In London and Calcutta ministers were endeavouring to cobble together a policy that would salvage something from the disaster, preferably a neutral and neutered Afghanistan. Roberts’s recent victories had raised hopes that the country might be partitioned, with Herat given to Persia, Kandahar placed under a British stooge and Kabul under a new amir. Yakub Khan had been dethroned and exiled for suspected collusion in Cavignari’s murder, and feelers were being put out to two candidates: his younger brother, Ayub Khan, the Governor of Herat, and his nephew, Abdul Rahman Khan, who was living in Samarkand. Whoever was selected would inherit an undivided state, for, in May, the new Liberal government recalled Lytton and replaced him with Ripon, who had instructions to bring all troops out of Afghanistan. It was a setback for supporters of the Forward policy, but Roberts felt sure that in any emergency a British army would be able to re-occupy Kabul and Kandahar without difficulty.
Plans for the evacuation were upset by Ayub Khan, who had stirred up an anti-British jihad to unite the tribes around Herat. Vague details of his activities had been reaching the local commander and political officer in Kandahar since the turn of the year, but had caused little concern. Early in June he sallied out of Herat with, according to intelligence estimates, between 6,000 and 8,000 followers; in fact he had well over 10,000. Counter-measures were taken and a brigade of 1,500 British and Indian troops together with Afghan levies raised by Sher Ali Khan, the puppet wali (governor) of Kandahar, was sent to intercept Ayub Khan. The Afghans soon switched sides, having no desire to fight for unbelievers against their countrymen. Command of this detachment was given to Brigadier George Burrows, an unusual choice since he was sixty-three years old and had never seen active service. He was a man of great charm with a tenderness towards animals and, as it turned out, enormous reserves of courage.32 True to the traditions of Indian warfare, Burrows was determined to take the offensive, even though he had no indication of Ayub Khan’s strength or movements.
On 27 July the armies met at Maiwand, forty-six miles from Kandahar. Burrows trusted to superior firepower, particularly the volleys of the 66th Regiment, the backbone of his force. The Afghan attacks were persistent and their artillery was well-handled, so well that it was imagined that European officers were directing fire.33 Many of the Indian troops were new recruits, inadequately trained, who crumpled under pressure and began to desert. The tide turned against the British, despite a heroic last-ditch stand by the remnants of the 66th, which lost two-thirds of its strength. Burrows gave his horse to a wounded colleague, but was later rescued by an Indian sowar. He had lost nearly half his men, having inflicted over 2,500 casualties on a determined and well-led adversary. The Afghans murdered their prisoners and a soldier was wise to heed Kipling’s advice:
When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to you rifle and blow out your brains
An’ you’ll go to yor Gawd like a soldier, . . .
The defeat at Maiwand was followed by the siege of Kandahar. Roberts, with 10,000 men, two-thirds of them Indian, rushed to the relief of the city in an epic march from Kabul which was also a masterpiece of logistical planning. His forces covered 313 miles in twenty-two days in temperatures which ranged from freezing to 100 degrees. On 1 September he engaged Ayub Khan’s forces and beat them with slight losses, avenging Maiwand, restoring British prestige and ensuring that the war ended with a flourish. Many years after, Roberts’s heroic march was magnificently commemorated by a statue in Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Park. The general sits firmly astride his horse on a plinth around which there are strongly carved panels showing Indian and British troops on the march in full kit.
The second Afghan war achieved very little beyond adding significantly to local anglophobia. The new amir, Abdul Rahman Khan, proved a shrewd prince who ruled independently but without upsetting Calcutta too much. Politically, Afghanistan was restored to what it had been at the outset of the war: a neutral buffer state. Roberts and the Forward camp still clung to their belief that an Anglo-Russian war was unavoidable, and it would be best for Britain if it was fought on Afghan and Persian soil. Its outcome filled him with foreboding, for he imagined that the sepoy would prove no match for the Russian conscript. In 1884, on the eve of his appointment as commander-in-chief of the Indian army, he wrote, ‘Only a limited number of our native troops could be depended upon to fight against a European enemy, and unless we show a bold front, and let it be clearly seen that we intend to win, even these few would most assuredly question the policy of remaining faithful.’ The only hope lay in recruiting more of the naturally warlike ‘martial’ races and castes such as Gurkhas, Sikhs and Dogras.34
III
After 1880 the local military initiative passed to Russia. For the next four years its forces fought a series of campaigns which put the finishing touches to the conquest of Turkmenistan. In January 1881 General Skobelev took the fortress of Gek Tepe, and in February 1884 Merv was occupied, bringing the Russian frontier to within 600 miles of the Indian. During the next few months, General Komarov’s pacification operations took a new turn as Russian units probed southwards into the ill-defined borders between Turkmeni tribal lands and Afghanistan. What appeared to be a reconnaissance force came at a bad time for Britain, whose army was heavily committed to a campaign in the Sudan to rescue General Gordon from Khartoum, where he was besieged by the Mahdi. It failed, and in February 1885 Gladstone’s government was reluctantly compelled to mount full-scale war to reconquer the Sudan. The Russians had carefully followed the course of events there and sensed that the time might be right to snatch an advantage in Central Asia.
On 11 February the Foreign Office received an account of conversations which Colonel Chevenix Trench, the military attaché in St Peters-burg, had recently had with some Russian officers. They had told him that, once the military position around Merv had been consolidated, Russian forces would pounce on Herat. Chevenix Trench suspected that this coup de main would be delivered ‘a month or two hence, as soon as a large portion of our Forces are locked up in Egypt and the Sudan and are fairly committed to a somewhat lengthened campaign’.35 His prognosis confirmed intelligence reports which had been reaching London during the past six months.
A new round in the Great Game was about to be played and, for the first time, the British could rely on an intelligence network that provided solid evidence of what the Russians were doing. One, possibly the only, positive result of the second Afghan war had been an overdue overhaul of British political and military intelligence. Before the invasion of Afghanistan, efforts to map the frontier districts had been desultory, partly for fear of antagonising local tribes. When a section of the Kandahar Field Force had returned to India by way of the Peshun valley, it had been marching blindly.36 A systematic programme of map-making was started and native agents were recruited and trained for espionage in Afghanistan and Central Asia. Colonel T. E. Gordon, who joined the newly founded Indian Army’s Intelligence Department at Simla in 1879, recalled one volunteer, Nur ad-Din, a former Guides sowar, who adopted the appearance of a diwana (imbecile). This masquerade placed him under Allah’s special protection and allowed him to travel as far as the Oxus to investigate Russian activities. Like other recruits, he had served in the army and had to be taught to read and write.37 Mashad, the capital of the Persian province of Khorassan and conveniently close to the Russian border, was, from 1881, the centre for a network of native spies under the direction of the consular agent, Mirza Abbas Khan, and Colonel C. E. Stewart, the consul.38 The town possessed a telegraph office that linked it to Tehran, which was invaluable, although, like other Persian public services, it often broke down. A further source of information was General Sir Peter Lumsden, who had been sent with a sizeable military escort to Sarakhs as part of a commission empowered by the British and Russian governments to establish a Russo-Persian boundary. He arrived at his destination on 31 October 1884 to find that the Russi
an commissioners would not appear until the spring.39
From these sources came a steady flow of intelligence during the winter of 1884–85 which strongly indicated that the Russian pacification of Turkmenistan had been a prelude to large-scale incursion into what, even in the absence of a formal frontier, was assumed to be Afghan territory. Lumsden and the Mashad-based spies uncovered indications that the Russian thrust would be directed against Pandjeh.40 Local tribesmen believed that there were at least 3,000 Russian soldiers in the vicinity, but as usual with such sources it was very hard to sift fact from rumour. The latter was running wild throughout the region: Turkmeni tribesmen imagined that there were 12,000 British troops in Herat, on hand to help them expel the Russians, and the Afghans were convinced the boundary commission was a cover for an Anglo-Russian partition of their country. This, so the tale went, would lead to the corruption of women and the overthrow of Islam.41 According to one report received by military intelligence in Peshawar, the Russian invasion was already in progress, with 25,000 soldiers moving towards Herat and a further 35,000 on their way from St Petersburg. In December Peshawar’s spies brought stories of heavy concentrations of men in Kokand, Tashkent and Samarkand.42 At the same time, what purported to be a Russian proclamation to the Afghan people came into British hands. It read as if it had been written for distribution as the Russian army advanced: ‘What will the British Government do for Amir Abdul Rahman? They will do for him what they did for Amir Sher Ali. Every ruler who wishes to retain his country should submit to Russian rule, otherwise he will be deprived of it.’43 This was hardly reassuring for the Afghans and added to British fears that an offensive was imminent.
Matters were clarified in the new year. Early in February the Russian government expressed an interest in negotiating a frontier with Afghanistan and, at the same time, began to occupy Afghan outposts.44 Under Foreign Office instructions, Lumsden and his escort withdrew towards Herat as a precaution against an accidental clash with the Russians which might lead to war.45 The Russian big push came on 31 March when a force stormed and captured Pandjeh, killing over 300 of its defenders. Assuming, as nearly everyone in the India, War and Foreign Offices did, that Russia was capable of any infamy when it came to expanding its empire, two alternatives emerged. The Czar’s army was going to draw the border with its bayonets or else it was about to creep forward into Herat, 100 miles to the south of Pandjeh. If it did either, Britain would declare war.
The stand-off was in many ways like an extended 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Gladstone’s ministry and its successor under Salisbury (which came to power in June) declared that India’s security was non-negotiable. Armies were mobilised in Britain and India and plans were drawn up in Simla for an advance to Kandahar. Russia was in an awkward position; it had made a maladroit attempt to snatch Afghan territory, had come unstuck and was faced with a war it had never intended to fight. In February 1884 Cherniaiev, the hero of Tashkent, had been rebuked and recalled after he had put forward a scheme for the invasion of India. Even if it had wanted to fight such a war, Russia lacked the money and the muscle; in the middle of the 1886 Bulgarian crisis, its high command were forced to admit that they lacked the resources to withstand an Austrian invasion.46
Britain’s scope for action was also limited because it lacked potential allies. This was the period in which the great European powers were embarking on their often acrimonious partition of Africa, and international tension was high. France was bitter at the recent British occupation of Egypt, and Germany used Britain’s embarrassment in Central Asia to secure concessions in Africa and the Pacific. As the German Chancellor, Bismarck, rightly guessed, Britain would need friends if it chose to fight Russia. None were forthcoming, nor a convincing strategy. During the spring and summer statesmen and generals scrutinised maps and devised stratagems, none of which was very practical. Turkey, still sore about the takeover of Egypt, would resist the navy’s passage through the Straits, which ruled out an attack on Russia’s Black Sea coast. Turkey’s arm might be twisted by a landing on the Gallipoli peninsula, but this scheme was wisely shelved. Another forlorn hope was an alliance with China.47
Without any clear means to injure each other, the two powers came to terms. In September it was agreed that the Russo-Afghan border should be settled by an Anglo-Russian commission. It completed its task within two years. The work appears to have been most congenial as British and Russian officers with common interests enjoyed each others’ company. Colonel Holdich later recalled pheasant shoots, disappointing camel fights and relaxing evenings around campfires during which he developed a taste for rye bread, caviare, salt fish and vodka. The last, he discovered, was a less efficacious restorative than whisky and ginger.48 Cheerful relations between British and Russian officers were a constant feature of the Great Game and whenever their wandering paths met there were impromptu parties. Crossing the Pamirs on a quest for the mir (ruler) of Hunza in 1889, Francis Younghusband and his Gurkha riflemen encountered another explorer, Colonel Grombtchevski. The Polish officer was ‘a thorough gentleman’ who made no bones about his mission and its implications. ‘We are both playing at a big game,’ he told Younghusband, ‘and we should not be one jot better off for not trying to conceal the fact.’ Grombtchevski boasted that half a million Russian soldiers were ready to invade India, and his Cossacks cheered when he asked them whether they wished to join this enterprise. A convivial evening ended with brandy.49
Grombtchevski’s talk was disinformation, as Younghusband probably guessed. The intelligence services of the British and Indian armies knew more or less exactly how many troops were stationed in Russian Central Asia, their movements and their operational efficiency. An unpublicised (many details were not realised until this decade) but vital aspect of the Great Game was systematic espionage by native agents scattered between the Caspian and the Chinese frontier. At the hub of these operations was Colonel Charles Maclean, a Mutiny and Afghan war veteran, who was consul-general in Mashad from 1885 to 1891. He was an ideal spymaster in that he was diligent, untrusting and a good judge of character. His expenses, together with funding for running repairs on the telegraph lines which linked him with Tehran and ultimately London, were paid by the Treasury, which in those days was keen to get value for money.50
Maclean’s spies were recruited locally from natives who needed his rupees. At one level there was a handful of venal Persian and Afghan officials anxious to supplement their incomes. A Mashad telegraph clerk supplied copies of the telegrams sent by the Russian consul, although it is not clear whether they were in cipher and, if they were, whether the British possessed the key. Nonetheless, he was paid 100 rupees (£8) a month for ‘running a great risk’. Russian consulates were kept under close surveillance through spies on their staff, including Mirza, a servant of the Russian consul in Mashad. There was also the postmaster-general of Khorassan province, who was instrumental in placing a valuable agent in Merv. Another fruitful contact was one of Abdul Rahman’s news collectors, who forwarded letters and telegrams which were worth 400 rupees a month.51 Field agents were of two kinds: men specially chosen for a task and professional intelligence gatherers based in Russian towns and outposts. Among the former were Muhammad Reza, who, although illiterate, managed to secure photographs from Turkmenistan in 1886, and Reza Beg, who was sent to check up on permanent agents over the border in March 1887. According to Maclean, he had been ‘for many years a hand aboard a Russian steamer in the Caspian’ and therefore knew Russian. ‘A promising man’, he might, the colonel feared, be a double agent.52
The full-time spies in Bukhara, Merv, Samarkand, Iolantan, Chardzhou and Pandjeh were of varying reliability in all matters save collecting their pay. In January 1887 Maclean reported that: ‘Either owing to snow, or treachery or fear of discovery they have not acted up to their agreements. They will be kept for another month and discharged thereafter if they show no improvement.’53 The turnover at this level appears to have been high, which suggests that either the agent
s were slack or Russian counterintelligence good. In 1889 a fresh attempt had to be made to establish spies in Bukhara, Ashkhabad, Chardzhou, Merv and Pandjeh, who were known by the letters A, B, C and D. Agent B and two of his colleagues were collared in March 1891, after the Russians had discovered secret correspondence in the packs carried by mules on the road between Ashkhabad and Quchan. What happened to them or the unlucky muleteer may only be guessed. In the future, agents were encouraged to write in invisible ink. A fourth spy was sacked that year after he had demanded extra pay.54
Maclean’s secret service delivered detailed information about Russian strength and dispositions. In November 1887 he was able to forward to the Foreign Office an analysis of Russian frontier garrisons which totalled 11,000 infantry and 2,800 cavalry. He also sent on those snippets of hearsay which were the small change of espionage: in February 1888 there were rumours that a French Hussar officer, the Vicomte Sabran, was about to make a tour of Central Asia for some unknown but doubtless sinister purpose.55
A Frenchman accompanied by a Russian was encountered by Kimball O’Hara, the Tibetan lama and Hurry Chunder Mookerjee in the Himalayas towards the end of Kipling’s Kim. This richly detailed, finely observed novel is probably the best-known account of the Great Game as played. It was also profoundly misleading, endowing the Great Game with a glamour it never possessed, in much the same way as James Bond’s derring-do romanticised the intelligence activities of the Cold War. The Indian government’s intelligence services were never as omniscient as Kipling imagined, and, while it did employ some resourceful agents, most of its information came by way of the sort of venal informers Colonel Maclean hired in Mashad. There was also an element of propaganda in Kim; as might be expected, for Kipling was an admirer of Roberts and the book reflects his fears that ‘a friendly northern power’ was bent on subversion in India. The novel appeared in 1901, and closely reflected contemporary events; there are references to mischief on the frontiers (there had been a sequence of tribal uprisings on the North-West Frontier in 1897–98), Russian penetration of the Pamirs and possible meddling in the affairs of Tibet.
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