With the Persian Expedition

by Martin Henry Donohoe

This, briefly, was the situation in the early days of March. Dunsterville had leaped and failed. He was back at Hamadan, holding on tenaciously, with a small body of officers and N.C.O.'s, no men, lacking supplies, from which he was separated by hundreds of miles of roadless country made doubly impassable by rain and melting snow, and threatened with extermination by unfriendly tribesmen who, wolf-like, were baying round him, eager yet afraid to strike.

HOTEL D'EUROPE AT RESHT.

But, one will ask, what were Dunsterville and his force doing in Persia at all? And why had Britain, who had gone to war with Germany because the latter had overrun neutral Belgium, and who had professed so much horror for Germany's aggression, why had she, of all nations, violated Persian neutrality, invaded Persian territory, and ignored Persian protests? The answer is simply that we entered Persia to defend Persian rights as much as to defend our own cause and the cause of the Allies. The territory of the Shah had been devastated by contending armies of Turks and Russians. It had been swept by fire and sword; and now those twin handmaidens of ruthless war, famine and disease, were abroad in the land of Iran, slaying indiscriminately such of the wretched helpless populace as had escaped the fury and the sword of Turk and Muscovite. Persia, by reason of its geographical boundaries—its frontiers being coterminous with those of Russia and Turkey—had in the early part of the great world struggle become the cockpit of the Middle East. The weak, emasculated Government of the Shah, a mere set of marionettes, hopped about on the political stage of a corrupt capital. It had no will of its own; and, even if it had, the constitutional advisers of the "King of Kings" had no means of enforcing it.

Hating Russia politically, and perhaps not without reason, coquetting with Turkey because of the common religious bond of Islamism, Persia herself very early in the War failed to observe the obligations which neutrality imposed upon her. She aided and abetted the emissaries of the Central Powers. Hun gold was the charm at which her gates flew open to admit Prussian drill-instructors, whose business was to organize and train the wild tribes of the south-west for raids against our vulnerable right flank in Mesopotamia. The "Volunteers of Islam," a body of fanatical Mollahs with a leavening of Turkish military officers and of bespectacled professors of German Kultur, were recruited round Lake Van in Turkish Armenia. They had for their object the preaching of a holy war in Afghanistan against Britain, and the setting alight of our Indian north-west territory. The "Volunteers of Islam," moving across the Persian frontier, established their base in Persian Kermanshah preparatory to turning their faces eastward in the long trek to Herat and the scene of their Islamic and anti-British crusade.

They were destined never to behold the mountain passes of their "Promised Land," for, valour outrunning their discretion, these militants of Islam and Potsdam, while engaged in the final preparations for the journey to Afghanistan, were foolish enough to throw in their lot with a Mesopotamian frontier tribe which was thirsting to distinguish itself in battle against the British. The combat duly took place, and the insolent tribesmen were punished for their foolhardiness. In fact, they found extinction, instead of the looked-for distinction; and many "Volunteers of Islam" were also given sepulture by the vultures, the concessionaires des tombeaux in these parts. As for the survivors, they readily abandoned Kermanshah for the greater security offered by the Armenian highlands.

After the Russian military collapse in the winter of 1917, followed by the Bolshevist triumph and the signing of the shameful treaty of Brest Litovsk, the Germans and their infamous allies, the followers of Lenin and Trotsky, lost no time in making themselves masters of the Caucasus. Tiflis fell, and arrayed itself under the Red Banner of National Shame; Armenians, Georgians, and Tartars, all victims of Turkish misrule, but hating each other more cordially than they collectively hated the Osmanli oppressor, wrangling over their respective claims to independent nationhood, varied by the absorbing passion of slitting each other's throats, were all too busy to seek to make common cause against the Bolshevik wolf when it appeared before their fold in the guise of a German lamb.

Would that all these nationless peoples of the Caucasus, who with so much vehemence are always pleading their own inalienable right to self-determination, possessed military gifts commensurate with their brilliant, perfervid, never failing oratory! If they could fight only half as well as they can talk, what unrivalled soldiers they would be!

The Bolsheviks and their German masters and paymasters, coming down the railway line from Tiflis, speedily possessed themselves of Baku and its oil wells. Immediately opposite Baku, and on the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea, is Krasnovodsk, the terminus of the Transcaspian Railway, that important strategic line which links up the khanates of Russian Turkestan, connects, on the one hand, Samarkand with Orenburg and the main reseau of Russian railways, and, on the other, bifurcates and comes to a dead stop—resembling the extended jaws of a pincers—within hailing distance of the Afghan frontier. Once masters of the Caspian littoral and of the Russian gunboats which patrolled its waters, the Bolsheviks and their German allies were free to use the Transcaspian Railway, and to menace India seriously by way of Afghanistan.