Its propaganda mills worked long and late; its agents came and went; Turkish emissaries slipped into Hamadan and out again without any difficulty, and the leaders of the Hamadan movement, which aimed at our overthrow by a _tour de force_, must have often chuckled to themselves at our apparent simplicity and at the ease with which we had been outmatched by Oriental cunning. While feigning blindness, the British were very watchful indeed. It was like the story of the faithful retainer of the Samurai noble in feudal Japan who set out to avenge his lord's death. His enemies were powerful and vigilant, but in the end his carefully simulated indifference threw them completely off their guard, and he triumphed. So it was in Hamadan, where sharp wits were pitted against sharp wits. In time the chiefs of the inner ring of the Hamadan combination grew careless. Little by little, their secret signs and passwords, their working programme, their membership roll, and even full details of the Turkish system of espionage in Persia generally, passed into our hands. There was little more to wait for. It was time to strike. {198} But a fresh difficulty immediately presented itself. The plotters, in co-operation with Kuchik Khan, had fixed the date for an armed revolt against British occupation; and what afterwards happened in Egypt, was, in June of 1918, deliberately and carefully planned to take place in Hamadan. There were practically no troops in the town at the time, and the torch of revolt once lighted and the work of our extermination begun, ten or twelve officers with a couple of dozen of N.C.O's. of Dunsterforce could not for long have resisted the determined onslaught of a fanatical and arrack-incited population of 70,000. To arrest the leaders openly in daylight would assuredly have precipitated a disaster, and led to bloodshed, and probably to our own undoing. The inner council of the conspiracy consisted of fifteen members, and included the Persian Governor and a number of local notables. Secrecy and surprise were essential; so the plan hit upon was a night descent simultaneously on the whole band, an officer and two N.C.O's. being detailed for each arrest.