The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia

by Peter Hopkirk

  ·32·

  The Railway Race to the East

  While the world’s newspapers and statesmen were predicting that the two greatest powers on earth were about to go to war over a remote Central Asian village, the ruler in whose domains it lay was temporarily absent from his throne on a state visit to India. Indeed, it may well have been Russian fears that Abdur Rahman and his British hosts were scheming against them, plus the fact that he was away from his kingdom, that had precipitated their seizure of Pandjeh. The prospect of the British, with the Emir’s blessing, occupying Herat was a worrying one to St Petersburg. For just as their own annexation of Merv, and now Pandjeh, menaced India, a strong British military presence at Herat would similarly threaten Russia’s new Central Asian possessions. The spectre might then arise of the British and Afghans joining forces to liberate the Muslim khanates from Russian rule. By occupying Pandjeh, however, the Tsar’s generals knew that if it came to a race for Herat they could be certain of getting there first.

  The news of Pandjeh’s fall, and the massacre of the Afghan garrison, was broken to Abdur Rahman by Sir Mortimer Durand, Foreign Secretary to the Indian government and, as it happened, the son of Henry Durand, the subaltern who had blown up the gates of Ghazni during the First Afghan War. No one was sure how the Emir, who was both hot-tempered and ruthless, would take the ill tidings. It was thought very likely that he would demand that the affront be expunged by the spilling of Russian blood and, under the terms of the Anglo-Afghan agreement, with British help. If so, it was hard to see how war was to be avoided, unless Britain was prepared to abandon its buffer state, so painfully and expensively acquired, to the tender mercies of the Russians.

  ‘We received the news about dinner time,’ Durand reported, ‘and I drove at once to tell him of the slaughter of his people.’ To Durand’s relief and astonishment, the Emir took it quite calmly, considering the alarm it was generating in Britain, India and elsewhere. ‘He begged me not to be troubled,’ Durand wrote. ‘He said that the loss of two hundred or two thousand men was a mere nothing.’ As for the death of their commander, ‘that was less than nothing.’ Lord Dufferin, the former British ambassador to Russia, who had recently become Viceroy of India, was to observe later: ‘But for the accidental circumstances of the Amir being in my camp at Rawalpindi, and the fortunate fact of his being a prince of great capacity, experience and calm judgement, the incident at Pandjeh alone, in the strained condition of the relations which then existed between Russia and ourselves, might in itself have proved the occasion of a long and miserable war.’

  The plain truth was that the Emir had no wish to see his country turned once more into a battlefield, this time by his two quarrelling neighbours. Some authorities have even doubted whether, until then, he had ever heard of the village of Pandjeh. Nonetheless, his restraint did much to defuse a highly incendiary situation. Even so, for the next few weeks, the outbreak of war was expected daily, with the British newspapers demanding that the Russians be taught a lesson, and those of St Petersburg and Moscow insisting that their government annex Herat, and warning Britain to keep away. But there were other restraining influences, besides Abdur Rahman, at work behind the scenes. The fact was that it was in neither side’s interest to go to war over Pandjeh, although Herat was another matter. This time, moreover, the Russians could see that if they advanced any further the British were prepared to fight, even with the Liberals in power. Throughout the crisis, a line was kept open between Lord Granville, the British Foreign Secretary, and Giers. Gradually calm was restored. Pandjeh, it was agreed, should be neutralised until its future could be decided by all three powers. Until then Russian troops would withdraw a short distance from the village. It was further agreed that negotiations over the frontier should commence as soon as possible. In the meantime, the immediate threat of war having faded, both the Royal Navy and British troops in India were stood down.

  The Joint Afghan Boundary Commission now commenced its work, which was to drag on, with numerous disagreements, until the summer of 1887, when the protocols for the settlement of all except the eastern part of the frontier were finally signed. Under these the Russians retained Pandjeh, which they exchanged with Abdur Rahman for a strategic pass lying further west which he and his British advisers were anxious to control. But once again the Russians had got more or less what they wanted (even if their generals were opposed to the restraints imposed on them by a frontier), showing themselves to be the masters of the fait accompli. Very roughly the new frontier followed the line originally agreed in 1873, except for the southward bulge in the Pandjeh region which brought it much closer to Herat. War, nevertheless, had been averted. Moreover, the Russians had been shown, by the vigour of Britain’s response, that any further move towards Herat would be taken as a declaration of war. Even so, many commentators were far from convinced that any of this would halt the Russian advance for long. Yet history was to prove them wrong. Almost a century would pass before Russian troops and tanks crossed the Oxus into Afghanistan in the winter of 1979.

  But further to the east, in the Pamir region, the frontier had still to be fixed. It was to this desolate region, where today Afghanistan and Pakistan share a border, that the focus of the Great Game was now to switch, as for the next ten years Britain and Russia manoeuvred against one another for military and political ascendancy. There was another development, though, which was to make for a further change in the rules of the game. During the Pandjeh crisis, depending upon one’s point of view, Gladstone’s government had displayed ‘consummate statecraft, lamentable vacillation, or abject surrender’ – as one commentator put it. Many of the British electorate evidently judged it to be the latter, especially as it came so soon after Gordon’s death at Khartoum, which was widely blamed on the government. As a result, in August 1886, the Tories swept back into office under Lord Salisbury, a man intensely interested in India’s defence.

  Thanks largely to courageous travellers like George Hayward and Robert Shaw, the British had been aware for some time of the vulnerability of the passes leading across the Pamirs, the Hindu Rush and the Karakorams into northern India. Even so, despite the pioneering journeys of a few such individuals, and the brief reconnaissance of Sir Douglas Forsyth’s party in 1874, very little was known militarily about India’s far north, where it merged with Afghanistan and China. Yet already Russian explorers, invariably soldiers, were busy mapping and probing well south of the Oxus in this vast no-man’s-land, while at least one of their generals was reported to have drawn up plans for invading Kashmir via the Pamirs. To remedy this deficiency, in the summer of 1885 a British military survey party was dispatched to the region to explore and map a large swathe of terrain stretching from Chitral in the west to Hunza and beyond in the east. One of its most urgent tasks was to explore the passes leading northwards towards the upper Oxus, and settle once and for all the worrying question of whether or not they represented a threat to India’s defence.

  Leading the party was Colonel William Lockhart, a highly regarded officer from MacGregor’s Intelligence Department, who was eventually destined to become Commander-in-Chief of India’s armed forces. Accompanying him were three other officers, five native surveyors and a military escort. During the remainder of that year and in the first few months of the next, they were to map 12,000 square miles of previously unsurveyed territory beyond India’s northern frontiers. In a lengthy report written on his return, Lockhart argued that earlier fears attached to the region, especially to the Baroghil Pass, were exaggerated, although a secondary Russian thrust might be directed across the Pamirs in support of a full-scale invasion via the Khyber and Bolan. But because the Pamir passes were closed every winter by snow, while in summer the numerous rivers became raging torrents, only during the short spring and autumn would the region be vulnerable. Even then a military road would first have to be built if a sizeable force, including artillery and other heavy equipment and supplies, was employed. A more likely strategy, Lockhart thought, wo
uld be for four small, highly mobile units to be used.

  Lockhart’s initial study of the passes leading northwards suggested that such a force would very likely come via Chitral. In a region entirely without roads or railways, it would take some time to get British troops to the spot, and then they might well find themselves fighting the Chitralis as well as the Russians. With the Viceroy’s full approval, therefore, Lockhart had signed a defensive agreement with Chitral’s ageing ruler, Aman-al-Mulk, a man once suspected of complicity in Hay-ward’s murder. In return for a generous subsidy, plus a guarantee that the throne would always remain in his family’s possession, the ruler undertook to unleash his fierce tribesmen against an advancing Russian force until British troops could come to their assistance.

  This reconnaissance by Lockhart was not the only forward move ordered at this time by Lord Dufferin. For the fall of the Liberal government at home had lifted the taboo on dispatching officers and politicals on missions beyond India’s frontiers. One area the Viceroy was particularly anxious about was Sinkiang, where the Russians appeared to have stolen a considerable march on the British. Under the Treaty of St Petersburg, which had restored Kuldja, or Hi, to China, the latter had agreed to the Russians having a consul in Kashgar. The man chosen by St Petersburg to fill this post was a formidable individual named Nikolai Petrovsky. A militant Anglophobe, he had vowed at all costs to keep the British out of Sinkiang, both politically and commercially. During the three years he had been there, by sheer force of character he had already made himself virtual ruler of Kashgar, intimidating Chinese officials and terrorising the Muslim population. The Chinese, only too aware that the nearest Russian garrisons lay just across the frontier, went in perpetual fear of annexation by St Petersburg – something which the Russian consul was not averse to threatening them with. They were most careful in their dealings with him never to cause him offence, or to give the Russians any other excuse for wresting Kashgar from them. Petrovsky’s hand was considerably strengthened by the fact that there was no British representative there. He had the field to himself, and fully intended to keep it that way.

  Lord Dufferin was determined to end Petrovsky’s monopoly in Kashgar before it spread throughout the whole of Sinkiang. For a start the Viceroy wished to obtain for Indian merchants the right to trade with Sinkiang on equal terms with their Russian rivals. Although the market was a far smaller one than had once been believed, it was dominated by cheap but shoddy Russian goods, there being no alternative. Dufferin also wanted to see a permanent Indian government official stationed there. Ostensibly his function would be to safeguard the interests of British-Indian subjects living in Sinkiang, many of them Hindu money-lenders and their families. His real role, though, would be to keep a close eye on Petrovsky, and to report back on his and other Russian activities in the region. At present this was done unofficially by an enterprising young Scottish trader named Andrew Dalgleish, who travelled regularly between Leh and Kashgar. However, the Viceroy wanted to see this put on a firmer footing.

  The man chosen by Dufferin for the task of trying to secure for Britain equal rights with Russia in Kashgar was an experienced political officer and Central Asian traveller with the somewhat curious name of Ney Elias. Currently he was serving as the Indian government’s representative at Leh, where for six years he had been engaged in gathering political and other intelligence from travellers arriving from all parts of Central Asia, especially from Kashgar and Yarkand. Dalgleish was one of his principal and most reliable sources. The British Legation in Peking was asked by the Viceroy to obtain diplomatic accreditation for Elias, and to arrange for him to be received in Kashgar by a senior Chinese official with whom he could conduct discussions on both British representation and trading rights there. To Dufferin’s intense annoyance, however, the Chinese refused his request, arguing that the volume of trade between India and Sinkiang was too small to justify a special treaty or arrangement of any kind. Nonetheless, they agreed to grant Elias a passport, although this gave him no diplomatic status. There were two possible explanations for this rebuff. One was that Peking was still smarting from Britain’s attempts, during Yakub Beg’s years as Sinkiang’s ruler, to ally herself with him. The other was that the scheming Petrovsky, with his usual mixture of threats and bribes, was leaning hard on the Chinese to keep Elias out.

  Despite this setback to his plans, the Viceroy ordered Elias to proceed, even without diplomatic accreditation, for he might at least be able to discover at first hand something of what was going on across the Karakorams, and what threat this might represent to British India. But even before he left Leh, a second piece of bad news reached Elias from Kashgar. The Chinese authorities had ordered Dalgleish to leave, pointing out that he had no passport. Previously they had turned a blind eye to this, and had always welcomed him. He told Elias that he was pretty certain that the Russian consul was behind his expulsion. If so, it certainly did not bode well for Elias’s own prospects. And so it turned out, for he was to get no further than Yarkand. Although he was received there by a guard of honour of sorts, Elias found the Amban, or senior Chinese official, openly hostile. Barred, despite his passport, from proceeding to Kashgar, Elias quickly saw that any hopes of his negotiating what the Viceroy wanted were in vain. He also learned of a third possible reason for the obstructiveness of the Chinese. At one time they would have welcomed a British presence in Kashgar to counter the powerful influence of Petrovsky. But now, unnerved by the painful experience of having one bullying Westerner in their midst, they had no wish to saddle themselves with another.

  Although his mission had proved abortive, Elias was not a man to return empty-handed from Yarkand, using the opportunity to check at first hand on various political and military matters, news of which normally reached him via often dubious sources in the bazaars of Ladakh. The Viceroy had been hoping, for example, that in the event of a Russian advance into Sinkiang, or even the eastern Pamirs, there might be some kind of military co-operation between Britain and China to halt this. Indian Army officers, it was thought, might be used as advisers, or perhaps even to command Chinese units. One glance, though, at the guard of honour which had lined the way as he rode into Yarkand, together with subsequent observations, showed Elias the hopelessness of this. Ill-armed, poorly trained and undisciplined, the troops slouched, chatted, joked, ate fruit and commentated loudly on the ‘foreign devil’ as he passed by. ‘These are the people’, Elias noted with exasperation in his diary, ‘we are asked to ally ourselves with against the Russians. Ye Gods!’

  But the tasks which Elias had been set were not yet over. It was the Viceroy’s hope that he would be able, on his return to India, to travel via the eastern Pamirs and upper Oxus, including regions lying beyond those explored and mapped by Lock-hart’s party. Having little interest themselves in this godforsaken area, where Russia, Afghanistan and Kashmir merged with their own territories, the Chinese raised no objection. In addition to surveying this previously unexplored (except by the Russians) terrain, Elias had been asked to discover all he could about the locally recognised frontiers there, whether Russian, Chinese, Afghan or merely tribal. Finally, he was to examine the worrying gap, formed of undemarcated and as yet unclaimed lands, known to lie between the easternmost part of Afghanistan and the westernmost part of Sin-kiang. Its existence had first been reported by Sir Douglas Forsyth following his mission to the court of Yakub Beg, and subsequent reconnaissance, twelve years earlier. India’s defence chiefs had hoped that the Russians would not spot it until a way could be found of sealing it against an invader.

  Elias’s task, much of it undertaken in the middle of winter, took him seventeen months. During this time, although dogged by illness, he covered 3,000 miles and explored no fewer than forty passes. His conclusion, like that of Lockhart, was that the Russians were unlikely to launch a full-scale invasion across a region incapable of supporting a large body of men. Political penetration, however, was another matter, and this he saw as the principal threat po
sed by the Russians in this far northern region. As for the vulnerable gap between the Afghan and Chinese frontiers, he recommended that the two powers should be persuaded to join their frontiers up, thereby making any Russian incursions an act of violation. Thus far, Elias and Lockhart were broadly in agreement. However, on the question of how best to keep the Russians out of Chitral, the soldier and the political differed strongly. Elias considered the Chitrali ruler, with whom Lockhart had just signed a treaty, to be totally untrustworthy, and certainly not to be relied upon if faced by Russian blandishments. ‘No guarantee given by an irresponsible barbarian of this kind could ever be effective,’ Elias warned. The only way to prevent Britain’s new ally from selling out to the Russians, he suggested, would be to garrison troops on his southern border, so that the threat from behind would be greater than that from in front. Such differences of opinion between the Viceroy’s military and political staffs were a familiar theme of the Great Game, there being little love lost between the two. But of more immediate concern than Chitral to India’s defence chiefs at that moment was the Transcaspian Railway. With its obvious capacity for transporting troops and artillery, this was being extended eastwards by Russian engineers at an alarming rate.

  Work on this line had begun in 1880 on the orders of General Skobelev when he was preparing for his advance on Geok-Tepe. He had originally envisaged it merely as a means of moving ammunition and other supplies across the desert from the Caspian port of Krasnovodsk. It was intended to be no more than a light, narrow-gauge track, along which heavy equipment could be hauled by traction engine, or even by camels, and which could be dragged forward as the force advanced. This had very soon been dropped, however, for a more ambitious and permanent rail link. One hundred miles of standard track from European Russia was shipped across the Caspian, and a special railway battalion, commanded by a general, was formed to lay it. In the event, Skobelev moved faster than the railway builders, and he stormed Geok-Tepe without waiting for them. But the railway had continued to creep forward as the neighbouring tribes were pacified, reaching Merv only a year after its capitulation to Lieutenant Alikhanov. The ensuing threat of war with Britain over Pandjeh led to the formation of a second railway battalion, and a rapid increase in the line’s rate of advance. By the middle of 1888, it had reached Bokhara and Samarkand, and work on the final leg of its journey to Tashkent had begun.