With the Persian Expedition

by Martin Henry Donohoe

Yet he sat there unharmed while the Asiatic world wondered. His position was precariousness itself. The full virulence of political animosity was focussed upon him and his dangerously thin khaki line. I am convinced that no Assurance Company, however speculative, would have considered him a "safe life" during those dark and doubtful days, when he was barricaded within the British Compound, alternately waiting for the inglorious but picturesque death so fervently promised him by the local Democrats, or watching for the reinforcements which dribbled fitfully from Bagdad and over Persian plain and mountain.

Hamadan was at once the foyer of Turkish espionage and of Persian intrigue. The moribund association of local Democrats, merchants and grain-growers, had been largely galvanized into anti-British activity by Kuchik Khan, whose army of Jungalis still barred the road from Manjil to the Caspian Sea. The Hamadan Democrats were "pure patriots," who talked glibly in the local tea-houses of the blessing of political freedom, cursed the British as mischievous, evil-minded interlopers, and called upon Allah to bless their deliberations and rid them of the British oppressor. Incidentally, they would meet in secret conclave and decree a further increase in grain prices, which meant a substantial gain to themselves. Supplies were refused to the British except at very exorbitant rates; the profiteers waxed fat and became more insolent; and the poor of Hamadan were left to die of hunger, victims of Persian cupidity and Persian indifference. Pamphlets, inflammatory in tone, and bearing the imprimatur of the principal democratic club, were distributed broadcast in the streets, and from these the victims of famine had at all events the ante-mortem satisfaction of learning that it was the British who were deliberately starving them to death in order that these beardless intruders might the more easily overrun the whole land of Persia.

If a Persian Democrat be valorous in speech, he is fortunately discreet in deeds. An ukase would go forth from Kuchik Khan that there was to be a truce to temporizing, and that the Dunsterforce must be sent without delay to the Jehannam of Unbelievers. "By Allah, it will be accomplished!" would be the prompt reply. Then the fearless Democrats, always careful never to risk their own skins unduly, would hire some half-starved fedais or irregulars, who for a kran or two would fire a few shots into British Headquarters, or, under cover of dusk and a sand-bank, snipe some solitary officer or soldier of our force. Whereat there would be much rejoicing in democratic circles, and the club would sit up late drinking arak.

Meanwhile the hunger mortality in Hamadan was increasing. Bread, the chief, indeed the only, article of diet of the poor, was at 14 krans a batman (roughly, the equivalent of ten shillings for 7 lbs.), and the wheat combine saw to it that the price increased rather than decreased. On May 6th Mr. McDouell, the British Consul, officially computed that the daily deaths from starvation were two hundred. Hamadan was a city of horrors. The unburied victims of famine—men, women, and children—were lying in the streets and in the fields adjoining British Headquarters. The Kashish or priest of the Shi'ite mosque, who received a fee of about twopence for officiating at the funerals of those buried in forma pauperis, admitted that the daily interment-roll was one hundred and sixty during the first fortnight of May. The hunger-enfeebled survivors became herbivorous, eating the grass in the fields like so many animals. A short course of this diet proved as fatal as the want of bread, for it invariably caused peritonitis and a lingering, agonizing death.

But there was worse to come. The foodless people, driven crazy by their sufferings, now resorted to eating human flesh. Cannibalism was a crime hitherto unknown in Persia, and no punishment exists for it under Persian law. The offenders were chiefly women, and the victims children stolen from the doorsteps of their homes, or snatched up haphazard in the bazaar purlieus. Mothers of young children were afraid to leave them while they went to beg for bread, lest in their absence they should be kidnapped and eaten. I never went into the Bazaar or through the narrow, ill-paved streets without a feeling of sickly horror at the sight of the human misery revealed there. Children who were little better than human skeletons would crowd round to beg for bread or the wherewithal to purchase it, and in parting with a few coppers to them, one could not help shuddering and wondering if they, too, were destined, sooner or later, to find their way into the cooking-pot.

The Persian Governor one day awoke from his habitual lethargy and roused the local police, who set out on the track of the child-eaters. A series of domiciliary visits brought to light fragments of human bones and rags of clothing. They arrested eight women, who confessed that they had kidnapped, killed, and eaten a number of children, pleading that hunger had driven them to these terrible crimes.

On the following day, May 8th, a yet more horrifying case of cannibalism was discovered. Two women, mother and daughter, were caught red-handed. They had killed the daughter's eight-year-old child, and were cooking the body, when the police interrupted the preparations for this horrible feast. The half-cooked remains were removed in a basket, and an indignant crowd of well-fed Democrats followed the wretched offenders to the police-station, threatening them with death.

Some of the people, who did not share the noble view of the Democrats that the poor should starve rather than that cornered wheat should be released, went to the telegraph office with the intention of informing the weak and incapable Teheran Government of the true state of affairs.

But the Democrats would have none of that; it might upset their carefully laid schemes for enrichment at the expense of the flesh and blood of their fellows. There was no telling what effect a telegraphed protest might have upon the supineness of the Shah's Cabinet Ministers. Those administrative sluggards might be goaded into some action bordering on interference with the policy of the Hamadan Democrats, which Heaven forbid! So Democrat emissaries picketed the Persian telegraph office, and pitched into the street any of their adversaries who questioned their right to impose an arbitrary censorship. Thus was made manifest the "benign rule" of the "friends of Persia" in all its callous disregard for the first principles of humanity.