Lionel Dunsterville

Major General Lionel Charles Dunsterville, (9 November 1865 – 18 March 1946) was a British Army officer, who led Dunsterforce across present-day Iraq and Iran towards the Caucasus and Baku during the First World War. Early life Lionel Charles Dunsterville was born in Lausanne, Switzerland on 9 November 1865, the son of Lieutenant General Lionel D'Arcy Dunsterville (1830–1912) of the Indian Army and his wife, Susan Ellen (1835–1875). He went to school with Rudyard Kipling and George Charles Beresford at The United Services College, a public school later absorbed into Haileybury and Imperial Service College, which prepared British young men for careers in Her Majesty's Army. He served as the inspiration for the character "Stalky" in Kipling's collection of school stories Stalky & Co. He was also uncle to H.D. Harvey-Kelly, the first Royal Flying Corps pilot to land in France during the First World War. Military career Dunsterville was commissioned into the British Army as a lieutenant in the Sussex Regiment on 23 August 1884. He later transferred to the Indian Army, was promoted to captain on 23 August 1895, and served on the North-West Frontier and in Waziristan. As a railway staff officer he served in China during the Boxer Rebellion 1900–02, for which he was mentioned in despatches (by Major-General O'Moore Creagh, commander of British forces in China after the end of the main hostilities), and was promoted to major on 23 August 1902. In the First World War Dunsterville held a posting in India. At the end of 1917 the army appointed then-Major Dunsterville to lead an Allied force (Dunsterforce) of fewer than 1,000 Australian, British, Canadian and New Zealand troops, drawn from the Mesopotamian and Western Fronts, accompanied by armoured cars, from Hamadan in the Zagros Mountains of Persia for some 350 km across Qajar Persia. Dunsterville was promoted to major-general in 1918. His mission set out from Baghdad in January 1918, aiming to gather information, to train and command local forces, and to prevent the spread of German propaganda. On his way to Enzeli on the Persian Caspian coast he also fought Mirza Kuchik Khan and his Jangali forces in Manjil.