Sabres on the Steppes

by Ure, John

  It is to Bell that we owe evidence of the Russians’ duplicity towards the Caucasian chiefs. He describes in letters home how some of these chiefs were lured ‘to a conference’ on Russian soil, and then detained there as hostages for the good behaviour of their tribesmen. He also recounts remarkable tales of escape by some of the Circassians captured while on operations – filing off fetters, digging holes through dungeon walls, fighting off Cossacks with planks of wood, swimming rivers across frontiers – which made him feel that his own non-belligerent status left him open to the criticism of wimpishness.

  This impression was enhanced by the obvious willingness of fellow compatriots Longworth and Knight ‘to join in the first regular enterprise against the Russians’. Bell’s reputation was restored to some extent by his practice of medicine (sometimes little more than urging less hard drinking on a people who were naturally abstemious but had caught bad habits from their Russian invaders), and by his obviously genuine enthusiasm for his ‘searching for fossils, plants, etc.’. But the incident that did most to establish his credentials among his hosts was his prediction of an eclipse of the moon. His forecast regarding this was widely disseminated among the tribes, together with a reassurance that they should not view the phenomenon as an evil omen – as they would otherwise have been inclined to do. When the forecast proved true, no amount of explanation of calculations could dissuade the tribesmen from a belief in his supernatural powers.

  Another factor that distinguishes Bell from his compatriots in the Caucasus is his awareness of many of the failings of those tribesmen in whom Longworth could see little fault. Some of them were devious to the point of disloyalty, others were greedy in their soliciting of gifts, while some indulged in extreme and antiquated forms of Islamic practice: marriage within a ‘fraternity’ (which might be several thousand people strong) was looked upon as incest and punishable by drowning.

  It is enlightening to read Bell’s account of the Kuban river-crossing raid, carried out in conditions of melting ice, which is described in such detail by Longworth. The basic facts are corroborated by Bell’s account, but he does not share Longworth’s somewhat gung-ho attitude to the whole enterprise. There are references to ‘the impropriety of the attempt’ and to its ‘impracticality becoming but too palpable’ and to the risk of ‘a useless sacrifice of lives’. This is the language of a rational spectator rather than of a committed participant.

  His lack of military dash did not however modify the Russians’ venom against him. He had long known that the governor of their fort at Anapa was anxious to capture him; he later learnt that the governor’s superior officer – Baron Rosen, commander-in-chief of the imperial army in the Caucasus – had urged the Circassians to ‘cut these English to pieces’. The baron went on to tell his interlocutors that if they put the Englishmen to death and pretended that the Russians had done it, they would see that the British did not intervene in any way, because the tsar treated the British government ‘as a child, making it do whatever we think proper’. Shortly after this event, a messenger who took a letter to the Russians reported that the Russian general had offered to give anyone who would deliver Bell into their hands 2,000 silver roubles, and for Bell’s dragoman (interpreter/guide) half that amount; Bell wryly commented ‘we have thus now – my man and I – some idea of our market value’. The Russian general had added that, if the Circassians feared he would not keep his word, he was ready to pay them in advance on trust – a statement that said something about both their keenness to secure Bell and the relative trust of each side in the other’s word.

  Even if he felt mostly safe from murder by his Circassian hosts, Bell was never very far from being captured by the Russians. On one occasion he had to give up his relatively comfortable billet to make room for a wounded rebel soldier. And on another occasion – 24 April 1838 – he witnessed a major battle when a Russian ship landed a substantial force, including artillery, on the coast of Abkhazia ( just south of Circassia on the Black Sea shore). The tribesmen rushed among the Russians ‘sabre in hand’ cutting down about 150 of them and carrying off twenty prisoners and three cannons. But Bell comments that the rebels’ losses amounted to twice that number and included a large proportion of chiefs and nobles. The captured cannons had to be abandoned as they proved too heavy to propel over the rough ground. Once consolidated ashore, the Russians had set about cutting down the surrounding forest and establishing a permanent fort. In all, Bell comments that the encounter with the intruders had ‘proved as usual little else than a sacrifice of the bravest and the best’. The merchant in him was forever totting up the cost.

  Sometimes his spectator status was resented by those who were risking or sacrificing their own lives while Bell remained – in their view – a voyeur ‘enjoying the disasters of [their] countrymen’. While battle often raged around him, Bell generally ‘judged it best in the circumstances to sit still and look indifferent (inspecting, however, at the same time, the trigger of my pistol)’; this sort of conduct generated so much anger on one occasion that a passing horsemen told his Polish servant that ‘had [Bell] not been the guest of Hassan Bey [a local chief ] he would have shot me’. Bell concluded from the incident that he must be cautious, since, in the absence of any positive British support, some of the rebels were viewing him with increasing suspicion. Nonetheless he was still invited to help draft a reply to a Russian ultimatum, and the invective against England in this Russian communication went some way towards restoring him to his hosts’ goodwill.

  Indeed, it was unjust of Bell’s hosts to imagine that he took any pleasure in their discomfiture. In his letters he reports with enthusiasm those of their successes where he calculates that the risks were not foolhardy. He recounts in May 1838 how a body of Abkhazians lay in ambush on the verge of a forest and attacked a Russian force as it was attempting to cross a fast-flowing river: ‘a great proportion was drowned [. . .] and of the whole detachment but a very few escaped [. . .] the evil doings [of their leader] will – thank God! – be suspended for a time, for he was wounded in the leg’.

  Bell goes on to express the hope that this will be the prelude to further concerted attacks upon the invaders, and his hopes were fulfilled when the Circassians captured a small fort near Anapa and carried off its garrison, ammunition and another three guns. Such guns could be a decisive factor in reducing the mud and wood Russian fortifications (‘sod-forts’ as they were known) to a rubble that could be easily overrun by the sabre-wielding tribesmen, Bell notes. When shortly afterwards several ships from the Russian Black Sea fleet were wrecked by a storm off the Circassian coast, and their crews mostly drowned or captured, together with yet more cannons, Bell describes the affair with obvious satisfaction. A calculating observer Bell might have been, but not an impartial one.

  Just how careful it was necessary to be, to avoid being mistaken for a Russian sympathizer, was illustrated by the fate of a Sardinian ship captain who set out for the Caucasian coast with a cargo of goods for sale. Although he had been before on similar missions, on the occasion in question a report was spread around that the captain was a Russian secret agent, and so his ship was boarded, he and his second-in-command were killed, the crew made prisoner and sold into slavery to the Turks, and the cargo divided among the captors. Despite the fact that this event occurred some years before Bell’s visit, it nonetheless haunted him: a false rumour about a foreigner could easily prove fatal.

  If Russian spies were thought to be everywhere, Russian deserters were even more in evidence. One such, a Tartar from Kazan, was considered by the brother-in-law of Bell’s protector, Hassan Bey, to have deserved well of his new patrons, who consequently purchased for him a young serf girl to be his bride. However, the lady in question did not fancy being married to a Tartar, particularly not one who had Mongol features and who was more than twenty years older than her. The girl – who was reputed to be beautiful as well as very young – roundly declared that she would only marry one of her own countrymen. When Hassan
Bey’s brother-in-law insisted, she promptly hanged herself, and not long after her brother stabbed the offending brother-in-law. Bell’s sympathies were wholly with the stabber rather than the stabbed, despite his connection with the latter. Indeed, he found that this whole incident fuelled his reservations about the Circassians, and he commented in his letters that they reduced their serfs ‘to the level of cattle, which must propagate for the benefit of their master’.

  Whatever his reservations about his hosts, and whatever his shock at what he saw as some of the more unacceptable facets of extremist Islamic behaviour, Bell was far more shocked at the arrogance of their Russian invaders. Being used as a scribe for some of the correspondence with the Russian general meant that he saw the text of the threatening Russian missives dispatched to the rebel leaders. One such read: ‘There are but two powers, God in heaven, and the Emperor [tsar] upon earth! Do you not know that if the heavens should fall, Russia has power enough to support them on her bayonets?’. Reading this, Bell for once explodes in his letters: ‘Powers Eternal! Such names mingled!’

  It was not only at sea that the Russians were experiencing setbacks. When the tsar’s troops tried to rescue some of the material from their ships which had been wrecked in storms on the coast, they were chased back to their forts with heavy losses. Frequently only a small proportion of the sortie parties got safely home. The tribesmen then looted the shipwrecks themselves and carried off all the metal goods they could find, with the intention not of beating swords into ploughshares, but of doing just the reverse: iron bolts were beaten into knives, water tanks transformed into axes ‘and other necessities’. Bell kept passing these looting parties on the beaches and they told him what they were up to. The beaches were often within range of the cannon from the forts, so Bell and his companions had to keep ‘close under the foliage of the bank to prevent being fired at’. There were also some Russian corpses still on the beach, and Bell – knowing how much importance his hosts attached to the retrieval of their own dead – suggested an exchange of bodies with the Russians.

  Bell was safer however, even on the beaches, when he had a Circassian escort. When alone, quite unarmed except for a walking stick, he was detained by tribesmen on one occasion under suspicion of being a Russian deserter (who could be captured and sold to the Turks) or a spy (who should be shot). When a body-search revealed that Bell had no hidden pistols, they thought this even more strange, and had he not been recognized by one of his ‘protectors’ it might have ended up badly for him.

  But one thing that annoyed Bell far more than his being searched and detained was the interception of his letters back to Constantinople, with all his innermost thoughts and reflections on what was happening in the Caucasus. This came about because ‘a discarded domestic of David Urquhart’s [. . .] had latterly been converted into a Russian hireling or spy’ and had shared a room at Sinop on the Turkish coast with the courier who had been carrying Bell’s confidential correspondence. During the night he had extracted Bell’s letters and substituted for them other papers and then resealed the packet. So the courier was quite unaware that what had been entrusted to him had been purloined, until he reached Constantinople and the blank papers were discovered. Bell, on hearing of this and being told that the Russian consul was in possession of his private letters, once more exploded in wrath: ‘The tricks and petty plottings of these imperial functionaries would really almost degrade the meanest-of-all-possible of pettifogging attorneys or brokers’. It was not made better for Bell by hearing that the discharged servant who had stolen his letters had been rewarded with a post in the Russian diplomatic service. Greater British involvement in the region – a consul at Sinop for instance – seemed to Bell to be called for urgently.

  In contrast to this Russian duplicity, Bell records the honesty of the Circassians among whom he was living. He explains in his letters how for four months he slept out of doors under a great pear tree in an orchard, or on a platform erected for him by his host Hassan Bey, overlooking a valley running down to the coast where so much military action was taking place. On this platform, which served as bed and residence in one, Bell was accustomed to leaving his valuables – ‘my watch, silver snuff-box, silver-mounted dagger, knives, etc [. . .] quite unprotected’. He says that although his retreat was widely known throughout the neighbourhood, he never missed a single article. More importantly, no one betrayed his whereabouts to the Russians although, as he had already discovered from the Russian general’s remarks, ‘my person also is of no little value’. Part of the reason why he and his hideout were so well known was that people were always dropping in to ask for favours; usually these were either in the form of requests for ‘a flint or a few charges of powder and balls’ before some raid, or else for medical prescriptions or advice. In respect of the latter, Bell was continually amazed at the way in which wounded tribesmen, instead of being left to rest and recuperate in quiet and whatever comfort was available, would instead find their tents or huts were the centre of the noisiest activity – it being considered that a rowdy party was the most heartening and restorative experience that could be afforded them.

  Like Longworth, Bell was aware of the tsar’s visit to the Caucasus in the autumn of 1837. Bell also learnt about the changes made in the Russian military command as a result of the tsar’s disappointment at the way the campaign was being conducted. Marshal Rosen, the governor of the province, and General Williamanoff, the military commander, were both dismissed from their posts and downgraded. The invading force was strengthened and the spring offensive the following year was brought forward to allow for a longer campaign.

  This surge in troops was attended by a measure of success. In particular, threats to devastate one of the regions to the east of that in which Bell was operating resulted in the tribesmen handing back to the invaders some seventy Russian refugees – many of them Poles – who had converted to Islam and professed to be anxious to go on pilgrimage to Mecca. The unforgiving Tsar Nicholas I had all these ‘deserters’ sent to Siberia for an indefinite period of hard labour. However the act of having handed them back was viewed as ‘perfidious’ and upset the unity and solidarity of the resistance movement.

  The intelligence reaching the new Russian commanders also seemed to be improving. When a large-scale gathering of the clans was organized to launch an assault on one of the Russian forts – an operation at which Bell planned to be a witness but not a participant – the assailants discovered that the enemy were completely on their guard ‘no doubt through treachery’ and great fires had been kept blazing around the walls all night and a corps of infantry already standing to arms to repel the attackers. But although the planned assault was frustrated, other lesser attacks continued, particularly focused on the supply columns between the Russian forts. Bell, although keeping his distance as always from the melees, was close enough to witness some scenes of remarkable audacity: the more dashing of the young tribesmen when confronted with discharges of musketry and artillery ‘never fired a shot themselves, but drawing their sabres, rushed amid the ranks wherever they could find openings’. It was a point of honour among them to leave no part of their gear behind in enemy hands: ‘to lose one’s bonnet is as great disgrace here now as it was anciently to leave behind one’s shield’. One youth is singled out for special praise by Bell because, when his horse was shot from under him, he ‘kept the bayonetted Russians around him at bay with his sabre’ until he had unstrapped his saddle and cut his way out carrying off this vital piece of his equipment.

  Bravery was more in evidence than discipline among the tribesmen. Bell records how when the ramparts of one Russian fort was scaled without ladders, and the occupants all killed or held prisoner, the position had to be abandoned because they found that their fellow tribesmen ‘who had been placed at the port-holes of the [Russian] guns commanding the fosse, to pistol the gunners whenever they presented themselves, neglected that important duty, and thoughtlessly joined the scaling party’. Consequently when the Ru
ssian gunners reappeared they turned their guns on the massed Circassians in the fosse and mowed them down with the dreaded grapeshot.

  For a considerable time now, Bell had been the sole Englishman with the insurgents as Longworth and Knight had departed some months before. By October 1839 he had therefore decided that ‘the time is arrived for my again running the gauntlet in departing in one of those crank-looking Turkish crafts’. When the winds turned favourable, he and several shipmates assembled in a little creek which was concealed from view. It was agreed that the danger from the Russian coastal patrol ships in smooth conditions was greater than that of setting out in rough weather. Indeed, the frequency of sightings of Russian warships convinced Bell that he was the object of this special vigilance: the Russians had probably learnt of his intended departure and saw this as a last chance of seizing him.

  There were various false starts: no sooner had a favourable wind induced them to foregather in the creek, than they saw ‘an old acquaintance – the three-masted cutter I was formerly chased by’. The decision of when to set sail was complicated by the fact that the greedy skipper of Bell’s ship had signed up far too many passengers in the hope of making more money on the dangerous run to Turkey, and he was now afraid that if he delayed they might defect to another vessel. Bell went down to the creek with his baggage and a debate ensued about whether or not to sail; the captain was so keen to set out before he lost his lucrative passengers that, when confronted with the threat of the Russian cruisers, resorted to the mantra that ‘Their fate would be decided by the Will of God’ so they might as well sail. This placed Bell – an unbeliever – in an awkward position, but he argued that although it was true that everything depended on the will of God, that did not absolve the captain from taking the best decision he could in all the circumstances. Finally, a postponement was decided upon, until the coast was clearer.