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The Russian Caucasian army, which occupied the liberated Western Armenian provinces, was in disorder and rapidly disintegrating, and the Russian soldiers deserted to return to their homes. The first task of the new Caucasian government, limited though its means were, was to gather an army which could maintain the Turkish front. Since the Tatars refused to fight their Turkish cousins and the Georgian Mensheviks were under the sway of an inconvenient and illogical pacifism, the entire burden of the war fell upon the shoulders of the Armenians. Winston Churchill writes: "At the beginning of 1918 the Russian army abandoned the front in Asia Minor and became a scattered flock whose only desire was to return home. Russians left the front very quickly and the Turks had not yet advanced. The Armenians who stayed behind made a desperate attempt to defend their country, Armenia, and the Armenians in the Russian army gathered and, with the volunteer units, for a time, were able to stop the Turkish advance. Of the 150 000 soldiers that the Armenians had supplied to the Russian army, all had fallen in battle or were scattered over the empire, so that the Armenians were not able to gather more than 35 000 men." 5



At the start of 1918, the Armenian army, continuing in Armenian military traditions, the hope and the condition for an independent Armenian government, took up position at the Western Armenian front. The Armenian army was led by commanders such as General Nazarbekian, General Andranik (known as the Armenian Garibaldi) and Colonel Morel, the Russian officer who was its founder and protector. The army fought without respite to defend Western Armenia and Transcaucasia, a 400 km front, against the Turkish army. General Brehman subsequently recorded: "The efforts of the Armenians at this remote front has been concealed from the European general public, but their place in history should be assured with the heroic deeds carried out during these battles, and the difficulties of providing food and provision, and communication in a landscape with high mountains and a merciless enemy, which in number of soldiers had a crushing advantage, and this in a region that had been closed off from the rest of the world and in which the people fought despite the fact that their doom had been long coming, and were subject to massacres and genocide." 6

H. Barby, military correspondent for a newspaper in Paris, who was an eyewitness to the battles, describes them thus: "The uneven battle between the Turkish army, with its huge advantage in number of soldiers and modern equipment, and the Armenian army had started and would continue for seven or nine months, as the heroic defence of Baku held until the middle of September 1918. During this time, the Armenians were far away from their allies, and the provisions which they promised to send to them never arrived, and in this difficult and sad moment the Georgians abandoned them, while their other neighbours, the Kurds and the Tatars, constantly sabotaged their work. Despite all this, this martyr nation of Christianity heroically resisted, of course not in the hope of an outright victory over the Turks, but in the hope that they would delay their advance towards the territory of Transcaucasia until the sounding of the bell for the allied victory." 7

The Armenian army first defended Erzinjan (February 1918), then Erzurum (March 1918) against the Turkish army. The leaders of the Young Turks concentrated their elite units at this front, hoping to be able to achieve their dream of Pan Turanism. 8 With the lack of movement of the British forces in Mesopotamia, around 400 000 soldiers, who after the conquest of Baghdad in 1917 did not advance towards Mosul in order to join the Armenian army at Lake Van, the entire weight of this front fell to the Armenians.