The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia (12 page)

The victorious Kotliarevsky now marched eastwards through the snow towards the Caspian where stood the great Persian 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.

That he and his colleagues had not been wasting their time during their fact-finding travels in Persia was evident from the kind of detail that he was able to produce. While it was true, he reported, that forests of oak abounded in south-western Persia, the trees (and he had seen them himself) were too small for building ships. Furthermore, they grew at a considerable distance inland, and would have to be transported to the shores of the Gulf at great expense and ‘over stupendous rocks and frightful precipices’. Although timber of sorts could be found on the Ethiopian shore of the Red Sea, this, he tells us, was inferior even to that of Persia. It was not surprising therefore, he added, that all Arabian and Persian dhows were either built in India or from timber brought from there.

Ultimately, India’s protection from such an invasion lay in the Royal Navy’s domination of the seas. ‘Were it even possible’, Kinneir wrote, ‘for an enemy to succeed in constructing a fleet with materials conveyed, at vast trouble and expense, from the interior of Syria, or the shores of the Mediterranean . . . there is no harbour which could protect such a fleet from the attack of our cruisers.’ And even supposing there was, he added, the invasion fleet would face certain destruction the moment it put to sea.

Kinneir now turned his attention to the several overland routes which an invader might use. Essentially there were two – directly eastwards through the Middle East, or south-eastwards through Central Asia. The former was the route most likely to be taken by an invader from Europe (‘a Napoleon’, as Kinneir put it), while the latter would be Russia’s most obvious choice. An invader marching directly eastwards would be faced by several alternatives. If starting from, say, Constantinople, he could either approach the Indian frontier-lands by first marching the length of Turkey and Persia, or he could all but bypass Turkey by transporting his invasion force across the Black Sea to north-eastern Turkey, or through the Mediterranean to the Syrian coast, entering Persia from there. The latter, Kinneir pointed out, would expose him to the full fury of the British Mediterranean fleet. The former, on the other hand, would put his troopships safely out of its reach.

Ideally, rather than having to fight every inch of the way, an invader would try to come to some sort of an accommodation with those whose territories he had to cross, although the British were unlikely to stand idly by and let this happen. But even if he did manage to achieve this – and here Kinneir spoke from first-hand experience of the terrain – he would be faced by a series of extremely formidable obstacles all the way to India. These would include high mountain ranges; passes so steep or narrow as to be impassable to artillery; waterless deserts; areas so poor that they could hardly support the existing population, let alone a passing army; and hostile tribes and cruel winters which, as history had shown, could annihilate an army almost overnight. Even Alexander the Great, military genius though he was, had nearly come to grief in the icy passes of the Hindu Kush, which had been left unguarded because they were thought to be impenetrable in winter. Thousands of his men had been frozen alive – many literally bonded to the rocks in the sub-zero temperatures – or had died of frost-bite. He is said to have lost more men during the crossing than in all his Central Asian campaigns put together.