Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 283
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[Page 283]
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of them when they realised the inevitability of their dying, would sit or lie down screaming hysterically: some of them were women with grotesque babies in their emaciated arms. It was alleged that some committed cannibalism and ate parts of dead bodies lying around. There was not much that we could do for them immediately: we did get a soup-kitchen going and arranged for it to be maintained from Baghdad, but it was like a drop in the ocean. In any case we had to hurry on over the next range.
We were now in the country of the Kurds, the ancient Medea [possibly Medes], and roving bands of these wild hillmen were making a nightly habit of firing rifle shots into our valley camps from the hilltops, but without injuring anyone; however, to be quite safe, flank patrols were organised for the very strenuous task of clearing the hills ahead of us. Except for the Poplar trees around the villages on the lower hill-slopes, the whole of the Persian landscape was quite bare of trees or shrubs, though well-grassed in flat-bottomed valleys, where wild roses, stocks and pomegranates flourished in big patches. We slept, three in a six by nine calico tent, in a compact camp sited on suitable ground near a valley stream. The supply of dry (tinned) rations we carried on the pack animals was supplemented by fresh meat, vegetables, fruit and cheese bought from local resources. An officer, a couple of sergeants and a butcher were always one village ahead of us to buy sheep for slaughter and any other suitable food that was available: fortunately the villages were usually friendly. The streams abounded in the big valleys, and some of them had a few trout and coarse fish which we caught occasionally by the rather reprehensible method of exploding a Mills hand grenade in the water.
A little less than twenty miles north-east of Kermanshah we camped for the night near the small village of Bisitun, where on an isolated high cliff face rising sheer behind it, the Persian King Darius commemorates his victory over the Medes in big pictorial carvings and an affirmation written in three languages, Aramaic, Greek and Cuneiform, which enabled the first interpretation of the last-named