My strictures on the fighting value of the Persian may appear unduly severe. I fully realize that one had no right to expect very much from a mass of raw, undisciplined material. The men were hastily recruited, and their training, necessarily circumscribed by the exigencies of time, could not have been anything but perfunctory and imperfect in the circumstances. But I am tilting rather at the theory prevalent in certain quarters at the inception of the Tabriz Expedition that one had only to send British officers into the highways and byways of Azerbaijan and that they would find there "ready-made" soldiers endowed with a fine fighting spirit, hardly inferior in quality to our own superb infantry, men who would stand up to trained and efficient soldiers like the Turks. Having once got the half-trained levies into the trenches, their British officers were expected to hold them by sheer force of will-power, and to hypnotize them into taking aim at an enemy without shutting both eyes. Now the bubble of Persian fighting efficiency has been pricked, and we have a more just appreciation of the virtues and shortcomings of the Persians as a unit in a modern army. {196} CHAPTER XVIII CRUSHING A PLOT Anti-British activities--Headquarters at Hamadan--Plans to seize ringleaders--Midnight arrests--How the Governor was entrapped. Back in Hamadan, the fierce political enmity of the Democrats, which had been quiet for some time, broke into fresh activity after the removal of Dunsterville headquarters to Kasvin at the end of May. General Byron, who was in charge at Hamadan, speedily discovered through his Intelligence Officers that the local Democrats were bent on making things merry for the British, if they possibly could. Previous rebuffs had taught the Democrats the value of silence and a more complete method of organization. Their defects in these directions were now to some extent remedied. Turkish gold, too, was forthcoming, and the Democrats of Hamadan became a secret political organization--a sort of Persian Mafia or Camorra--which was hatching a political conspiracy against the British. It was the Ittahad-i-Islam again at work. This organization, while outwardly making common cause with the Islamic malcontents of Hamadan and elsewhere, was in secret working strenuously for Turkey and the Turkish cause, and the Democrats {197} who were caught in its net were but a means to that end. One thing, however, soon became clear--that a vast network of Turkish espionage, with ramifications through Persia, had its headquarters in Hamadan. For many weeks the organization was allowed to have free rein in the carrying out of its "holy work."