Sabres on the Steppes

by Ure, John

  Having by now renounced his business career, and having established his reputation as an intrepid traveller, Elias now needed some regular and gainful employment. He was therefore fortunate that Sir Henry Rawlinson, the president of the RGS, arranged for him to be taken on by the government of British India. His early appointments included assignments in Calcutta and Mandalay, from where he joined a mission to open up trade between Burma and China. Plans for an expedition to Tibet failed to materialize in 1876, and the following year he was attached to another abortive mission, this time to Kashgar. By now, Elias was beginning to become preoccupied with Russian expansionism and intentions in Central Asia, and particularly with their bearing on the security of India.

  He was therefore gratified to be appointed to a post where he could spend more of his time and energies on countering this growing Russian influence. The post in question was a curious one: he was to be an agent of the Indian government and a ‘joint commissioner’ at Leh in Ladakh, from which listening post he would be expected to report on developments in Kashgar (where the Chinese had recently re-established their control after the death of the Islamic ruler Yakub Beg). The task was not made easier by the fact that Kashgar was some four hundred miles north of Leh and the other side of the formidable Karakoram mountain range with its precipitous pass.

  It was now that he began to set out on unauthorized missions of his own initiative. He made contact independently with the Chinese official resident in Yarkand (north of the Karakorams) but even so it was some time before he heard the news of Yakub Beg’s death – he was said to have been poisoned by his enemies – and of the Chinese takeover, as all caravans took nearly two months to cross over the passes between Leh and Yarkand. But distant and inaccessible as Kashgar, Yarkand and Leh were from each other, it was still the case that all the caravans going to India from western China came by this route, so Elias was well placed to pick up the news, gossip and intelligence that flowed with the merchandise and caravan traffic. He also had the full support of the viceroy, Lord Lytton, who wrote to the secretary of state for India expounding the merits of Elias and thus managed to procure for him a permanent place in the Indian civil service without going through ‘the usual channels’. This was an exceptional, if not unique, preferment.

  But despite his good relations with the viceroy, Elias did not wait for official instructions or authority to take off on his trans-Karakorum mission to Yarkand and Kashgar. Ostensibly, the reason for his expedition was a commercial one: to see for himself the problems of establishing a profitable trade route and to find out why the traffic was so slow. In reality his reasons were far more political and military: to determine whether or not the route was a viable one for an invading army – and the army he had in mind being not a Chinese one but a Russian one. He did not have much difficulty in finding out why the commercial caravan traffic was so sporadic: there were no less than five narrow passes of over 15,000 feet altitude to be crossed, the highest being the Karakorum at nearly 19,000 feet; some of the passes were no more than narrow clefts in the rock where both mules and camels had to be unloaded before they could squeeze through. If trade caravans were a problem, Elias was comforted by the thought that there could be no question of an army with artillery and heavy equipment passing that way.

  When he reached Yarkand, Elias had extensive talks with the Amban (the local Chinese government representative) and emphasized the British wish not only for good commercial relations but also for close political links. He took the opportunity to listen sympathetically to Chinese complaints about the Russians stirring up rebellion among the Tungan tribesmen and about their permitting Kirghiz tribesmen to make raids across the border into what was now again a western province of China. The Chinese clearly felt that the Russians were pressing in on their frontiers, and Elias lost no time in capitalizing on this feeling, which reflected his own concern over the long-term threat this posed to British India. He also managed to recruit a local agent who could send him ongoing reports about these border matters. He took the opportunity of his visit to be the first to congratulate the Chinese on the recovery of their lost province, thereby scoring a diplomatic point over the Russians. Elias had hoped to move on from Yarkand to Kashgar and have further talks there. But no firm invitation arrived and so – thinking it would be a mistake to arrive with no credentials and no invitation – he returned the way he had come. All in all, it had been a useful visit and one that had been entirely on his own initiative.

  Elias was to make two further trips to Yarkand and reached Kashgar in 1880. He found that anti-Russian feelings had increased, and he was approached about the possibility of buying arms from India for use against any possible Russian incursions. Indeed, there were more ambitious hopes in London and Calcutta that the British and Chinese might cooperate in other military matters; there was talk of attaching British Indian-army officers to the Chinese to help train their troops in Kashgar; there was even a proposal that some Chinese units might be commanded by British officers. Elias was highly sceptical about these ideas. He had seen something of Chinese troops – they had provided a sloppy, chattering and abusive guard of honour for him at Yarkand – and he commented in his private journal, ‘These are the people we are asked to ally ourselves with against the Russians – Ye Gods!’. He could think of better ways to pursue the Great Game.

  While still based at Leh, Elias had continued to collect and collate intelligence received from his numerous visitors from all over Central Asia; perched at this junction of caravan routes he had, like Sir Walter Bullivant in John Buchan’s Greenmantle, ‘heard reports from agents everywhere – pedlars in South Russia, Afghan horse-dealers, Turkoman merchants, pilgrims on the road to Mecca, sheep-skinned Mongols, Hindu fakirs, as well as respectable consuls whom use cyphers’; all these reports confirmed that, whatever the likely problems of launching an invasion through the Karakoram or Pamir mountain ranges, the Russians were far from giving up their ambitions in the region. He learnt from such sources as these and from his own agents how the Russians had sent spies into Hunza and Chitral (near the Indian, now Pakistani, border with Afghanistan and China). Elias was strongly in favour of a British agent being appointed at Kashgar, and doubtless saw himself in that role. But Lord Lytton’s successor as viceroy of India was of a cautious disposition: Lord Ripon opposed the idea of such an appointment and even was reluctant to authorize any further exploration. It was therefore only in 1885 (after his return from sick leave in England and Lord Ripon’s recall) that Elias was able to embark on his next great adventure.

  This was a journey over the Pamirs and along the upper Oxus river. It was an undertaking he had been quietly planning for years from Leh. He made a survey of over 500 miles from the Chinese frontier to that part of Afghanistan where there had always been controversy about the main stream of the Oxus. In helping to define this, he also helped to define the contentious frontiers between Russia, China and Afghanistan on which the peace of the region largely depended. The main recommendation in his report was that China and Afghanistan should establish a common frontier which cut off Russia from the Hindu Kush; the so-called Wakham Corridor (a narrow strip of land belonging to Afghanistan between Russia in the north and India in the south) was an essential ingredient in any solution, and Elias was anxious to reconnoitre it, but the various boundary commissions that had been set up greatly complicated his task.

  By any standards, Elias had by now done great service to the British Raj. Other boundary arbitrators had been knighted; other explorers had been knighted, and other diplomatic officials left in remote and lonely stations were to be knighted in the next few years. Knighthoods were distributed generously by the queen and her viceroy at the high-water-mark of the British Empire – far more so than in modern times. There were two distinct orders of chivalry devoted exclusively to India: the Order of the Star of India (which was awarded to Indian princes and an elite of British officials) and the Order of the Indian Empire (which was awarded to lesser officials).
The lowest rung of the latter order was that of Commander: C.I.E. This was the award that it was deemed right to give to Elias at this juncture. He thought otherwise. He wrote to a colleague who had learnt of his award before he had and addressed him with his new initials after his name: ‘I hope I have not been made the victim of any such damning mark of faint praise’. He declined to accept the order.

  It is difficult to judge at this distance of time whether he was justified in responding so negatively and ungraciously. Part of the reason for his not being offered a higher award was undoubtedly that he had always been a very private person; he had not indulged in self-glorification in his reports of his achievements; he had not written popular books which might have drawn him to the attention of a wider readership and converted him into a public figure. But it seems all too likely there was also another underlying reason for his failure to achieve more elevated recognition: although Elias had converted with his family to Christianity, he was still thought of by many as a Jew; his Jewish surname and strange first name would not have resonated readily with a title. Although England had accustomed herself over the past decades to a Jewish prime minister in Benjamin Disraeli, there was still a strong latent anti-Semitism, particularly among the ranks of imperial administrators. Be that as it may, his unusual behaviour in rejecting an honour did not seem to impede his subsequent career.

  His next appointments were somewhat out of line with his previous role in containing Russia in Central Asia. He was sent on special duty to Sikkim, and later to the Burma-Siam frontier. But by 1891 he was installed in a post that completely fulfilled his ambitions to counter the spread of Russian influence on the fringes of the British Raj, and which also enabled him to use all his previous experience and skills to good advantage. He was appointed as agent of the viceroy of India in Meshed and simultaneously consul-general of Britain in the surrounding Persian provinces of Khorasan and Seitan. This region of Persia had previously been dominated by tsarist influences, and it was Elias’s role to redress the balance. But as well as this general objective, there were many more specific tasks to be accomplished in the field of intelligence gathering and espionage which were to exercise all his ingenuity.

  One of the first of Elias’s objectives was to impress the Persian government and community by building a consular residence that would not only match but would outshine the Russian consul-general’s spacious accommodation. He was helped in this aim by the remarks – both in his book and in letters to The Times – of George Curzon (the future Lord Curzon and viceroy of India) who had noted on passing through the previous year that the British residence was a discredit to a great imperial power. With this support, Elias got a handsome and colonnaded British residence constructed, into which he promptly moved. His prestige was also helped by the secondment of a personal escort of mounted cavalry in the colourful uniforms of the Queen’s Own Corps of Guides. These measures helped him establish himself as a person of respect, but were to prove the least challenging of his tasks.

  The Russians had perfected the art of intriguing behind the backs of the British. His Russian counterpart, Consul-General de Vlassow (whose rank equated with that of a major-general), had already set up a network of spies and agents who reported to him not only on developments inside Persia but along the frontier with Afghanistan in the east. He was also engaged in infiltrating Russian troops and railway engineers in Trans-Caspian Russia, which lay directly to the north of Meshed. To assist in this process, and to avoid detection, de Vlassow arranged for all the Indian traders and clerks (‘babus’) to be expelled from Trans-Caspian territory; this action caused so much upset and offence that he had to rescind the order eventually. His objective in all this was to pave the way for such an expansion of tsarist influence that, when the time was deemed ripe, a Russian army could quietly advance across this hinterland to the very frontiers of the British Raj. Insider knowledge and influence was seen as the key to later aggression.

  Elias was a match for his Russian opponent. He too set up a network of native agents and of ‘newswriters’ (reporters) who not only sent him their own version of developments, but who also managed to detect the machinations of Persian officials who had been seduced or suborned by the Russians. One of their nefarious schemes which he uncovered with the help of his agents was an arrangement by which Persian officials in the telegraph office – who it transpired were also in the pay of the Russian consulate – were making a practice of passing copies of all telegrams between Meshed and India to de Vlassow. The latter had been reading Elias’s reports for some time before he became aware of this.

  Despite all these surreptitious moves and counter-moves, very few complaints were passed back to London or St Petersburg. This was largely because, at a personal level, Elias and de Vlassow got on well together and saw a lot of each other on the limited social circuit of Meshed. Their contact was increased and enhanced by the fact that both de Vlassow and his assistant had English wives – a fact that occasionally resulted in indiscretions, as when one of the English wives gave away that it was a Russian-inspired rumour of an impending bread shortage that had given rise to riots in the town. Mischief making was part of the Russian brief, because they felt it was in their interest that the tense relations between Persia and Afghanistan should be further sharpened. The excessively cruel behaviour of the ruler of Afghanistan – who regularly threw offenders down deep wells, gouged out their eyes and had them fired from cannons – meant that there were many unwelcome exiles from Afghanistan in Persia, who were afraid to return to their own country across the ill-defined frontiers. They helped to unsettle the authority of the shah, and so – in de Vlassow’s view – made it easier for the tsar rather than the viceroy of India to exercise influence over the troubled kingdom.

  It was against this background that Elias had uncovered the Russian plot to implicate two of his staff in the murder of the travellers who were carrying suspiciously large sums of money between Meshed and Herat (referred to in the opening of this chapter). On the one hand, the gloves were off in the fierce contest for power and influence in Persia; on the other hand, the two consuls-general continued to take tea together and exchange cutlets in the best diplomatic tradition. When eventually Elias had to go home for reasons of health, de Vlassow invited him to travel on the newly built Russian Trans-Caspian railway and – having crossed the Caspian – to return home through Russian territory to save him from the rigours of a more round-about journey. The courtesies between Europeans took precedence over their political rivalries.

  There must have been some recognition in London and Calcutta that Elias was doing a difficult job uniquely well, because when his sick leave in England was extended again and again on medical grounds, the Foreign Office and the viceroy kept his post open for more than two years until he was fit enough to return. Meanwhile, de Vlassow and his Russian staff at Meshed had not failed to take advantage of his prolonged absence: more of the tsar’s troops had been moved into Trans-Caspia; the Russians were looking for any excuse to intervene across the Afghan frontier if given the slightest provocation; more plots – involving Russians entering Afghanistan disguised as Turkomans – came to light; threats were made of sending for 300 Cossacks to support de Vlassow’s staff in their machinations; the Persian province of Khorasan had been in danger of defecting to Russia; Elias’s stand-in and deputy took to drink under the strain. Elias had been away too long. Return he did, but not for long. Ill health finally led to his retirement in 1896, and he died in London a few months later.

  The shy, Jewish-born explorer and confidential agent of the Indian government had worn himself out, playing the Great Game beyond his strength, by the age of fifty-three. But he had worn himself out on his own initiative and without recording his feats for posterity. As Sir Francis Younghusband said in his obituary in The Times, ‘he was restless and sensitive of constraint from his superiors’; his career had shown that the driving force behind his achievements had been himself and not his political masters. But
he had paid a price for this independence: as the author of another of his obituaries said: ‘His true distinction was to die undistinguished.’

  Epilogue: Why and Wherefore?

  ‘You shall judge a man by his foes as well as by his friends.’

  – Joseph Conrad (1857–1924)

  So why did the disparate collection of protagonists in this book – often middle-aged men from a variety of professions – risk their lives, and often their fortunes and reputations, in challenging the might of tsarist Russia? It is a much harder question than it would have been about the characters in my book Shooting Leave, which concerned young officers who volunteered to spy out Central Asia at the behest of their government, while pretending to be on safaris in the Himalayas. Those characters in the earlier book had obvious motivation – usually ambition to do well in the service of their country, and to enjoy the kudos that followed on their achievements.

  But the protagonists in this book were distinguished by not following the approved path to professional and public recognition: in their own way, they each and every one got out of line with the authorities on whose patronage their advancement depended. Career ambition was certainly not their driving motive. What then was it?

  Perhaps three different motives could be defined. First, most of the adventurers whose exploits have been recounted in the previous chapters had become aware through their extensive travels in Central Asia or the Caucasus of the encroaching ambitions of tsarist Russia in these regions. As Englishmen – or Scotsmen, or Irishmen or adopted Englishmen – they resented this process, which they saw as constituting a long-term threat to the frontiers of British India, where many of them had spent the formative years of their lives and which all of them regarded as the jewel in the crown of an empire of which they were proud. Although they were not docile or even disciplined agents of the British or Indian governments, it nonetheless seemed natural and right to them that they should confront this aggressive movement.