Enemy on the Euphrates (34 page)

The town itself was situated on four knolls, two on either side of a steep gully running north–south. Its houses were well constructed from local stone and, on the eastern side of the gully, a large, partially destroyed medieval castle crowned the heights of the highest knoll, and from under this eminence emerged a stream which provided the inhabitants with fresh water and irrigated their gardens of figs, olives and other fruit trees.

For the town’s new British rulers its location presented some difficulties. Like Dayr az-Zawr, it was a considerable distance from the main northern garrison at Mosul; to the west the stony desert stretched away to the border with Syria and Faysal’s unruly new Arab state; and to the north lay the armistice line across which hostile pro-Turkish Kurdish and Arab tribes ranged and raided. Nevertheless, Wilson had thought it important to ‘show the flag’ in even this distant and isolated spot and accordingly an APO supported by a small troop of British-officered Arab levies had been established in the town.

Since the withdrawal of the British from Dayr az-Zawr the area west and south of Mosul had become the target of Arab raiding parties operating out of the no-man's-land of the Syrian border. Some of these raiders reached as far as the towns of Sharqat and ‘Ain Dibbs. On 21 April the first caravan for some months arrived at Mosul from Dayr az-Zawr, bringing more news of the British ‘defeat’ and inaugurating a spasm of anti-British propaganda. Political meetings were held and anti-British notices were posted on the walls at night.
¹⁴

On 26 May British intelligence staff at Mosul received reports that a force of about 1,000 Arab horsemen, under the command of the militant al-‘Ahd member Jamil al-Midfa‘i, had established itself at Fadghami on the Khabur river well within striking distance of both Tal ‘Afar and Mosul itself.
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Like Lieutenant Faruqi, the thirty-year-old Midfa‘i was a native of Mosul and his plan was to make a striking military demonstration against British power in the region by cutting the occupiers’ lines of communication with the south of the country.
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This was expected to lead to an uprising in the city of Mosul, where Midfa‘i was in touch with Amin Effendi al-‘Umari, a prominent member of the clan of that name, described in British intelligence reports as ‘a young and misguided fanatic’ and a ‘liaison officer between Kemalists and Sharifians’ (i.e. those supporting independence under ‘Abdallah).
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Midfa‘i’s troops were accompanied by an approximately equal number of Shammar, Juhaish and Khabur Jubur tribal horsemen, all Sunni tribesmen. The Shammar were under the command of Humaydi Ibn Farhan, hitherto Ottoman
rais
(governor) of the al-Jarba‘ section of the Shammar; the Juhaish were led by Salih, son of Ahmad al-Khudhayir, sheikh of that tribe; and the Jubur were commanded by its paramount sheikh, Muslat Pasha.
¹⁸

Two days later the British received a report of hostile Arab tribesmen moving towards Sharqat on the Tigris and rumours of an advance by a unit of Mustafa Kemal’s Turkish troops on Zakho, Wilson’s most northerly outpost. Meanwhile, in Mosul itself, anti-British agitation was continuing to spread throughout the city. On 30 May the PO for the region, Lieutenant Colonel L.F. Nalder, submitted a report to Wilson and to the commander of the Mosul-based 18th Division of the British Army that he believed an attempt to drive the British from the city with the aid of rebel tribesmen was imminent.
¹⁹

At British Military Headquarters in Baghdad it was unclear whether Jamil Midfa‘i’s group was operating independently or was part of a combined Arab–Turkish manoeuvre. Whichever was the case, Wilson feared a repetition of the Dayr az-Zawr incident and urged General Haldane to send reinforcements to the region. Unfortunately news of
these developments came at a particularly awkward moment for the British High Command in Iraq.

Eight days earlier, at 8.00 a.m. on 18 May 1920, Commander F.F. Raskolnikov on the bridge of the Bolshevik destroyer
Karl Liebknecht
was peering through his Zeiss binoculars at the British-held port of Enzeli, two kilometres away on the southern coast of the Caspian Sea.
²⁰
In the bay he could see the anchored ships of General Denikin’s White Fleet which had fled there after the Bolsheviks’ capture of Baku a few weeks earlier. Onshore, he could just make out the clay-and-gravel houses of the Persian town and the governor’s palace surrounded by slender palm trees. To the left of the town lay the British military camp of Kazian.

Signalling to his two shallow-draught gunboats,
Kars
and
Ardahan
, to move closer inshore, he waited a few minutes before giving the order to open fire. Then the 4-inch guns of his own ship and those of the rest of the Soviet Volga–Caspian Flotilla began a heavy bombardment of the British cantonments while Bolshevik sailors in blue jumpers with white collars, the long ribbons of their hats fluttering in the wind, rowed their launches up to the beach, leapt out through the surf and cut the telegraph lines linking Enzeli to the outside world.

The British base was manned almost entirely by Indian troops, in total around 500 men – a company of the 2nd Gurkha Rifles, a company of the 42nd (Deoli) Regiment and the 122nd Rajputs. But by an unfortunate coincidence, Brigadier General Bateman-Champain, commander of the 36th Indian (Mixed) Brigade and GOC of Noperforce, the whole British contingent in northern Persia, was also visiting the base at the time. After a brief and unsuccessful attempt by the Gurkhas to repel the Bolshevik landing parties, General Bateman-Champain opened radio communication with the Soviet commander.

‘By whose authority have you come here?’ he demanded.

‘The Soviet Government bears no responsibility for me. I have come here on my own initiative, on my own responsibility and at my own risk’, replied Raskolnikov.
²¹

As a matter of fact, on 20 April, Trotsky had insisted that the Caspian
must be cleared of the White Fleet entirely. Consisting of ten auxiliary cruisers, seven transports, several smaller vessels and six seaplanes, the White Fleet which lay at anchor in the port of Enzeli had escaped Baku and fled to Persia, where it had been interned. But the Bolsheviks were determined to remove any threat to the movement of oil between Baku and Astrakhan, from where it could be shipped up the Volga to Moscow and Petrograd. So Raskolnikov’s orders were to capture that fleet. The British could fight to protect it or withdraw, Commander Raskolnikov informed General Bateman-Champain.

Bateman-Champain replied that he had no authority to surrender Enzeli or the White Fleet. However, he was seeking instructions from Baghdad. Until a reply had been received he proposed a two-hour truce. Raskolnikov agreed. But while the unfortunate British commander desperately tried to restore telegraph communications with Baghdad, Raskolnikov continued to land more and more sailors and marines and since no further radio communication from the British had been received by the expiry of the truce, the Bolsheviks recommenced shelling the British positions. Bateman-Champain now asked for a one-hour extension of the truce, which was granted, but shortly before its termination, realising that he had lost all hope of communicating with Baghdad, he informed Raskolnikov that he was willing to hand over Enzeli and the White Fleet if his troops were allowed to leave the town with their weapons. Delighted, Raskolnikov agreed and sent the commander of his landing parties ashore to settle the details.

The situation of the garrison at Enzeli had always been worrying. Indeed, Churchill himself had urged its withdrawal in February, fearing precisely the kind of humiliation which had now been inflicted. However, he had been strongly opposed by Lord Curzon. The foreign secretary and former viceroy of India had long considered Persia a crucial factor in the defence of the British Empire. He knew the country well; as a young man he had travelled widely throughout its vast territory and had later written a magisterial two-volume account of its people, religion and history. On 9 August 1919 he believed he had achieved a lifelong ambition – a treaty with Persia was signed which, in effect,
converted it into a British protectorate. In return for a loan of £2 million (of which £160,000 was, in reality, a bribe to the Persian prime minister and two Qajar royal princes), the young Anglophile Shah Ahmad and his government agreed to hand over control of Persia’s finances and military forces to British ‘advisors’. The agreement, Curzon informed his colleagues, was essential to avoid ‘a hotbed of misrule, enemy intrigue, financial disaster and political disorder’ which would have led inevitably to Bolshevik intervention and a threat to the British-owned oilfields.
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The British military presence in Northern Persia was therefore an integral element in this new relationship between the two countries. To have withdrawn from Enzeli when the Bolsheviks were consolidating their recent gains in Azerbaijan would surely have looked like weakness and a signal to the Persian nationalist opponents of Curzon’s treaty that the British could not deliver on their promises of military support for the shah and his government. Unfortunately for both Britain and the shah, the fiasco at Enzeli had now created even greater embarrassment for the two parties to the treaty.

In a desperate attempt to shore up the rapidly deteriorating situation in northern Persia – with Bolshevik forces and Persian nationalist irregulars pushing on past Resht and threatening to overrun British outposts at the Manjil Pass – on 24 May the War Office turned to the only available source of troops – Iraq. So just two days before news of potentially hostile Arab forces gathering near Tal ‘Afar and Mosul began reaching Baghdad, General Haldane received orders to send two battalions to Qasvin, fifty miles south of the Manjil Pass outposts and the HQ of Bateman-Champain’s 36th Brigade. By chance there were two weak British battalions, about 600 men in total, currently resting in the Persian highlands at Karind and these were promptly transported to Qasvin by motor lorry. But soon afterwards another, separate demand for military assistance assailed Haldane from Sir Percy Cox, the British minister in Tehran, urging him to send more troops and artillery to Qasvin.

Difficult though the military situation was, the events in Persia held out certain opportunities for General Haldane personally. The weather
in Baghdad was now becoming unbearable and the thought of cool Persian climes began to seem irresistible to the heat-tormented GOC-in-chief. He had already announced that the whole of the GHQ would move up to Karind in the Persian highlands for the summer and remain there until October, but until now their departure had been delayed by various engagements including an official visit to Iraq by the shah. Most of the wives and children of the British officers and civilian personnel now lived at Karind, which was 150 miles north-east of Baghdad by air, and the location was well provided with amenities of all kinds. There was even a golf course. And now Haldane could claim that he had a genuine and pressing reason to go immediately to Persia – the Bolshevik threat. Surely it was only proper that he should proceed to Qasvin himself to examine this serious military situation, and after that, perhaps Tehran? He soon made the necessary announcement.

Needless to say, General Haldane’s decision was not well received by those whose duties meant they would have to remain in Iraq during the sweltering summer heat. Gertrude Bell, for one, was disapproving. Since his arrival in March she had befriended the general and initially had felt a little sorry for him. MacMunn, his predecessor as GOC-in-chief, had been a popular and sociable commander and by contrast Haldane seemed almost totally lacking in personality. ‘I cannot find any real solid person in Sir A.,’ Gertrude told her father. ‘He is very kind and friendly and most polite, but he doesn’t seem to me to have a mind at all … He is shy and nervous and un-self-confident and of course the poor man is at a drawback from knowing nothing about the people or the country. He is most anxious to do the right thing but he has no means of knowing what it is.’
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Nevertheless she had taken him under her wing, frequently invited him to her house and tried to help him by introducing him to various pro-British Arab dignitaries. But now she was beginning to lose patience with him. ‘Going up to Karind until October,’ she wrote to her father, ‘it’s very wrong.’ She went on,

There’s a strong feeling against it both among military and civil. We have a critical six months ahead of us; we all ought to be on the spot, and after all Sir Aylmer is still head of the administration – even if he doesn’t know anything about it (and he doesn’t) things have to be done in his name … We have electric fans and lights, plenty of ice and good houses. No hot weather is a hardship under such conditions. And if it were a hardship, many people, including all the civil administration, have got to do it, and G.H.Q. ought to do it too. And that’s what they all feel.

Arnold Wilson agreed. He accepted that the general should, in due course, leave for Persia – but not now, with reports just coming in of an outrage at Tal ‘Afar and continuing Arab raids out of Dayr az-Zawr. But Haldane was adamant. Consequently, on 5 June, General Haldane and his staff left Baghdad by train, their destination the railhead at Quraitu in Kurdistan and thence by car to the British camp at Karind. En route, the general hoped to do a little sightseeing and photography – the scenery at the Tak-i-Girrah Pass was reputed to be very impressive.

After he left, Gertrude Bell recorded a remarkable conversation she had just had with the general. In a further letter to her father she wrote,

I lunched with Sir Aylmer the day he left. We chatted about common acquaintances in London over our iced melon and mayonnaise. As I went away I said: ‘I suppose if you hear when you reach Karind that the tribes have taken Baghdad, you’ll – go on to Kermanshah [Bakhtaran]?’ He replied ‘Oh I don’t feel any responsibility for what happens while I’m away.’
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Meanwhile, sixteen British officers and men had been killed at Tal ‘Afar.
²⁵
On the night of 2 June, one of Jamil Midfa‘i’s men entered the town and addressed a meeting of the town’s elders organised by Agha ‘Abdul Rahman ibn ‘Usman. He told them that a large force of Arab troops and tribesmen was approaching and that they should either gather together all their men with weapons and get ready to join them or themselves immediately attack the small British outpost on the summit of one of the hills above the town where the APO had his house and office and the barracks of the levies were situated.