At Mosul the sword was stayed; we cannot conceive for what reason. But perhaps the Arabs, though equally keen robbers, were not found such practised butchers as the Kurds.

Jevdet Bey, the Vali of Van, was one of the most relentless murderers; and the thoroughness of his methods in the villages of his Vilayet even caused him to be employed as an expert in redeeming slackness elsewhere. But of Van city itself—thanks to its proximity to the frontier—he made rather a botched job. Aram, the Tashnakist whom we mentioned in an earlier chapter[167] was by accident absent from the city when the other two local leaders were assassinated. The Armenians took alarm betimes and stood on their defence.

Van was a large sprawling city, and the Armenians formed rather the larger half of the population. They had much{390} previous experience of massacres and alarms of massacre; and they now drew together instinctively in their own quarter of the Garden City, and fortified themselves with abattis and barricades. They sent a message to their Moslem fellow-citizens that they had no quarrel with them and were only defending themselves against the Vali. And the Moslems replied sympathetically though they said they would be obliged to fight.

Perhaps it was owing to their lukewarmness that Jevdet, though supported by the regular soldiers of the garrison, never ventured to deliver a formal assault upon the entrenched quarter; but there was much desultory fighting, and most of the city was burned. Jevdet relied principally upon blockading his victims, and reducing them by hunger; and, to quicken their surrender, he even refrained from massacring the few surviving villagers, and drove them into the entrenchments to help in consuming supplies. After four weeks’ leaguer this scheme was on the point of succeeding, when suddenly the despairing Armenians saw their enemies preparing to withdraw. The Russians advancing from Sara Hamish had approached within striking distance, and next day Van was relieved.

When the Russians withdrew a little later the Armenians, of course, fled with them, and took refuge across the border, near Tiflis and Erivan. How many of them, we wonder, have survived their later tribulations—war, famine, typhus, internecine strife and Bolshevism?

And the motive for all this butchery? The alleged “plot” is merely a subterfuge. The Armenians would, no doubt, have welcomed the coming of the Russians; what subject race in Turkey would not? But, until the Russians arrived, they were no more a menace to the rear of the Turks than the citizens of occupied Belgium were to the rear of the Germans. There is something, perhaps, in the suggestion that one motive was sheer plunder. Many Armenians were wealthy; and the Turks, impoverished by a series of wars, were intent on seizing their wealth, never reflecting that by the extermination of their cleverest traders, and their best artificers and husbandmen, they were only consigning themselves{391} to a deeper and more hopeless poverty. There was certainly also a religious motive; for, though we can hardly say that the profession of Islam would in all cases have secured quarter, yet it is certain that this was made an essential condition in the sparing of the few who were spared. And what but religious bigotry could have involved the Jacobites in the fate of the Armenians? There was no plot to fear from the Jacobites. They had neither the cohesion nor the national aspirations of the Armenians. Their escapes in previous massacres prove that the Turks could have spared them if they wished. And yet this time they were not spared.

But professed infidels like Talaat and Enver are not swayed by religious bigotry. It was national and political bigotry that was the ruling motive with them. They only consented to the sparing of apostates because apostasy in those regions sets the seal upon the abjuration of nationality. And in the Ottoman Empire they meant the Turk to reign alone. In their extirpation of the Armenians the Young Turks were carrying out a deliberate national policy, conceived by the Old Turks more than a generation before. And the Young Turks, taking it over, had only been waiting their opportunity till the preoccupation of Europe should leave their hands untied.

It only remains to add that the Yezidis were not massacred. And, even in such a plethora of massacres, it is strange they should have suffered such neglect. We can only suppose that Melek Taüs, seeing all idle hands so desirably occupied, devoted his unaccustomed leisure to taking care of his own.{392}

CHAPTER XVIII

DEAD SEA FRUIT

{393}

The idea of the people was that they would very speedily be put back, under British protection, in their old homes; and that full compensation (and incidentally full revenge) for all past sufferings and losses would be assured them. They were the allies of the victors in the war; and there was, of course, no limit either to the power or the wealth of their British protectors. The inability of European statesmen to make a peace at all,[168] and the fact that the British Government, in consequence, could not make up its mind what it wanted to do, or could do, either with the country at large or with this relatively small factor in it, were matters simply outside their mental horizon. “Our own country, under British protection,” was their simple and intelligible demand; a “benevolent” government was all that British authorities could promise them in return, and, meantime, there was nothing to do but to wait. If you maintain anyone in idleness, you soon produce a pauper with all a pauper’s vices. Assyrians proved no exception to that rule, and paupers they soon became, taking all that was given, and expecting more. They declined to do even necessary camp work without payment; and the quarrelsomeness and disposition to intrigue that have been their bane since the beginning appeared among them again.

One thing, however, they could do which was useful—they could fight. A double battalion of infantry, with one mounted company, was raised from among them, and put under picked British officers. Such officers, as has been shown many a time, can make good soldiers out of far worse material than warlike mountaineers; and the mutual regard that is usual in such cases soon grew up between the officers and their men. “See that lad there?” said one of these officers to the writer. “He sprained his ankle on the way down, but he turned up on parade with it next day hideously swollen. He only burst out crying when I told him he must not march, and went off to a bonesetter, who slashed it all round with a blunt knife and rubbed in gunpowder. Then{394} he turned up again, begging to be allowed to march with the regiment!”

It is true that some difficulties arose. It had been intended to raise two battalions: one of mountaineers, and one of Urmi men. The latter, however (owing to the mistaken advice of some foreign friends), demanded impossible conditions of service; while the mountain men declared their readiness to go anywhere, if only they had British officers to lead them. The double battalion was raised, in consequence, of the mountain men alone. Then Petros Agha, who was now describing himself as the “Commander-in-Chief of the Assyrian Army,” demanded as of right that any contingent raised should be under his orders, with such British officers to assist him as he judged expedient. When this modest demand was refused, he began intriguing against the project, till it became necessary to shepherd him gently out of the camp, and suggest Baghdad (or India) as his residence in future. The force was raised however, and the little campaign that became necessary against the Kurds in the summer of 1919 gave these hillmen an opportunity of getting as near to their own conception of heaven as some of them are ever likely to get, for they were given good rifles and good leaders, and a real chance of a slap at their hereditary enemies!

Experienced judges were loud in praise of their marching and fighting capacities, though admitting that they were “a trifle indiscriminate” at times. “Those Assyrians have got into it quick,” said the G.O.C. on one occasion, noting how quickly the men opened fire in their advance up a hill they had been ordered to clear of the enemy. “Oh no, sir,” said an A.D.C., who had experience of the creature; “I’ll bet what you like it’s a pig they are firing at!” He did them but a small injustice; it was a bear and not a boar; but having finished him, they cleared the hill. “How did the Assyrians really do in the fighting?” asked a British officer of a Subadar of the Gurkhas with whom they were brigaded. “Why did you not give us the same mountain sandals that they wear?” came the answer. “Then we should have done as well as they did!” Verily, when{395} Gurkhas apologise for not doing as well as the irregular, there is no fault to find with the fighting capacity of the latter.[169]

Once, it must be admitted, a party of them found civilised campaigning too slow, and committed the heinous crime of deserting while on active service; but the apology they sent in (in a mixture of Syriac and English) went far to redeem their fault. “To the beloved and reverend Major Knight, our Commander, peace and love be multiplied,” it began. “Dear Father, be it known to you that we did not run away because we did not wish to kill Kurds, but because we so wished to kill them; and by the blessing of God, we have been doing that thing for ten days. Regret to report following casualty: soldier, private, one. But we have killed a lot more Kurds. Now, dear Father, if you will promise to punish us yourself, we will come in. But we fear going to Mosul Gaol.”

The Major promised that if they came in he would punish them all right, and he did so; but he subsequently squared matters somehow with his conscience, and reported that there had been a gratifying absence of crime on active service!

The campaign had the effect of clearing what is known as the Sapna area of Kurds; and, incidentally, the house of the English Mission at Bibaydi, the building of which has been referred to,[170] was fortified and occupied by British{396} troops. Those old enemies of the writer who had prophesied that “if that house is built we shall see British troops in it before our beards are grey,” were so delighted at the fulfilment of their prophecy, and at the local kudos that it brought them, that they entirely forgot their ill-feeling against the Englishman who had caused it, and greeted him on a visit as a long-lost friend![171]

Men on the spot now held that the Assyrian problem could be solved at once; the nation could be settled in the area that they had helped to clear and conquer, where they would be an admirable frontier guard for the future state of Irak. Suggestions to this effect were sent home, but no answer was returned. Those in authority could neither allow the men on the spot to act for themselves, nor could they produce any other plan. It was not that they objected (that would at least have been positive action of a sort), but they neither could, nor would, say or do anything; and so time passed until local circumstances (notably the impossibility of keeping British troops dangling in the hills till folk in comfortable offices at home had made up what they pleased to call their minds) made a withdrawal inevitable, and a promising scheme impossible.

By a very unfortunate decision the Assyrian contingent was disbanded shortly after this, owing to some breaches of discipline in the corps. Men who were at least being kept from idleness were thus returned to Baqubah, where a policy of pauperising was sapping all the morale of the nation; and where Assyrian and British, tied up together under uncomfortable conditions for too long, were rapidly getting on one another’s nerves, and each showing the other their worst side! About the same time, too, the nation was deprived of its titular leader by the death of Polus Mar Shimun, their patriarch. Tuberculosis brought on by hardship had{397} become worse in the dust-laden air of Baqubah, and a removal to the purer air of Sheikh Mattai[172] by Mosul had been too late to stop the disease. A flicker of improvement at the last had encouraged him as is so often the case, and he returned to his own people, but only to die. Meantime Authority, both in Mesopotamia and England, was getting very anxious to be rid of the Assyrians—as is frequently the case, when a man knows that he has neglected a good opportunity of getting a thing done. And it was at this juncture, when the nation had no titular head and all were anxious to be rid of an incubus, that Agha Petros came forward with a new scheme. Somewhat to the north of the area occupied by the British was a stretch of relatively fertile land, extending from the plain of Gawar to the town of Ushnu, which had once been largely Christian and was now practically derelict. To the east it stretched nearly to the Urmi plain; on the west it bordered on the Hakkiari mountains. Petros proposed to lead up the whole nation, duly armed, and to occupy this “Gawar-Ushnu” area. There they would be in a state of practical independence under his rule, and those Urmi folk who wished to return to their own homes could do so, while Hakkiari would be open to the mountaineers. The fighting men could go up first and take seizin[AA?] of the land, and the women and non-combatants could follow after a little.

The scheme was not impossible, provided that the people had enough of cohesion to unite on any scheme at all, and Petros enough of the statesman in him to enable him to execute any. If feasible, it certainly had the merit of providing an Anglophile buffer state just where one was most wanted; and as such, and as offering some means of getting the refugees off the shoulders of the British taxpayer, it was accepted by the Mesopotamian authorities, and urged with more or less of authority on the nation at large. Under this pressure, the bulk of the nation accepted it; though it is to be feared that one of its merits in their eyes was its indefiniteness, and the fact that it could be interpreted by everybody in his own sense. An Assyrian state with a measure{398} (undefined) of British protection was what everyone wanted; but everyone also assumed that the area of the supposed state would include his own old home. And it is to be feared that Petros Agha[173] got a large measure of his support by promises to the effect that everybody should have just what he wanted, if only he was willing to come up with his true national leader to get it!

Even so the Patriarchal House, and certain sections of the mountaineers as well, rejected the scheme, owing to their rooted distrust of Petros and all his works. This, however, was disregarded. The “House,” left leaderless by the death of the Patriarch, and by the fact that Surma Khanim (possessor of the best brain in it) had gone to England to put the case of her nation before the Government[174] was just then at a discount in the nation and had left the camp for Mosul. It was therefore ignored. It was assumed that the recalcitrant sections would follow with the rest when they found themselves alone; and so preparations were made for the breaking-up of the Baqubah camp, and the transfer of its inmates to Mindan (north-east of Mosul), which could be the base of the new move.

Assyrian ill-luck, however, dogged the scheme throughout. Time was of the essence of the plan, if several thousand people had to be got up to a high tableland, and there to provide food and shelter for themselves before the winter set in, and one cause of delay after another supervened. There was a change in the central authority first, for Sir{399} Arnold Wilson, acting Chief Commissioner, was not only removed from office, but practically dismissed from the service of the King. Politicians at home found it convenient to make the good man on the spot the scapegoat for the fact that the policy they had approved was more expensive than they had anticipated, and were full of virtuous indignation because he did not effect in Mesopotamia the drastic economies which they could not themselves enforce in England. A new Chief Commissioner (Sir Percy Cox) was soon in the field; but the change implied delay, and the new man had not (owing perhaps to his home instructions) that power of giving a quick decision on a question which had been one of the strong points of his predecessor. Sir Percy, however, approved the general lines of the policy laid down, and the move to Mindan was in full swing when the Arab rising of 1920 put a stop to all action. All fighting men and all transport were imperatively needed elsewhere, and the Assyrian problem had to wait.

The story of the rising itself does not concern us, though the fighting men of the Assyrians were actively engaged in it in support of the Government. Men began to ask what new form of lunacy had possessed those in authority, that they had disbanded an existing force composed of such good material, and so absolutely trustworthy. It is true that some of the fighting was pure self-defence, for the Baqubah camp was left to look after itself, in the assurance that Assyrians could do so, but in forgetfulness of the fact that they had been disarmed! For some time the place was in real peril, particularly when a train loaded with rifles and ammunition for its defence was derailed some miles from camp.

The force raised in the camp, however, though then armed with a “scratch” armament, rescued the train and its contents,[175] and from that time forward the camp was in a state of safety. Skirmishes took place near it, and after one of these the combatants boasted to their British officer{400} of the number of Arabs whom they had accounted for. “Oh, rubbish!” said the officer. “I know how many bullets go astray, and you need not tell me you hit as many as that.” The disgusted mountaineers said nothing; but after the next action laid out before a rather horrified Englishman a large number of human ears—right ears all of them. “Look here, sahib! You can’t say we didn’t hit those fellows, anyhow!” Those who already had been transported to Mindan, though outside the real area of the rising, were not entirely deprived of their share of the fun. A disorderly tribe of Kurds, the Surchi, thought that so good an opportunity of making trouble ought not to be missed, and undertook a raid in the Akra district. The Assyrians had the satisfaction of sweeping the raiders into the Zab, and of thus restoring order in that corner of the world.

While this was being done, steps had been taken in Baqubah camp which tended to split up an already divided nation still further. Polus Mar Shimun, the Patriarch, had died as stated, and the larger half of the nation had been removed, under the leadership of Petros Agha, to Mindan. Those who remained took that opportunity of electing and consecrating Ishai, son of David d’Mar Shimun and nephew of Polus and Benyamin, to the Patriarchate—the new prelate being a child of twelve years old! It is true that, according to the old “natar cursiya system”[176] this lad was the lawful heir of his departed uncle; but even so the election, according to that very tribal custom to which they were appealing, was an affair for the whole nation, and not of a minority in it. The electing party looked on themselves as the “faithful remnant,” who remained loyal to the old head of the tribes when the bulk of them had gone off after a new leader who was not of the Sacred House; and also urged, not too consistently, that the “Mindan seceders” had, in fact, knowledge of the proceeding, and made no objection to it. In spite of this defence, the step was a disastrous and improper one; a decision that, in the opinion of the wiser of the party responsible, would not have been taken “had Surma{401} Khanim been here.”[177] It divided the nation when union was the one necessity, and degraded the Patriarch into a mere party leader; while at the same time it gave a fresh lease of life to just those ancient anomalies (such as the hereditary Patriarchate and the temporal power of the holder of that office) which men of experience saw had outlived their usefulness, and for which they were seeking to provide a decent euthanasia. However, the thing was done and could not be undone, though the British Director of Repatriation marked his disapproval of a step which he did not feel entitled to forbid, by giving an order that no British officer was to attend the consecration ceremony.

The Arab rising flickered out in due course, but the summer had passed before the rising did; and when the question of the Assyrian settlement came up again, those who knew the country shook their heads over the prospect of moving masses of population at such a season of the year. October had begun—the month that sees the first snows on the hills—and there were signs of an early winter. Warnings to that effect, however, were disregarded, and the Assyrian force that was to go up and clear the ground under Petros Agha was concentrated at Akra.[178] and made ready for its march. It numbered about 5,000 men—mountaineers and Urmi men combined—and made an impressive show under a multitude of cross-bearing banners. High titles abounded, for Petros as Commander-in-Chief was at least liberal in this direction. A “Field-Marshal” served under him, sporting crossed batons on his khaki-clad shoulders, with Generals, Brigadier-Generals, and Colonels by the score. But if titles were plenty, experience was far to seek; and{402} considering what a tremendous risk was being run in sending up the force at all, at so late a date as the end of October, there was a marvellous casualness shown about the whole affair. Those in authority seemed to be only anxious to be rid of the people and the problem together, and to act on the assumption that if once they could be got over the boundary all would go well, or that at least the British Government would not be concerned if it did not. Good rifles were provided, with ammunition, some mountain-guns, and plenty of mules for transport. There was also a big dump of provisions, and medical stores in abundance; but when the Assyrians wanted to leave these behind, those who were there to protect these wild people from their own folly and ignorance allowed them to do so; and the force moved off with not so much as a bandage, with provisions for a short seven days, and no means of securing a regular supply after that. In fact, these people who were in theory to go up to a land, occupy and colonise it, and maintain themselves there for a winter, were allowed to go off with the equipment of a raid and nothing else!

The British officers who were to accompany the force “in a purely advisory capacity” (three British Lieutenants, to wit) made some representations, urging in particular the provision of proper pack-saddles for the mountain-guns sent with the force. They were told the guns could go on their own carriages, as it would be a stiff pull over Akra Dagh, but plain sailing after that! A man who can stand at Akra, and think that the rugged ridge behind that town is the only obstacle between him and Gawar Plain, has the strangest ideas of the land he is sending his subordinates into!

No doubt Petros was to blame. An Assyrian who wants to get to a place will tell you that the road is easy, with the gayest defiance of facts; and men who will go off with a small raiding party, with no equipment save rifles and the clothes they wear, have not the least notion that “an army cannot charge in and out again like a troop of hussars.” Those who directed this “Repatriation” were supposed to know something of that most difficult of problems, land transport{403} in country where no mechanical means are available; but they did not force the Assyrians to benefit by their knowledge.

The frontier was crossed; the Zab, swollen by recent rain, was crossed also, though with some difficulty in the face of opposition from the local Kurds, of the Barzan and Zibar tribes. These were swept aside, however, though in the action Petros rather amused the British officers by the fact that he would persist in firing his few guns at the mountain landscape at large. “Hadn’t you better wait till you have a target of some sort to fire at?” they urged. “You won’t hurt the rocks, even if that is your object.” “The noise will impress the Kurds,” said Petros, and went on wasting his small supply of artillery cartridges. Barzan village was stormed and burned, the only remarkable piece of loot secured therein being a copy of the Book of Common Prayer. It bore the stamp of a Canadian parish—“St. Luke, North Battleford, Saskatchewan. Not to be taken away.” Had the little book been able to speak, it might have told of strange adventures.

All this took time, however, and provisions began to fail. While the rations lasted, there had been little looting, if any; but when men are hungry it takes better discipline than that of such a force as this to keep them to their ranks and duty. Also, day after day of pitiless cold rain (such as is common in late autumn in this land) began to tell on the health and spirits of the Urmi plainsmen, who were quite unused to such conditions of travel as these. Many broke down altogether, more than 100 died on the way—the mortality among the animals being also very heavy—while hundreds abandoned rifles and gear, and turned back to the refuge of the British once more. The subsequent comment of the British officers on this proceeding was terse and forcible. Stripped of some rather unquotable verbiage, it amounts to the statement that a Tyari man may be as big a thief as heaven ever made, but at least he will leave his head before his rifle! In fact, one of the two wings into which the force was divided, that composed of Urmi men, had lost all spirit and “go” before they were half-way{404} through the mountains. Had they had to face an enemy of any enterprise, they would have been like sheep before the butcher.

At this moment news came from the mountaineers of Tyari and Tkhuma which, though different enough in character from that current among the plainsmen, was at least equally fatal as far as the success of the expedition was concerned. These clansmen formed the left, or western, of the two columns of advance, and when the defeated Zibari Kurds retired in the westerly direction, they had pursued them till they had lost touch with their Urmi companions. Now they were in their own mountains, free from all control, and well armed; their faces were toward their own homes, and also toward the homes of their hereditary enemies.

What did they care for Urmi men and the settlement of Persia, when balanced against such a chance of loot and vengeance? Off they went on the raid, seeing in every Kurd a foe, in every village lawful prize. Nerwa and Rikan were turned out and burned, Tyari men being quite reckless of the fact that in all Kurdistan none had been so orderly and so loyal to the British as the men of these two districts! Word had gone to the Agha of Chal that he was to cut off the retreat of the fleeing Zibaris, and he had come out, more or less as an ally of the Assyrians, to do so. Either from deliberate treachery, or merely from the indiscipline natural in such a force, troops of the Tyari and Tkhuma men got round his flank and into his villages, and Chal also went up in flame and smoke. A glance at the map will show that their wild career had now brought them again to the Zab, and to the district of Berwar. Mira Reshid,[179] the biggest brigand in the district, now held this land as representing British Authority (having undergone, we hope, a change of soul like Petros Agha); and he now gathered his forces and held the bridges over the Zab in the name of King George, while a most naturally indignant British Political{405} officer was hurrying up from Dohuk with such police as he could gather. The mountaineers’ wild career was now stayed, and like schoolboys who have broken bounds, anticipatory of dire consequences, but yet feeling that the “rag” had been worth it, they obeyed the angry master’s orders, and returned to the plains and British authority. The Urmi men, feeling that they could do nothing by themselves, had also drifted back; and Petros Agha himself, having entirely lost his army, found that he and his “personal staff” could do nothing but follow their example. He reported on arrival that he had not been able to do what he intended, but he was sure that the Government would be pleased, “because the moral effect upon the Kurds was so extremely good!”[180]

As it happened Government was anything but pleased; the whole expedition had failed, the money spent on it was wasted, the problem that they had hoped solved was still on their hands, and the Kurds, whom it was most important just then to keep quiet and contented, were all in a state of entirely justifiable suspicion and wrath. How could they be expected to believe that this was not what Government had intended? Those responsible for the arrangements that had broken down so utterly were, of course, furious, and planned condign punishment for the guilty hillmen; but these were vetoed by the Political authorities, who perhaps felt that, whatever the guilt of the men of Tyari, the blame{406} did not lie entirely with them! The camp at Mindan was reorganised and set going once more, and harassed authority set itself to consider what could be done with a problem difficult enough before, and now tangled worse than ever. One thing only was clear, that in any case it was hopeless to attempt anything till spring; and so refugees and British, each extremely cross with the other, settled down for the winter in camp at Mindan, with nothing settled but the extreme difficulty of a settlement!

Government fell back on a scheme of “settlement by infiltration,” or putting the people on the sites of villages that had “gone vacant” in time past, either through the war, or by virtue of the general decline of population during the later years of the Ottoman Empire. It was, of course, not the “enclave” that had once been planned for them and which they had been given the opportunity of securing, nor was it “their own country” for most of them, and they did not at all like the notion of being put where they could go, with Moslem neighbours and sometimes Moslem landlords.

Their behaviour towards these was not, it must be owned, altogether conciliatory. There were cases of villagers put under a particularly good landlord (and a good Moslem gentleman is a gentleman), who accepted large advances from him on condition of promising to reap his crops at a certain wage-rate in harvest, and then (with true up-to-date spirit) struck for a large advance at the last moment! Even then the landlord was not anxious to take steps. It was, he said, a point of honour with him: he had never put any tenant, of any religion, in the law courts yet.

“Neither shall you now, Agha,” said the local Political officer; “but the Government has its honour, too, and these fellows shall carry out a contract to which the Government was a party.”

In another case, too, one had to admit that the Christians were asking for trouble. It is not neighbourly to kill a pig, cut him up, and put the disjecta membra of him in and about the only spring from which your Mussulman neighbours have to draw their water!{407}

Delay followed delay, it seeming to be the policy of the Government to keep those who were getting on one another’s nerves tied together in idleness. Home authority said that it would give a “block grant” of £500,000 to settle the whole Assyrian problem, but would not allow those on the spot to get to work at the plan they had prepared, being apparently under the impression that when you are settling people “on the land” they can begin farming operations on it at any season. “I am willing to tackle Joshua’s job,” said a harassed official, “and try to settle these tribes in a promised land of sorts. Still, unlike Joshua, I cannot stop the sun, and the summer is advancing now!”

At last permission was received, and preparations commenced for the movement of the people, tribe by tribe, to villages on and about the northern border of Irak. The fact that the border was still undefined, and the only thing clear to everyone on the spot was that the line suggested by the unratified Treaty of Sèvres was unworkable, added yet another element of confusion to the problem. One person who was doing his efficient best to “queer the whole show” was Petros Agha. When inquiry was made into the fiasco of November, 1920, that worthy had got off at least as cheaply as he deserved, being acquitted of anything worse than incompetence and gross mismanagement. There was nothing to show that he intended Tyari and Tkhuma to go off and raid as they did, when he assigned to them just that part of his line from which it was easiest to do so! Thus, he had not been put into prison with others, and was using his freedom to intrigue against any plan of settling his people which was not under his control.

His dream now (and how far the man believes in his own dreams is a problem beyond our solving) was of an “independent Assyria,” a thin strip that should stretch between Turkish and Irak territory, from Urmi in Persia to Alexandretta on the Mediterranean, the whole to be under French protection! This he put forward at the moment when the French were deciding that even Cilicia was beyond their power to hold; and he perpetually urged all of his nation to have nothing to do with any British schemes for their{408} disposal, for was not he, Petros Agha, just coming back with boundless supplies of French rifles and French napoleons, to lead them back in triumph to their own land once more? That at least was the song sung by his agents in Mindan camp in his name, and no suggestion as to the desirability of shepherding the man out of the country met with any response. In particular, his influence was thrown against the most hopeful element in the Government scheme—viz., the reconstitution of the Assyrian contingent. The attempt to raise an Arab force in Mesopotamia was not looking too promising just then, and military men were proposing to collect afresh the force that they had so unfortunately thrown away before, and to use the best fighting element in Irak in the defence of the land. It was to be as numerous a force as the nation could raise, and to be officered by British officers.[181] Petros passed the word round (or his agents in camp did it for him), that no man who regarded Petros as his leader must enlist, and Government would not allow those charged with recruiting for the force to stop this counter-Government propaganda! It says something for the possibilities of using this nationality in the one way it can be really of use, that under these circumstances some 600 men were enrolled. On the final removal of Petros (see below) this number went up at once to over 2,000. It was only British advice, given for the sake of the people, that fixed that limit.

However, the wheels continued to revolve, if slowly, and with a vast amount of creaking and of worry to political officers who had the work of settling some 10,000 recalcitrant people. This trifling job was thrown in as a sort of additional{409} faggot on the top of an already heavy load! Arrangements were come to with the Kurds of Berwar for the return of the Christians to that district, and to that of Ashitha beyond it, it being held that if that country was perhaps not strictly in Irak, at least it had never been efficiently in Turkey! The local Kurds, indeed, behaved quite unexpectedly well, seeming to regard the presence of their old Christian neighbours as a part of the established disorder of things, which had a sort of vested right to be restored. One was reminded of certain married couples who lead a “cat and dog life” in one another’s society, but who yet both crave for the accustomed irritation if ever it is withdrawn! They recognised the right of the returning Christians to their old lands and villages, and even to a half of the crops that were in the ground, in places where the land was being cultivated by Kurds after the Christians had left it. Sometimes there were difficulties to settle, but surprisingly seldom.

In one case, some nomad Kurds who owed no allegiance to anybody had developed ambitions to try a more settled life, and had sat them down in a little group of villages known as the Halamun district, far away from anywhere. These fellows showed no eagerness to clear out and let the lawful owners return. It took a visit from the assistant Political Officer and a long argument to put matters straight here, and matters at one time got so strained that the Kurds began debating whether it would not be better to kill the English intruder there and then. This matter was solved by the A.P.O. (who quite understood the matter under debate) coolly going to bed, and to sleep, in the midst of them, and so leaving them to talk the interesting problem over. When he woke up in the morning the Kurds were ready with a compromise. They would turn out of three of the four villages under debate, but wanted to retain one. This was agreed to. So matters went on. A pass through a seemingly impassable range is always found as you approach it. Caravan after caravan of tribesmen (each caravan perhaps 1,000 strong) was moved in turn from Mindan camp and up to the distributing centre at Dohuk, whence they could be forwarded, after considerable grumbling,{410} to the destination which was marked out for them. Every man, woman, and child received the Government grant of 120 rupees at Dohuk, and sometimes there were unforeseen claimants. One lady walked in triumphant with a baby that had not been there when she left Mindan two days before. She had simply gone aside from the caravan as it travelled, produced this infant, and then put it on the top of the bundle she was carrying, and so finished the day’s journey! She wanted the Government to make the usual “capitation grant” to this new arrival. Strictly, he (or she) was not entitled to it, as not having been on the roll at the time of the departure from Mindan! Still, a point was stretched in this case.

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!

The war was “to make the world safe for Democracy.” Has Democracy shown itself capable of dealing with the world? Its weaknesses are, first, that it cannot trust its agents. No race on earth has such administrators as the British; and the writer, who has been privileged to live with some of them and see their working, only hopes some day to be able to tell the story of what he has seen, that England may have at least the chance of knowing what manner of men they are who serve her in despised Mesopotamia. Yet, because one man in a hundred may show himself no true sahib, and may fall under temptations that he has never been trained to bear, Democracy at home hampers the ninety-nine good men for that reason; and will not allow the man on the spot, who knows, to act on his own judgment in crises, without delaying reference to those who neither know nor can know.

Second, Democracy, as represented by its leaders at home, gives pledges lightly, and abandons them. “Its vows are lightly spoken; its faith is hard to bind.” In the East, decision and firmness come first. A governor who has these will always be respected, even if he be cruel as no Englishman can be. Let him be just as well, and he is worshipped. But how can he be firm and decisive when those at home will not let him act for himself, and send him ever-varying orders from Downing Street?

It is this conduct in the British Government; this failure, not in the men on the spot, but in those at home, that calls{415} out all the worst qualities in Turk and Arab, Armenian and Assyrian. Few people know better than the writer how annoying those latter types can be, but they can respect and serve a Government that knows its own mind. It is because of this evil spirit that we have ourselves evoked that some now clamour for the complete evacuation of Mesopotamia.

This is a claim to which in honour we cannot yield. Even apart from the guardianship that we have definitely accepted under treaty, we have contracted a moral obligation that it is impossible for us to disown. We did not make war on the inhabitants of Mesopotamia; we came to free them from the domination of the Turk. Having so freed them, we cannot honourably leave them till fresh authority has arisen to control the disorderly elements that swarm in every quarter of that land. That was our pledge to those who have stood by us through good and ill.

We have cast out one unclean spirit; now, if we leave the house empty, seven other spirits more wicked than the Turk will enter in, and the last state of Mesopotamia will be worse than the first.

Printed by Lowe & Brydone (Printers) Ltd., London, N.W. 1.{416}{417}

GLOSSARY