[163] This must have been a col in the distant mountain range, shown in the illustration facing p. 257.
[164] See pp. [127], [159], etc.
[166] The Kitab ul Fakhri on the Tartar sack of Baghdad.
[167] See pp. [256-69]. Firebrand as he was, Aram on this occasion did all he could to avert disorder, exhorting the Armenians to suffer anything rather than give a pretext for “repression.”
[168] The delay was partly owing to the “Sykes-Picot Treaty” which left Mosul in the French sphere. The French could not work this treaty, and for long would not consent to its abrogation, and the fact tied British hands.
[169] A quaint episode marked the campaign. After storming—and plundering—a Kurdish village, some exultant mountain warriors came to their C.O. to announce that they had secured the most valuable loot they could hope to win. They presented to the amused officer an enormous MS. tome of Church services! It was a copy of their “Khudra”—i.e., the collection of the variable parts of the offices on all Sundays and ferials of the “circle” (khudra) of the year, an enormously enlarged equivalent to the Collects and occasional prayers of the Book of Common Prayer. They begged for a mule from the transport train to carry this sacred trophy at the head of the column on the march, and it gives some idea of the size of the book when we say that the mule was actually necessary to carry it, though, as the companion volume of the “Gezza” (Treasury, containing the prayers for saints’ days) was not there, it was not more than half a load for the beast. For the rest of the campaign the book was the palladium and standard of the corps, and was given a voluntary guard of honour every night. Subsequently, it was presented to the Patriarch, and is now in use in his church.
[171] The Ottoman Government had, during the war, some notion of hanging the writer “because he had built a house to serve as a British fort.” He escaped by a clerical error, heartlessly described by Sir A. Wilson as “one of those errors of routine inevitable in even the best administrations!” His name, in the list of civil prisoners, was transliterated one way; on the list of criminals, in another. We hope that this posthumous justification of the sentence is as satisfactory to the judges as it is to the criminal!