Billeder på siden
PDF
ePub

almost imperceptible gradients to the summit of the range. There is hardly a hill to be seen up which a horseman could not ride, while all is bare open moorland.

On the south-west side of the range, however, the hills drop steeply in great rocky cliffs to the bottom of deep valleys. At the bottom, instead of a bleak moorland, you drop into a land of fatness, of fruit - pomegranates, peaches, nectarines, and beautiful grapes. Never have I seen fruit growing in such luxuriance. A penny is sufficient to buy a great tray of lovely blushing peaches, dozens of them, all fat and ripe and juicy, delicious at the end of a long and thirsty march. Another twopence will provide cream and honey, and what better food can one want than peaches shredded with honey in a plate of cream. Most things in the East are disappointing. One hears great tales, but reality never approaches them. All up the road we had heard of the beauty of Persian Kurdistan and of its fruit. For once we were not disappointed, for reality surpassed anything which we could possibly have imagined.

I do not think any of us will ever forget our first halt after descending the pass. We lay for an hour or more and rested on a grassy bank beside a running stream, all around us deep green boughs, laden with red and golden fruit ripe for the plucking, the cooing of doves, the song of thrushes

and blackbirds, and above, the great shoulder of the mountain. It was hard to believe that we were still at war, and only a week or two before had been roasting in the July heat of the plains of Iraq. Even the birds conspired in producing the illusion of home. For here you will hardly see a bird that you would be surprised to meet beside a Scottish or a Devonshire stream.

The road lay for some miles down this wonderful valley, in places so overgrown with the low boughs of the fruittrees that there was hardly room for a horseman to pass. Presently it turned the corner of a ridge, and we found ourselves in the open valley of the Kara Su. At first, but for the brilliant sunshine and the bareness of the distant hills, we might have been in England-fields of ripening corn, meadows of lush riverside hay, and in the middle of the valley the Kara Su itself, clear, rippling, and swift, the very model of an English trout-stream. Only when we crossed the quaint old bridge and found, in the midst of all this plenty, a woman newly dead from hunger, did we realise that we were still in Persia.

Sennah itself lies up a side valley some three miles from the river. It is a curious town, a wonderful mixture of the filthy hovels of the poor and the palaces of the rich. Here you will see women and old men dying of hunger at the gates of the rich man's man

1

sion. Within is all the luxury of the garden of the thousand nights; without is squalor and filth undescribable.

Never shall we forget the scenes which greeted us on our first arrival. Most of the

way up to Persia we had marched through a country stricken with famine. We had seen children like skeletons, too weak to move, lying beside the road, while their parents begged for a morsel of bread. "Thank God we are free from that," we had said as we surveyed this fertile and prosperous-looking land. And here we now were in Sennah, with luxuriant crops all round, while the poor died at the rate of several hundred a day from sheer starvation, and died separated only by a few a few feet of stone wall from granaries stocked to overflowing.

Men

and women were actually being eaten by dogs in the streets, all in order that a few rich men might treble their capital by a corner in wheat. And that is how they tried to excuse themselves when we discovered the situation and sought to put things right. The Americans, one of the most highly civilised nations in the world, made vast sums in corners. Why should not they? They had, however, improved on · American business methods. For even the German-American-Jew has certain human feelings. Even he would weaken in his blood-and-iron methods if he daily found one or two famine corpses huddled

together on his doorstep. Not so the rich Persian. He is made of sterner stuff, and no amount of human suffering will make him forgo one penny of his profits.

Obviously the first thing to do was to cope with the famine situation. Not only from the humanitarian point of viewand that, God knows, was urgent enough, but for purely military reasons. We expected in the near future a considerable influx of troops. These had to be fed, and at the same time kept in health. Neither of these would be possible while the town was in such a state.

Fortunately a very energetic Political Officer had joined the force. He soon had men on to ferret out stocks of grain in the town, and to discover their owners. A short visit was paid to each of these, and the matter soon righted itself. The most important of these grain - hoarders said, 'God knows I love the poor. I would sell my grain below the market rate for their benefit if I could only bring it into the town through the tribes." Well, we happened by that time to know that this particular gentleman was actually subsidising certain sections of the tribes to keep the roads unsafe, and so prevent importations until his last year's stocks had been sold at a vast profit. Fortunately, he added, "I am a wretched man with no influence, and if any contractor would buy my grain on the spot at a cheap rate I would sell it to him, but no

66

[ocr errors]

one will buy it for fear of the tribes on the road," well knowing that his arrangement with the tribes was quite sufficient to keep any contractors away. Well," we said, Iwe have the British Government behind us. You sell it to the British Government at the price you name, and we will see that it comes into the town, tribes or no tribes." This line of action, coupled with a few stern but probably quite illegal threats, soon put matters right. We only once had to make an actual import of grain, and that quite a small one, and yet a month or two later, even when we were feeding over a thousand troops on the place, the price of grain was some 70 per cent lower than when we arrived. If the price showed signs of rising, we had only to send a telegram over the Persian telegraph-line to the Supply people at Hamadan asking them to prepare a convoy for us, and down came the price again. I suppose the mere fact that the contents of our telegrams were obtained from the Persian operators by bribery was sufficient to make them appear genuine. It was not realised that all important communications, including orders countermanding these convoys, were sent out by wireless, or, for that matter, that the Supply people in Hamadan were in such difficulties themselves that they could not have spared us one ounce of grain. That is the Persian all over. Such information as he gets by

bribery or some underhand method he believes. What he is told in good faith he will not believe. As soon as one realises this fact, he becomes a much easier person to deal with.

Soon we had two or three official bakeries running in the town supplying bread at cheap rates to the genuine poor. It shows the wonderful hypocrisy of the Persian that the most prominent supporters of those bakeries were now the same landowners who previously had been in the wheat ring and had been coining thousands out of the starvation of the poor. They knew it, and they knew that we knew it, yet they were neither ashamed nor abashed.

Although bread was now available at reasonable rates, we found that the poor had no money and no means of earning money to pay for it, even at the low rates at which it was obtainable. We had therefore to start paid relief works of various kinds. There was, however, a great deal of urgent work in connection with the improvement of communications and the preparation of winter billets for the troops, all of which were genuine military necessities. On to these we turned large numbers of starving women, and we paid them in good hard cash, as well as giving them permits to buy bread from our bakeries. At one time we had nearly two thousand of these poor creatures at work, and a very wretched sight they were to begin with.

Personnel to supervise this was, of course, a great difficulty, as to be of any value it could not be entrusted to 1 Persian officials. At last the right man for the job was discovered, one Private Ridgeway, of the 14th Hussars. Monsieur Ridgeway, as all the local people called him, was one of the most singular products of the British Army. He had knocked about the world a good deal during his service, had acquired an unusual fluency in soldier French and soldier Hindustani, and was now learning soldier Persian very rapidly. He was a tiny man, a thorough Cockney, with the true Cockney mental agility, while with it all he obviously had strongly developed paternal instincts, for certainly he was a father to these poor wretches. In a few days there was nothing he did not know about his thousand odd Amazons. He could tell you all about their moralswhich were keeping straight, which were likely to get into trouble, and which were a bit flighty, but with no real harm in them." He knew which were beginning to respond to better feeding and put on a bit of flesh, and he took it almost as a personal insult if any dared not to look better after she had been for a few days under his charge. It was really embarrassing at an inspection of the labour corps to be asked to poke a respectable-looking old lady in the ribs, and to be asked if one did not think that she had

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

put on a bit more flesh since one was last round. And yet the good old thing resented it not a bit from Monsieur Ridgeway, whom they all adored. I asked him how he managed to get them all to look as clean as they did, for cleanliness is not normally one of the virtues of the Persian poor. Oh," he said, "I learned them to wash in the river, and a rare difficult job it was too. The first time I took them down to the stream not one of them would touch water, so I jumps in myself and shows them how. It weren't long before they followed me, and now we all does it first thing every morning." I always meant to attend one of Ridgeway's bathing parades, but somehow I could never summon up the necessary nerve. Nothing like that ever troubled Ridgeway, however, and I am sure he owed a great deal of his influence among them to his complete lack of anything approaching self-consciousness.

The great difficulty with these women, as I think it always is in famine time, was to prevent young girls selling themselves or being sold to the rich men of the town. I am sure Ridgeway in his quiet way prevented a good deal of this. I know that on more than one occasion a formal complaint was lodged by prominent townsmen of their having received, to say the least of it, scant courtesy at Ridgeway's hands. "He would come smelling round these here girls of mine," was his reply when a protesting son of a rich

banker in the town was displaying some useful bruises said to have been received at Ridgeway's hands. Well, I suppose he has got his little bit of a shop now, somewhere within the sound of Bow Bells. I am sure he will not enjoy his evening cigarette any the worse for the way he looked after and cared for these poor girls. For he was one of nature's gentlemen if ever there was one. Sennah is one of the great centres of the carpet-making industry in Persia, and before long we managed, by advances of money and some gentle pushing, to get this going again to a certain extent, and so employment for them was gradually obtained as our military works were completed. The price of bread, too, soon began to approach normal, and it actually went on falling all the time we were there in spite of a large influx of troops.

One of the chief difficulties with which we had to contend in dealing with the local situation was the fact that there was no actual governor in Sennah, although two were said to be on the way there. The post of governor of a province such as Kurdistan is usually much sought after. The governor of a Persian province does not, I believe, draw any pay, but he is given certain troops by the Central Government, and these he has to support out of his own pocket. His stipend depends entirely on how much he can wring out of his unfortunate sub

jects over and above what he has to send to Teheran in the form of revenue. Governorships are rated according to what a reasonably active and unscrupulous man can make out of the people during the two or three years he is likely to hold the appointment. Kurdistan, I believe, is reckoned as a second-grade province, and the governorship is said to be worth something like £250,000 sterling clear profit. Not only does this amount come straight out of the pockets of the inhabitants in addition to revenue sent to Teheran, but an enormous retinue and quite a useful standing army are also kept up, neither of which costs the governor or the Central Government a single penny. Practically the whole of this comes out of the pockets of the poorer classes, the small farmers, and the small traders, for obviously it would be bad policy to alienate the sympathies of the more wealthy and more powerful leaders who might either be able to offer direct opposition locally, or be rich enough to obtain the ear of the higher authorities in Teheran. The burden thus placed on the local populace and the corruption which accompanies it are almost unbelievable, unless one has previous experience of government of Orientals by Orientals.

While we were in Sennah a governor had actually been appointed, and had come as far as Kermanshah. Here he

« ForrigeFortsæt »