In the meantime his enemies had not been idle. Their spies were quick to report that no British reinforcements were arriving. Dunsterville's numerical weakness was apparent, and the drooping spirits of the Bolshevik Council revived. It had been cowed into inaction, but now it grew bold, and its attitude became menacing. The British General was presented with an ultimatum demanding his immediate withdrawal on pain of capture and death. There was no help for it. Withdraw Dunsterville must, and did. The Ford cars carrying the daring raiders sped away from the Bazaar of Resht and back to Hamadan, and through streets crowded with armed and hostile ruffians ripe for any crime. This, briefly, was the situation in the early days of March. Dunsterville had leaped and failed. He was back at Hamadan, holding on tenaciously, with a small body of officers and N.C.O.'s, no men, lacking supplies, from which he was separated by hundreds of miles of roadless country made doubly impassable by rain and melting snow, and threatened with extermination by unfriendly tribesmen who, wolf-like, were baying round him, eager yet afraid to strike. [Illustration: HOTEL D'EUROPE AT RESHT.] But, one will ask, what were Dunsterville and his force doing in Persia at all? And why had Britain, who had gone to war with Germany because the latter had overrun neutral Belgium, and who had professed so much horror for Germany's aggression, why had she, of all nations, violated Persian neutrality, {65} invaded Persian territory, and ignored Persian protests? The answer is simply that we entered Persia to defend Persian rights as much as to defend our own cause and the cause of the Allies. The territory of the Shah had been devastated by contending armies of Turks and Russians. It had been swept by fire and sword; and now those twin handmaidens of ruthless war, famine and disease, were abroad in the land of Iran, slaying indiscriminately such of the wretched helpless populace as had escaped the fury and the sword of Turk and Muscovite. Persia, by reason of its geographical boundaries--its frontiers being coterminous with those of Russia and Turkey--had in the early part of the great world struggle become the cockpit of the Middle East. The weak, emasculated Government of the Shah, a mere set of marionettes, hopped about on the political stage of a corrupt capital. It had no will of its own; and, even if it had, the constitutional advisers of the "King of Kings" had no means of enforcing it.