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.
{147}
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.
{149}
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.
{152}