No. 16

Mar Shimun had made two attempts to obtain further succour from the Russians during the five or six weeks’ respite which succeeded the first attacks. And on the second occasion some reinforcement appears to have been[{369}] sent, but it is not quite known at what period, while it is certain that it never arrived. For some years previous to the war common rumour had persistently credited the Russians with having secretly sapped the allegiance of many prominent chiefs among the Kurds; and as soon as war broke out it had been confidently expected that these men would turn against Turkey. How far this rumour was justified is perhaps known positively to no one; but it is certain that, while hopes of plunder and butchery lasted, the Kurds all sided with the Turks. Perhaps the Russians may have had some cause to think that the more prosperous aspect of their affairs in Asia Minor might now be prompting these double traitors to think better of their first bargain. Anyway a party of some 400 Cossacks was about this time pushed up from Urmi into Oramar. Sutu Agha received them most graciously, and sent two of his own sons with them to guide them on their further journey. But secretly he betrayed them into an ambush which he had prepared with the assistance of the Kurds of Shemsdinan, and in the deep Balanda gorge they were exterminated to the last man.

The second assault on the Assyrians was delivered in the middle of August; and this time the assailants had the formidable assistance of the Kurds of Barzan, who lay to the south of Tkhuma, and formed the connecting link between the co-ordinated assaults from Oramar on the east and from Berwar on the west. Our friend Sheikh Abdul Selim[159] was unhappily no longer their leader. The Government had always looked with a jealous eye on the tolerant “Sheikh of the Christians,” and a few months earlier he had been enticed down to Mosul by the Vali Haidar Beg, and there secretly put to death.

It is doubtful perhaps whether, had he still been in power, he would have been able to resist the pressure put upon him by the Hukumet (and by his own tribesmen) to play his part in an official Jehad. After all he was a Moslem, and a Turkish vassal, and a consistent contemner of Russians, so wherefore should he stand aside? But he might have proved a chivalrous, albeit a formidable, enemy,[{370}] and his influence might have alleviated some of the vindictiveness of the campaign.

For this second assault was successful. It was from the southern side that the Christian valleys were most assailable; and Tkhuma, Baz, Jilu, and Tyari were ravaged from end to end. The churches and houses were burned, the fields wasted, the trees cut down, the irrigation channels demolished; and the valleys were thus rendered practically uninhabitable for years.

It was in this devastation that the famous church of Mar Zeia in Jilu[160] was plundered for the first time in its history—maugre that notable talisman that had always preserved it previously, the Charter of Protection granted to it (as believed) by Mohammed himself. But its fate was not quite unavenged. A fierce young Kurdish chieftain, the eldest son of Simco Agha of the Shekak Kurds, was the leader of the spoilers; and he (like Fanatic Brooke) had boasted that he would not rest till he had seen the ruin of every Christian church in the land. As he now stood at the door, watching the destruction of that wonderful and weird collection of age-old votive offerings, a bullet fired at extreme range took him in the head, and he dropped dead on the desecrated threshold.

But though beaten out of their valleys, the Assyrians were not yet done with. They now took refuge on their Yailas—the upland pastures on the laps of the mountains, 10,000 feet above sea-level—whither they had always been accustomed to drive their flocks and herds in summer, and where a considerable part of the nation used generally to remain encamped as long as the cattle were there. It was summer still, and the cattle had been driven there as usual: the Yailas were, therefore, already well provisioned, and there is always water from the melting snows.

These strongholds are only approachable by a few precipitous pathways, and the Kurdish attempts to penetrate to them were everywhere easily repulsed. Raiding parties of Assyrians were even able to sally down from them into the valleys, and carry back small supplies of corn from the[{371}] hidden granaries in the villages. Lack of salt was the chief privation that the bulk of the people suffered during their sojourn here, but salt is wellnigh a necessity to an Oriental; and their Patriarch, who (as a Rabban) was prohibited by his vows from eating flesh meat, was obliged to live almost entirely upon milk and parched corn.

But if the Yailas were impregnable, there was yet one fatal defect in them. It is absolutely and utterly impossible for any creature to live there in winter. Autumn was already beginning; and, at these lofty altitudes, the first snows may fall as early as October. The Assyrians were virtually “treed” (to use an expressive Americanism); and their enemies, as fully conscious of the defect in their position as they were, were content to form a leaguer round them, and wait till they should come down to be killed.

In this almost hopeless position, Mar Shimun determined on making one final appeal to the Russians. Accompanied by one of his principal chiefs (the Malik Khoshaba of Lizan) and by two other companions, he quitted the Yaila of Shina[161] at the head of the Tal and Tkhuma gorges to make his way across the mountains and down to Urmi Plain. The whole intervening country was thickly beset with enemies; but, travelling mostly by night and with experienced guides, the little party succeeded in accomplishing their daring journey, and reached the Russian outposts near Salmas.