kran. Another thing, too, that militated against the successful
working of the "all cash" scheme of assistance was that it did not to
any extent ameliorate the pitiable lot of the women and children.
The men did not always bother to buy bread for their starving
dependents, preferring to dissipate their earnings in a nightly
carouse in an opium den--the local equivalent to a British gin palace.
An unpleasant element of "graft" was also brought to light. No
Persian for very long can keep his itching fingers from other
people's money. The native foremen of the road gangs were not an
exception to the rule, and for a brief period they made a lucrative
income by trafficking in labour tickets. First they issued spurious
ones to their friends and relatives, none of whom had done a stroke
of work; they even sought, somewhat clumsily to be sure, to
counterfeit the official stamp which each ticket bore on its face.
They rubbed some Indian ink on the reverse side of a two-kran piece,
and with this stamped the forged tickets, adding a few pencil strokes
_à la {125} fantasie_ by way of giving a finishing touch of
verisimilitude.
As the tickets entitled the bearers to draw four krans when presented
nightly at the pay office, the thieving foremen were in a fair way to
becoming rich by the time the fraud was discovered. The same
individuals were also in the habit of coercing their hapless
underlings into selling their tickets for a kran or two. These were
then resold to a middleman, who cashed them at their full face value.
But a liberal application of the bastinado worked wonders, and
speedily rendered such dishonest practices highly unpopular.
Still, it was felt that some radical alteration was necessary if we
were to get full value for, and the Hamadan poor full benefit from,
the money that was being expended on their behalf. General Byron, a
level-headed practical soldier, and very wise in worldly knowledge,
who at this time was second in command to General Dunsterville, now
took over control of famine relief work. He decided upon an
alteration of the existing system of doles in favour of one
consisting of a free distribution in food supplemented by payment in
cash of two krans instead of four. Bread alone was deemed to be
insufficient, and it was felt that the starving people who toiled
daily road-making required some more nourishing food. After
overcoming many difficulties, official as well as unofficial, and
silencing the usual group of objectors who vowed that it could not be
done, the {126} General opened soup kitchens at several centres, and
fed as many as 2,000 hungry people per day.
The recipients were delighted and grateful. But it was now that the
local Democrats, who throughout had stood aloof from the movement for
succouring their starving brethren, reached their high-level of
political strategy. It was not at all to their liking that the
detested British interloper was filling the empty stomachs of the
people gratis. In such circumstances they could not be expected to
revolt and join hands with the Democrats, and besides, if this free
distribution of food were not stopped, it would be a bad day for the
wheat-trust and inflated grain prices. So they set to work and
issued broadcast handbills warning the poor against partaking of
British soup, on the ground that it was heavily flavoured with
poison. It was part of another "deep-laid plot," they said, to kill
off all the Hamadani whom the ravages of famine had so far overlooked.
The average Persian peasant is an ignorant and gullible individual as
a rule, but this time the Democrats overshot the mark and their
assertions were too much even for Persian credulity. The hungry
people came and ate. The second and succeeding days they came in
thousands. Barricades and armed soldiers were required to prevent
their storming the distribution centres and carrying off all the
available supply. And, to the dismay and horror of all good
Democrats, not a single one died from poisoning. This was the
deathblow to the prestige of the Democratic {127} movement. It lost
its grip on the people. There is nothing a Persian, or indeed any
Oriental, hates so much as being made to look ridiculous; and the
Democrats became the target for quip and jest in the bazaars of
Hamadan, until in rage they plucked their beards and tore their
garments, exclaiming, in accents of sorrow and humiliation, "Alas,
what ashes have fallen on our heads to-day!"
But they rallied in their last ditch, and made an eleventh-hour
attempt to avert the consequences of the moral defeat which had
overtaken them. Kuchik Khan, the "Robin Hood" of the Caspian
Marches, yielding to democratic pleadings, and in the hope possibly
of discrediting British famine relief work, sent fifteen mule-loads
of rice to Hamadan to be sold for the benefit of the poor. But
Kuchik's agents had seized the rice without payment from growers
living in his "protected area," so he was able to play the merry game
of robbing the Persian Peter in order to comfort the Persian Paul.
The artifice was too thin. Hamadan was not deluded. The British
were _de facto_ masters of the situation. They had conquered the
people of Hamadan not by the sword and halter of the Turk who had
preceded them, but by a modern adaptation of the miracle of the
loaves and fishes.
By a _ruse de guerre_ the grain owners were induced to disgorge some
of their hoarded stocks. Telegrams purposely written _en clair_
which passed between Bagdad and Hamadan made it appear that large
{128} supplies of wheat were being forwarded from Mesopotamia,
whereupon the local Hamadan hoarders rushed into the market and sold
readily at daily diminishing rates, until something like normal
prices were reached once more. And so the bottom fell out of the
wheat ring.
Private foreign effort closely co-operated with the military in the
distribution of food and the relief of the famine-stricken. Dr. Funk
and Mr. Allen of the American Presbyterian Mission, Mr. McMurray of
the Imperial Bank of Persia, and Mr. Edwards, local manager of the
Persian Carpet Factory, amongst them spent considerable sums of money
and devoted a great deal of time to this work of charity.
Mr. McMurray is a man possessing much business acumen and financial
ability, and as expert adviser to the British in occupation at
Hamadan he was able to render very great services to his country.
Too modest to seek reward or recompense of any kind, he nevertheless
had an honour thrust upon him. It was a minor class of a minor
decoration which a grateful Government in England somewhat
grudgingly, it seems, bestowed upon him in generous recognition of
his zealous labour in the common cause of Empire. So now, should he
attend a public function at home, and the question of precedence
arise, he will probably find himself ranking next after some lady
typist from the War Office, who can write shorthand and spell with
tolerable accuracy. To be {129} an unofficial Briton working for
Britain abroad is a very serious handicap for the Briton concerned.
The Government of the Empire sees to that. I have never been able to
discover exactly why it is, but the handicap holds good all the way
from Tokio to Teheran, and from Salonika to Archangel. Should you
desire to acquire merit, and you happen to be the possessor of a name
that betokens pure British ancestry, hide it, and let it be inferred
that the cradle of your race is somewhere in Palestine or the Middle
East. Then your path is easy. The India Office will pat you on the
back, and the British Foreign Office will ecstatically fold you to
its bosom.
McMurray's bungalow was the chief trysting-place for the British
officers in Hamadan. It stands within the great walled enclosure or
compound where many members of the British and American colonies had
made their homes. It was a city within a city, fringed with trees
and pleasant pathways, and bordered by flower-beds. Mrs. McMurray
was always "at home" to her compatriots from about 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.
daily. While she fed starving Persians, she also gave luncheons and
dinners to British officers. Rarely were there fewer than six of the
latter billeted under her hospitable roof. The eaglets of the
R.A.F., and especially the fledglings still without their second
wing, found her an admirable foster-mother, who counselled them in
health and nursed them in illness, and was always a sympathetic
amanuensis when {130} fevered brows and unsteady hands attempted to
grapple with the problem of inditing a "line or two" for home to
catch the outgoing mail.
Dunsterville, as he was popularly called, was a frequent visitor at
the bungalow. The original of Kipling's "Stalky," he rode easily and
without straining on the anchor of his reputation. He is
keen-witted, with an illimitable fund of dry, racy humour, and no
drawing-room was ever dull when the General was having his fling. As
a retailer of _bon mots_ the G.O.C. had no compeer in Hamadan. His
shafts were never envenomed, and his victims laughed as heartily as
anybody else, as, for instance, once when rations were running low
and cannibalism was in vogue among the poor of the city,
Dunsterville, turning to a very youthful A.D.C. whose cheeks were the
colour of a ripe apple, said in his droll way, "I shall never starve,
my lad, while you are about!"
One of his _obiter dicta_ was that every British officer in Persia
should be compelled to pass a qualifying examination in "Hadji
Baba"--the Oriental Gil Blas--for he would then know more about the
Persians, their manners and customs, than could be acquired by months
of travel and unaided observation.
"Stalky" had no fear of personal danger. He was an optimist who
always saw a diamond-studded lining to the blackest of clouds. It is
related of him {131} that at his fateful interview with the
Bolsheviks on the occasion of his raid on Resht he told the "Red
Committee" so many amusing stories in their own mother-tongue that
they quite forgot the principal business of the evening, which was to
sentence him (Dunsterville) to death.
{132}