With the Persian Expedition

by Martin Henry Donohoe

On the succeeding day, by dint of a good deal of spade work, we reached Jamalabad, about fifteen miles from Mianeh, where the road approaches the Baleshkent Pass. The ascent to the pass from the Jamalabad side is about three miles from the village, and the road mounts abruptly at a very sharp angle. On the reverse slope it zigzags down the side of a gorge which made one giddy to look at. It required the united efforts of fifty sturdy villagers from Jamalabad to push the car to the top of the pass, but, even if we could have negotiated the descent in safety, it was doubtful if we should ever have been able to climb back by the precipitous corkscrew ascent.

To be caught by the Turks at the bottom of the Pass unsupported would mean disaster for the expedition, so very reluctantly we turned the armoured car's head for Zinjan. We learned that there were Turks in Mianeh, but none of those who had quitted Zinjan in such haste before the advance of the Wagstaff column had come along the Jamalabad road.

Pierpont, who was in charge of the car, was a mild-mannered youth, but of a very warlike disposition, and was much disappointed that we had not had a brush with his old enemy, the Turk. Down Mesopotamia way he once charged an infantry position and engaged in "close action" by laying his armoured car alongside a front-line trench, where he speedily closed the account of its defenders with machine-gun fire.

Another swift stroke now placed us in possession of Mianeh and brought us eighty miles nearer Tabriz.

Captain Osborne, taking with him a small detachment from Wagstaff's force, as well as a contingent of hastily recruited Persian irregulars, was despatched from Zinjan over the recently reconnoitred route. He had a convoy of Ford vans, took with him the armoured car under Lieutenant Pierpont, and pushed forward rapidly, negotiating the difficult Baleshkent and the still more difficult Kuflan Kuh Passes. The Kuflan Kuh at its highest point is 5,750 feet, and the ascent on the south side and descent on the north side are very difficult for ordinary wheeled transport. This is especially so on the south slope, which, in a series of short, sharp gradients rises 2,000 feet in two miles.

By the aid of a good deal of native labour the armoured car was safely taken over the formidable Kuflan Kuh, and duly made its appearance in Mianeh. The Turks were reported to have had a small post here, but when Osborne's party entered Mianeh the enemy had already withdrawn towards the north-west.

The premises of the Indo-European Telegraph Company, which had a stout wall and a compound, were selected as British headquarters. Leaving a part of his slender command here to hold the place until Wagstaff and his main body could come up, Osborne with the armoured-car patrol and a few British N.C.O's pushed along the Tabriz road, crossed the Shibley Pass twenty miles south-east of Tabriz, and reconnoitred up to the gates of the city itself. It was a hazardous and daring undertaking, but it would have succeeded, and we could easily have won the race to Tabriz and so checkmated the less enterprising Turks, had a few companies of British troops been available to hurry to the support of Osborne. But one cannot very well expect the equivalent of a sergeant's guard to perform the work of a battalion, and to hold a city of 200,000 inhabitants whose attitude was doubtful from the point of view of friendship. So Osborne had to fall back slowly towards Mianeh.

The armoured car had by this time used up all the spare tyres and inner tubes, and, when the retirement over the Shibley Pass began, it was going on bare rims. Its mobility was impaired, and, while it could still fight, it certainly could not run, and its tyreless progress over the mud and boulders which pass for a road in Azerbaijan was slow and painful.

The limping car looked an easy prey to Turk or prowling robber hordes. So thought a band of two hundred Shahsavan tribesmen, as they rode down from the hills one morning on one of their periodical forays. They had watched the car from afar, and noted its limping gait and its helplessness.

In that corner of upper Azerbaijan, from the Tabriz road east to Ardabil and the Caspian Sea, and north towards the Russian frontier, there roam free and unhampered a score or so of sub-tribes of the Shahsavan Clan, wild and lawless rascals for the most part, but not wanting in courage or in that rude chivalry common to the Asiatic hillmen. The Shahsavani handle a rifle skilfully. Pillaging is for them both a livelihood and a distraction. They are the recognized tax-gatherers of the Tabriz road, and will rob a fat caravan, or disarm and strip the Shah's Cossacks, with equal impunity.