With the Persian Expedition

by Martin Henry Donohoe

A mystery expedition—Tower of London conference—From Flanders mud to Eastern dust—An Imperial forlorn hope—Some fine fighting types—The amphibious purser—In the submarine zone—Our Japanese escort.

Scarcely had dawn tinged the sky of a February day in 1918 when there crept out of the inner harbour of Taranto a big transport bound for Alexandria. It was laden with British and Dominion troops.

All were for service overseas. There were units for India and Egypt, a contingent of Nursing Sisters for East Africa, and a detachment of Sappers for Aden. The transport stealing noiselessly towards the open sea was the P. and O. liner Malwa, and, as a precaution against submarine attack, she had been so extensively and grotesquely camouflaged by dockyard artists in black and white that some of her own crew coming alongside on a dark night had difficulty in recognizing her.

The Malwa, too, had on board the members of a military expedition, surely one of the most extraordinary that ever crossed the sea to fight the battles of the Empire in distant lands. Our official designation was the "Dunsterville" or "Bagdad Party"; but War Office cynics, and the damsel who sold us our patent filters and Tommy Cookers at the military equipment stores in London, knew us as the "Hush-hush" Brigade. And the "Hush-hush" Brigade we were privileged to remain. This nickname met us in Alexandria, followed us to Cairo and distant Basra, and preceded us to the City of the Caliphs on the shores of the muddy-brown Tigris.

On the eve of the departure from England of the main body for the Italian port of embarkation, a heart-to-heart talk between General Sir William Robertson and the members of the Bagdad Party had taken place at the Tower of London. The veil of official secrecy was drawn ever so little aside, and, allowed a peep behind, we beheld a field of military activity with a distinctly Eastern setting. Men who had been "over the top" in Flanders heard with a joyous throb of expectation that the next time they went into the line would be probably somewhere in Persia or the Caucasus. They were as happy as children at the prospect, finding it a welcome relief from muddy tramps through the low-lying lands of the Western Front, the dull grey skies, the monotony of life in flooded trenches under incessant bombardment, varied only by an occasional rush across No-Man's Land to get at the Hun throat. We were going from mud to dust, but hurrah! anyway.

On that February morning, as the Malwa slipped past Taranto town and into the roadstead where lay her Japanese destroyer escort, the roll-call of the Bagdad Party showed a strength of 70 officers and 140 N.C.O's. This was to be the nucleus of a force which we hoped would combat and overthrow Bolshevism, make common cause with Armenians, Georgians, and Tartars, raise and train local levies, and bar with a line of bayonets the further progress of Turk and German by way of the Caspian Sea and Russian Turkestan towards the Gates of India.

With few exceptions our party consisted of Dominion soldiers gathered from the remote corners of the Empire. There were Anzacs and Springboks, Canadians from the far North-West, men who had charged up the deadly shell-swept slopes of Gallipoli, and those who had won through at Vimy Ridge. They were, in fact, a hardened band of adventurous soldiers, fit to go anywhere and do anything, men who had lived on the brink of the pit for three years and had come back from the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

The War Office needed the raw material for a desperate enterprise. It was found by Brigadier-General Byron, himself an able and experienced soldier with a brilliant South African fighting reputation. He went across to Flanders and picked out the cream of the fighting men from the South African contingent and from the magnificent Australian and Canadian Divisions. I do not recall a single officer or N.C.O. who had not won at least one decoration for bravery. We had with us, too, a small party of Russian officers who, fleeing from the Red Terror when their army broke and melted away, remained loyal to the Entente, and volunteered for the Caucasus, where they hoped to prove to the Bolsheviks that the cause of Russian national and military honour was not entirely lost.

Our Russian allies for the Caucasus were mostly young men, enthusiastic and keen soldiers, endowed with the splendid fighting spirit of the old Russian Army such as I knew it in the early spring campaign of 1915 in Bukovina, when it fought with empty rifles and stood up to the encircling Austrians in those terrible February days that preceded and followed the evacuation of Czernowitch.