Annotated Copy of Persia and the Persian Question by George Curzon, with Inserted Papers [‎415r] (832/1814)

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THE ARMY
by the insulting dismissal of all English civil and military officers
from the royal camp in the summer of 1836 ; and when, after two
years of ineffective protest and diplomatic duelling, Sir J. McNeill
finally hauled down his flag and quitted Persia, all British officers
in the Persian service were ordered to do likewise. Thus abruptly
and futilely terminated the last appearance of British officers upon
the parade grounds or battle-fields of Persia. Failure though the
experiment may have been, viewed in the light either of immediate
consequences or of its bearing upon Anglo-Persian relations, it
yet remains true that, such as it is, the Persian army, even at this
day, exists only by virtue of what British officers did for it in the
past; and that though other nationalities may have stepped in to
claim, or more frequently to ruin, the harvest, yet whatever of
drill, or discipline, or efficiency, is still found among the soldiers of
the Shah, has sprung from the seeds which were so laboriously
sown for thirty years by the exertions, and were even watered by
the life-blood, of Englishmen. 1
Upon the retreat of the English detachment, the French, who
seem throughout the century to have occupied a position analogous
5 French f° fbnf °f a second string in a racing stable, again
officers appeared upon the scene. Sir H. Layard encountered
them in the Shah’s army at Hamadan in 1840 ; 2 and his companion,
Mr. Mitford, was in their company at Teheran a little later. 3 The
1 Sir H. Rawlinson, in a lecture delivered before the Royal United Service In
stitution in 1858, mentioned as an illustration of the resourcefulness developed in
the Persian artillery under Sir H. Bethune, the fact that, at the siege of Herat in
1837-8, when the Persian army was lacking in heavy guns, the artillerymen col
lected all the copper trays belonging to the chiefs in the camp, and the bells off
the mules, improvised a foundry, made moulds, and cast three large 64-pounders
on the spot. It was true that two of these guns burst immediately, and the third
before long. But still it was a great achievement in a desert. It was, indeed, the
Persian artillery who responded to European tuition more quickly than any other
branch of the service, and who longest retained the efficiency thus acquired.
Eraser, who saw them in 1834 in Khorasan, described them as ‘light-hearted,
willing, active men, who cheerfully put up with privations and hardships. In
the performance of duty they were alert and ready; and no European troops
could have handled their heavy field-pieces better in difficult ground. In fact, the
passes over which they dragged them with little aid from pioneers or tools would
have made a European artillery officer stare’ (A Winter’s Journey, vol. ii. p. 293).
He Bode bore exactly analogous testimony to the artillery in the army of the
Motemed-ed-Dowleh, when operating in the difficult Bakhtiari mountains in 1841
{Travels in Luristan, vol. ii. pp. 18, 19).
2 Early Adventures, vol. i. pp. 255, 265.
3 Land March from England to Ceylon, vol. ii. p. 6.