Ten years previously, Wilson wrote, the Tsar had had an army only 80,000 strong. This had now grown to 640,000, not including second-line troops, militia, Tartar cavalry, and so on. There was ‘none more brave’, moreover, than the ordinary Russian soldier. He might also be cruel, but no other troops could ‘march, starve or suffer physical privation’ to the same degree. Wilson blamed Russia’s spectacular rise to power on the short-sightedness of its allies, most especially Britain. ‘Russia,’ he declared, ‘profiting by the events which have afflicted Europe, has been handed the sceptre of universal domination.’ As a result the Tsar – a man ‘inebriated with power’, he claimed – was now an even greater potential threat to Britain’s interests than Napoleon had ever been. It only remained to be seen how he intended to use his vast army to extend Russia’s already vast empire. ‘There is evidence amounting to conviction’, Wilson concluded, ‘that he has always proposed to accomplish the instructions of Peter the Great.’
Wilson’s once close acquaintance with the Russian sovereign (who had after all honoured him with a knighthood), as well as with his army on the battlefield, invested his book with an authority which could not be ignored. However much it might enrage those who wished to see Britain and Russia brought closer, the general’s alarmist and sensational message guaranteed him widespread attention in the press and among his parliamentary colleagues. Some editorials and reviews welcomed his warning as timely, while others condemned Wilson for slandering a friendly power and spreading what they claimed to be needless alarm. In an extended review of the book, running to no fewer than forty pages, the then pro-Russian Quarterly Review declared: ‘Let us not, on the mere possibility that she might one day become too dangerous, dissolve our union with an ancient ally from whose greatness we now derive, and are likely to derive, increasing benefits.’ Instead, in words which might have been taken from a leading article today on Anglo-Russian relations, it proposed that any rivalry should be restricted to ‘which shall govern best’.
Although Wilson had no lack of supporters among the intelligentsia and the liberals, who abhorred Alexander’s authoritarian rule, and from newspapers and journals of like view, he was largely shouted down. Nonetheless his book, much of which was based on false assumptions, gave birth to a debate on Russia’s every move which would continue for a hundred years or more, in press and Parliament, on platform and in pamphlet. The first seeds of Russophobia had been sown. Fear and suspicion of this new great power, with its vast resources and unlimited manpower, and about which so little was known, had been planted firmly and permanently in British minds. The Russian bogy was there to stay.
Wilson was not alone in fearing that the Russians would use their Caucasian possessions as a springboard for an advance on Constantinople, or even Teheran. The Turks and Persians had long had similar worries, and in the summer of 1811, shortly before Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, they had agreed to set aside their ancient rivalries and fight the infidel intruder together. Things had looked promising for them when Alexander began to withdraw his troops from the Caucasus for service at home, and the remaining Russian units began to suffer heavy casualties. In one engagement the Persians forced an entire regiment to surrender, together with its colours – an unheard-of humiliation for the Russians. ‘The rejoicings at the Persian court can be imagined,’ wrote one commentator. ‘The Russians were no longer invincible.’ At least that is how it appeared to the Shah, who had visions of further victories which would restore to him all his lost possessions.
Any such hopes, however, were quickly dashed. Locked now in a life-and-death struggle with Napoleon, the desperate Alexander had managed to negotiate a separate peace with the Turkish Sultan, the Shah’s supposed ally. In return for an end to all fighting, the Russians agreed to return to the Turks virtually all the territory they had won from them during the previous few years. It was a painful decision for Alexander, but it gave his badly depleted forces in the Caucasus the respite they desperately needed, enabling them to concentrate all their efforts now against the Persians. Still smarting from their earlier disgrace at the hands of the Shah’s troops, who had clearly benefited from the presence of General Malcolm’s team of British officers, the Russians were burning to avenge themselves. The opportunity was not long in presenting itself.
One moonless night in 1812, a small Russian force led by a young general of only 29 named Kotliarevsky secretly crossed the River Aras, the Araxes of Alexander the Great’s time, which today marks the frontier between Persia and the Soviet Union. On the far bank was encamped a much larger but unsuspecting Persian force commanded by the Shah’s headstrong son and heir, Abbas Mirza. He had been lulled into complacency by his earlier successes against the weakened Russian forces and by reports, very likely spread by the Russians themselves, that they went in great fear of him. So confident was he that he ignored the warning of his two British advisers to post pickets to watch the river, and even withdrew those they had placed there. His advisers were Captain Christie, Lieutenant Pottinger’s former travelling companion, seconded to the Persians as an infantry expert, and Lieutenant Henry Lindsay, a massively built artillery officer, nearly seven foot tall, whom his men likened to their own legendary hero, the great Rustum.
Now that Britain and Russia were allies against Napoleon, members of Malcolm’s mission had orders to leave the units to which they were attached in the event of hostilities breaking out, so as to avoid any risk of political embarrassment. But the Russians struck so swiftly that Christie and Lindsay, not wishing to be thought by the Persians to be running away, decided to ignore the order and fight with their men for whom they had formed a strong attachment. They tried desperately therefore to rally their troops, and for a whole day managed to hold off the fierce Russian attacks, even driving them back. But that night Kotliarevsky’s troops struck again in the darkness, causing the Persians to fire into their own ranks in the confusion. Abbas Mirza, convinced that all was now lost, ordered his men to retreat. When Christie ignored this order, Abbas himself galloped up, seized the colours, and again called upon his men to abandon the position. In the chaos which ensued, Christie fell, shot through the neck by a Russian bullet.
Such was his men’s devotion to him, according to the account of another member of Malcolm’s mission, Lieutenant William Monteith, that ‘more than half the battalion he had raised and disciplined himself were killed or wounded trying to get him off the battlefield to safety. Their efforts were in vain, however. The next morning a Russian patrol found the British officer lying mortally wounded. ‘He had determined never to be taken alive,’ Monteith reported. If he was to face court martial for disobeying orders, he was reported to have said, ‘it should be for fighting and not for running away.’ A man of immense strength, Christie promptly cut down the unfortunate Russian officer who tried to raise him.
Word was hurriedly sent to Kotliarevsky that there was a severely wounded British officer lying out on the battlefield who was refusing to surrender. Orders came back that, whatever the risk to his captors, he was to be disarmed and secured. ‘Christie made a most desperate resistance,’ Monteith tells us, ‘and is said to have killed six men before he was dispatched, being shot by a Cossack.’ His body was later found by the mission’s British doctor who buried him where he lay. ‘Thus fell as brave an officer and amiable a man as ever existed,’ Monteith concludes, though the Russians had seen little of this amiability during their brief encounter with him. Abbas Mirza’s complacency, which had allowed his troops to be taken by surprise, cost 10,000 Persian lives, according to one account, while the Russians lost only 124 men and 3 officers. In addition to annihilating the Persian army, Kotliarevsky captured a dozen of Lieutenant Lindsay’s fourteen precious guns, each ornately inscribed (or so the Russians claimed): ‘From the King of Kings to the Shah of Shahs’. The earlier Russian defeat had been more than amply avenged.
The victorious Kotliarevsky now marched eastwards through the snow towards the Caspian where stood the great Pe
rsian stronghold of Lenkoran, only 300 miles from Teheran, and recently rebuilt along modern lines by British engineers. Believing it now to be siege-proof, the Persian defenders ignored Kotliarevsky’s call to them to surrender, and drove back his first assault with considerable loss of life. But finally, after five days of bloody fighting, and with Kotliarevsky at the head of his troops, the Russians succeeded in breaking through the defences. Having turned down the Russian offer of an honourable surrender, the Persians were slaughtered to a man. Even so, Kotliarevsky lost nearly two-thirds of his troops, and was himself found semi-conscious and suffering from severe head wounds among the heaps of Russian and Persian dead beneath the breach his sappers had blown in the wall. Later, from his hospital bed, he reported to Alexander: ‘The extreme exasperation of the soldiers at the obstinacy of the defence caused them to bayonet every one of the 4,000 Persians, not a single officer or man escaping.’
General Kotliarevsky himself never fought again, so grave were his injuries. Regretfully he had to turn down the Tsar’s offer of the command of all Russian troops in the Caucasus, one of the greatest prizes to which a soldier could aspire. But for his victory, costly as it had been, he was to receive the highest award the Tsar could bestow, the coveted Order of St George, roughly the equivalent of the Victoria Cross. It was the second time he had won it, an unprecedented feat at so young an age. Years later, when he knew he was dying, Kotliarevsky summoned his family together and unlocked a small casket, the only key to which he always kept on his person. ‘This’, he told them with emotion, ‘is why I was unable to serve my Tsar and fight for him and my country to the grave.’ Opening the casket, he removed from it, one by one, no fewer than forty pieces of bone which Russian army surgeons had extracted from his shattered skull so many years before.
Following their two devastating defeats at Kotliarevsky’s hands, the Persians had by now lost all stomach for the fight, and when the British, who were anxious to halt the Russian advance by diplomatic means if possible, offered to mediate a ceasefire, the Shah was only too glad to accept. The Russians, too, were grateful for a breather and the chance to rebuild their strength. And as the victors they were able to dictate the terms, and retain most of the territory they had won from the Persians. Thus, in 1813, under the Treaty of Gulistan, the Shah was obliged to surrender almost all his domains north of the River Aras, including his claims to Georgia and Baku, as well as renouncing all naval rights on the Caspian Sea. The latter effectively turned the Caspian into a Russian lake, bringing the Tsar’s armed might another 250 miles closer to India’s northern frontiers. The alternative would have been to allow his troops to continue their remorseless advance further and further into Persia. All that the Shah got in return, apart from an end to hostilities, was an undertaking from the Tsar that he would support the claim of Abbas Mirza, his son and heir apparent, to the Persian throne if this were ever disputed.
For his part, however, the Shah had no intention of honouring this treaty which had been forced upon him by his aggressive neighbours, regarding it as no more than a short-term expedient to halt their immediate advance. With Britain’s continued help he hoped to rebuild his army, momentarily vanquished, along the latest modern lines, and at the opportune moment to seize back all his lost territories. After all, the Persians had once been a great conquering power, while their initial victories over the Russians in the recent war had shown what they were still capable of doing. But the Shah appeared not to appreciate that Britain and Russia, faced by a common foe in far-off Europe, were now officially allies, and that London, having successfully checked the Russian advance by peaceful means, had no wish to quarrel with St Petersburg over someone else’s tribulations. For Russia’s military buildup in the Caucasus was not yet widely viewed in Britain as posing a serious threat to India, at least not in government circles, where Sir Robert Wilson and his like were regarded as scaremongers.
With the Napoleonic menace towards India now over, and to the grave disappointment of the Shah, the British military mission to Persia was considerably reduced, while strict orders were issued that never again were British officers to lead Persian troops into battle against the Russians. The Christie affair had been overshadowed by the stirring events in Europe, and no protests had ensued from St Petersburg, but no one in London or Calcutta wished to risk a repetition. The Shah was in no position to argue, for any defensive treaty with Britain, then still the world’s leading power, was better than none. Even a request that Persian officers might be sent to India for training was turned down, it being feared – according to a confidential note by the Governor-General – that their ‘arrogance, licentiousness and depravity’ might undermine the discipline and morals of the Company’s native troops. However, if Wilson and his fellow Russophobes had failed to win much support in official circles for their fears of a new colossus arising in Napoleon’s place, members of the British mission in Teheran had for some time been gravely concerned about Russia’s growing power in the East.
Some of the mission’s officers had already felt the hot breath of the monster to the north. Among those who had served as advisers to the Persian forces on the Russian front was a young Indian Army captain named John Macdonald Kinneir. Later he was to drop the Kinneir, and adopt Macdonald as his surname, but for simplicity’s sake I have stuck to his original name. Seconded from the Madras Native Infantry to the Company’s political department, he had served for some years in Persia, where one of the first tasks entrusted to him by General Malcolm was the assembly into one volume of all the geographical intelligence gathered by Christie, Pottinger and other officers in the team. Published in 1813 under the title A Geographical Memoir of the Persian Empire, it was to remain for many years the principal source of such intelligence. In addition, Kinneir had himself travelled widely in these regions, and was extremely well qualified to air his views on the question of a potential Russian threat to Britain’s interests in the East. This he was shortly to do, in a lengthy appendix to a second work, this time devoted to his own travels in the East, which appeared a year or so after Wilson’s.
If Christie and Pottinger were the earliest players in the Great Game, albeit in its Napoleonic era, and Wilson its first polemicist, then Kinneir can lay claim to being its first serious analyst. Just how vulnerable, he now asked, was India to attack?
·5·
All Roads Lead to India
The glittering riches of India have always attracted covetous eyes, and long before the British first arrived there her rulers had learned to live with the perpetual threat of invasion. This went back to the very earliest times when, some 3,000 years before the East India Company drove out its European rivals, successive waves of Aryan invaders had crossed the north-western passes, forcing the aborigines southwards. Numerous invasions, both great and small, followed, among them those of Darius the Persian circa 500 BC, and Alexander the Great two centuries later, although neither stayed for long. Between AD 997 and 1026, the great Muslim conqueror Mahmoud of Ghazni (which now forms part of Afghanistan) made no fewer than fifteen raids into northern India, carrying off vast quantities of booty with which to embellish his capital. Mohammed of Gor (today in northern Pakistan), having in his turn conquered Ghazni, led six invasions of India between 1175 and 1206, one of his generals becoming ruler of Delhi. After Tamerlane’s troops sacked Delhi in 1398, another Central Asian warrior, Babur the Turk, invaded India from Kabul and in 1526 founded the great Mogul Empire, with Delhi as its capital. But even he was not the last of the Asiatic invaders. In 1739, with an army spearheaded by 16,000 Pathan horsemen, the ambitious Nadir Shah of Persia briefly seized Delhi, then still the Mogul capital, and carried off the world-famous Peacock Throne and Koh-i-noor (‘Mountain of Light’) diamond to grace his own capital. Finally, in 1756, the Afghan ruler, Ahmad Shah Durrani, invaded northern India, sacking Delhi and removing as much loot as he could struggle back with over the passes.
Every one of these invaders had reached India overland, and it was not until
the Portuguese navigators opened up the sea route from Europe at the end of the fifteenth century that her Mogul rulers began to worry about the possibility of an invader arriving by sea. Because the British themselves had come that way, it was perhaps natural for John Kinneir, in what is today called a ‘risk assessment’, to look first at the prospects of success of a sea-borne invasion. After all, India’s 3,000-mile coastline appeared vulnerable, being ill-watched and virtually unguarded against a surprise attack. Not only the British, but also the Portuguese, Dutch and French had come that way, while as long before as the year AD 711 an Arab army, 6,000 strong, had sailed down the Persian Gulf and conquered Sind. Wilson warned that the Russians might do likewise.
Kinneir, however, who knew the Gulf region well from his own travels (he had even had a brush with Arab pirates there) and had access to the latest intelligence, argued that the obstacles facing a sea-borne aggressor were sufficient to rule out such an operation. ‘We have little to dread from this quarter,’ he wrote. To begin with, a hostile power would somehow have to gain possession of suitable harbours within reasonable sailing distance of India. Only the Red Sea or Persian Gulf, he believed, would provide the sheltered anchorage necessary for the preparation and launching of an invasion fleet. First the fleet would have to be built, which could hardly fail to attract the attention of the Royal Navy. And where would the materials come from? ‘Neither the borders of the Red Sea, nor those of the Persian Gulf, afford timber or naval stores,’ wrote Kinneir. ‘Nor could materials be brought from a distance by water, or a fleet be collected, without our express permission.’ The entrances to both these waterways were so narrow that, if the need arose, they could easily be blocked.
The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia Page 8
