Memoir of the Career of Thomas Edward Rogers [‎25r] (49/118)

a verdict of suicide by a remorseful philanderer. I do not know whether the
Russians intervened in this case. That the Persians were sensitive to Russian
pressure is borne out by a story Reader Bullard, our Ambassador in Teheran at
the time, used to tell. A Persian Minister reproached an editor for only
attacking the British in his paper and never the Russians. 'What?' said the
S'
editor, 'attack the Russians? Why, they kidnap people'.
The sudden death of our ally's Vice-Consul shocked me. At this time I was a
stranger to Russian literature and only later reading of, say, Dostoievsky would
show me I need not have been surprised. Besides, looking back years later from
the attitudes of cold war suspicion which blotted out the early honeymoon days
of allies united against a common enemy, I might have harboured less charitable
thoughts about a man and his wife both likely to have been, as the sole Russians
in Bushire, primarily concerned with intelligence.
Not all the new wartime colour in Bushire was Russian. The Americans put on
stage a bearded slouch-hatted elder looking more baddie from an early Western
than the distinguished professor of geology he was in fact as, full of hope and
desire to help the Persians, he took me along to inspect the parched water-worn
ravines near the Residency An office of the East India Company and, later, of the British Raj, established in the provinces and regions considered part of, or under the influence of, British India. near Sabzabad (which he was surprised to learn meant
'green place'). His face fell as he declared them exactly like the badlands of
South Dakota. He was still less hopeful of their potentialities for irrigation
when I said Bushire's sparse rains only made our brown rock-hard nine hole golf
course a little softer but hardly green for a few weeks and that not every year.
We had no 'greens', only flat sand mixed with crude oil which we called 'browns'.
A plump fresh-faced young American officer new out of college and of open mind
and speech arrived to size up Bushire in general and its port capacity in particular.
I liked this first sample of the thirty thousand non-combatant, mainly technical
American troops who would take part in the despatch of economic and military aid