The Turks pursued us to Jamalabad, but it was the last kick. Their offensive spent itself here, thanks to a new factor which had entered into the game. This was the armoured car sections, light and heavy, under Colonel Crawford and Lieutenant-Colonel Smiles, which, when our position was indeed precarious, had been rushed up from Kasvin and Zinjan in support of our retiring column. The Turks got a bad peppering at Jamalabad, and a few miles farther south at Sarcham where the cars were in action. The enemy had no liking for this sort of fighting, and troubled us no more. They withdrew from Jamalabad and, in anticipation of a counter-offensive on our part, proceeded to fortify themselves on the Kuflan Kuh.
A week after the fight at the Kuflan Kuh two men of the Hants who had been captured by the Turks arrived in our lines, clothed in nothing save a handkerchief apiece. While their captors were squabbling amongst themselves as to the distribution of the worldly possessions of the prisoners, the latter had slipped away unperceived and gained Jamalabad. There they were waylaid by Persian thieves, badly beaten, stripped of their clothing, and left for dead on the roadside. Still, they were a plucky pair, for, recovering, they set out afresh, and, completing a fifty-mile tramp in the blazing sun without food or raiment, rejoined their unit.
The Crawford armoured cars and the Matthews column slowly fell back on Zinjan, and there ended the military activities of the Tabriz expedition.
My strictures on the fighting value of the Persian may appear unduly severe. I fully realize that one had no right to expect very much from a mass of raw, undisciplined material. The men were hastily recruited, and their training, necessarily circumscribed by the exigencies of time, could not have been anything but perfunctory and imperfect in the circumstances. But I am tilting rather at the theory prevalent in certain quarters at the inception of the Tabriz Expedition that one had only to send British officers into the highways and byways of Azerbaijan and that they would find there "ready-made" soldiers endowed with a fine fighting spirit, hardly inferior in quality to our own superb infantry, men who would stand up to trained and efficient soldiers like the Turks. Having once got the half-trained levies into the trenches, their British officers were expected to hold them by sheer force of will-power, and to hypnotize them into taking aim at an enemy without shutting both eyes. Now the bubble of Persian fighting efficiency has been pricked, and we have a more just appreciation of the virtues and shortcomings of the Persians as a unit in a modern army.
CHAPTER XVIII
CRUSHING A PLOT
Anti-British activities—Headquarters at Hamadan—Plans to seize ringleaders—Midnight arrests—How the Governor was entrapped.
Back in Hamadan, the fierce political enmity of the Democrats, which had been quiet for some time, broke into fresh activity after the removal of Dunsterville headquarters to Kasvin at the end of May.
General Byron, who was in charge at Hamadan, speedily discovered through his Intelligence Officers that the local Democrats were bent on making things merry for the British, if they possibly could. Previous rebuffs had taught the Democrats the value of silence and a more complete method of organization. Their defects in these directions were now to some extent remedied. Turkish gold, too, was forthcoming, and the Democrats of Hamadan became a secret political organization—a sort of Persian Mafia or Camorra—which was hatching a political conspiracy against the British. It was the Ittahad-i-Islam again at work. This organization, while outwardly making common cause with the Islamic malcontents of Hamadan and elsewhere, was in secret working strenuously for Turkey and the Turkish cause, and the Democrats who were caught in its net were but a means to that end.