THE YPRES TIMES
240
Wheat and coffee," he said, was burnt because, well, because there was too
much of it.
We have travelled far since 1918, you see, but if you will travel a few minutes
with me I will try and show you a sight which even the aforementioned financier might
have been hard pressed to explain away.
In the summer of 1918, the 39th Infantry Brigade, operating N.E. of Baqubah on
the Diala river, and on the extreme right flank of our army in Mesopotamia was ordered
to follow Major General Dunsterville's famous Hush-Hush Brigade right across
Persia in the new dash to Baku on the Caspian Sea and operating, roughtly, seven
hundred miles from our railhead in Mesopotamia.
Gifted authors, the late Major M. H. Donohoe, Lt.-Col. Sir Arnold J. Wilson, Mr.
Ernest Raymond, General Dunsterville himself, and others, have written in varied ways
of the enthralling drama in this, a side-show of the Great War, and I need only state
here how on the fourth day after we had passed the frontier town of Khaniquin and had
crossed into Persia, our detachment came to a halt in Bisitum, some twenty miles north
east of Kermanshah.
Here, carved out of the rocks, on the wall of a perpendicular cliff, and some three
hundred feet above the ground is the famous Darius inscription The King of Kings,"
chiselled there by Persian workmen five-hundred years before the dawn of the Christian
era, and still in a marvellous state of preservation. And three-hundred feet below it
we met starvation.
They were remnants of the Nestorians, Christians who inhabited Kurdistan and
North West Persia, followers of the Patriarch of Constantinople, who was condemned
for heresy in the year A.D. 431. We know them to-day as Assyrians and, to every right
thinking Englishman, their troubles are still with us, or should be.
From 1915, following the Russian retreat from the Assyrian countryside, to the
summer of 1918, they had suffered all the most indescribable horrors that war could
bring and now the survivors, about 40,000 of them, were marching hundreds of miles
down country in the hope of obtaining sanctuary behind the British lines in Mesopotamia.
The story of those who survived and reached British protection is magnificently told in
Lt.-Col. Sir Arnold T. Wilson's book, Mesopotamia 1917-1920 A Clash of Loyalties."
I would tell you here bf those who failed to arrive. The Persia they had to traverse
was in the grip of a famine in part owing to the fact that the Persians had never grown
more wheat than was absolutely necessary for local requirements, but chiefly owing to
the method of successive Turk and Russian invaders who had commandeered, often
without payment, and had left the mark of destruction wherever they had gone, while
yet another unpleasant cause was the cupidity and selfishness of local officials.
We would round a bend and come across several families resting by the road
side. Their clothes were mostly in rags. Clothes Beside their elders, some toddlers
had nothing but a piece of rag to cover them, and nights, even in summer, can be chilly
in those Persian uplands, some thousands of feet above sea level. Their poor bodies
were emaciated and shrunken, their bones stood out as a frame with nothing to cover it.
Many were obviously in the last stage of exhaustion. Unsatisfied hunger, slow starva
tion, and physical suffering showed in their wild, burning eyes. Some would obviously
go no further, they laid waiting for merciful death to put an end to their sufferings.
We were to meet hundreds of these starving people in the days that followed.
Death, met along the road-sides of those quiet Persian uplands, appeared to me more
horrific, more pitiable there was no background such as one knew on the Western
Front, no familiar crashes of 5.9's, no whining of bullets, no distant rattle of a machine
gun. That was it no background. Possibly even Darius, the King of Kings," looking
down on that road for the last two thousand odd years had not seen such sights as our
vaunted civilisation could show him in A.D. 1918.
