The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

by Frankopan, Peter

  Russian ghosts were everywhere. Anxious Foreign Office officials pored over a stream of reports on the activities of tsarist officers, engineers and surveyors in Persia that was flooding back to London.46 The significance of a new Russian-backed trading company operating between Odessa on the Black Sea and Bushihr on the southern coast of Persia was earnestly discussed in Parliament, while MPs were alarmed by confident reports that shadowy figures who claimed to be spotting ‘birds, butterflies and other animalculae’ were in fact Russian agents distributing rifles to tribesmen in contentious border regions and stirring up discontent.47 The situation attracted the attention of King Edward VII, who wrote to the Foreign Secretary in 1901 stating his concern that ‘Russian influence seems daily preponderating in Persia to the detriment of England,’ and urging him to tell the Shah that failure to stand up to the Russians would not be tolerated.48 It counted for little that the British minister in Teheran, Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, reported that the Shah swore blind that he ‘does not intend to take up position in Persia which would facilitate the invasion of India’.49

  Anxiety mounted at a time when there was an acute sense of imperial overstretch. Confrontation with the Boers in southern Africa and the Yihetuan uprising (better known as the Boxer Rebellion) in China drove home the idea that Britain was at risk of being overwhelmed overseas – further exacerbating fears of Russian advance. A doom-laden report presented to the Cabinet in London at the end of 1901 stated that the Russians would be able to deliver 200,000 men into Central Asia, and more than half that number uncomfortably close to the Indian border, once the railway line was extended from Orenburg to Tashkent.50 This came hot on the heels of a report from Batumi in Georgia that the Russians were about to transfer 20,000 men to Central Asia – a false alarm, as it turned out.51 The problem was that from Britain’s point of view the options seemed limited: the cost of reinforcing the frontier was ruinous – calculated a few years later to be no less than £20 million, plus a rolling annual cost.52

  Violent scenes on the streets of St Petersburg in 1905 and the catastrophic defeat of the Tsar’s navy in the Russo-Japanese War provided small comfort to those who thought it was only a matter of time before Russia broke its shackles. Britain could ill afford to resist what was openly referred to as the ‘menacing advance of Russia’; other solutions were needed to stop a bad situation from becoming worse. Perhaps, one paper prepared by military intelligence suggested, it was time to agree terms with Germany to concentrate Russian minds?53

  In London, talk turned to the possibility of a British military intervention in Mesopotamia, part of the now constant preoccupation with shoring up Britain’s presence across the Middle East. The Committee for Imperial Defence reviewed the possibility of occupying Basra, while there was excited discussion about dismembering Asiatic Turkey to gain access to the rich fields of the Euphrates. Then there were proposals in 1906 for a railway line to be built from the Persian Gulf to Mosul, which among other benefits would allow British troops to be delivered to Russia’s soft underbelly in the Caucasus.54 One by one these were dismissed, on the grounds of practicality and cost: as Sir Edward Grey, the new Foreign Secretary warned, the cost of an invasion – and of securing and defending new frontiers – would run into the millions.55

  Grey had another idea. Britain’s position in the east was limited and dangerously exposed. What was needed was the reorientation of Russia’s focus away from this region altogether. In a bold statement given to The Times just a month before his appointment at the end of 1905, he made it clear that there would be much to gain if an understanding could be reached about ‘our Asiatic possessions’. No British government, he said, would ‘make it its business to thwart or obstruct Russia’s policy in Europe’. It was ‘urgently desirable’, therefore, ‘that Russia’s position and influence’ should be expanded in Europe – and diverted, in other words, from Asia.56

  The timing could not have been better. France was becoming increasingly agitated about the burgeoning economic growth of Germany, its neighbour and bitter rival. Memories of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1, which had led to the siege of Paris and a Prussian victory parade through the centre of the city following the agreement of an armistice, were still fresh in the mind. The speed of that invasion had been a great shock, prompting fears that another lightning strike might catch France unawares again – especially since one of the effects of the attack had been the unification of Germany into an empire, proclaimed in the Palace of Versailles itself.

  This was bad enough. The French were deeply alarmed by the surging rise in German industry in the two decades after 1890 as coal production doubled and metal production trebled.57 The upswing in the economy led to greater and greater investment in an already impressive military machine on both land and sea. French diplomats worked furiously behind the scenes in the early 1890s to conclude a military convention and then a full-blown alliance with Russia, the primary purpose of which was self-defence: both countries agreed to attack Germany in the event that the latter or its allies mobilised their armies – and indeed both gave formal undertakings to act against Britain in the event that London moved against either.58

  The British desire to reorientate Russian attention to its western border was therefore music to French ears. The first phase of a realignment between London and Paris took place in 1904, when an Entente Cordiale was signed following detailed discussions of mutual interests around the world. Not surprisingly, the role of Russia was central to these negotiations. In 1907, the moment came when the circle of alliances was completed. Formal agreement was reached with Russia across the heart of the world, with a fixed line demarcating spheres of influence in Persia alongside terms to restrict Russian involvement in Afghanistan to a minimum.59 The way to relieve India ‘from apprehension and strain’, Edward Grey argued, was to forge a more positive understanding with Russia. This would ensure that ‘Russia does not get hold of the parts of Persia which are dangerous to us’.60 As he confided in 1912, he had long had misgivings about the traditional policy of simultaneously trying to push and contain Russia, noting that ‘for years, I have held that this was a mistaken policy’.61 Seeking an alliance, in other words, was a much more elegant and productive way to move forward.

  Senior diplomats recognised, however, that rapprochement with Russia came at a price: Germany. As Sir Charles Hardinge, permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office in London, stressed in 1908, ‘it is far more essential for us to have a good understanding with Russia in Asia and the Near East, than for us to be on good terms with Germany’.62 It was a message he was at pains to repeat, even after he had been posted to India as viceroy two years later. ‘We are practically impotent,’ he wrote, if Russia were to escalate in Persia. It was therefore worth doing everything possible to balance the situation in Europe: ‘it is far more disadvantageous to have an unfriendly France and unfriendly Russia than an unfriendly Germany’.63 Britain’s relations with Russia were ‘being subjected to severe strain’ as a result of tensions in Persia, agreed Sir Arthur Nicolson, ambassador to St Petersburg. ‘I think’, he went on, ‘that it is absolutely essential that we should at all costs maintain to the full our understanding with Russia.’64

  Keeping Russia happy at all costs became the driving thrust of British policy after the alliance had been signed. In 1907, Sir Edward Grey told the Russian ambassador to London that Britain might consider being more flexible on the issue of the Bosporus – if the Russians agreed to establish ‘permanent good relations’.65 This was enough to prompt a shuffling of the European house of cards, as St Petersburg embarked on a round of diplomatic horse-trading that included gaining Austrian support on the issue of the Bosporus Straits in exchange for acquiescence over the annexation of Bosnia – a deal that was to have spectacular consequences.66

  In 1910, Sir Edward Grey wrote again of the need to sacrifice relations with Berlin if necessary: ‘we cannot enter into a political understanding with Germany which would separate us from Russia and Fr
ance’.67 The single-mindedness of this approach was keenly felt in St Petersburg, which recognised the frantic courting by the British – and the opportunities it presented. ‘It seems to me’, mused the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Sazonov towards the end of 1910, that ‘the London cabinet looks upon the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 as being important for the Asiatic interest of England’. That being the case, he went on, it seemed that Britain could be pushed to make valuable concessions ‘in order to keep a Convention alive which is of such importance to them’.68 It was an astute observation.

  As Russian forces began in 1910 to make new forays into Mongolia, Tibet and Chinese Turkestan, British observers could barely hide their alarm.69 The extension of Russia’s reach emphatically underlined just how weak Britain’s position was. Things could hardly have looked worse, as Grey’s downbeat assessment in the spring of 1914 made clear. It was the same story in Afghanistan, Tibet, Mongolia and Persia: ‘all along the line we want something, and we have nothing to give’. In Persia, there remained ‘nothing to concede’ to Russia, he noted, while there was no leverage in Afghanistan either. Worse, ‘the Russians are willing to occupy Persia, and we are not’.70 Britain was spent – at least in Asia. It was time, surely, for the endgame. The question was where and when that would come.

  As the reality of the difficulties facing them sank in, British officials did not lose sight of the fact that they also had to contend with the ultimate nightmare scenario, one that could easily make a fragile position even worse: an alliance between Russia and Germany. These fears had stalked British policymakers for some time. Indeed, an important element of the Anglo-Russian alliance of 1907 had been to co-operate and find a status quo that was mutually beneficial in Asia. To maintain the fine balance, Sir Arthur Nicolson stressed to Grey, it was essential to ‘deter Russia from moving towards Berlin’.71

  The sense of mounting panic was made worse by the continuing growth of German capabilities – and ambitions. Berlin’s buoyant economy and the rise in its military spending were sources of concern. Some senior figures in the British Foreign Office had no doubt at all that Germany’s aim was to ‘obtain the preponderance on the continent of Europe’, and that this would lead to military confrontation. After all, all empires faced challenges from rivals, Sir Edward Grey was reminded; ‘personally’, said Nicolson, ‘I am convinced that, sooner or later, we shall have to repeat the same struggle with Germany’. It was vital, therefore, to keep France and Russia happy.72

  Germany’s potential to destabilise a finely balanced equilibrium in Europe, and therefore beyond, meant that there was something of a perfect storm brewing. Fears that ‘Russia should emerge on the side of the Central Powers’ Alliance [that is, Germany, Austro-Hungary and Italy]’ became acute. Dislodging relations between Britain, Russia and France and ‘smashing . . . the Triple Entente’ was perceived to be the overriding goal of Berlin.73 ‘We are sincerely afraid’, admitted Grey during a later round of anxiety, of the possibility that Russia could be tempted to leave the Triple Entente.74

  The fears were not without some basis. The German ambassador to Persia, for example, recognised that while there was ‘little to be gained’ in that country, useful concessions elsewhere could be wrung from St Petersburg if Russian interests in Persia were perceived as being at stake.75 This is what lay behind a meeting between the Kaiser and Tsar Nicholas II at Potsdam in the winter of 1910, accompanied by high-level discussions between the respective Foreign Ministers, which simply seemed to confirm fears that the ‘European groupings’, as Sir Arthur Nicolson called them, might be rearranged – to Britain’s detriment.76

  Suspicion of Germany and its actions (real or imagined) had been burnt into the psyche of British diplomats well before the alliance of 1907. Three years earlier, Sir Francis Bertie received a letter from one of the assistant clerks at the Foreign Office shortly before Bertie’s appointment as ambassador to Paris, which told him how important it was that the mission in France should be led by ‘someone there with his eyes open and above all to German designs’. In reply, Bertie wrote that it was quite right to breathe distrust about Germany: ‘she has never done anything for us but bleed us. She is false and grasping and our real enemy commercially and politically.’77

  Ironically of course, the sense of German menace was itself underpinned by the vulnerability felt by this middle European nation as it faced the possibility of being caught in the middle of a Franco-Russia alliance which talked of military co-operation and joint attack in the event of provocation. It was not long before festering paranoia about being trapped on two flanks led the German High Command to consider its own options. In the aftermath of the Franco-Russian alliance of 1904, the Chief of the General Staff of the German army, Count Alfred von Schlieffen, came up with a plan that drew heavily on the experiences of 1870 when the French had been torn to shreds, and posited a scenario in which the Kaiser’s army might neutralise France before swinging east to deal with Russia. The plan was ambitious militarily and logistically: it would require a million railwaymen, 30,000 locomotives, 65,000 passenger cars and 700,000 goods wagons, that would shift 3 million soldiers as well as 86,000 horses and mountains of ammunition over a seventeen-day period.78

  This blueprint was mirrored by similar planning at the time by the Russian army, which by the summer of 1910 had devised Plan 19, a set of detailed steps to be taken in the event of a German attack that involved falling back on a chain of fortresses along a north–south line running from Kovno to Brest, and preparing for a counter-attack. Two variants were developed to this proposal in 1912, known as Plans 19A and G, the latter of which involved a swift counter-attack in the event of Germany commencing hostilities, and whose aim was blunt: ‘the transfer of the war into [enemy] territory’ – that is to say, into Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.79

  The German High Command, as well as the Kaiser, were acutely aware of the pressure ratcheting up from outside, and of the sense of being pushed into a corner. The public outcry over a proposal to build a railway line from Berlin to Baghdad bemused the Kaiser: surely, he reasoned, the laying down of track thousands of miles away would be an issue only if there were a war between his country and England. And in the event that that happened, he went on, would it be realistic to think that we would want our soldiers stationed so far away from home?80

  Or there was the reaction to Germany’s response to the deployment of French troops in Morocco in 1911, in contravention of a previous agreement between Berlin and Paris. On that occasion, the dispatch of a German cruiser, Panther, in an attempt to strong-arm the French into a settlement, backfired badly. Not only was Germany given an embarrassing public lesson that its political reach was severely limited, but to make matters worse Berlin saw a heavy fall in the stock market: in the wake of the Morocco crisis in September 1911, shares crashed by more than 30 per cent, causing the Reichsbank to lose more than a fifth of its reserves in a single month. Even if this financial disaster was not engineered by the French, as many Germans believed, it was certainly true that the former had exploited the situation, withdrawing short-term funds in an act that undoubtedly played a role in creating a liquidity crisis.81

  Considerable effort went into opening up new channels and building new connections and alliances. Much attention was paid to the Near and Middle East, with German banks expanding heavily into Egypt, Sudan and the Ottoman Empire, while a programme of establishing posts in Arabic, Persian and related studies was not only generously endowed but was followed by the Kaiser himself. The increasing links between the Islamic and German-speaking worlds caught the imaginations of the young, as well as of academics, soldiers, diplomats and politicians. One young man in the early years of the twentieth century wrote wistfully that when he looked out at the beautiful buildings of Vienna and at the Ringstraße – the road surrounding the city – he could not help but experience a ‘magical effect’. Yet Adolf Hitler did not feel he was back in the Holy Roman Empire, or in classical antiquity, just two o
bvious choices of a romanticised past; he felt as though he was in a scene from A Thousand and One Nights.82

  A dangerous siege mentality was building up in Germany, alongside an acute sense that Berlin had powerful enemies and was at their mercy. Helmuth von Moltke, Schlieffen’s successor as Chief of the General Staff, as well as other senior officers became convinced that war was inevitable and that the sooner conflict came the better; postponing confrontation, he argued, would be to Germany’s disadvantage. It was better to start a war and engage with the enemy, Moltke said in the spring of 1914, ‘while we still stand a chance of victory’.83

  Why was there such hatred of us, asked the German writer Robert Musil in September 1914; where did the envy come from that ‘was no fault of our own?’84 He was right to note the rising tension in Europe, which was being stoked in popular culture. Books about German spies and German plans to take over Europe became enormously popular. The Invasion of 1910, written by William LeQueux, sold more than a million copies and was translated into twenty-seven languages; then there was When William Came: A Story of London under the Hohenzollern, by Saki, another bestseller that came out on the eve of the war, which sees the hero return from Asia to find Britain defeated and occupied by the Germans.85

  It was almost a self-fulfilling prophecy therefore that the Germans should look to find ways to minimise risks or to be able to counter them. It was entirely understandable, for example, that assurances and agreements should be sought from Russia – though this fact alone further alarmed Britain.86 Likewise, the recommendations for the German army made by General Colmar von der Goltz, who had spent more than a decade reforming the Ottoman army (where he was known as ‘Goltz Pasha’), were all about trying to provide some manoeuvrability in a military crisis. While Turkish support could be useful against Russia, Goltz told his colleagues, it could be ‘of the highest value’ against Britain in the Near East.87