volume 2 - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian History Workshop

His Punitive Expedition Sets Out. 57
Constantinople, and that they had arrived safely, but
had been sold, and so the cavalry horses went without
their shoes. The merchants came to the assistance of
the Military Governor and supplied not only horse-shoes
and nails but men to shoe the horses. Then we heard
that the number of soldiers to be sent was reduced, first
to 150, then to 100, and eventually only 86 could be
equipped at all adequately. On the sixteenth day after
the Pash^ decided to attack the Shammar news ran
through the town that the punitive expedition was to
start that afternoon, and all Mosul flocked to the Sinjar
Gate to see it start. The men themselves were fine
large men, but their uniform and equipment were very
dilapidated. The tunics of many were burst at the
shoulders and lacked buttons, all their boots were dirty
and most of them needed repair, their bandoliers contained
old cartridges, as could be seen by the state of the
bullets, the rifles of many were slung at their backs by
bits of string, and great was the number of the varieties
of their bridles. Each soldier had many small bundles
tied to himself and his saddle-bags, and though some
were mounted on horses and some on mules and some
on asses, each man's load seemed to be the same. As
far as I could see no baggage train either preceded or
followed them as they rode out of the gate, and I assumed
that camels carrying fodder for their beasts and water
and rations for the men had started for Jabal Sinjar
earlier in the day. When I looked at the eighty-six men
that rode away to the west and compared them in my mind
with the Shammar horsemen who had robbed us, I could
not but feel sorry for them. But all Mosul was happy,
and seemed to have no doubt that the Turkish soldiers
would " eat up " the Shammar, and I drove away
gloomy thoughts and hoped that the Shammar would
be eaten up.
Five or six days later two horsemen galloped into
Mosul from the west and said that they had seen in the
distance the soldiers who had gone out against the
Shammar riding towards Mosul, together with a large
body of Shammar Arabs. This news created great