Overnight they sent into the village, unperceived by the British, an infantry detachment which fraternized with the inhabitants and also with a small party of our irregulars who were on observation duty there. The treacherous irregulars said nothing of the presence of the Turks in their midst, and made common cause with them at once. Towards midnight the Turks smuggled in a machine-gun, which they subsequently mounted on the flat roof of the dwelling of a Persian official. At daylight the Turks, from cover of the village itself, opened a violent machine-gun fire on the headquarters of Osborne, which were in a serai a short distance on {172} the Mianeh side of Tikmadash village. All the officers, some eight or ten in number, lived here. There were two doors to the serai on two different sides of the building. Both these exits were sprayed with machine-gun fire. There was nothing for it but to open the door and run the gauntlet. It was like coming within the vortex of a hail-storm, yet, surprising to relate, few were hit. Beyond the weak units of the 14th Hussars, the Hants, and the Ghurkas, Osborne had nothing to depend upon in this critical hour save levies recruited in Mianeh and elsewhere who, in spite of their boastings, were always fire-shy. They took up a position this morning at Tikmadash, but it was clear from the beginning that their hearts were not in the business. After firing some shrapnel into the position, the Turks stormed it with two thousand infantry. The shell fire had already stampeded the Persians, but their British officers, Captains Heathcote, Amory, and Trott of the Devons, and Hooper of the Royal West Kents, by dint of persuasion and threats, temporarily stopped the disorderly flight, and induced the wavering men to follow them back into the line. But a few more shells from the Turkish gun, which burst with telling accuracy, finished the resistance of the levies. Osborne had no artillery, the mountain battery section from Mianeh not having yet arrived. This time the portion of the line held by the levies {173} doubled up like a piece of paper. Panic seized them, and they fled with all the swiftness of hunted animals, throwing away their rifles as they ran. The Hants, Ghurkas, and Hussars were now all that was left to cover the retirement. The Turks were working round both flanks and, had the British hung on, the whole force would have been surrounded and killed or captured. Some of the British soldiers were so incensed at the cowardice of the Persians that they turned their rifles against the fugitives and shot them in their tracks.