IV
All were uppermost in the minds of Indian strategic planners at the turn of the century. From the mid-1880s British and Indian intelligence services had become increasingly obsessed with the progress of Russian railway construction in this region. Superficially, it provided the means for economic development, particularly cotton cultivation, and the movement of colonists. In Simla and Whitehall the new tracks had one purpose: shifting troops and their supplies. The Russian railway programme began in 1880 with the Caspian line, which ran from from the port of Krasnovodsk to Merv, which was reached by 1886. It then continued to Samarkand and terminated uncomfortably close to the foothills of the Pamirs at Andijan in 1899. Branch lines snaked out to Tashkent (1898), Kushk (1900) and Bukhara (1906), where the inhabitants had long objected to railways on the grounds that they were instruments of the devil. A fast line which linked Orenburg with Tashkent was completed in great haste in 1906.
Together these lines represented a fresh danger to India’s security. Steps were immediately taken to assess their military efficiency by army officers who posed as travellers. Among the first was Colonel A. Le Mesurier, who went as far as he then could into Central Asia in 1887 and published an account of his journey. There was plenty about engines and rolling stock, which he counted, the speed of trains and Russian habits, most notably women smoking in public.56 His travelogue is a reminder that, while the Great Game was ostensibly a duel of secret services, the players never missed the chance to rush into print the moment their adventures were over.
Like Kim, the publications of men like Le Mesurier, Francis Young-husband and Curzon kept the Russian threat and the Great Game in the forefront of public consciousness. They were also constant reminders that Russia was a rapacious power with its eyes on India. There were dissenters who both questioned this interpretation of Russian policy and the notion that India could only be saved by a hypothetical war waged somewhere in the Afghan passes or the Persian plains. Reviewing Simla’s plans for the defence of India in 1889, Sir Garnet Wolseley, the Adjutant-General, wondered whether sending 30,000 reinforcements to India was playing Russia’s game. As in 1854 and 1877, its real aim was Constantinople, and in consequence the main theatre of war was bound to be in the Near East, or possibly Europe. He had nothing but scorn for any Indian counter-attack:
Offensive operations against Russia on the Oxus, or in Central Asia, from a base in India, is in my opinion, the dream of a madman, whose head is filled with military theories from the time of Xerxes or Alexander the Great.57
Lord Salisbury shared his view of Russian objectives. Any upsurge in Russian military activity in Central Asia was a smokescreen behind which its rulers prepared for an attack on the prize they really wanted: Constantinople. His judgement was upheld when he met Czar Nicholas II at Balmoral at the end of September 1897. A few years before, when he had been Czarevitch, Nicholas had toured India where he and his entourage had raised eyebrows by shooting rather than sticking pigs, and had been discreetly watched by Indian officials fearful as to their real purpose.58 The emperor fondly remembered his visit for, as he told the Prime Minister, ‘it had convinced him of the absurdity of Russia ever trying to obtain it’. He added, ‘A few Russians had been induced to express a wish for an attack on India by the folly of our newspapers and public men, who were always talking of it; but no Russian Emperor could ever dream of it.’59
This was true. But it did not silence the expansionist editors and the generals in St Petersburg, nor calm the Russophobes who were always on the look-out for the tell-tale signs of some new manoeuvre directed towards India. And in any case, Nicholas II did not have a reputation for firmness. By 1890 there were signs that Russia was again on the move, this time towards the Pamirs and Chinese Turkestan. Part of this area had been crossed by Francis Younghusband some years before and, like every British sportsman, explorer and adventurer who found himself in remote lands of possible strategic value, he filed his report with the Foreign Office. What was a ‘no-man’s-land’ between Russia, India, Afghanistan and China appeared to Younghusband to be in China’s possession; the British government hoped that things would stay that way.60
The frontier, in so far as the word meant anything in the Himalayas, was finally settled by an Anglo-Russian commission in the summer of 1895. The British were led by Captain E. F. Swiney DSO, an Indian cavalry-turned-intelligence officer, and two native NCOs, one of whom had accompanied Francis Younghusband on his trek through this region. Dressed in local padded clothing, balaclavas and tinted snow goggles, they were agreeably entertained by their Russian opposite numbers. Everyone stuck to the rules of the game; at one outpost Russian officers had discreetly covered the perimeter field-pieces so that Swiney could not tell whether they were cannon or machine-guns, and he celebrated Queen Victoria’s birthday by presenting a keg of rum to a detachment of Cossacks. Sensitive to all matters of prestige, he was peeved when he noticed that the Czar Nicholas II range of mountains were higher than their opposite numbers on the British side of the border, the Queen Victoria range.61
Russian goodwill was bogus; or so Captain Ralph Cobbold believed when he entered the Pamirs two years after. He captured the spirit of the Great Game when he digressed on what animated its players:
The British officer, jaded with his work in the heat of the plains, is, like a keen sportsman, prepared to rough with the best. He will willingly for a time do without his luxuries, and live, as a Russian officer lives, on what he can get. A month of native chapattis is fully compensated by the mountain air and fine sport available amongst the Himalayas.62
Cobbold not only had mountain ibex in his sights. He inspected Russian positions in the Pamirs, counted their garrisons and noted their armaments, for he feared that the region would become a springboard for an offensive southwards. Not surprisingly, he was briefly arrested as a spy, which he indignantly denied. He had lied, for back in London, he duly delivered an account of what he had seen and heard to the Foreign Office. His ears had pricked up when he heard Russian officers praising the new War Minister, Prince A. N. Kuropatkin, whom they hoped would adopt a more pugnacious frontier policy.63 Most of the speakers were in debt and saw a war as a means to achieve solvency, as Cobbold knew.64
Nothing was further from the truth. Kuropatkin was preoccupied with the modernisation of the Russian army and wanted to avoid any entanglement with Britain in Asia. If it occurred, Russia could only afford a half-hearted Maskirovka move by local units which would advance into Khorassan and towards Kabul. According to Russian estimates they would be outnumbered two to one by a combination of Anglo-Indian troops and Afghans whom, it was believed, would resist Russian incursions as fiercely as they had British.65 A different picture of Russia’s military capacity was being drawn in London and Simla, where the recent extension of the railway to Kushk on the Persian frontier, coupled with vague reports of troop movements east of the Caspian, provided the ingredients for a new war scare at the beginning of 1900.
As in 1885, Britain was militarily over-stretched. The Boer war had broken out in October 1899 and the greater part of the British army was concentrated in South Africa, and making heavy weather of the campaign there. Stories of Russian forces in transit across Central Asia added to a general jitteriness, although no one was sure of how many were involved or their destination. The focus of the Great Game shifted to the Caspian and new players were hastily recruited. In April 1900 the military attaché in Vienna approached Major-General Sir John Ardagh of the Intelligence Division of the General Staff with an offer from a ‘hard-up’ senior Russian officer. He provided details of Russian numbers and dispositions east of the Caspian, but was dismayed by the niggardly payments he received in return. His information tallied with other reports which may explain the value placed on it. A Mr White, ‘an educated, observant and reliable man’ based in Petrovsk and involved in oil exploration, was hired in July to report on the transport of men and equipment across the Caspian. It all came to nothing: at the end of Sept
ember the consul in Batumi reported that there had been no further troop movements and that ‘things appear to be very quiet’.66
A phantom Maskirovka gambit had produced an astonishing attack of nerves and, in turn, led to a re-examination of how India could be protected from a sudden attack. A committee duly went to work and concluded that, as things now stood, the balance of power in Asia had shifted decisively away from Britain.67 It was calculated that Russians could deploy up to 180,000 men in Central Asia within four or five months using its new railways, and many more once the Orenburg–Tashkent line had been finished. Moreover, there was the possibility that the navies of Russia and its ally, France, would combine in the Mediterranean to disrupt communications with India. Whether or not this occurred, Britain’s initial response would have to be defensive. Sitting tight on India’s frontiers would undermine the Indian soldier’s morale, and reinforcements, including Australian and New Zealand troops, might take as long as nine months to reach the front.68 The bleak possibility that Britain no longer possessed the capacity to defend India adequately prompted a radical revision of its foreign policy, which, hitherto, had been characterised as ‘splendid isolation’. One result was the defensive alliance with Japan in 1902 and approaches to France for an entente the following year.
V
At the beginning of the twentieth century the manic element in Russo-phobia became more and more pronounced, perhaps as a consequence of wider and deeper anxieties about the future and security of the British empire. The Russian menace became more ominous when it was added to the threat of the expanding German navy and the persistent colonial grudges of France. Furthermore, there were signs of increasing restlessness inside India. The nationalist, vernacular press had always seen the twists and turns of Anglo-Russian relations as an opportunity to put pressure on a discomposed Raj. At times, newspapers expressed a muted sympathy for Russia, even claiming with the authority of ignorance that Czarist government was more humane and less racist than British.69 Journalistic license and nascent nationalism were undermining the Raj, according to General Sir Robert Low, a North-West Frontier veteran and backer of the Forward policy. ‘Orientals have not the Commonsense of the Englishmen’ he told a Daily Graphic reporter in 1897, and were therefore unable to distinguish truth from fiction. ‘We have for many years allowed treason to be spoken and published not only by natives but occasionally by our own people,’ and now Indians believed the Raj had become soft.70
Fears that the public image of the government was one of feebleness, together with a wider mood of apprehension, explains the absurd response to a ragbag of rumours current during 1901 and 1902, which suggested that Russia was about to use Tibet as a base for making mischief in neighbouring Sikkim and Bhutan. The evidence for this was based upon two visits to St Petersburg undertaken by a will-o’-the-wisp called Agvan Dorzhiev, a Buddhist monk. He had proposed closer ties between Russia and Tibet and had been officially rebuffed. Neither the Tibetan theocracy nor the Russian government wanted such an association and, as the latter pointed out, Tibet was legally a Chinese province. But, as in Alice’s Wonderland, nothing was what it seemed in Russia, and alarmists immediately sensed that something underhand was being plotted. One veteran Russophobe, Sir Henry Drummond-Wolff, warned Lord Lansdowne (now Foreign Secretary) in January 1902 that trouble lay ahead. The ‘Chauvinist military party’ in St Petersburg was now calling the tune and the Czar could be discounted, for he was always ‘a very weak factor in the formation of important decisions’.71
Like Afghanistan, Tibet was a thorn in the Indian government’s side, although much less painful. It was a remote, virtually inaccessible state ruled by the Dalai Lama and Buddhist monks, who treated the Indian government with a galling indifference. In Calcutta it was believed that these clerics deliberately kept Tibetans ignorant of the outside world and did all within their power to exclude foreigners and foreign influences. Western knowledge of Tibet was imprecise and confined to descriptions written by a handful of European explorers and reports compiled by the pundits of the Indian Survey Department. Since the 1860s these Indian mapmakers had placed remote regions within and beyond India’s frontiers, and memorised what they saw and measured with a remarkable precision. Two Tibet experts, who might have stepped from Kim, the pundit, Sarat Chandra Das and Sherab Gyatso, Lama of Ghoon, were asked by the Indian government what they knew about Russians in Lhasa. Neither knew anything whatsoever, as there were none.72
Lack of exact knowledge had never been an impediment to Russophobe scaremongers in the past, and it did not stop Curzon from believing that Russian influence was permeating Tibet. He invoked that principle of the Great Game which was to act rather than wait and see. As Lansdowne told the Russian ambassador in February 1903:
We are much more closely interested than Russia in Tibet, it followed that, should there be any display of Russian activity in that country, we should be obliged to reply by a display of activity not only equivalent to, but exceeding that made by Russia. If they sent a mission or an expedition, we should have to do the same, but in greater strength.73
Prestige tipped the balance in favour of a war which, as it turned out, was as much about frightening the Tibetans as it was about expelling imaginary Russians. For the past twenty years, Tibet’s rulers had stubbornly refused to co-operate with the Indian government over matters of trade and cross-border incursions into Sikkim and Bhutan. Niggling rows about answering viceregal letters or whether or not Tibetan yaks could graze in Sikkimese meadows added up to what Curzon considered a gross affront to the King Emperor. As with Afghanistan in the past, the antidote to insolent indifference was a well-armed mission empowered to force the miscreant to the conference table. The Cabinet in London was unhappy, but acquiesced to a demonstration of force which would penetrate a short distance into Tibet in order to bring the Dalai Lama to his senses. Command of the small force was given to Colonel Francis Younghusband, the explorer, who was on the look-out for promotion and whose chief qualification was his agreement with Curzon’s policy.
The 1903–04 invasion of Tibet has been very well chronicled.74 True to established form, the men-on-the-spot bulldozed the British government into a frontier war which it had tried to avoid. Every instance of Tibetan cussedness, and there were many, was used as an excuse to edge forward a little further until the army reached Lhasa. Edmund Candler, the Daily Mail’s war correspondent, was astonished how the primitively-armed Tibetans faced up to machine-gun and artillery fire. Trusting in their own talismans and faith, they were ‘unterrified by the resources of modern science and war, the magic, the demons, the unseen, unimagined messengers of death’. The result was a number of massacres, and the campaign was denounced in the Indian native press and in the Commons, where Winston Churchill, then a Liberal, spoke up for the right of Tibetans to defend their homeland. After the war, Younghusband found the avenues of advancement closed, and set off along new paths which led to dotty religious mysticism.
Needless to say, when he reached Lhasa there was no trace of any Russians. It says much for the mentality of the war’s promoters that, whereas in 1878 there had at least been a Russian emissary in Kabul, none had ever ventured to Lhasa with messages from the Czar. Interestingly, what turned out to be the final round of the Great Game was marked by a novel intelligence ploy: in March 1904 the Treasury’s secret service fund paid £400 to a Russian journalist specialising in Asian affairs for articles supporting British policy.75
What he had to say would have had little interest for Russian readers, whose minds were now focused on events in the Far East. In February 1904, four months before Younghusband rode into Lhasa, Japanese warships had attacked and destroyed the Russian fleet at Port Arthur. Contrary to what the sibyls of the Great Game had been saying for the past fifty years, the Russian army proved not to be invincible. In spite of its swift and decisive defeat, Anglo-Indian agents continued the close surveillance of rail traffic across Central Asia.76 The content of intelligence summaries changed
dramatically during the early months of 1906, with reports of riots, strikes, mutinies and native unrest, all by-products of the revolution which had broken out in St Petersburg the previous December.77 As Ralph Cobbold had percipiently predicted a few years before, the Russian bogeyman would succumb to wounds inflicted by internal revolution.78
Like the Cold War, the Great Game ended with the implosion of Russia. In August 1907 and under French pressure, the Russian government settled its outstanding differences with Britain. It promised to respect India’s frontiers and agreed a partition of Persia by which it enjoyed a sphere of influence in the north and Britain one in the south and east. This was a rapprochement based on temporary convenience rather than mutual trust. While the diplomats bargained, Indian intelligence officers were intercepting official Russian telegrams which passed along Indian lines. By September 1907 the Russian code had been broken and messages from the Russian consul in Mashad and the Governor of Manchuria were being read in Simla.79 This proved a wise precaution. By 1912, when Russia’s military revival was well under way, its consul in Mashad was covertly encouraging anti-government dissidents in the city, and familar reports were reaching Simla and London of clandestine Russian activity in Tibet and Chinese Turkestan.80
The war against Germany intervened and no Maskirovka gambit materialised. To judge by the events of the past sixty years, had one appeared, the rulers of India would have suffered panic or paralysis, or a mixture of both. These were the reactions of men whom one North-West Frontier veteran, Sir George Robertson, called ‘hard funkers’, because they spread despondency everywhere, in particular to the Indian population, which was credulous and easily lost confidence in the government.81 His verdict was correct; players of the Great Game did more harm than good and had much to answer for in terms of squandered lives and treasure. All that can be said in their favour is that they were true to that code which had guided them from their schooldays: they played the game for its own sake.
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