Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 265
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[Page 265]
131
in the bars, restaurants, clubs and theatres of the West End.
Page 131A [See Page 267 for 131A]
I rented a very nice little furnished service flat in a new block, Mayfair Chambers, in Bolderton St, just off Oxford St, opposite Selfridges, for £3-15-0 a week. But all of my mates in the Party had gone out of town, and never for the rest of my life was I to feel so lonely as I did during that week in th heart of big busy London. I used to go into shops and buy something I didn't really want, just to be able to talk to someone, and the week seemed as long as a month. However, at the end of the week we were all together again in the tower and given a lecture by Colonel Steel, Director of Operations at the War Office. He explained to us that just before the Russian Revolution in November, the British and Russian Cossack cavalry had joined forces at Khanakin [also spelt Kanaqin], a small Iraqui [Iraqi] village near the Persian frontier north-east of Baghdad; thus completing the encirclement of the Central Powers. But when the revolution spread to the Army, the Russian troops straggled back up the way they had come, pillaging and ravishing the farms and villages of North-West Persia as they went. This left a serious gap again in the encirclement and our mission was urgently to rally the Russians who had remained loyal to the Cossack General Bituracoff and were still in Persia, and also to raise, equip and train local levies, in an endeavour to contain the Turks still very active in Armenia and the Caucasus Mountains, where our ultimate objective was to get to Tiflis, the capital of Georgia, before the Bolshevicks got there. We were also informed that our top commander was Major-General Dunsterville, who went to school in India, and there, and in the Middle East, had soldiered during most of his active life. He spoke Russian and Persian fluently, and was very proud of the fact that he was the original "Stalky" of Kipling's book "Stalky and Co." He had already made contact with General Bituracoff in Persia, and was now making a temporary headquarters at Kasvin, about sixty miles south of the Caspian Sea.
On the next day, 29th January 1918, we entrained at Waterloo Station for Southampton, being joined there by a score of