Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 295
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[Page 295]
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labour for road work. So after the Armenian refugees had settled down, we went out to their encampment and interviewed the Chief of their mountain tribe, the Jelus, offering employment at the usual wages, plus the free rations they were already getting. His reply was forthright and final. "No," he said proudly, "God made us to fight and plunder, not to work". A few weeks afterwards they were all started down the road to Iraq under armed escorts. They were more full of syphilis than even the Kurds.
Also in August, a number of army units were transferred from Iraq to Dunsterforce: an Armoured Car Squadron (Lt-Colonel Crawford) ; an understrength British Infantry Brigade of only three battalions (Brig-General Kelly); the second battalion of the 6th Gurkas (Lt-Colonel Little) and a battery of Royal Field Artillery which had been at Mons. These units moved up, independently, through Hamadan to Enzeli where they concentrated and were joined by several companies of only partly trained levies commanded by British officers of Dunsterforce who, for a couple of months had been busy recruiting them from the local populace and training them: in addition to being physically fit, these levies had to bring their own serviceable rifle and a supply of ammunition for it in bandoliers and no distinctive uniforms were supplied or worn. At Enzeli this force embarked on small ships that took it to Baku, a big oil-field town on the mid-western coast of the Caspian Sea, surrounded by numerous oil-drilling derricks on a very shallow oil-field, where crude oil lay in surface pools in some places. The Russian revolutionaries, the Bolsheviks, had not yet completely taken over this part of the Russian Empire, and nearly all of the local inhabitants were Menshiviks and opposed to the revolution. The British Force had been hurried to the scene to support the Menshiviks and also hold Baku against Turkish occupation.
The Turks had originally occupied Baku in May, but stayed there only two days before retiring to the central Caucases. Within a few days their reaction to the British arrival was to move almost a division of veteran troops back to Baku on the railway that runs from Batum on the Black Sea to Baku.