The tribesmen were, of course, armed for self-defence, receiving a quota of rifles; and a very delicate business it was, in the light of recent events, to determine the proportion of guns that would enable them to defend themselves, and at the same time not tempt them to go a-raiding against their neighbours! This danger was a real one, as may be seen from the request of one Tabriz, an Amazonian lady who had led her own retainers in person through all the fighting, and who now specially demanded two rifles for herself. “Why two, Tabriz?” “One to kill the Turkish Agha of Chal, and the other to kill the man who killed my brother, and who is now in your gendarmerie!”
In spite of such grateful flashes of humour the business was a weary one, hearing the same sort of grumbles from an endless succession of people over and over again, and trying to get them to see that, when they could not get what they would like, it was better to take what they could get! One thought with profound admiration of Moses. We had not 1 per cent of the mass of people whom he had to manage for forty years; and yet—so far as is recorded—he only lost his temper once, and then only hit out at the rock instead of his tormentors! Would that we could say as much.
Ultimately, the thing got done somehow, and the people put where, given honest work and fair luck, they had at least a chance of living. The writer, as a reward for his[{411}] small share in the work, found himself identified, not with Moses or Joshua, but with a much humbler Scriptural character. A flippant friend declared that he had always wanted to make the acquaintance of “that Egyptian” (Acts xxi. 38) “who made an uproar, and led out into the wilderness 4,000 men that were murderers,” and now at last he had done so! The final stage of the work consisted in the settlement of the Patriarchal family in the “English Mission House” at Bibaydi (the property of the Archbishop of Canterbury), which was repaired and made ready for their reception. During the later stages of the volks-wanderung, they had remained rather in the background, seeming to acquiesce in a rather unfortunate manner in their own supersession by Petros Agha and his partisans. It was, therefore, a satisfaction to see them settled in a place where they could resume their proper work for their people; and where the old loyalty has a chance of crystallising afresh, though perhaps in a new form, round the ancient ecclesiastical throne they represent. The ultimate removal of Petros Agha[182] from the land, and the arrangement of working understandings with the local Kurds, both help in the same direction, and the boy-patriarch shows signs (under the influence of his aunt and guardian) of developing on sound lines. Indications that the human boy in him is not entirely swamped by his office (the fact that the Patriarch has been known to snowball official callers suggests joyous visions of what might be at episcopal palaces in England) will probably be thought, at least by English folk, absolutely healthy symptoms!
The mountaineers were thus settled in a place where they could live, even if they had to fight famine, local diseases, and domestic foes, and their settlement provides a centre[{412}] to which scattered refugees may rally. With the Urmi sections, however, it is a different case. It was simply impossible for British authority to guarantee protection to these folk if they returned to their old home in Persia, and equally impossible for the Persian “Government” to protect them when there.
The only effective authority in the Urmi district is the ruffian Simco, and the feeling against the return of the expelled Christians is far more pronounced in Persia than in Kurdistan. In Kurdistan the war was simply a large instance of the feuds that had always been fought out in the land since time began. In Persia it was an unprecedented, and largely successful, rising of an inferior and subject race! This is a thing far harder to forgive. Thus, in Kurdistan the Kurds were ready to clear out of “Christian lands” that they had actually occupied and tilled; in Persia, the Mussulmans were ploughing the Assyrian village sites, and building houses on the vineyards, in their readiness to face any loss and labour, if only all trace of the Christians could be obliterated.
The British authorities declared that they could not repatriate men of Urmi. Every individual would receive a “capitation grant” similar to that given to others, and every family would be given lands, in Irak, if they would accept them. If they returned to Persia, it must be as individual Persian subjects at their own risk. It was a hard saying, but one does not see what else they could possibly say.
Even so, the drawing force of their own land was too strong to be resisted in many cases. “The earth that bore us lies lightest on our bones,” and some thousands of Urmi people (there were some 10,000 of them in all) sought to return to their own land. Many settled in Mesopotamian towns, and found work there, but hardly any accepted the lands in Irak that the Government would give. Nothing is harder than helping folk! At first there were difficulties about the reception of even individuals at the frontier, but this was overcome, and several thousand returning refugees drifted to centres like Hamadan and Tabriz (where others[{413}] of their co-nationals had preceded them), there to wait and live as they could, till fate should open a way for them to return to their own. One must admit with deep regret that, for these people, the result of joining the Entente in the war has been the utter extinction of a community of Christians who trace back their life to the Magi who came to worship at the manger of Bethlehem. Even the life of their mountain brethren is not assured. If war, famine, and disease shall spare them, and if a British democracy that fought the war to secure the safety of small nations shall not make peace at the price of handing over a small allied nation to its avowed and bitter enemy, then it may, perhaps, be allowed the chance of doing what it desires to do, and of continuing to serve England in the only way in which it can render service. But that matter is not settled at the date of writing.
The Assyrian settlement then has been, like the Mesopotamian settlement of which it is a part—like the whole Peace for that matter—a “botched job.” A piece of work that might have been finely done has, in fact, been just patched up to go on somehow: because the Democracy that was going to make the world safe is too tired to finish its work; and because it was unwilling or unable to make up its mind as to what it wanted at all.
The spectacle is a pitiable one, only redeemed by the magnificent work done in Mesopotamia by the officers who now seem likely to meet the usual reward of those who serve the British Government well!
Turkey in 1918 was willing to accept absolutely any terms that Britain laid down, with thanks to Allah that they were not more severe. “We don’t even care who governs us now,” said a Turk of position to the writer (then a prisoner in Turkish hands in Anatolia). “No conceivable Government can be as bad as our own, and we only hope that the British will take us over.” Then, because our “statesmen” did not know what they wanted, came delay, delay, delay: till the Turk could gather his forces again, and show himself, as usual, a good fighter, but uncivilised and uncivilisable; absolutely incapable of recognising that a rayah has or[{414}] can have rights, and equally incapable of seeing anything wrong in his habit of dealing with even the suspicion of “treason” by massacring every man and ravishing every woman! There may have been some excuse for maintaining him in Europe before the war, when to abolish him meant the outbreak of one. Now, after it, he has been maintained to be the seed of future trouble, by statesmen who proclaimed the “war to abolish war”; and on their heads rests the guilt of the future massacres that will surely arise after the gigantic lesson they have given to the world that massacres can be committed with impunity, if only they are big and horrible enough!