Sabres on the Steppes

by Ure, John

  They were uncomfortable experiences in every sense: the reed huts or broken-down forts that constituted the Turkoman camps were alive with black fleas, cockroaches and scorpions; and the attentions of his Turkoman hosts were alternately embarrassing and threatening. ‘A fire of camel’s dung smouldered [. . . the hut] speedily became crammed to suffocation by Turkomans, whose curiosity was little short of ferocious [. . .] they literally thrust their noses into my face, and seemed desirous of looking down my throat’.1 More worrying than this unwanted attention was the fact that the majority of them seemed convinced that he was a Russian spy. They could not think what he could be doing wandering round the desert with a refugee from Geok Tepe and a dubious Kurd (his two servants or guides) unless he were spying out the route for an advancing Russian army – which was known to be all too close. On this occasion he was saved by a Persian visitor who ‘having seen a little more of men and things than the nomads’ firmly declared that he was not a Russian. Even when this suspicion was lifted, there were other hazards. A well-disposed local chief whispered to him that the greater number of his fellow camp-occupants were thieves and that it was ‘advisable to look very sharply after my horses [. . .] he had taken the precaution of chaining them together by the fetlocks’.

  Having convinced his hosts that he was wanting to warn the inhabitants of Merv of the oncoming Cossacks and make the outside world aware of what was happening (the concept of a foreign correspondent was a totally novel one to them), he was eventually allowed to proceed on his way with four armed Turkomans to guard him. But like his earlier escort at Kelat, these less-than-intrepid companions soon abandoned him to his travels. At his next stopping place he was told tales of the quarrels between the Turkoman and Persian inhabitants of the desert he was crossing; his host explained at length what a generous-hearted man he was, because when the descendant of a Persian who had murdered his great-uncle fell into his hands, he refrained from killing him ‘only cutting off his ears and nose, and chopping off his fingers in the middle’. O’Donovan confesses in his book that ‘this disclosure of the amenities of border society [. . .] doubled my anxiety to make a final plunge [on to Merv]’.

  And press on he did. Again he was allocated an escort, this time ‘each of them as truculent-looking a fellow as I ever met with in any part of the world’ (and O’Donovan had met a few truculent fellows among his fellow-prisoners and mercenaries). When they eventually came to the Tejend river, which was about fifty yards wide at that point, they found the fording of it quite a problem, the horses zig-zagging across to find the shallowest route and the men kneeling on their saddles with their supplies of tea and sugar on their shoulders to keep them dry. The waters were infested with otters and huge water rats. For the final stages of his journey it was necessary, for reasons of avoiding ambush, to travel whenever possible at night; sleep was difficult by day and interrupted at night; he was periodically soaked through his leopardskin wrap; when he did arouse himself for the next stage of the ride, he frequently found himself to be ‘a peripatetic museum of entomology [. . .] there were juvenile tarantulas, stag beetles, lizard-like mantis’ and other wildlife to be shaken off or combed out of his hair.

  When he finally found himself approaching Merv, it proved to be a grave disappointment at first sight. He had expected a city of minarets and domes, fountains and elegant courtyards. What he found was a series of clusters of kibitkas (round felt tents not unlike Mongolian yurts). But if the city was a disappointment to him, he was not a disappointment to it. Crowds gathered to watch his approach, which must have been a fairly remarkable sight: he rode holding an umbrella (something unseen there before) over himself; he wore ‘an enormous tiara of greyish-black sheepskin [on his head . . .] over my shoulders was a drenched leopard skin [. . .] my legs were comparisoned in long black boots armed with great steel spurs, appendages utterly unknown in Turkestan [. . .] a sabre and revolving carbine completed my outfit’. He knew he looked bizarre, but had long ago given up any hope of passing himself off as a native of the region.

  But the truly worrying aspect of his arrival was not that he looked bizarre, but that he looked as if he was a prisoner – booty being brought back from a desert raid. And the truculent-looking escort had suddenly transmogrified themselves into not so much a bodyguard as a group of warders. O’Donovan could hear them speculating among themselves about what they should do with him. ‘How could anyone know that he was not a Russian? What will our friends say when we bring him among them? Who knows but he has a brigade of Cossacks at his heels? What is his business here? Who knows but they will kill him at the first village?’ For two hours he was kept waiting in the saddle in driving rain while these issues were debated among his escort; periodically some of the party looked daggers at him, and others ‘seemed inclined to solve the matter there and then by finishing me off’. Fortunately, the more well-disposed towards him won the day, and he was permitted to proceed further towards the centre of the city.

  Unimpressive as the city was, there was plenty of evidence of Merv being the crossroads of desert caravan routes from all over Central Asia: bales of silk, tea, tobacco and other merchandise from Bokhara and bound for Meshed lay stacked around the dusty tracks. He consoled himself with the thought that, whatever problems and dangers lay ahead for him, he had at least reached his long-sought destination: ‘Here I was, at last, at the heart of the Turkoman territory. Let the future take care of itself’.

  The debate about what was to be done with him continued when he reached another gathering. One local chief asked him directly who and what he was. He tried to explain ‘the functions of a peripatetic literary man’ and said that if he wrote a letter to the British agent at Meshed, and sent it by the caravan that was about to set out, confirmation would quickly be forthcoming of the innocent nature of his mission. But the mere suggestion of putting pen to paper ‘was met by a shout of warning not to attempt to write a single word, or my throat would be immediately cut’. Writing things down and espionage were synonymous in the eyes of his hosts. Nonetheless, under cover of his mantle he did manage to jot down a few notes about his adventures: already he probably had a book in mind. But this was a dangerous occupation because ‘fully a dozen eyes were watching me through crannies in the door and walls [of his hut]’.

  The following day he was taken on to the very heart of Merv, the seat of the Tekke government, and lodged in a comfortable tent – captured from the Persians on an earlier campaign – where he was received by a mullah who was the brother of one of the khans, as the khan himself was away. The mullah treated him with a reserve which O’Donovan decided reflected the query hanging over his fate: was he about to have his throat cut as a spy, or was he to be considered an honoured guest who was the representative of a potential military ally? This doubt and curiosity about the nature of the Westerner – the first most of them had ever seen – who had so mysteriously appeared among them, extended to some thousands when the inhabitants of the oasis gathered around for a market day. People would crowd into his tent sitting on their heels ‘gazing at me with the ludicrous eagerness which may be observed in baboons and apes when some unfamiliar object meets their eyes’. Fresh waves of sightseers arrived to stare at him, abandoning the market for this new diversion. So great was the crowd that the tent pegs got lifted and at one moment the whole tent collapsed on him, prompting the local police to intervene ‘striking right and left with sticks’ and upbraiding the visitors for their lack of manners towards a stranger.

  This state of affairs went on day after day. O’Donovan wrote that he might be said during this time to be living in the interior of a much-patronized peep-show, in which he was the only object of attraction; the way he washed or combed his hair drew forth exclamations of surprise and interest from the spectators. But he had still not met the senior khan in whose brother’s charge he was. The first indication that his condition was under review was a visit by the three other khans of Merv.

  The first of these was Baba Khan, t
he chief of the Toktamish division of Turkomans. He was a short man with a cunning aspect, not improved by the fact that he had lost the use of one of his eyes due to the fierce sunlight and dust of the plains; he appeared to be sneering at O’Donovan’s protestations that he was not a Russian and, even while ostensibly talking to the him, was in practice seeking the plaudits of the crowd; he pointedly referred to the proximity of the Russian army and the remoteness of the British.

  The second khan was called Aman Niaz Khan and was chief of the Otamish people. He was less hostile; O’Donovan decided he ‘was evidently more of a natural gentleman’. However, he suffered from all the symptoms of excessive opium consumption. He also was distinguished by wearing a white robe with splashes of bright colours which made him look from a distance as if he were wrapped in a Union Jack; the picture was completed by a carving-knife-like dagger stuck in his sash.

  The third of the visiting khans was called Yussuf Khan and was the leader of the eastern division of the Merv Tekke people. He was only some fifteen years old and looked every inch a Tartar with a flat nose and high cheekbones; out of deference to his two older companions, he spoke little and gazed into space.

  These were the rulers in whose hands it seemed that O’Donovan’s fate rested. They interrogated him all day, repeating the same old weary questions, and then left him, while the crowd enjoyed this variant of the peep-show. His only comfort was a visit from an elderly Jewish merchant – one of the few living at Merv – who brought him a bottle of arrack and some almost-undrinkable wine to cheer him up in this anxious time.

  It was only after sunset on the second day of these deliberations that another stranger entered the tent quite unannounced. This turned out to be Kadjar Khan, the missing khan whose mullah brother had been looking after him. O’Donovan decided that this patrician-looking figure was a spitting image of the bust of Julius Caesar in the British Museum. It was some while before he realized that he had met this khan before, in fact the previous year at Tehran where the khan had been a guest of the shah.

  The days dragged by. There was not a moment of privacy. He was not able to leave the tent to walk around the oasis because – he was told – ‘the dogs might bite you’. In effect he was a prisoner in a glass case. And then on the seventh day after his arrival a grand council of all the khans, chiefs and elders was convened to decide once and for all what O’Donovan’s status should be: friend or foe. By then, he was entirely on his own as far as moral or physical support went: his guide from Geok Tepe had found relations at Merv and moved off to be with them, and his terrified Kurdish servant had collapsed in a drugged heap. Before finally succumbing to opium, this Kurd had done O’Donovan a considerable disservice by repeatedly declaring that the latter was an official representative of England ‘with the British flag in my pocket [. . .] and about to summon from Kandahar endless legions of British troops’. O’Donovan’s inability to live up to these expectations was to be the cause of much misunderstanding and embarrassment.

  After the council of elders had been deliberating for an hour, O’Donovan was summoned to attend and give an account of himself. He was careful to come before the council wearing what were left of his European clothes, and although these were by now fairly bizarre he thought they would deflect any charges that he was in disguise. There was a general whispering buzz of expectation when he appeared. Then a giant of a man with a long white beard who was known as ‘The Old Man of the Sword’ roared at him the now all-too-familiar question: ‘Who and what are you, and what brings you here?’ He explained that he was ‘a native of that part of Frangistan [western Europe] called England’ and having come to report on the Russian campaign had fled before General Skobeloff’s advancing army from Geok Tepe to Merv. He was asked for proof of this identity and produced some convincing papers, but it was then suggested that perhaps he had just murdered an Englishman and stolen these; he was asked to explain – no easy matter – the exact status of the East India Company; and there was general incredulity about the claim that England was ruled over by a woman. After an hour of such interrogation, he was led back to his tent and could hear his case being debated for a further half hour. When he was re-summoned, it was to be told he would not be killed, at least for the present, but would remain a prisoner until a message could be sent and a reply received from the British agent at Meshed.

  Meanwhile he was moved into more comfortable accommodation, and felt sufficiently self-confident to be able to adopt native dress – a long crimson tunic of coarse Bokharan silk – which enabled him to move around with at least a little less obsessive attention from the locals; he now only had ‘a following of not more than two hundred persons’. The risk of being attacked by dogs also seemed to have been forgotten.

  But the real moment of relief came with the arrival of the reply from the British agent at Meshed. This confirmed that he was British and had no connection of any sort with the Russian military campaign. Although he was still under surveillance, he was now in comparative liberty. Indeed, the Kadjar Khan took him on a tour of the fortifications under construction and showed him the guns they had captured from the Persians and others. Some 8,000 local men were working on improving the fortifications, focused on their task by the perceived Russian advance. But O’Donovan was rather sceptical about the effectiveness of the defences – ‘the smallest mountain gun would pierce as through cardboard’ – and thought that any army with howitzers would annihilate the breastworks that were being so laboriously constructed and leave ‘a gently sloping path to an assaulting column’. The captured guns were also in an awful state, having been used to fire such ‘heterogeneous projectiles’ that their barrels were eroded beyond repair; they were counting on traders’ scale-weights from the bazaar to use as ammunition. Almost the only feature in favour of the defence was the fact that internal wells could provide the water required during a siege. He ended up very disillusioned; having thought that the experience of Geok Tepe would have given the citizens of Merv a more realistic sense of what was required to resist the Russians, he now found quite to the contrary that ‘each man thought that, armed with his curved brittle sabre, his antiquated, cumbrous muzzle-loader with its forked rest, a half pound of bad gunpowder, and the bullets he founded from the material dug up on the battle-fields of his ancestors, he was amply provided with all the necessities of war’.

  It is clear O’Donovan now identified himself with the inhabitants of Merv in opposition to the Russian invaders. Any traces there might once have been of an impartial reporter were long since abandoned. The local khans too, however ambivalent in their former attitude towards him, were also becoming convinced he was now wholly on their side. One of the three khans in fact suggested that O’Donovan should take command of their rickety artillery in the event of an attack. He responded politely by standing up and bowing profoundly, but he added for the record that he felt he ‘might accept the position of artillerist-in-chief without in the least compromising my national neutrality’. Few in London would have agreed with this last statement: O’Donovan was again getting out of step with the British establishment.

  Ironically, it was only now that he was ‘firmly established in the good graces’ of the locals that he decided he wanted to get out of the place as quickly as possible. Perhaps he felt that there would be few survivors of a Russian assault and there were limits to the sacrifices he should make even for a good news story. He therefore wrote to the British agent at Meshed asking him to send a letter explaining that he was ‘instantly required at Meshed’; and he wrote a parallel letter to the British Minister at Tehran asking for his support also. A natural messenger for these letters presented himself in the form of his drug-addicted and recalcitrant Kurdish guide, who was only too glad of any excuse to get out of Merv. The local khans were happy to let him go, as they had long ago concluded that the Kurd would have no ransom value. The same was not the case with O’Donovan himself; he was only too aware that, however friendly they might now be, the local khans were
not prepared to let him leave; he was part talisman, part hostage, part military adviser; he was going to need a very convincing reason for his eventual release from this Queen of the World city.

  However much he might be in the good graces of his hosts, there were always occasional incidents which triggered the oft-repeated – but now rejected – charges about his being a Russian agent. One such incident arose when an elderly Russian officer from Circassia was captured and brought to Merv. He was wearing an Astrakhan hat and gold epaulettes which, taken together with his age, led his captors to assume that he was a general. As such he would be worth a handsome ransom and all those involved with his capture would be greatly enriched by the event. But O’Donovan knew from his experience of military matters that the gold epaulettes, with a single black stripe and a solitary silver star, were not those of a general (commanding an army) but of a second-lieutenant (commanding a platoon of twenty men). He explained this to the consternation of his hosts, who realized that the ransom value of their prisoner was drastically reduced by this knowledge. Their annoyance momentarily resuscitated the old accusations of his knowing suspiciously much about the Russian army; but these charges no longer stuck.

  Events were now about to take an unexpected turn, and O’Donovan found himself in the thick of internal intrigues between the various khans. It transpired that Kadjar Khan, in whose tent he had been originally lodged and by whose brother he had been befriended, was not in reality a hereditary khan at all; he had been given the title to enable him to go to Persia and negotiate on behalf of the people of Merv in circumstances in which none of the other khans wished to go, because they feared they might end up as prisoners or hostages. Now the three other khans, who had all called on and interrogated O’Donovan before, turned to him for support in their plotting to re-establish their pre-eminent power. They were encouraged to do this by the fact that, having once decided O’Donovan was not a snake in the grass, they swung the other way and decided, with no justification beyond the exaggerated boasts of his Kurdish servant, that he was an influential emissary of the British government who could ensure not only financial support but also that British troops from Kandahar came to the rescue of Merv.