Somewhat to the west of the Urmi-Van road, and up among the highest of the mountains, stands one interesting memorial of the past. One particular valley runs down from the edge of lake Van to the Tigris; a pass open practically all the year round, between the plain of Mesopotamia and the Armenian plateau. It should be a highroad for commerce; but the Kurds who live in it are too turbulent to allow any traveller to pass that way as a rule, and it is very little known in consequence. It was a passage of strategic importance, however, in the days when Rome held Nisibis as her frontier post on the Persian border; and when Armenia was a buffer state of most uncertain loyalty, between the Roman and Sassanid Persian empires. Hence it was a road to guard; and Roman engineers planted upon it one of the grandest of Roman fortresses, which stands to this day practically unruined. Diocletian, who fortified this strategic frontier, was probably its builder; and it must have been evacuated when Jovian ceded the provinces to Persia some fifty years after his day. Since then it has remained derelict, for anyone to occupy who cared; and so it stands still—one of the grandest Roman relics anywhere.
It is a great square fortress, built after the pattern of their camps, with the prætorium as its citadel in the centre[{228}] of the western side. One wall, the northern, has been pulled down to provide material for the mediæval Kurdish kala into which the general’s quarters have been transformed; but this probably embodies much of the old citadel in itself. The whole would well repay examination by an expert—provided that its present owner could be got to understand the difference between antiquarianism and espionage, which is doubtful in the extreme.
A miserable Kurdish village occupies the interior of this grand fort; the hovels being built, of course, from the hewn stones of the walls. But even these “beggars hutting in the palace” are dimly aware that such a place has harboured greater men than they; and tell you that it was the work of giants and enchanters—at which one does not wonder.
The writer once visited the spot, in company with the British military Consul of Van; being attracted both by the interest of the building itself, and also by a story that there was a hoard of ancient documents in some unknown tongue in one of the rooms of the castle. The tale is quite probably true, though the documents may be of any date; but the present owner of the place politely denied all knowledge of them. His guest was a marvel of erudition, he declared, but had been misinformed in this particular; and so he changed the subject to something that interested him more. This was the Consul’s Mannlicher rifle, a beautiful tool that always excited envy everywhere, and was invaluable as a topic of conversation. Our host examined it, dandled it, played with it; and finally proposed a fair exchange—that rifle against his newly married wife! A deal which the Englishman rather ungallantly declined.
Disappointed in this, the Agha started yet another hare, with a hint that if we could oblige him in this, he might find it possible to refurbish his own memory in the matter of the documents. He told us a long tale of woe, of which the principal feature was that his hereditary enemy had recently been building a fine new castle, just in the one spot where he least wished to see it. We sympathized, but were[{229}] not very clear what we could do in the matter, till we were enlightened by a confidential whisper from our host. “Look here Bey, I know the ways of you English, and you’re sure to have a little dynamite; you always have. Could you not spare me just a few cartridges? I want—to kill a few fish!”
We were the guests of the Agha for the evening, and ate of course what was set before us; next day, however, there was some bargaining to be done for the fowl that was to have the honour of providing our supper that night. It is always well to buy your fowl in the morning, because it saves time at the hour of cooking; and it is easier to drive a bargain when you are obviously not dependent on the completion of the purchase for getting your next meal. Here the Consul’s kavass hit on an ingenious expedient. The Consul had a good rook-rifle with him; and the kavass, a Serb by nationality, was a very good shot with it. Five piastres was the sum demanded for the old cock we had fixed on; two was our offer, which is the usual market rate. The kavass produced the rifle and made a sporting suggestion. “Look here,” he said to the owner, “the bird is about eighty yards off. If I bring him down with one shot, will you let me have him for two piastres? If I have to spend a second cartridge, you shall have the full five.” A Kurd has a sport-loving soul, and the offer was accepted at once; particularly as their rifles do not throw too accurately. The kavass bowled the fowl over neatly; and the same trick got us several dinners at a fair rate that journey, though naturally it could not be played in the same place twice.
When this frontier province was occupied by the Turks (an event that occurred shortly before the revolution), it was strongly garrisoned from end to end. But the sufferings of the unhappy soldiers in the ensuing winter were terrible. No provision was made for their accommodation; no medical stores were provided; and hardly any food. It says much for the troops that they did not loot every village in the neighbourhood; but the fact is that “Nefer Mustafa” (the Turkish Tommy Atkins) is the most easily disciplined[{230}] and normally one of the kindliest of men. He is not the most intelligent of soldiers, but he is the most obedient; and he will march and starve, fight or freeze, and die in scores of dysentery and cholera, not only without a mutiny, but even without a sense of grievance against anybody; though he can hardly be ignorant that the rascally minor officials are making their profit out of the stores which he does not get. In one particular case, two battalions, amounting to perhaps 1200 men in all (the contractors probably drew stores, &c., for the 2000 they should have been, but that is a detail), were marched from Van to Tergawar late one autumn. There they remained, billeted in the deserted villages, till the following spring; when such of them as could walk were brought back to Van once more. Four months’ peace service in that district, without a shot being fired, had brought those 1200 men down to 400; of whom a bare half were able to march at all! It was simply the work of cold, hunger, fever, and neglect! Things did improve with the army under the new régime, or did for a while at any rate; but the pre-revolutionary state of things would have been regarded as exaggerated for a comic opera but for the tale of human suffering that it implied.
The pay of the soldier was nominally one or two piastres a day; but when he got this magnificent sum, which was not often, it was paid him in sanads, Government assignats, not cash. The local treasury, moreover, would not cash them (in fact, they were usually payable in some other province than that where the poor recipient was quartered), and no shop would look at them as payment for goods. Certain merchants made a business of buying them, at ⅕th of the face value, and presenting them in the proper quarter, when they might perhaps get half the sum due. The Government would be debited with the full amount; and the officials got the balance. By a final touch, which surely nobody but Ottoman officials of the old régime could have conceived, the Government would not receive its own bank-notes from its own soldiers in payment of its own taxes! Those had to be paid in gold, the Government only accepting silver at a heavy premium.[{231}]
Add to this that the soldier, nominally enlisted for five years with the Colours, and seven in the “Redif” or Reserve, was never allowed his discharge. Greybeards in the ranks were the commonest of sights; and we have seen men serving in 1905 who bore the medal granted for the defence of Plevna in 1878, and who had never been discharged.
Bashkala, to which we must now return, is two days journey from Van; and the road crosses the lofty Chokh range, an obstacle easy enough in summer, but uncommonly formidable in winter. At the best of times it is impassable to artillery, though a road could be constructed across it with a little labour. Half of it has in fact been accomplished, and a properly graded track, with wide sweeps and zigzags, goes up part of the ascent. Like most Turkish roads, however, it has neither beginning nor end, and nobody ever uses it. A little more trouble over the removal of the rocks in which it terminates at each end (and which keep it inacessible to all beasts of burden) would have made it useful. However, when this point had been reached, the official interested in it was recalled, or the money ran out, or the Vali wanted the funds for something else; and so it remains unfinished and useless to this day. It is somehow characteristic of the Arab and Ottoman races (though not of all Orientals) that they can form magnificent designs, and can begin and work at them for a time. Seldom, however, can they finish them, and never can they undertake the toil of maintenance and repair. So magnificent monuments and civil works fall into utter decay, and boats go to ruin everywhere, for lack of a ha’porth of tar.