This is a great story, but I became suspicious when they finally got to their source:
> The story of the Khevsurs comes from American adventurer Richard Halliburton's 1935 book, "Seven League Boots," a collection of his essays written while traveling off the beaten paths of the early 20th century. It includes an interview with the assassin of Tsar Nicholas II and a dinner conversation with Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie I.
Obviously, I can't know for certain which of these anecdotes is fact and which just make a great story, but this particular anecdote relies in part on a very suspect story about the ancestry of these people—a story which only outsiders ever told about them and which is of extremely dubious historicity [0].
Could a bunch of poorly armed horse-riding Khevsurs have volunteered to fight in WW1? It's plausible. But the idea that they were some sort of descendants of Western crusaders smacks of a story created for a sensational early-20th century travelogue.
> The story of the Khevsurs comes from American adventurer Richard Halliburton's 1935 book, "Seven League Boots," a collection of his essays written while traveling off the beaten paths of the early 20th century. It includes an interview with the assassin of Tsar Nicholas II and a dinner conversation with Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie I.
Obviously, I can't know for certain which of these anecdotes is fact and which just make a great story, but this particular anecdote relies in part on a very suspect story about the ancestry of these people—a story which only outsiders ever told about them and which is of extremely dubious historicity [0].
Could a bunch of poorly armed horse-riding Khevsurs have volunteered to fight in WW1? It's plausible. But the idea that they were some sort of descendants of Western crusaders smacks of a story created for a sensational early-20th century travelogue.
[0] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/nationalities-papers...