With the Persian Expedition

by Martin Henry Donohoe

One week-end while at Basra I was one of a few British officers invited to assist at the elaborate festivities which precede a Persian marriage. The contemplated matrimonial alliance was intended to unite the family of the Sheikh and that of Haji Reis, his Grand Vizier or Prime Minister. In the small party that dropped down the river on one of His Majesty's gunboats, were the Admiral of the Station, one or two generals, the Political Officer, the liaison officer between the Indian Government and the ruler of Mohammerah, and my friend Akhbar, a Persian from Manchester who had joined up early in the War. As we dropped down stream past the Palace, a salute was fired in our honour by the Sheikh's artillery-men with a couple of old six-pounders. An antediluvian Persian gunboat dipped her ensign as we steamed past. It was the first time I had seen a warship or indeed any other vessel flying the Persian flag, and I regarded her with interest. Akhbar, who despite his British uniform and his long residence amongst us, remained always an ardent Persian, professed to be very much hurt by some chance observations of mine directed at the river gunboat and the Persian navy in general.

The Palace was a rectangular building, with stuccoed front, standing back from the water and approached by a winding stone staircase. On landing we were received by the chief dignitaries of the place with the Grand Vizier at their head. There was much bowing and salaaming, and it was here that I first made acquaintance with that elaborate code of official and social ceremony which surrounds every act of one's life in Persia. A guard of honour from the Sheikh's household troops made a creditable attempt to present arms as we stepped ashore. More soldiers lined the stairway leading to the reception room. They wore a variety of uniforms, and were armed with everything in the way of rifles, from antiquated Sniders to modern Mausers and Lee-Enfields. Like most of the irregulars that we encountered in Persia afterwards, they fairly bristled with bandoliers stuffed full of cartridges. A Persian on the war-path, be he tribal chief or simple armed follower, is generally a walking arsenal. He is full of lethal weapons which nearly always include a rifle of some kind and a short stabbing sword with an inlaid hilt. He often displays a Mauser pistol as well, and usually carries enough ammunition hung round him to equip a decent-sized small-arms factory.

The Sheikh himself received us in the main reception hall, which was covered with rare Persian carpets, any single one of which would be worth a small fortune in London. The Prime Minister and his son, we found, spoke excellent English, and the former, who was wearing the conventional frock coat of the Occident, but no shirt collar, presented each visitor in turn to our Arab host, a man just past middle life with all the stately grace and dignity of his Bedouin forebears. He was dressed in native costume; his manners were easy and full of charm. He had a dark, olive-tinted face, black beard and wonderful lustrous black eyes. A strict adherent of the Shi'ite sect, and an abstainer from strong drink himself, he was, nevertheless, not averse to supplying it to his Western guests. The Grand Vizier during his sojourn in Europe had evidently studied our customs and civilization au fond. Apart from a knowledge of the English language and literature, he had brought back with him a fine and discriminating taste in the matter of aperitifs, knew to a nicety the component parts of a Martini cocktail, and was a profound connoisseur of Scotch whisky. Our party had few dull moments with the Grand Vizier as cicerone, and our admiration for his versatility rose by leaps and bounds.

The dinner was à la fourchette. It is not always so in hospitable Persia where, as a rule, host and guests sit in a circle on the floor and help themselves with the aid of their fingers. Here everything had been arranged in European fashion, and the long table was topped by a rampart of specially prepared dishes with a lavishness that was truly Oriental. It is a Persian custom to supply five times more food than one's guests can possibly consume. What remains becomes the perquisite of the servants of the household.

According to Persian etiquette a son may not sit down in the presence of his father, so the bridegroom-elect had no place at the board, and his active participation in the banquet was limited to carrying out the duties of chief butler and waiting upon the guests. It was hot and exhausting work, in the intervals of which he liberally helped himself from a black bottle which stood on a table behind the Grand Vizier's chair. Barefooted servitors passed nimbly along the table, and saw to it that their master's guests wanted for nothing. A plate was emptied only to be speedily replenished.

We saw nothing of the bride-to-be. She played but a minor part in the evening's entertainment. Nor were any other women of the household to be seen. At one end of the banqueting hall was a heavily curtained aperture. Occasionally this was furtively drawn aside an inch or two, and a woman's veiled face would appear for an instant, and as quickly disappear. It was the private view allowed to the bride and her girl friends.

The menu was inordinately long. Dish succeeded dish, and eat we must unless we wished to cause dire offence to our host. He himself, seated at the middle of the table, ate sparingly and drank but water, his air of quiet impassivity giving place to a smile from time to time as he listened to some Persian bon mot or other from one of his neighbours.

The Sheikh excelled as a host. No sooner was the banquet at an end than he told us that a display of fireworks had been arranged in our honour. Seats had been placed for the visitors on the long veranda at the back of the palace and facing the extensive grounds. No Persian feast is held to be complete without a pyrotechnic display of some kind, and that organized for our pleasure would have done credit to the best efforts of Brock or Pain.

There were Catherine-wheels, rockets, and welcoming mottoes in Persian and English which flared up merrily, until the whole grounds were one blaze of light.

The retainers entered fully into the spirit of the affair. Clad in fireproof suits, they were hung round with squibs which were set alight, and then the human Catherine-wheels carried out an astonishing series of somersaults, to the intense delight of the native portion of the audience. An English gunnery instructor, aided by native workmen with material from the Sheikh's arsenal, had been responsible for the pyrotechnic part of the entertainment.