The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia (11 page)

If one man could be said to be responsible for the creation of the Russian bogy, it was a much-decorated British general named Sir Robert Wilson. A veteran of many campaigns, with a reputation for hot-headedness both on and off the battlefield, he had long taken a close interest in the affairs of Russia. It was he who had been the first to report Alexander’s now notorious words as he stepped aboard the barge at Tilsit in 1807. ‘I hate the English as much as you do, and am ready to assist you in any undertaking against them,’ one of Wilson’s contacts overheard him declare. Wilson had begun by greatly admiring the Russians, and even after this had remained on good terms with them. When Napoleon turned on Russia, Wilson had been sent as official British observer with Alexander’s armies. Despite his non-combatant status, he had thrown himself as frequently as possible into the battle against the invader. This gallantry had won him the admiration and friendship of the Tsar, who had added a Russian knighthood to those of Austria, Prussia, Saxony and Turkey which he already possessed. The general was to witness the burning of Moscow, and was the first to send back news of Napoleon’s defeat to a disbelieving Britain.

It was on his return to London that Wilson drew official wrath upon himself by launching a one-man campaign against the Russians, Britain’s allies, and in the eyes of most people the saviours of Europe. He began by demolishing romantic notions about the chivalry of the Russian soldier, especially those darlings of press and public, the Cossacks. The atrocities and cruelties perpetrated by them against their French captives, he alleged, were horrifying by the accepted standards of European armies. Large numbers of defenceless prisoners were buried alive, while others were lined up and clubbed to death by peasants armed with sticks and flails. While awaiting their fate, they were invariably robbed of their clothes and kept standing naked in the snow. The Russian women, he claimed, were especially barbaric towards those Frenchmen unfortunate enough to fall into their hands.

Few at home were in any position to challenge Wilson, a soldier of great distinction and experience, who had witnessed these things at first hand, including acts of cannibalism. Nor did he have much time for the Tsar’s generals, then still basking in the glory of their victory. He accused them of professional incompetence in failing to attack the retreating French, thus allowing Napoleon himself, together with an entire army corps, to escape. They had been content, he reported, to allow the Russian winter to destroy the invader. ‘Had I commanded 10,000, or I might say 5,000 men,’ he noted in his diary at the time, ‘Buonaparte would never again have sat upon the throne of France.’ He even claimed that the Tsar had confided to him his own lack of confidence in the abilities of Marshal Kutuzov, his commander-in-chief, but explained that it was not possible to sack him because he enjoyed the support of powerful friends.

But Wilson’s most violent onslaught was still to come. In 1817, four years after his return from Russia and after successfully standing for Parliament, he published a diatribe against Britain’s ally. Entitled
A Sketch of the Military and Political Power of Russia,
and written anonymously (although no one was in any doubt as to its author), it was quickly to prove a bestseller and run to five editions in rapid succession. In it he claimed that the Russians, emboldened by their sudden rise to power, were planning to carry out Peter the Great’s supposed death-bed command that they conquer the world. Constantinople would be their first target, followed by the absorption of the remains of the Sultan’s huge but dying empire. After that would come India. In support of his sensational claim, Wilson pointed to the massive and continuing build-up of Russia’s armed forces, and the remorseless expansion of the Tsar’s domains. ‘Alexander’, he warned, ‘already has a much larger army than his defensive line requires or his finances can satisfy, and yet he continues to increase his force.’

During Alexander’s sixteen years on the throne of Russia, Wilson calculated, he had added 200,000 square miles to his empire, together with thirteen million new subjects. To underline this, his book included a folding map on which Russia’s latest frontiers were marked in red, and its previous ones in green. This demonstrated just how close Alexander’s armies now were to the capitals of Western Europe, and also to Constantinople, the key to the crumbling Ottoman Empire and eventually to the most direct route to India. The Ottoman capital was vulnerable to an attack by Russia from three directions. One was down the western littoral of the Black Sea from what is now Romania. Another was across the same sea from the Crimea. A third was from the Caucasus and westwards through Anatolia. Once Alexander was in possession of the Sultan’s Near Eastern territories, he would be in a position to strike against India, either through Persia – and papers captured from Napoleon showed that he considered such a route feasible – or by a sea-borne force from the Persian Gulf, a voyage taking under a month.

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.