The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia

by Peter Hopkirk

  The meeting was friendly, even convivial. The Englishman had no vodka to offer his guests, only Russian wine which he had brought from Kashgar. He told the colonel, who was called Yanov, that he had heard that the Russians were annexing the whole of the Pamir region. Explaining that he was anxious not to cause unnecessary alarm in Calcutta and London by reporting mere native rumours on so serious a matter, he asked Yanov whether in fact this was true. The Russian’s answer was unequivocal. ‘He took out a map,’ Younghusband recounted, ‘and showed me, marked in green, a large area extending right down to our Indian watershed.’ It included much which was unquestionably Afghan or Chinese territory. Yet all of it was now being claimed as belonging to the Tsar. Carefully avoiding discussion of the implications of the move, Younghusband merely remarked to Yanov that the Russians were ‘opening their mouths pretty wide’. At this the colonel laughed, but added that it was ‘just a beginning’. The Russians remained in Younghusband’s camp for about an hour before excusing themselves, saying that they had their own camp to prepare. On leaving, however, Colonel Yanov invited Younghusband to join them for dinner that evening.

  Once more it was a cordial affair, with the seven officers squatting round a tablecloth spread in the centre of one of the low-slung Russian tents, which at night three of them shared. Although Younghusband noted with satisfaction that his own tent, with its bed, table and chair, was considerably larger and more comfortable than those of his rivals, the Russians did not stint themselves when it came to eating. ‘There followed a dinner,’ he wrote, ‘which for its excellence astonished me quite as much as my camp arrangements had astonished the Russians.’ There were soups and stews ‘such as native servants from India never seem able to imitate’, together with relishes, sauces and fresh vegetables. The latter were an unbelievable luxury to Younghusband, just as they are today to travellers in Pakistan’s far north. Besides the inevitable vodka, there was a choice of wines, followed by brandy.

  Younghusband soon discovered why his hosts were so elated. In addition to claiming the whole of the Pamir region for the Tsar, they had that very moment ‘returned from a raid across the Indian watershed into Chitral territory’, entering it by one pass and leaving by another, mapping as they proceeded. This was an area which India’s defence chiefs regarded as lying strictly within their sphere of influence. Yanov even expressed surprise to Younghusband that the British had no representative of any kind in Chitral, in view of its strategic importance to India, and seemed content to rely on a treaty with its ruler. The Russian pointed out to his guest on the map how they had ridden to the summit of the highly sensitive Darkot Pass, and peered down into the Yasin valley, which led by an easy route towards Gilgit. It was, Younghusband knew, enough to make the blood of British generals run cold. But that was not all, as Younghusband was soon to discover.

  At midnight, after toasts had been drunk to Queen Victoria and Tsar Alexander, the party broke up. The Russian officers, including Colonel Yanov, insisted on escorting the young British captain back to his camp. There, after exchanging compliments and amid protestations of friendship, they parted. Early next morning the Russians struck camp, before heading northwards to join their main force and report on their encounter in this desolate spot with a British intelligence officer. Younghusband himself stayed on, for unknown to the Russians he was expecting to be joined shortly at Bozai Gumbaz by a colleague. This was Lieutenant Davison, an adventurous subaltern in the Leinsters, whom he had met in Kashgar and co-opted to investigate Russian moves further to the west. He needed to know what Davison had discovered before racing for Gilgit, the nearest British outpost, to report to his chiefs in India on the Russian incursion.

  Three nights later, just as he was turning in, Younghusband was surprised to hear the clatter of hoofs in the distance. Peering out of his tent, he saw in the bright moonlight some thirty Cossacks drawn up in line. While he slipped into his clothes, he sent one of his men to ask what had brought them. The man returned to say that Colonel Yanov wished to speak to him urgently. Invited into Younghusband’s tent, together with his adjutant, the Russian said that he had something disagreeable to tell his guest of a few days earlier. He had been given orders, he explained, to escort the British officer from what was now Russian territory. ‘But I am not in Russian territory,’ Younghusband protested, adding that Bozai Gumbaz belonged to Afghanistan. ‘You may think this Afghan territory,’ Yanov replied grimly, ‘but we consider it Russian.’ What if he refused to move, Younghusband asked. Then they would have to remove him by force, Yanov replied, looking extremely uncomfortable. ‘Well, you have thirty Cossacks, and I am alone,’ the Englishman told him, ‘so I must do as you wish.’ However, he would agree to leave only under the strongest protest, and would report the outrage to his government so that it could decide precisely what action to take.

  The colonel thanked Younghusband for making his unpleasant task easier, and expressed his deep personal regret at having to carry out the order, particularly in view of the cordial relationship which they had established such a short time before. Younghusband assured the Russian that he would not hold it against him, but against those who had given this unlawful order. Meanwhile, having ridden so far, might not Yanov and his adjutant like something to eat? He would happily instruct his cook to produce some supper. Much moved by this gesture, the Russian colonel seized Younghusband in a bear hug, thanking him emotionally for the gracious way he had taken it all. It was, he declared, a most unpleasant task for one officer to have to act like this towards another in what was more properly a policeman’s job. He had hoped, he added, to find the Englishman gone, which would have saved them both considerable embarrassment.

  To show his appreciation to Younghusband, Yanov suggested that he might like to proceed to the frontier by himself, instead of being escorted there. There was one proviso, however. He had been given strict instructions by his superiors that Younghusband, whom they regarded as a trespasser, must leave via the Chinese frontier and not the Indian one. Furthermore, he must not use certain passes. The reason for these requirements was not entirely clear, though it was presumably to delay for as long as possible news of the Russian moves, not to mention his own expulsion. There may also have been an element of revenge in it for the earlier British refusal to allow Captain Gromchevsky to winter in Ladakh, and perhaps Younghusband’s suspected role in the near disaster which had ensued. The British officer, who was quite confident that he would be able to discover passes unknown to the Russians, and therefore not on their list, undertook to abide by this, and signed a solemn statement to that effect.

  It was now long past midnight, and the two Russians gratefully accepted Younghusband’s offer of a meal, although they did not linger long over what must have been a somewhat awkward occasion. The next morning, as Younghusband prepared to leave for the Chinese frontier, Yanov came over to his camp to thank him again for accepting the situation with such grace, and bearing with him a haunch of venison as a parting present. But if the colonel’s superiors had hoped to delay the news of Younghusband’s expulsion by making him return by a roundabout route, they were to be disappointed. For within an hour of parting from the Russians, the British officer had dispatched one of his men post-haste to Gilgit with a detailed report of what had happened, as well as of the latest moves by St Petersburg on the Roof of the World. He now rode eastwards towards the Chinese frontier, intending to find his way home from there across one of the passes not on Colonel Yanov’s proscribed list. He was in no hurry, though, and lingered on the Chinese frontier just north of Hunza, hoping to meet up with Lieutenant Davison, and meanwhile to monitor any further Russian moves. This was Great Game playing at its most enthralling, and the 28-year-old Younghusband was in his element.

  Some days were to pass before Davison appeared. ‘Away in the distance,’ Younghusband wrote, ‘I saw a horseman approaching dressed in the peaked cap and high boots of the Russians, and at first I thought that another Russian was going to honour me with a v
isit. This, however, proved to be Davison. He had been treated in an even more cavalier manner than I had, and had been marched back to Turkestan.’ There he had been interrogated by the Russian governor in person, before being escorted to the Chinese frontier and released. His arrest and detention had, however, served one useful purpose. His captors, Younghusband noted, had taken him northwards by a route which no British officer or explorer had previously traversed. The two officers now made their way back to Gilgit across a pass whose existence was revealed to them by friendly shepherds. It was the last that Younghusband was to see of his friend, for Davison was to die of enteric fever during a subsequent reconnaissance. He was, Younghusband wrote afterwards, an officer of remarkable courage and determination, with ‘all the makings of a great explorer’.

  By now news of the incident had reached London, and in Whitehall frantic efforts were being made to hush it up while the government decided how best to deal with this latest Russian forward move. Rumours soon began to reach Fleet Street via India, however, it even being reported in The Times that Younghusband had been killed in a clash with the intruders. This was hastily denied, but details of the Russians’ high-handed behaviour towards two British officers on Afghan territory could no longer be kept quiet. Press, Parliament and public were incensed, and once again anti-Russian feelings hit fever pitch. Lord Rosebery, the Liberal peer, who was shortly to become Foreign Secretary, went so far as to describe Bozai Gumbaz, the barren spot where Younghusband had been intercepted by the Russians, as ‘the Gibraltar of the Hindu Kush’. In India the Commander-in-Chief, General Roberts, told Younghusband he believed that the moment had come to strike the Russians. ‘We are ready’, he said, ‘and they are not.’ At the same time he ordered the mobilisation of a division of troops in case the Russian seizure of the Pamirs led to war.

  Other hawks were quick to join the fray. ‘The Russians have broken all treaty regulations with impunity so far,’ wrote E. F. Knight, special correspondent of The Times, then travelling in Kashmir and Ladakh. ‘By marching their troops into the territory of Chitral, a state under our protection and subsidised by the Indian Government, they have deliberately taken steps which are generally looked upon as equivalent to a declaration of war.’ Were Britain to ignore such incursions into states which she guaranteed against foreign invasion, he warned, then ‘the natives cannot but lose faith in us’. They would conclude that Russia was the stronger power, ‘to which we are afraid to offer resistance’. Inevitably, therefore, they would turn towards the Russians. ‘We must’, he concluded, ‘expect intrigue against us, if not more open hostility, as the result of our apathy.’ His forebodings were seemingly confirmed by secret intelligence from Chitral. This suggested that the expulsion from Afghanistan of Younghusband had seriously undermined British prestige among the Chitralis, and that they were no longer to be trusted where the Russians were concerned. Similar doubts, as we have already seen, existed with regard to Safdar Ali, the ruler of Hunza, whose personal sympathies were known to lie with St Petersburg.

  A strong protest over Russia’s aggressive moves in the Pamirs was delivered on Lord Salisbury’s orders by the British ambassador at St Petersburg, the forthright Sir Robert Morier. In addition to challenging Russia’s claims to the Pamirs, he demanded an outright apology for the illegal expulsion of Younghusband and Davison from the region, adding a warning that unless this was immediately forthcoming, ‘the question would assume very grave international proportions’. The unexpected vehemence of the British response, coupled with the knowledge that a division of the Indian Army had been placed on a war footing at Quetta, had the Tsar and his ministers rattled. At home things were in poor shape. Much of Russia was in the grip of famine and serious political unrest, and consequently the economy was in no position to sustain a full-scale conflict with Britain. St Petersburg therefore decided with reluctance to back down. To the indignation of the military, it withdrew its troops and its claim to the Pamirs pending a permanent settlement of the frontier. Blame for the entire incident was pinned on the unfortunate Colonel Yanov, who was accused of greatly exceeding his orders by proclaiming the annexation of the Pamirs, and in expelling Younghusband. Only later did it become known that by way of compensation for acting as a scapegoat he had been presented with a gold ring by Tsar Alexander in person, and quietly promoted to general. Nonetheless, Britain had got her apology, and for the time being at least the Pamirs were clear of Russian troops.

  The Russian military held to the view that the British had brought the crisis upon themselves. Their decision to annex the Pamirs, they insisted, had been forced upon them by a British government determined to break up their Central Asian empire. As evidence of this they cited General MacGregor’s hawkish tome The Defence of India, supposedly secret, but a copy of which had somehow found its way into their hands and been translated into Russian. Indeed, as recently as 1987, a Russian scholar seized upon MacGregor’s long-forgotten work to prove what he calls ‘the age-old dreams of British strategists’. Leonid Mitrokhin, in his Failure of Three Missions, quotes MacGregor’s view that Britain should ‘dismember the Russian state into parts which would be unable to represent a danger to us for a long time’. In fact, if one turns to MacGregor’s original text, it is quite evident that he advocated such a move only if the Russians attacked India – something that Mitrokhin and his Tsarist predecessors found it convenient to ignore, or which may even have been omitted from the St Petersburg translation.

  But even if determined British action, and St Petersburg’s fear of war, had this time forced the Russians to step back, the incursion by Yanov and his Cossacks to within a few hours’ march of Chitral and Gilgit had given India’s defence chiefs a nasty fright. If the past was anything to go by, the Russian military would perceive this as no more than a temporary reverse, and before long would once again begin to creep southwards into the Pamirs and eastern Hindu Kush in this unending game of Grandmother’s Footsteps. While no one in Calcutta saw the Pamirs any longer as a suitable route for an all-out invasion of India, the presence there of hostile agents or small bodies of troops could, as one commentator put it, cause ‘far-spreading mischief in the event of war between the two powers. The answer, wrote Knight of The Times, was ‘to lock the door on our side’, which was precisely what the British now set out to do, beginning with Hunza, which was regarded as the most vulnerable of the small northern states. From that moment, as Britain went over to the offensive, Safdar Ali’s fate was sealed.

  The Viceroy did not have to look far for an excuse to remove him from his throne. For many months he had been giving trouble, in the evident belief that the Russians would come to his assistance if needed. Following the withdrawal of Younghusband’s Kashmiri detachment from the head of the Shimshal Pass, which became uninhabitable in winter, he had resumed his raids on the Leh–Yarkand caravan route, not to mention on other neighbouring communities. He had even been unwise enough to seize and sell into slavery a Kashmiri subject from a village lying well within Kashmir. Furthermore, he had let it be widely known that he regarded the British, who tried to curb his excesses, as foes, and the Russians and Chinese as his friends. Then, in the spring of 1891, shortly before Yanov’s appearance in the Pamirs to the north of Hunza, Colonel Durand at Gilgit learned that Safdar Ali was planning to seize the Kashmiri fort at Chalt, which he had long coveted. By sending men to cut the rope bridges on the Hunza side, and reinforcing the Kashmiri garrison there, Durand was able to foil this, though it was clear that sooner or later Safdar AH would try again, perhaps even with Russian help. As it was, he had managed to persuade the ruler of the small neighbouring state of Nagar to join forces with him against the meddlesome British and their Kashmiri clients.

  In November 1891, amid great secrecy, a small force of Gurkhas and Kashmiri Imperial Service troops was assembled at Gilgit, under Colonel Durand’s command, preparatory to marching northwards against Hunza and Nagar. While this was going on, the Kashmiris succeeded in capturing a Hunza spy sent
by Safdar AH to report on the strength of the British forces in Kashmir. Among other things, he revealed to his interrogators his master’s ingenious new plan for surprising the garrison at Chalt. A number of men from Hunza, carrying loads on their backs to make them appear like coolies from Gilgit (whom they closely resembled), but with weapons hidden about them, were to seek shelter in the fort for the night. Once inside, they would fall upon the unsuspecting defenders, engaging them for long enough to allow Safdar Ali’s troops, concealed nearby, to pour in after them.

  Clearly it was time for Durand’s force to get moving. It consisted of nearly 1,000 Gurkhas and Kashmiris, all regulars, and several hundred Pathan road-building troops. They were accompanied by a battery of mountain artillery, seven engineers and sixteen British officers. The going was so difficult in places that it took them more than a week to reach Chalt, only twenty miles north of Gilgit, and their forward base for operations in Hunza and Nagar. Here Durand received a bizarre missive from Safdar AH, who by now had learned of the British advance towards his frontier. Declaring that Chalt was ‘even more precious to us than the strings of our wives’ pyjamas’, he demanded that it be handed over to him. He warned Durand, moreover, that if the British entered Hunza they should be prepared to take on three nations – ‘Hunza, Russia and China’. Already, he claimed, ‘the manly Russians’ had promised to come to his assistance against ‘the womanly British’. He added that he had given orders for Durand’s head to be brought to him on a platter if he and his troops dared to enter Hunza. At the same time, George Macartney learned in Kashgar, Safdar Ali dispatched envoys to Petrovsky, the Russian consul, reminding him of Gromchevsky’s promises of help. Similar pleas for arms and money were made to the Chinese governor.