"تاريخ الحرب الكبرى استنادًا إلى وثائق رسمية: العمليات في بلاد فارس ١٩١٤-١٩١٩" [ظ‎‎٧‎٩] (٥٦٦/١٦٣)

126
OPERATIONS IN PERSIA
in the hopes of winning Persia over to the Central Powers
Mr. Marling trusted that the Persian proposal to the Allies
would be favourably considered.
Russian Russian forces, moving out from Urmia and Tabriz on the
Action 3 ; 8th November had recently occupied Ushnu and Sauj Bulag
end Of without difficulty and it was now learnt that the Russian
November expeditionary force under General Baratoff would police the
I915, triangle Hamadan-Qum-Tehran with a small cavalry force
and would then operate against Kermanshah and Khaniqin.
The composition of this force was reported to be fifty squadrons
of cavalry, four batteries of artillery and six and a half bat
talions of infantry with an effective strength of about 10 , 000 ,*
of whom about half had already reached, or advanced beyond,
Kazvin. In the meantime, however, the Swedish commandant
of gendarmerie at Tehran had been so sedulously playing on
the nervous apprehensions of the Shah by stories of his im
minent arrest by the advancing Russian troops that the
Russian Minister had felt compelled to promise that they
would at once withdraw to Yengi Imam. They commenced
this withdrawal from Karedj on the 21st November.
On leaving Tehran the Austrian and Turkish representatives
had gone no further than Shah Abdul Azim (ten miles south of
Tehran), whence they continued to maintain touch with their
sympathisers in the capital; but Prince Reuss, some fifty
Democrat deputies of the Majlis and a large number of the
gendarmerie with many of the German agents and levies had
gone to Qum. Here they formed a body which styled itself the
Committee of National Defence and which, with the assistance
of several of the leading Persian officials and of the gendarmerie,
not only flooded the country with official-looking telegrams
announcing a revolution at Tehran and the flight of the
Russian and British Ministers, but also stopped all Govern
ment messages. Another step taken to neutralise the de
pressing effects of the German failure at Tehran was the
organisation of an attack on the Persian Cossacks at Hamadan
by a force of gendarmerie under their Swedish officers. Since
the arrival at the end of October of these Cossacks and the
consequent desertion of the German levies, a reinforcement
of the gendarmerie at Hamadan had encouraged many of
these levies to return and had caused such a deterioration
in the Allied position that the Russian Minister had recently
arranged for a sotnia of Russian Cossacks to move there from
* Mr. Marling’s telegrams of this period complain that the Russian Minister
had practically no information of the strength or intentions of Baratoff s fore •