My best friend among the natives was a Kurdish chief named Hamdi Bey Baban. His father had been captured and taken to Constantinople. After living there a number of years in semicaptivity he died—by poison it was said. Hamdi was not allowed to return to Kurdistan until after he was a grown man and had almost forgotten his native language. He spoke and read both French and English. Eventually permission was granted him to live in Baghdad as long as he kept out of the Kurdish hills, so he set off by motor accompanied only by a French chauffeur. Gasolene was sent ahead by camel caravan to be left for him at selected points. The journey was not without incident, for the villagers had never before seen an automobile and regarded it as a devil; often stones were thrown at them, and on one occasion they were mobbed and Hamdi only escaped by driving full speed through the crowd.
His existence in Baghdad had been subject to sudden upheavals. Once he was arrested and convoyed back to Constantinople; and just before the advance of the British his life was in great danger. Naturally enough he had little love for the Turk and staked everything on the final victory of the Allies.
He intended writing a book on the history of his family, in which he was much interested. For material he was constantly purchasing books and manuscripts. In the East many well-known histories still exist only in manuscript form, and when a man wishes to build up a library he engages scribes and sends them to the place where a famous manuscript is kept with an order to make a copy. In the same way Hamdi Bey had men busied transcribing rare chronicles dealing with the career of his family—extant in but one or two examples in mosques. He once presented me with a large manuscript in Persian in which his family is mentioned, the mention taking the form of a statement to the effect that seventeen of them had had their heads removed!
Next to various small tradesmen with whom I used to gossip, drink coffee, and play dominoes, my best Arab friend was Abdul Kader Pasha, a striking old man who had been a faithful ally to the British through thick and thin. The dinners at his house on the river-bank were feasts such as one reads of in ancient history. Course succeeded course without any definite plan; any one of them would have made a large and delicious meal in itself. True to Arab custom, the son of the house never sat down at table with his father, although before and after dinner he talked and smoked with us.
A jeweller's booth in the bazaar
I had a number of good friends among the Armenians. There was not one of them but had some near relation, frequently a parent or a brother or sister, still among the Turks. Sometimes they knew them to be dead, more frequently they could only hope that such was the case and there was no further suffering to be endured. Many of these Armenians belonged to prominent families, numbering among their members men who had held the most important government posts in Constantinople. The secretary of the treasury was almost invariably an Armenian, for the race outstrips the Jews in its money touch.
With one family I dined quite often—the usual interminable Oriental feast varying only from the Arab or Turkish dinners in a few special national dishes. All, excepting the aged grandmother, spoke French, and the daughters had a thorough grounding in the literature. Such English books as they knew they had read in French translations. The house was attractively furnished, with really beautiful rugs and old silverware. The younger generation played bridge, and the girls were always well dressed in European fashion. Whence the clothes came was a mystery, for nothing could have been brought in since the war, and even in ante-bellum days foreign clothes of that grade could never have been stocked but must have been imported in individual orders. The evenings were thoroughly enjoyable, for everything was in such marked contrast to our every-day life. It must be remembered that these few Armenians were the only women with whom we could talk and laugh in Occidental fashion.
By far the best-informed and cleverest Arab was Père Anastase. He was a Catholic, and under the supervision of the Political Department edited the local Arab paper. All his life he had worked building up a library—gathering rare books throughout Syria and Mesopotamia. He was himself an author of no small reputation. Just before the British took Baghdad the Germans pillaged his collection, sending the more valuable books to Constantinople and Berlin, and turning the rest over to the populace. The soldiers made great bonfires of many—others found their way to the bazaars, where he was later able to repurchase some of them. When talking of the sacking of his house, Père Anastase would work himself into a white heat of fury and his eyes would flash as he bitterly cursed the vandals who had destroyed his treasures.
It was in Baghdad that I first ran into Major E.B. Soane, whose Through Mesopotamia and Kurdistan in Disguise is a classic. Soane was born in southern France, his mother French and his father English. The latter walked across the United States from ocean to ocean in the early forties, so Soane came by his roving, adventurous spirit naturally. When still but little more than a boy he went out to work in the Anglo-Persian Bank, and immediately interested himself in the language and literature of the country. Some of his holidays he spent in the British Museum translating and cataloguing Persian manuscripts. Becoming interested in the Kurds, he spent a number of years among them, learning their languages and customs and joining in their raids.