In the spring of 1874, following the fall of Gladstone’s Liberal administration, the Tories were returned to power with a massive majority. At their head was Benjamin Disraeli, who believed passionately in Britain’s imperial destiny and in maintaining a vigorous foreign policy, views which he shared with Queen Victoria. He had long been critical, moreover, of what he considered to be his predecessor’s display of weakness towards the Russians. This he was determined to put right. From now on forward policies were to return with a vengeance, and Anglo-Russian relations to cool at an ever-increasing rate. Following St Petersburg’s dramatic gains in Central Asia, India naturally commanded much Cabinet attention. Disraeli and Lord Salisbury, his new secretary of state for India, feared not so much an imminent Russian attack as attempts by St Petersburg, despite Gorchakov’s 1873 undertaking, to gain some kind of a toe-hold in Afghanistan. If this was successful it might be used as a base from which trouble could be stirred up against the British in India, or even as a springboard for a combined invasion. Disraeli was anxious, therefore, to establish a permanent British mission in Kabul, while the hawks around him urged similar representation at Herat and Kandahar.
To institute his new policies, the Prime Minister decided to appoint Lord Lytton as Viceroy in place of the Liberals’ man, Lord Northbrook, who had resigned over the government’s decision to meddle thus with Afghanistan’s highly combustible domestic affairs. On the eve of his departure for home, Northbrook had warned London that to abandon its policy of masterly inactivity would expose Britain to the risk ‘of another unnecessary and costly war’ with her unpredictable neighbour. His warning, however, was to go unheeded, and Lord Lytton, armed with detailed instructions regarding the new forward policies he was to enact, set about his task with vigour. One of his first duties was to proclaim Queen Victoria Empress of India, Disraeli’s way of pleasing the sovereign while at the same time signalling to the Russians, ‘in language that cannot be mistaken’, that Britain’s commitment to India was permanent and absolute. In other words ‘hands off.
Two other moves made by Britain around this time greatly strengthened her hand in India. One was the purchase from the Khedive of Egypt, amid intense secrecy, of 40 per cent of the shares in the newly opened Suez Canal. This waterway reduced the distance by sea between Britain and India by some 4,500 miles, and Disraeli wished to make absolutely sure that this crucial lifeline, for both troops and goods, could never be threatened or even severed by a hostile power – notably by the Russians in the event of their acquiring Constantinople and the Turkish straits. The purchase of the Egyptian ruler’s entire holding, which effectively rescued him from bankruptcy, made Britain the largest shareholder in the Suez Canal Company. A second major improvement in communications with India was the opening, in 1870, of a direct submarine cable link with London. Five years earlier an overland telegraph line had been completed, but traffic went via Teheran and was thus vulnerable to interference or severance in time of war. The new submarine cable was far less vulnerable. ‘As long as England holds the empire of the sea the cables will be safe from enemies,’ declared The Times. ‘To grapple and raise them would require not only a knowledge of their exact position, and a ship specially fitted with proper apparatus and trained hands, but also more time than could be given to the task. The electric lines will lie beneath the great highways of traffic, and no grappling ship in search of them could escape notice.’ The inauguration of the new link, moreover, enabled Whitehall to maintain a tighter control over the affairs of India than ever before, it now taking hours to elicit a reply from either end where once it had taken weeks or even months.
Disraeli’s instructions to the new Viceroy, Lord Lytton, included bringing not only Afghanistan but also the neighbouring state of Baluchistan into a defensive alliance with Britain. For there lay the Bolan Pass, leading out of Afghanistan into India. Baluchistan was then torn by internal strife which threatened the throne of its ruler, the Khan of Kelat. Worried by the region’s instability, and the Khan’s inability to control the turbulent tribes, Calcutta considered deposing him and replacing him with someone more able. This was strongly opposed, however, by British political officers on the spot, who argued that it was likely to do far more harm than good. Instead, it was decided to allow Captain Robert Sandeman, an officer possessing a remarkable influence over the Baluchi chiefs, to try to bring them to heel by persuasion. In the winter of 1875, alone and armed only with a revolver, Sandeman visited the insurgent tribesmen in the mountains where he succeeded in resolving their conflict with the Khan. The following autumn, in gratitude to Calcutta for thus securing his throne, not to mention a generous annual subsidy, the Khan agreed to lease both the Bolan Pass region and the nearby garrison town of Quetta permanently to Britain.
Afghanistan, as might be expected, was to prove a far tougher proposition. Part of the problem arose from the previous policy of non-interference in Afghanistan’s affairs. In 1873, fearing the Russians more than the British, the Emir, Dost Mohammed’s son Sher Ali, had approached Lord Northbrook with the offer of a defensive treaty against a threat from the north. The Viceroy had been instructed by Gladstone’s government to turn this down, as well as to reprimand Sher Ali over certain other matters. Understandably the Emir had been angered by this rebuff from those he had considered to be his friends. It was not long after this that reports began to reach India that he was in communication with General Kaufman at Tashkent. Lytton’s orders from Disraeli were to try to undo the damage done by Northbrook’s snub by offering the Emir the treaty he had previously sought, but with the added proviso that he accept a permanent British representative at Kabul or Herat. This was so that a close eye could be kept on Kaufman’s activities at the royal court, for the Emir was now strongly suspected of being partial to the Russians and therefore not to be fully trusted. But as the less hawkish among Lytton’s advisers had warned, the presence of British officers anywhere in Afghanistan was to prove totally unacceptable to the Emir. Indeed, he would not even agree to a temporary British mission visiting Kabul to discuss such matters, arguing that he would then have no grounds for refusing a Russian one. Talks must take place, he insisted, either on the frontier or in Calcutta. Needless to say, this did little to relieve Lytton’s growing distrust of Sher Ali – not to mention St Petersburg, whose malign influence he believed to be behind it all.
‘The prospect of war with Russia immensely excites,’ he wrote to Lord Salisbury in September 1876, ‘but so far as India is concerned does not at all alarm me. If it is to be – better now than later. We are twice as strong as Russia in this part of the world, and have much better bases for attack and defence.’ In the event of war, he added with gusto, ‘a sea of fire’ could be spread around India’s northern frontiers by inciting the khanates to turn against their Russian masters. Coming from a man like Lytton – a liberal-minded and somewhat Bohemian ex-diplomat, more interested in poetry than in politics – such bellicose talk may seem out of character. However, like most men of letters and intellectuals of his day, he had an inborn dislike of Russia’s autocratic system of rule. To this were now added not only grave misgivings about St Petersburg’s intentions towards Afghanistan, but also the universally held conviction that another showdown with Russia was inevitable, either in Central Asia over Afghanistan or in the Near East over Constantinople.
Concern over Russian ambitions had been heightened by the recent publication of a book, England and Russia in the East, by the leading British authority on the subject, Sir Henry Rawlinson, now a member of the government’s advisory body, the Council for India. Although it added little to what he and other forward school writers had been saying since the days of Wilson, McNeill and de Lacy Evans, the book was to have a considerable influence on Cabinet thinking and on those, including the new Viceroy, responsible for the defence of India. As always with the literature of the Great Game, timing was everything. There were other books and articles which questioned the opinions of Rawlinson and his school, but the
y received scant attention in the largely Russophobe press. Although Rawlinson denounced those who scorned his warnings as ‘dangerous enemies’, it would be unfair to regard him and his allies as wild men spoiling for a fight. Indeed, Lord Salisbury, while a believer in forward policies, was anything but a warmonger or scaremonger. ‘A great deal of misapprehension arises from a popular use of maps on a small scale,’ he once told a worried fellow peer. ‘If the noble lord would use a larger map, he would find that the distance between Russia and British India was not to be measured by the finger and thumb, but by a rule.’ However, while he did not for a moment believe that a Russian invasion of India could succeed, he was concerned lest they incite the Afghans to attempt it at a time when British troops were desperately needed elsewhere. As he was to put it later: ‘Russia can offer the Afghans the loot of India. We can offer them nothing, because there is nothing in Turkestan to loot.’
The airing of hawkish views in print was not this time confined to the British forward school. Warning of Britain’s ambitions in the East, one St Petersburg newspaper declared: ‘They will attempt to extend their influence to Kashgar, Persia and all the Central Asian states bordering on us, and then will pose a direct threat to our interests in Asia . . . We must watch them vigilantly and take swift measures to parry the blow being prepared for us by them.’ The words might easily have come from a London newspaper issuing a similar warning about Russian designs. Indeed, it was from the St Petersburg press that the British embassy there obtained much, if not all, of its intelligence about what was going on in Central Asia, albeit usually long after it had happened.
In 1876, the year after Rawlinson’s book appeared, an English translation of a Russian Great Game classic – Colonel M. A. Terentiev’s Russia and England in the Struggle for the Markets of Central Asia – was published in Calcutta in two volumes. Intensely Anglophobic, among many other things it accused the British of secretly distributing rifles among the Turcoman tribes for use against Russia. It also alleged that Sir John Lawrence, that staunch believer in masterly inactivity, had been sacked as Viceroy of India for not being sufficiently Russophobic. The Indian Mutiny, Terentiev maintained, had only failed because the Indians lacked a proper plan and outside support. They continued to suffer from British misrule and exploitation. ‘Sick to death,’ Terentiev went on, ‘the natives are now waiting for a physician from the north.’ Given such assistance, they had every chance of starting a conflagration which would spread throughout India, and thus enable them to throw off the British yoke. In the event of such an uprising, the Russian claimed, the British would find themselves unable to rely on the support of their native troops, who formed the major part of their army in India.
Turning to the question of a Russian invasion of India, Terentiev declared that if the two powers were to go to war ‘then we shall clearly be obliged to take advantage of the proximity of India to our present position in Central Asia’. He rated highly the chances of such an expedition succeeding in ending British rule in India, particularly in view of what he claimed to be the seething discontent of the native population. As for the many natural obstacles in the path of an invading army, he saw no insurmountable problems. If such an expedition had been judged feasible during the reign of Tsar Paul, more than seventy years earlier, then it should pose considerably fewer difficulties now that the intervening distance had been dramatically reduced. This latter argument said little for the colonel’s powers of reasoning, for it will be recalled that the invasion force sent against India by the half-mad Paul in 1801 was saved from almost certain annihilation only by its hasty recall on his assassination.
It need hardly be said that Terentiev’s views on the Great Game were precisely the reverse of those which Prince Gorchakov was trying to convey to the British government. Yet in Russia, where the printed word was so rigidly controlled by the censor, the colonel’s exposition must have enjoyed high-level approval for it to have been published. Very likely it was intended for internal consumption only, and not for British eyes. It serves nonetheless as yet another example of Russia’s twin-policy strategy. One, emanating from St Petersburg, was official and conciliatory. The other, unofficial and aggressive, was left to those on the spot, and could always be repudiated if necessary. Terentiev’s book clearly reflected the thinking of the Russian forward school. As such it was extremely valuable, for very little was known about what lay in the minds of the Russian military in Central Asia, let alone about what was going on in the Tsar’s new domains north of the Oxus. One British officer, who had read Terentiev’s work in the original Russian, was determined to discover more. And that could only be done by going there.
·28·
Captain Burnaby’s Ride to Khiva
Captain Frederick Gustavus Burnaby of the Royal Horse Guards was no ordinary officer. For a start he was a man of prodigious strength and stature. Standing six-foot-four in his stockinged feet, weighing fifteen stone, and possessing a forty-seven-inch chest, he was reputed to be the strongest man in the British Army. Indeed, it was even said that he could carry a small pony under his arm. Another Herculean feat of Burnaby’s was to grasp the tip of a billiard cue between his middle and index fingers, and hold it out horizontally, his arm fully extended and the butt end steady. Nor was this son of a country parson entirely brawn. He also displayed a remarkable gift for languages, being fluent in at least seven, including Russian, Turkish and Arabic. Finally he was born with an insatiable appetite for adventure which he combined with a vigorous and colourful prose style. Inevitably these two latter qualities brought him into contact with Fleet Street, with the result that during his generous annual leaves he served abroad on several occasions as a special correspondent of The Times and other journals, on one occasion travelling up the Nile to interview General Gordon at Khartoum.
It was during one of these periods of leave that Burnaby made up his mind to visit Russian Central Asia, which was then said to be closed to British officers and other travellers. His plan was to journey to St Petersburg and apply direct to Count Milyutin, the Minister of War, for permission to travel to India via Khiva, Merv and Kabul. It was a bold approach, though it appeared to offer little prospect of success, especially at a time when Anglo-Russian relations were anything but cordial. But where the slightest chance of adventure was concerned, Burnaby was willing to try anything. He had carefully avoided doing one thing, however, and that was seeking permission for his journey from the British Foreign Office or from his own superiors. The answer, he knew very well, would be no.
Burnaby, carrying only 85 lbs of baggage, left Victoria by the night mail train for St Petersburg on November 30, 1875. In the Russian capital he was advised by friends that the authorities would never agree to his journey. ‘They will imagine that you are being sent by your government to stir up the Khivans,’ he was told. ‘They will never believe that an officer, at his own expense, would go to Khiva.’ Surprisingly, his friends proved wrong, for the following day he received a reply to his request to Milyutin which gave partial approval for his journey. The Minister informed him that the authorities along his route had been instructed to help him on his way, but that ‘the Imperial Government could not give its acquiescence to the extension of the journey beyond Russian territory’, as it was unable to accept responsibility for his life in regions outside its control. This, Burnaby decided, was ambiguous. Either Milyutin meant that he could not go as far as Khiva, then nominally still self-governing – and certainly not to Merv, which lay outside Russian control – or that he could go there, though strictly at his own risk. Given the circumstances, most people would have taken it that Milyutin meant the former. Burnaby decided to assume he meant the latter. Quite why the Minister agreed to Burnaby travelling in the Tsar’s Central Asian territories at all is puzzling, unless he feared that the British authorities might apply similar restrictions on Russians travelling in India or elsewhere in the Empire, which at present they were free to do.
Burnaby was not the first Brit
ish officer to have attempted recently to reach Merv, which many felt might very shortly become the flashpoint of an Anglo-Russian conflagration if Kaufman attempted to seize it. The previous year, while travelling in north-eastern Persia, Captain George Napier, an Indian Army intelligence officer, had gathered an impressive amount of strategical and political information on the line of advance likely to be taken by a Russian force marching on Merv from Krasnovodsk, their new base on the eastern shore of the Caspian. Although invited to visit Merv by the Turcomans, who were anxious for British protection from Kaufman’s troops, Napier had reluctantly declined lest this raise the tribesmen’s ‘undue expectations’. Only five months before Burnaby’s arrival in St Petersburg, a second British officer, Colonel Charles MacGregor, who was later to become chief of military intelligence in India, had reached Herat, intending to visit Merv. But at the last moment he had received an urgent message from his superiors in Calcutta ordering him not to proceed. It was feared that a visit to this strategically sensitive oasis by a British officer known to be involved in intelligence work might expedite its seizure by Kaufman. Indeed, on his return MacGregor had been reprimanded for having gone as far as he had, although he, like Napier, had managed to collect much valuable information on this little-known region.
Burnaby, answerable only to himself, was not a man to allow such considerations to deter him. Travelling part of the way by rail, and the remainder by troika, he reached Orenburg shortly before Christmas. On the way there he had met the Governor and his wife returning to St Petersburg. ‘You must remember’, the Russian had told him, ‘that on no account are you to go to India or Persia. You must retrace your steps to European Russia along the same road by which you go.’ It was all too evident to Burnaby that the Governor had received instructions about him from Milyutin. He made little attempt to conceal his own disapproval of the visit, or to assist Burnaby with advice. It was also clear that he had been warned by St Petersburg that this British officer spoke Russian, something highly unusual in those days, although at their roadside meeting Burnaby had addressed him in English. Nonetheless he made no attempt to prevent Burnaby from continuing to Orenburg, although it was still left somewhat in the air just how far he could proceed from there. He was well aware, however, that wherever he went the Russians would keep a close watch on him, and ensure that he saw nothing he was not supposed to see. At Orenburg he met the former Khan of Khokand, exiled there by the Russians but evidently enjoying his new lifestyle, having recently thrown a ball for the garrison officers and their wives. He also learned that Kaufman had asked for two more regiments to be sent to Central Asia for his unspecified use.
The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia Page 40