Then, less than two months later, the ruling was abruptly reversed as the Liberals fell from power and Lord Salisbury was back once more in Downing Street. More important perhaps for India, Curzon was appointed Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. Strongly urging the Prime Minister to retain Chitral, he warned of the likelihood of the Russians seizing it if Britain withdrew. Even if they did not, a British withdrawal would be viewed by the frontier tribes as a sign of weakness, especially following Russia’s gains in the Pamirs. Already serious trouble was brewing among the tribes in parts of the north, and such a move would only encourage them into believing that the British could be driven out. Curzon’s arguments prevailed, and it was decided to retain Chitral. A permanent garrison was to be maintained there, consisting of two battalions of Indian infantry, mountain batteries and sappers, while two further battalions would guard the Malakand Pass and other points on the route northwards.
The hawks had won the day, and subsequently it emerged that very likely they were right in urging the retention of Chitral. In the spring of 1898, while on a ‘shooting expedition’ in the Pamirs, an officer of the 60th Rifles – Captain Ralph Cobbold – learned from a Russian frontier officer he met there that they had orders to take immediate possession of Chitral if the British evacuated it. ‘Very complete plans’ had been drawn up for this eventuality, and a Russian officer had visited Chitral in disguise in order to examine its defences and approach routes. Cobbold’s informant added that plans for the invasion of Chitral ‘are a matter of common discussion at the dinner table of the Governor of Ferghana’, while other Russian officers told him that they looked upon the present frontier with Afghanistan as a ‘purely temporary arrangement’ and ‘by no means permanent’. Cobbold was much impressed by how well informed they were about the British and Afghan side of the frontier. This he put down to ‘the extensive system of espionage which is encouraged by the Russian Government along the Indian frontier’. He added: ‘Trusty men in disguise are constantly coming and going between the Russian frontier, Kabul and Chitral, and these are encouraged to gain all the information possible compatible with their own safety.’ The Russian officers he met ‘all look forward to war with the greatest eagerness’, he reported.
Russian officers serving on the frontier had long been given to such bellicose talk, as we have noted before. Its encouragement was one way of keeping up morale, while the preparation of invasion plans, and the gathering of intelligence, was merely part of a staff officer’s routine in most armies. Allowing word of it to reach British ears, moreover, was an effective way of encouraging them to keep more troops in India than they would otherwise have needed. That was all part of the Great Game. Whatever the truth of this Pamir gossip, in the event St Petersburg was to stick firmly to the agreement, making no further moves towards Afghanistan or India. The Russians had got pretty well what they wanted. Not only had they secured their long southern frontier, but they had also placed themselves advantageously if ever it came to a war with Britain. After the best part of a century, the Tsar’s empire in Central Asia had finally reached its limits. But the British, so often hoodwinked in the past, were still far from convinced. The last round of the Great Game was about to begin. Once again the play moved eastwards – this time to Tibet, a secretive land long closed to foreigners, and protected from the inquisitive by some of the highest mountains on earth.
·36·
The Beginning of the End
Although the British had not yet grasped the fact, far grander visions now occupied the mind of the new Tsar Nicholas than the annexation of Chitral, or even the conquest of India. Under the persuasive influence of his Finance Minister, Count Witte, he dreamed of opening up to Russia the whole of the Far East, with its vast resources and markets, before these fell to other predators. It would thus become his India. Russia would be a great economic power, as well as a great military one. Witte knew just how to feed his sovereign’s dreams with visions of a golden future for Russia. ‘From the shores of the Pacific, and the heights of the Himalayas,’ he declared, ‘Russia will not only dominate the affairs of Asia, but those of Europe also.’ And while his grand design would extend Russia’s resources to the full, it involved no risk of war – or so he believed. To wrest India from the British was one thing, but to capture its trade was another.
Witte’s plan involved the construction of the greatest railway the world had ever seen. It would run for 4,500 miles across Russia, from Moscow in the west to Vladivostok and Port Arthur in the east. Indeed, work had already begun on it, starting simultaneously at either end, although it was not expected to be completed for at least twelve years. When finished, Witte calculated, it would be capable of carrying merchandise and raw materials from Europe to the Pacific and vice versa in less than half the time it took by sea. It would thus attract not merely Russian commercial traffic, he reasoned, but also that of other nations, thereby seriously threatening the sea routes which served as Britain’s economic arteries. But there was much more to it than that. The railway would enable Russia to exploit its own enormous but still untapped resources in the inhospitable Siberian wastes through which it would run. Entire communities from overcrowded parts of European Russia could be moved eastwards by railway, to work both on its construction and also in the new towns along its length. And in time of war its role could be crucial, for it could be used to rush – at 15 miles an hour – troops and munitions eastwards to a Far Eastern war zone, without risk of interference by the navies of Britain or any other power.
Even that, however, was not all that Witte dangled before the impressionable Nicholas in his vision of the future. In 1893, the year before Nicholas’s accession, an astute Buryat Mongol named Peter Badmayev, a lecturer in Mongolian at St Petersburg, had submitted to Alexander III an ambitious plan for bringing parts of the Chinese Empire, including Tibet and Mongolia, under Russian sway. This could be done, he assured Alexander, without any risk of war and at comparatively little cost by fomenting large-scale insurrections against the already enfeebled and universally disliked Manchus. To accomplish it he proposed the setting up of a trading company, to be run by himself, whose real purpose would be to incite the population against their alien rulers. Alexander, however, turned the scheme down, calling it: ‘so fantastic . . . that it is hard to believe in the possibility of success’. But that did not deter Count Witte from reviving it after Alexander’s death, and using it to excite Nicholas’s expansionist dreams. And in this he appears to have had some success. Badmayev’s company, with an initial capital of two million roubles, was set up, and Nicholas expressed to his Minister of War, General Kuropatkin, a wish to add Tibet to his domains. It is perhaps more than a coincidence, therefore, that around this time a growing number of reports began to reach Calcutta of shadowy Russian agents, usually Buryat Mongol subjects of Tsar Nicholas’s, travelling between St Petersburg and Lhasa. All appeared to be somehow connected with the mysterious Badmayev.
Whatever the truth about Badmayev’s machinations in Tibet and Mongolia, elsewhere in the Far East the major European powers were at that moment engaged in a frantic scramble for their share of the dying Manchu empire, and anything else that was going. The Germans, late starters in the colonial game, began the immediate rush, fearing lest the other powers gain a monopoly of the world’s markets and resources. Their first requirement was a naval base and coaling station for their new Far Eastern fleet somewhere on China’s northern coastline. The murder of two German missionaries by Chinese bandits in November 1897 gave them their chance. By way of reprisal, Kaiser Wilhelm’s troops seized nearby Kiaochow, known subsequently as Tsingtao, on which the Russians already had their eye. Peking was given little choice but to grant Germany a ninety-nine-year lease on it, together with mining and railway concessions. In the ensuing scrimmage, Britain and France gained further concessions, while Russia, ever posing as China’s protector, obtained the warm-water naval base of Port Arthur and its immediate hinterland. The Russians further gained
a crucial strategic concession – agreement to link the base by rail to the now half-completed Trans-Siberian line. The United States, too, joined the Far Eastern scramble, acquiring in 1898 Hawaii, Wake, Guam and the Philippines, which Russia, Germany and Japan were known to covet.
While this was taking place on the periphery of Great Game territory, something occurred in India which was to have a profound effect on the game itself. George Curzon, that arch-Russophobe, had been appointed Viceroy of India. At the age of only 39, and newly raised to the peerage, he had thus achieved his boyhood dream. Needless to say, the hawks were delighted, for Curzon’s views on the Russian threat to India were well known. St Petersburg’s ultimate ambition, he was convinced, was the domination of the whole of Asia, a goal it sought to achieve step by step. It was a remorseless process which must be resisted at every stage. ‘If Russia is entitled to these ambitions,’ Curzon wrote, still more is Britain entitled, nay compelled, to defend that which she has won, and to resist the minor encroachments which are only part of a larger plan.’ He was confident, moreover, that with firm action the Russian steamroller could be halted. ‘I will no more admit’, he declared, ‘that an irresistible destiny is going to plant Russia in the Persian Gulf than at Kabul or Constantinople. South of a certain line in Asia her future is much more what we choose to make it than what she can make it herself.’ It need hardly be said that his appointment as Viceroy was to cause alarm in St Petersburg.
Persia, particularly the Gulf, was seen by Curzon as an area especially vulnerable to further Russian penetration. Already St Petersburg was beginning to show an interest in acquiring a port there, and even in building a railway for the Shah from Isfahan to the coast. It was worrying enough, he wrote to Lord George Hamilton, the Secretary of State for India, in April 1899, having to defend India from a Russian overland attack, without the added menace of a seaborne one. He urged the Cabinet to make it quite clear to both St Petersburg and Teheran that Britain would never allow southern Persia to fall under any foreign influence other than her own. Nor were the Russians alone in showing an interest in the Gulf, for both Germany and France were beginning to challenge British supremacy there. The Cabinet, however, did not appear unduly perturbed, causing Curzon to write to Hamilton: ‘I do not suppose that Lord Salisbury will be persuaded to lift a little finger to save Persia . . . We are slowly – no, I think I may say swiftly – paving the way for the total extinction of our influence in that country.’ Afghanistan, too, was a worry to Curzon, despite Britain’s long-standing treaty with Abdur Rahman and the settlement of the northern frontier with Russia. For intelligence began to reach Calcutta that Russian officials in Transcaspia, including the governors of Ashkhabad and Merv, were endeavouring to communicate with the Emir directly, and not, as St Petersburg had agreed, through the Foreign Office in London. In the event, the Russians were rebuffed by Abdur Rahman, and a crisis was averted. It was to Tibet, however, that the focus of the Great Game now shifted, as word was received in India that twice within twelve months an emissary from the Dalai Lama had visited St Petersburg, where he had been warmly welcomed by the Tsar.
The Russians have always insisted that the comings and goings of this emissary – a Buryat Mongol named Aguan Dorjief – were purely religious, and without any political significance. Indeed, it could not be denied that the Tsar had many Buddhists of the Tibetan school among his Buryat subjects in southern Siberia. What was more natural, therefore, than for spiritual contacts to be made between a Christian head of state and a Buddhist one? But Curzon, for one, was unconvinced. He felt fairly certain that Dorjief, far from being a simple Buddhist monk, was working on behalf of Tsar Nicholas against Britain’s interests in Asia. The discovery that Dorjief was a close friend of Peter Badmayev’s, who was now the Tsar’s adviser on Tibetan affairs, served only to confirm Curzon’s suspicions. The final truth will almost certainly never be known, although most scholars today believe that British fears were largely groundless, Nicholas being beset by too many problems of his own to be thinking about Tibet. However, writing in 1924, a respected German traveller and Central Asian scholar, Wilhelm Filchner, claimed that between 1900 and 1902 there was an all-out drive by St Petersburg to secure Tibet for Russia. In Storm Over Asia: Experiences of a Secret Diplomatic Agent, Filchner described in detail the activities of a Buryat Mongol named Zerempil, a man even more shadowy than Badmayev or Dorjief, with whom he was closely associated. Among other things, Filchner claims, Zerempil was used by the ‘Indian Section’ of the Russian General Staff to smuggle arms into Tibet. If Zerempil, who was said to go under a variety of names and guises, did in fact exist, then he managed to go undetected by the British intelligence services, for there are no references to him in the archives at that time.
But it was the behaviour of the Tibetans themselves rather than of the Russians that finally convinced the new Viceroy that something underhand was going on between Lhasa and St Petersburg. Twice he had written to the Dalai Lama raising the question of trade and other matters, but each time the letter had been returned unopened. And yet the Tibetan God-king appeared to be on excellent terms with the Russians, as even the St Petersburg newspapers were beginning to claim. Curzon was both genuinely alarmed, lest some secret treaty was being forged behind his back, and also personally affronted by this rebuff to his authority by a political nonentity like the Dalai Lama. By the beginning of 1903 he was convinced that the only effective course of action was for the Indian government to dispatch a mission to Lhasa – using force if necessary – to discover the truth about Russian activities there, and to put Britain’s relations with Tibet on a firm and proper basis.
Curzon found the home government – which had only just extricated itself from a humiliating and unpopular war with the Boers – reluctant to embark on any further adventures, especially in Central Asia where there was the added danger of a Russian countermove. Nonetheless, that April he managed to get the Cabinet’s approval for a small escorted mission to visit Khamba Jong, just inside Tibet, where it would endeavour to hold talks with the Tibetans. The political officer chosen by Curzon to lead the mission was one whose earlier Great Game exploits he much admired – Major Francis Younghusband, now aged 40, and promoted to colonel for the occasion. However, the Tibetans refused to negotiate – except on the British side of the frontier – and withdrew into their fortress, or jong. After a stalemate lasting several months, the mission was recalled to India, having achieved nothing and lost considerable face.
Stung by this second rebuff by his puny neighbours, the Viceroy persuaded London to agree to a second mission. This time it would be accompanied by a 1,000-strong military escort, and would venture considerably further into Tibet. Such a show of force, Curzon believed, would surely bring the Tibetans to heel. Strict orders were given, however, that the mission was to proceed no further than the great fortress at Gyantse, half-way to Lhasa. At the same time St Petersburg and Peking – the latter being the nominal ruler of Tibet – were officially notified of Britain’s intended move. The Russians immediately lodged a strong protest. But this was brushed aside by London, it being pointed out firmly that this move was purely temporary, and in no way comparable with their own permanent annexation of vast areas of Central Asia. Again Colonel Younghusband was chosen to head the mission, with a brigadier-general in command of the Gurkha and Sikh escort. Led by a sepoy bearing a Union Jack, the party crossed the passes into Tibet on December 12, 1903. Behind, in the snow, trailed a straggling column of 10,000 coolies, 7,000 mules and 4,000 yaks, together carrying the expedition’s baggage, including champagne for the officers. So began the last forward move in the Great Game, and what would prove to be one of the most contentious episodes in British history. At the same time the Russians, seemingly at the height of their power in Asia, were about to suffer a succession of spectacular disasters there. Between them, these two events were to mark the beginning of the end of Anglo-Russian rivalry in Asia.
As the Younghusband mission made its way no
rthwards towards Gyantse, much was happening elsewhere in Asia, particularly in China. In the summer of 1900, taking the European powers by surprise, had come the Boxer Uprising. It sprang from a bitter resentment among the Chinese towards the ‘foreign devils’ who, taking advantage of their weakness, were acquiring treaty ports and other commercial and diplomatic privileges. The rebellion began in Tientsin with the massacre of Christian missionaries and the lynching of the French consul, and was finally put down by a six-nation relief force which occupied (and looted) Peking. But although the uprising was over, it was to have far-reaching consequences in Manchuria, where the Russians had feared for the safety of their newly-built railway at the hands of the Boxers. For, among many other grievances, the rebels were convinced that the construction of railways had upset the natural harmony of man, and had thus been responsible for recent droughts and flooding. In order to protect their expensive investment there – or so St Petersburg insisted – the Russians had at once moved 170,000 troops into Manchuria. It was one of the largest such concentrations of military might ever seen in Asia, and it caused considerable alarm among other powers with interests there, especially Japan.
During the protracted negotiations which followed the crushing of the Boxers, considerable pressure was put on St Petersburg to withdraw its troops now that the danger was over. The Russians were clearly extremely reluctant, though finally they agreed to do so, but in three stages. As it turned out, they only honoured the first of these promised withdrawals, for in the meantime Count Witte and the more moderate of his ministerial colleagues had been eased out of power by those close to Tsar Nicholas who favoured a more aggressive foreign policy. ‘Russia has been made, not by diplomacy, but by bayonets,’ declared the new Minister of the Interior, ‘and we must decide the questions at issue with China and Japan with bayonets and not with pens.’ It now became increasingly obvious that the Russians, as so often before in Asia, intended to stay put. To the British it was merely another broken promise by St Petersburg, but to the Japanese it was the last straw.
The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia Page 56