With the Persian Expedition

by Martin Henry Donohoe

After six days' march we were in the country of the Afshar tribe, one of the five main branches of Shahsavans, which is credited with being able to put a thousand mounted and armed men in the field. The chief of the Afshars, Jahan, Shah Jahan, we found sojourning in one of his villages called Karasf. A day's march from this village we were met by a messenger from the Amir Afshar, as he is generally called, who invited us to make a detour and break our journey at Karasf.

It was at the close of a hot, dusty afternoon that we reached the Amir's abode, very tired after a long march. The Amir's headman bade us welcome, and announced that we were to be the guests of his master during our stay. The customary sacrificial offering of sheep was made in our honour, and our horses were led away by native mihtaran or syces. As for ourselves, we were installed in a spacious caravanserai with a retinue of servants to wait upon us. The Amir Afshar proved an admirable host, and supplies were forthcoming in abundance from the many villages in his domains.

Ascertaining that several members of the party were poorly mounted, he sent us six horses, the very best of his blood stock. The Amir lives in semi-regal style, and, as paramount chief of the Afshar tribe, is lord of his people and the arbiter of the lives and fortunes of about five thousand tribal families, who render him unswerving, unquestioning obedience. Here was ancient feudalism in the heart of the twentieth-century Persian Empire! Although owing a nominal allegiance to the "King of Kings" in Teheran, the Amir apparently did not bother his head very much about party intrigues or the trend of national politics at the Court of the Shah. He did his own intriguing, and did it exceptionally well. A man of extraordinary ability and political shrewdness, he first coquetted with the Turks and then with the British, adroitly playing one off against the other in the great game of politics. Too careful to commit himself irrevocably to one side or the other while the Great World War was still undecided, this Oriental Vicar of Bray nevertheless contrived to maintain a cordial and unbroken friendship with both Turk and Briton. If a Turkish emissary, backing up his persuasive pleadings with a bag of gold, besought him to put an end to neutrality and to place his resources and his small army of irregulars at the service of his blood relatives, the Amir always accepted the gold cheerfully, and fervently wished success to the Turkish arms. Then the British, not to be outdone by the Turk, would ask, as a guarantee of his good faith, for fifty or a hundred armed levies from amongst his tribesmen. The Amir invariably agreed in principle, but he would point out that no self-respecting Afshari could fight at his best unless equipped with a British rifle. The latest pattern army rifle would be forthcoming to the number required, but then a border foray would always be staged about the same time, and the wily Amir would plead, and with some show of reason, that he needed every sowar he had to prevent his territory being overrun by his powerful and unscrupulous tribal neighbours. Still, for all that, during the darkest of the famine days, he kept the British commissariat well supplied with grain, and that, too, at a reasonable price.

Our host was usually "at home" to distinguished visitors from four to five a.m. He sent to say that the state of his health forbade his receiving us at the more conventional hour of noon. The Amir, I learned afterwards, was a confirmed opium-eater, his daily dose of the drug being far in excess of the quantity consumed by our own candid de Quincey. He was an old man, verging on eighty, but although his physical health was indifferent, his mental energies were unimpaired. He rarely ventured abroad, and spent his days and nights in the privacy of his apartment, abandoning himself to the full enjoyment of his enthralling passion of opium-eating. At daylight he was usually recovering from his latest dose of the drug. Then he would partake of a little food, see callers, read his letters, and depart for dreamland again, carried thither on the wings of the insidious and baneful poppy extract.

One morning at dawn the members of the Wagstaff Mission paid a ceremonial call on the Amir. Fortunately we were accustomed to early rising. We were conducted to his presence with considerable ceremony, and found him reclining on the floor of a large apartment covered with rare Persian rugs. There was little else in the way of furniture in the place. I saw before me an old man with shrivelled, sunken features, piercing black eyes, and a grey beard growing on a face the colour of yellow parchment. A long, thin, bony hand was held out for us to shake in turn, the Amir excusing himself from rising on account of physical weakness. He bade us welcome in a quavering, piping voice.

Whatever else may have been his infirmities, it soon became clear that he had a remarkably alert brain. The most recent phases of the European War, the varying fortunes of the participants engaged therein, the latest tit-bit of scandal from Teheran, and the pretensions of the Turks to territorial occupation of Azarbaijan and possible aggrandizement at the expense of Persia, all these topics drew from the aged but mentally virile potentate pungent and sagacious criticism. He talked high strategy with all the assurance of a Field-Marshal, and gleefully told how he had politically out-manoeuvred the wily, calculating Turk in a recent little affaire à deux. While he spoke he ran his hand idly through a pile of correspondence, read and unread, opened and unopened, which littered the floor beside him. Letter-filing has evidently not reached any high standard at Karasf.

I think we all fell under the spell of our host's well-informed mind and his world-wide interests, and when he asked if there had been any Cabinet changes recently in London, and whether Lloyd George was still Chief Minister of our King, we felt that the march of contemporary events, rapid indeed as they can be sometimes, had failed to outstrip the keen alertness of the overlord of Karasf.

On May 29th, having previously exchanged adieux with our kindly host, we set out from Karasf. The weather was now oppressively hot, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to march during the noon-day heat. We accordingly moved off earlier, and usually contrived to take the road about sunrise daily, halted at noon for an hour or so, and then on again, finishing the day's march early in the afternoon in the welcome shade of some garden on the outskirts of a village and close to a good water-supply.

A day's trek from Karasf took us beyond the confines of the Amir's territory. Couriers whom he had despatched in advance of us warned his local headmen of our coming, and we lacked nothing in the way of supplies. We crossed rough, broken country, wound over mountain passes, and down into pleasant valleys beyond. Our advent, it was clear, caused much excitement in the countryside, but the people, while they sometimes held aloof, were never unfriendly. We were passing through a country less ravaged by starvation than the region close to Hamadan. Food was more plentiful, and the "hunger battalion," with its suffering members, was not to be seen in the Persian North-West.