Mar Shimun, the spiritual head, and Agha Petros, the recognized military leader, accompanied the Nestorians from Urumia. The survivors of the exodus were put in a concentration camp at Hamadan with their women and children. The able-bodied and healthy amongst the men were subsequently drafted out and sent to Bakuba near Bagdad, where {224} an attempt was made by the British to organize and train them into fighting units. They received good pay and rations, but proved very difficult material to handle. Their wild, free lives had apparently unfitted them for a régime of discipline and ordered restraint. A large contingent refused to sign attestation papers lest they should be sent to fight overseas. It was useless attempting to reassure them on this point, and to tell them that all the military service they were expected to render in return for British pay and British rations was that of defending their own country against the common enemy, the Turk. It may be that their physical sufferings had demoralized them, but the irregulars of Agha Petros were incapable of attaining an ordinary degree of military efficiency as judged by British standards. They were a perpetual source of embarrassment to the British officers entrusted with their training. The experiment proved a failure, and at last, on the Turks suing for an armistice, the men of Agha Petros' command were disbanded and sent back to their own country. {225} CHAPTER XXII IN KURDISTAN The last phase--Dunsterforce ceases to exist--The end of Turkish opposition--Off to Bijar--The Kurdish tribes--Raids on Bijar--Moved on by a policeman--Governor and poet. It was in South-Western Kurdistan that I saw the last phase of the war between the Turks and ourselves. At the end of September, Dunsterforce had ceased to exist, at any rate under that name. Dunsterville himself had gone down to Bagdad to discuss the whole Caucasian and North Persian situation with General Headquarters, and the officers of Dunsterforce had either gone back to their units in France, Salonika, and Egypt, or had been absorbed by the North Persian force which was concentrating under General Thompson at Enzeli for a fresh smack at the Turk in Baku. After his capture of the oilfields' port, the enemy seemed to have reached the last stages of physical exhaustion, and to be incapable of further effort. His push through from Tabriz towards Zinjan and Kasvin had been finally arrested, and he had been driven back to his entrenchments on the Kuflan Kuh Pass, where he was well content to sit down to {226} a peaceful, inoffensive life, smoke his hubble-bubble, nurse his blistered feet lacerated by long marches on unfriendly Persian roads, and, in general, by his exemplary behaviour earn "good conduct" marks from the inhabitants of the zone of occupation.