War and Revolution in Asiatic Russia
alone, the last missionary, Dr. Shedd, having left. They were clinging on devotedly to their noble work of saving life, and relieving sufferings, in this unhappy land that lay between the two armies which advanced and retreated over it in turn. Dr. Packard is six feet tall, with the eye of an eagle and the courage of a lion. He has travelled during the last thirteen years in every remote valley of this wild Turco-Persian borderland; he is intimately acquainted with every tribal chief of the Khurds, and can go among the fiercest and most intractable of them, such is his moral hold over these men, his medical skill, and the confidence which they place in a man who is not engaged in political intrigue.
All through the winter of 1914–15 there had been terrible disorders in Urumiah. First a small Turkish force came in and drove the Russians out in December. Instantly all the Khurdish tribes of the mountain swooped into the plain of Urumiah like vultures on a carcase, and began to plunder the Assyrian Christians and even the Moslems themselves. The Turkish civil officials, Neri Bey and Raoub Bey, took part in the pillage, and it was not till the army of Halil Bey arrived that anything like public security existed. This part of Persia was in fact witnessing one of those incursions of nomad tribes from the mountains into the peaceful oases of the plains, which have been going on all through her history. The same thing occurred in 1880, when Sheikh Obeidulla, the great Khurdish chief of Neri, invaded Azairbijan right up to the walls of Tabriz. On the present occasion the Khurds of the Turco-Persian borderland, profiting by the political disturbances created by the Great War, invaded the plains of Urumiah, partly with a view to loot, but also,
100
