Sabres on the Steppes

by Ure, John

  Before they arrived in what was now the territory of Afghanistan (Herat had only been captured from Bokhara very shortly before) they had to go through some narrow passes and over some precipitous one-foot-wide paths where a false step by man or camel would have resulted in falling into a ravine far below. Vambery had pictured to himself ‘Afghanistan as a land already half organized, where, through long contact with Western influence, at least something of order and civilization had been introduced’. He had hoped to be able to shed his disguise as soon as he got there. But he was sorely disappointed. From the first contact with the customs officials, he realized that he was still amid ‘all the inhumanity and barbarity [. . .] of Central Asia’. The only thing that slightly cheered him up was the appearance of an officer who had a ‘genuine soldier-like bearing, and his uniform buttoned tight over his chest’. This at least reminded him of Europe. But rather disconcertingly, the officer in question thought Vambery also looked European, and tried to shake his hand in the English manner.

  Despite being so recently a war zone, Herat lived up to its reputation as a fertile and rich plain. But the city itself showed all too clear evidence of the recent fighting. Everyone went everywhere heavily armed, not just with poniards but with swords, shields and pistols: to be well dressed was to be martial-looking. Many were still wearing English red military coats – probably trophies from the First Afghan War – which they declined to take off even when sleeping. The friction between the dominant Pathans and the underclass of Heratis was already all too evident.

  Vambery himself was by now so impoverished that he was sleeping rough in the ruins and scraping together whatever he could to eat: no longer did the locals support a visiting dervish as at Khiva. He tried in vain to join various caravans bound for Meshed in Persia. Finally he decided that the one person who might help him on his way was the ruling prince – the sixteen-year-old boy who, in the absence of his father the king, was governing Herat. The young prince was usually so bored by granting audiences that he sat by the window in his palace and spent his time watching the guards drilling outside. When Vambery was admitted, he adopted his usual technique of boldly asserting his status as a dervish holy man: he stepped right up to the prince and seated himself between the prince and his grand vizier ‘after having required the latter, a corpulent Afghan, to make room for me by a push with the foot’. It was then that the awkward exchange occurred – with the prince accusing him of being an Englishman – which was recounted at the opening of this chapter. After Vambery had successfully managed to treat this suggestion as a joke, the prince had ‘sat down half ashamed’ saying it was still the case that he had never seen a pilgrim looking like this one. At that point, Vambery produced his much-used passport from the Turkish sultan and dropped the names of various distinguished Afghans who had appeared at the Ottoman court during the time of his residence there. After this all was sweetness and light, and the prince gave him a small donation.

  However he was still no nearer to getting away from Herat. And when word got around of the prince’s suspicions that he was an Englishman, everyone wanted to stare at him and express their own view on the subject. The longer he stayed, the more his feelings became hostile towards the Afghans; he heard shocking stories of how they had behaved after their capture of the city a few weeks earlier; he heard nostalgic talk of the days when the British officer Major Todd had presided there; and he even was persuaded that the population ‘long most for the intervention of the English’. Everything conspired to make him feel that only a British forward policy in the region could protect it from the Russian advance or the cruelty and corruption of its own rulers.

  Eventually he managed to join a caravan of some 2,000 people, mostly Hezaris from Kabul, heading for Meshed and Persia. This was a trading caravan, unlike the earlier pilgrim ones with whom he had travelled; many of his companions were carrying cargos of indigo or skins. He managed to negotiate a seat on a lightly loaded mule, by promising to pay for the privilege when he reached Meshed and ‘should no longer be in a state of destitution’. By doing this, he realized he was for the first time compromising his cover story: no real dervish pilgrim would be able confidently to call on funds the moment he reached a Persian city. But he did not dare completely to set aside his disguise, because he thought the more fanatical Afghans might ‘avenge their insulted tenets on the spot’. But all the time his true provenance was the subject of speculation among the merchants: some thought he was a Turk but an increasing number now leant towards the idea that he really was an Englishman. As they approached the frontier, Vambery himself started setting aside the postures of humility and holy status that he had for so long adopted as a dervish, and began more and more to revert to ‘the upright and independent deportment of a European’.

  At Meshed Vambery was welcomed by Colonel Dolmagne, an English officer in the Persian service, who offered him the hospitality of his house for a month of recovery from the rigours of his travels. From Meshed onward his journey was totally relaxed. At Tehran, from where he had set out nearly a year before, he was made welcome by Mr Alison, the British Charge d’Affaires, who arranged an audience for him with the shah, in the course of which he was decorated with the Order of the Lion and Sun. More importantly, Alison also paved the way for Vambery’s warm reception in London.

  The first thing Vambery wanted to do on arrival in London in June 1864 was to give an account of his travels to the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) at Burlington House. This was such a success that he was showered with invitations to society dinner parties and to weekends at grand houses in the country. He became ‘the lion of the London season’; he met the Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VII); publishers sought him out and he had encounters with Charles Dickens and the poet Swinburne; other explorers like Sir Richard Burton were fascinated by his tales; he was invited to join the Athenaeum Club; his views on Islam were listened to with attention by the foremost Anglican theologian of the time, Bishop ‘Soapy’ Wilberforce of Oxford (who was to become renowned for wrestling in debate with Charles Darwin about evolution); he exchanged views on foreign policy in Central Asia with Lord Palmerston and even with Disraeli. But he still had many moments of nostalgia for the steppes and deserts he had left behind. He recorded: ‘My wanderings have left powerful impressions upon my mind. Is it surprising, if I stand sometimes bewildered, like a child, in Regent Street or in the saloons of British nobles, thinking of the deserts of Central Asia, and the tents of the Kirghis and the Turkomans?’

  In a book about British adventurers confronting tsarist Russia, it may at first sight seem strange that Arminius Vambery should find a prominent place. It is true that he was not born British but Hungarian; however, he saw himself as centred on England and was continually on the lookout for British interests – and threats to British interests – in his travels; it was to London he returned to unburden himself of his experiences at the RGS; it was in London that in 1864 he found a publisher, John Murray, for his best-selling account of his trip; it was in London that he was appreciated and lionized; and it was to London he returned twenty years later to continue his campaign to alert the British establishment to the dangers facing India from Russia in Central Asia. It must also be remembered that when he was suspected on his travels of not being a Turkish dervish, it was almost always as an Englishman that he was perceived. He had the outlook and bearing of an Englishman and was proud of it.

  That he was an adventurer needs no elaboration: even Sir Richard Burton (who knew something of the perils of disguising oneself as a Moslem) recognized a like spirit in Vambery. And his role in confronting tsarist Russia was to become very explicit from the moment of his publication of his travelogue. His book contains a final chapter entitled ‘The Rivalry of the Russians and English in Central Asia’, in which he confronts head-on what he sees as British complacency in the face of the advancing tsarist conquest of the khanates and emirates dividing southern Russia from the British Raj in India: ‘I disapprove of the indi
fference of the English to the Russian policy in Central Asia’, he writes. He thinks the British argument that, because Russia is a Christian power her influence on Islamic emirates must be benign, is deeply flawed. He draws attention to the inexorable encroaches of Russian power and influence into the region, and foretells – all too accurately – how one state after another (Tashkent, Khiva, Bokhara, Samarkand, Merv and so on) will fall to them in the next few years. He writes of the building of forts and defences, and of the Russian shipping dominating the Aral Sea. He doubts whether Russia will satisfy herself with the Oxus as a boundary, and whether she will not ‘seek some richer compensation than is to be found in the oases of Turkestan’ – in fact the compensation of India itself.

  It was Vambery’s misfortune that his arrival in England and the publication of his book in 1864 coincided with a period when ‘forward’ policies were discouraged in favour of ‘masterly inactivity’ in Central Asia. The peace-loving Mr Gladstone was a rising force in the government, and the country was still bruised by the heavy losses of the Crimean War and anxious to avoid renewed confrontation with Russia. Vambery went back to Hungary and took up a professorship in oriental studies at Budapest. But he continued to write to The Times and to other bodies in England about Russian expansion, and when – by 1885 – many of his gloomy prophesies had been fulfilled, he returned to London and was invited to lecture up and down the country on his favourite theme of the threat to India. This time, his words fell on more fertile ground: the Great Game was launching once more into full swing. His book on the subject, The Struggle for India, became an instant best-seller. He was described by Charles Marvin (a notable expert on Russian interests in Asia) as ‘England’s warmest and most disinterested supporter in her rivalry with Russia [. . .] a model English patriot’.

  Towards the end of his life, Vambery’s close connection with the sultan of Turkey was exploited by the British government, who even paid him a salary from secret service funds to supply confidential information. He had instant access to the sultan, while accredited ambassadors were often kept waiting for weeks for an audience and – never over modest – he boasted that ‘ten ambassadors could not accomplish in years what I have done in days’. His secret paymasters were afraid that he would mention their payments to the Prince of Wales and that, if once the indiscreet prince knew, then ‘all London will know’. Eventually he negotiated a pension from the Foreign Office who were afraid he might – in his uncertain old age – release embarrassingly private and confidential letters that had been written to him by successive foreign secretaries over the previous quarter of a century. ‘He is not a bad sort but tremendously self-centred and vain’ was the verdict of one senior Foreign Office official on the aging self-styled dervish. The pension may have had an element of hush-money in it.

  Whatever might be the case, this adopted Englishman and celebrated adventurer had confronted tsarist Russia as directly and effectively as many who had fallen – decked out in their scarlet uniforms or concealed in their shabby disguises – in the passes of Afghanistan or on the steppes of Turkistan.

  1. When the author crossed the Elburz mountains in the course of the journey recounted in The Trail of Tamerlane (1980), his muleteer-guide assumed that his luggage included a tent. When informed it did not, he managed to find overnight shelter under the roof of a brigand-like family whose reaction to his arrival was more hostile than welcoming.

  2. It seems more than likely that his romantic feelings about the Oxus owed something to Matthew Arnold’s poem ‘Sohrab and Rustum’, which had been published less than ten years earlier and with which, as an ardent anglophile, he would have been familiar.

  Chapter 10

  Edmund O’Donovan: The Frustrated War Correspondent

  ‘I had no idea you could become what I became, an unscathed tourist of wars.’

  – Martha Gelhorn (1908–98)

  Among the troublemakers on the frontiers of Central Asia there were many unorthodox characters who were out of step with their own government’s policies. Few however had quite such a chequered record as Edmund O’Donovan, the special correspondent of the London Daily News. Born in Ireland in the middle of the nineteenth century, his father – who was an eminent Irish scholar – had his son educated by the Jesuits and then encouraged him either to join the Royal Irish Constabulary or to read medicine at Trinity College, Dublin. But it was not to be. Young Edmund’s inclinations were in a very different direction: by the time he was in his early twenties he was already involved with the Fenian (Irish revolutionary independence) movement. In 1866 he was arrested and incarcerated for a year at Mountjoy Prison, only being released on condition he immediately emigrated to America. He accepted this condition, but had no sooner arrived in the United States than he was making plans to return illegally to his native Ireland. Having done so, he resumed his subversive activities and was again arrested, this time for possession of unauthorized weapons, and was back in jail at Limerick. After a ten-month sentence, he again went abroad, this time to England where he started plotting with an underground Irish revolutionary movement. When one of his co-plotters was sentenced to fifteen years hard labour, O’Donovan realized that things were becoming too hot and he went abroad – this time to France – with the intention of staying away.

  But he did not intend to settle down to a quiet life. In France he joined the Foreign Legion and was soon seeing active service in the Franco-Prussian War. After a period as a German prisoner of war, he moved on to Spain and was involved in the Carlist War, once more being on the losing side and ending up in prison. Perhaps tiring of such regular detention, he now shifted his field of activity from insurgency and soldiering to journalism, resolving to report on military activities rather than participate in them. After covering insurrections in the Balkans and sending dispatches about the Russian-Turkish war of 1877, he moved on to Central Asia just in time to witness the tsarist troops storming and capturing Geok Tepe. He would have liked to have been more closely involved (he only saw the action from a hilltop ten miles away) but determined to be a closer witness to the next Russian assault, as his sympathies were already firmly with the struggling khans and emirs whose territories lay in the path of the tsar’s advance. The oasis city of Merv, ‘Queen of the World’, seemed a sensible place to await further action.

  Getting to Merv from Geok Tepe was to prove no easy task. To start with, all the steppe around Geok Tepe was swarming with soldiery on the rampage: some were Turkoman refugees, some were Russian soldiers intent on plunder, others were neighbouring tribesmen who – sensing that there was loot to be had – had swept down from the hills to join the fray. O’Donovan managed to make his way southwards to Ashkhabad and then headed on towards Kelat, passing through ‘jungle so thick that it was with much ado that we were able to force our way through’; there were encounters with jackals and leopards and ‘snakes, mostly of a venomous kind, glided across our track every moment’. He was not far here from the dreaded swamps which surrounded the banks of the Tejend river, and which made a formidable barrier for those escaping the advancing Cossacks from the north. He made two reconnaissances of the swamp and found that wild boar and leopards abounded and tigers were not uncommon. ‘The marsh’, he concluded, ‘is a treacherous expanse and men and horses are often swallowed in its depths while attempting its passage at night’.

  From Kelat he hoped to set out across the desert to Merv before the Russians could get there. But getting out of Kelat was almost as difficult as reaching it. The Khan of Kelat was reluctant to let him travel alone in these parts in case he upset the prospect of some ultimate accommodation with the Russians. Most of the Turkomans and other inhabitants were fairly unconcerned about who claimed sovereignty over their lands, provided that their Moslem faith was not interfered with. O’Donovan records: ‘I remember an old man asking if the Russians were likely to build churches and ring bells in their villages [. . .] these were the only points that seemed to interest him’.

  To prev
ent his slipping away and causing trouble, the khan attached an ‘escort’ to O’Donovan to keep him under surveillance. Indeed any thought of slipping away was made more difficult by the fact that ‘Kelat is not a town, properly speaking: but an oval valley, enclosed on all sides by almost vertical cliffs over a thousand feet high. Narrow gorges [. . .] are the only means of access to the valley’. No one could leave through these gorges without a pass from the khan. However, O’Donovan was equal to the challenge. He got permission to go out of the valley on a short excursion, where he managed to shed his escort – who were more frightened than he was of the approaching Cossacks – and then, pretending to be returning to Kelat with his two servants, he managed to give the slip to those who were watching his every move from the ramparts. Having followed the road back to Kelat until out of sight ‘among the first ravines and hills spurs [. . .] I turned my horse’s head and rode swiftly in the direction of Merv’.

  His brief spell at Kelat had had one important effect on his attitude towards the Russians. Here he met refugees from Geok Tepe who reported horrendous tales of General Skobeloff, the army commander, who had told the 15,000 Turkoman women left behind after the rout of the stronghold that, unless their male relatives returned to look after them and accept the rule of the tsar, he would abandon them to the lusts of his soldiery. He had also made them pile up all their gold trinkets and jewellery as ‘a war contribution’.

  The decision to strike out across the desert to Merv was a bold, indeed reckless one. Not only were there few watering places, but those which there were tended to be frequented by roving bands of Tekke Turkomans. Colourful as these people might be, with their huge black sheepskin hats and their dark red robes, their sabres and carbines, they were in fact more of a serious menace than a picturesque experience. Although they professed to be intent on sowing and harvesting crops (the water came from a stream dependent on the goodwill of the Khan of Kelat) they were clearly in the habit of robbing or capturing anyone rash enough to venture within their range. O’Donovan spent two nights in their encampments.