The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia (24 page)

They had now been in Bokhara for a month, and their enquiries were complete. Burnes had hoped to press on to Khiva, and return home from there via Persia. However, the Koosh Begee warned him strongly against attempting the journey to Khiva, saying that the surrounding region was unsettled and extremely dangerous. In the end Burnes decided to head directly for Persia, via Merv and Astrabad, and forget Khiva. He managed to obtain from the vizier a firman bearing the Emir’s personal seal and ordering all Bokharan officials to assist the party in every way possible. However, once they were outside the Emir’s domains, he cautioned Burnes, they would be in treacherous country all the way to the Persian frontier, and should trust no one. For reasons he did not explain, the vizier had at no time allowed them to meet the Emir himself, although this may well have been done in their own interest. Newly installed on the Bokharan throne was the man who was to have the next two British officers to arrive there brutally put to death. Finally, as the Koosh Begee, who had been so kind to Burnes, bade them farewell, he asked them to pray for him when they reached home safely, ‘as I am an old man’. And Oh yes! One other thing. If Burnes ever returned to Bokhara would he be kind enough to bring him a good pair of English spectacles?

After a series of adventures and misadventures too numerous to go into here, Burnes and his party reached Bombay by sea from the Persian Gulf on January 18, 1833. There they were to learn that a great deal had taken place elsewhere during their thirteen months away, leading to a further sharp decline in Anglo-Russian relations. On February 20, just as Burnes arrived in Calcutta to report to the Governor-General on the results of his reconnaissance into Central Asia, a large fleet of Russian warships dropped anchor off Constantinople, causing profound dismay in London and in India. This was the final outcome of a chain of events which had begun in 1831, following a revolt in Egypt, then nominally part of the Ottoman Empire, against the Sultan’s rule. At first the revolt had seemed purely a local affair, though very soon it began to represent a serious threat. The man behind it was one of the Sultan’s own vassals, the Albanian-born Mohammed Ali, the ruler of Egypt. Having first seized Damascus and Aleppo with his powerful army, he now advanced into Anatolia, and looked set on marching on Constantinople and relieving the Sultan of his throne. The latter appealed desperately to Britain for help, but Lord Palmerston, the Foreign Secretary, hesitated to act alone.

If Britain was slow to respond to the Sultan’s pleas, however, Tsar Nicholas was not, for he had no wish to see the present compliant ruler in Constantinople replaced by an aggressive new dynasty. He at once dispatched Nikolai Muraviev (of Khiva fame, and now a general) to Constantinople to offer the Sultan protection against Mohammed Ali’s advancing army. At first the Sultan hesitated, for he still clung to the hope of receiving British assistance, which he would have much preferred. London continued to do nothing, though, Palmerston being convinced that St Petersburg, officially an ally of Britain’s, would never act unilaterally. But finally, on the urgings of his men on the spot, who viewed the crisis as a threat to Britain’s Near Eastern interests, not to mention those of India, he allowed himself to be persuaded, though even now he preferred mediation to intervention. His decision, needless to say, proved too late. As Mohammed Ali’s troops fought their way through Anatolia towards the capital, driving all before them, the Sultan had no choice but to accept gratefully Nicholas’s offer of immediate help.

As it was, the Russian fleet arrived off Constantinople only just in time, for the invaders were now less than 200 miles away. The Sultan’s throne, however, had been saved. Aware that they could not defeat both the Russians and the Turks, Mohammed Ali’s commanders called a halt, and a settlement was duly arranged. British indecisiveness had enabled St Petersburg to realise at last its age-old dream of landing troops at Constantinople. When news of this latest Russian move reached Calcutta it was at once seen as part of a grand design, with India as its ultimate goal. The pieces seemed to be falling ominously into place. No longer were men like Wilson, Moor-croft, Kinneir and de Lacy Evans viewed as scaremongers. Such then was the mood when Burnes arrived in Calcutta. He could hardly have chosen a better moment to reappear. The Great Game was beginning to intensify.

After Burnes had reported to the Governor-General, Lord William Bentinck, he was ordered to sail at once for London where he was to brief the Cabinet, the Board of Control and other senior officials on the situation in Central Asia and the likelihood of a Russian threat to India. The reception he received was a heady one for a young subaltern, culminating in a private audience with the King, for he, like everyone else, wanted to hear Burnes’s story at first hand. Overnight Burnes became a hero. Professionally, too, he was made. In addition to being promoted to captain, he was awarded the coveted gold medal of the Royal Geographical Society for his remarkable journey. He was also invited to join the Athenaeum, holy of holies of England’s literary and scientific elite, without first having to stand for election, while society hostesses and would-be mothers-in-law joined in the pursuit of this dashing young officer.

John Murray, the leading publisher of the day, was quick to acquire Burnes’s account of his journey. Entitled
Travels into Bokhara,
it was rushed through the press so as to steal a march on Arthur Conolly’s book, which appeared a few months later, and Moorcroft’s long-delayed posthumous work, which was not to be published for a further seven years. Burnes’s epic, in three volumes, thus brought to the reader for the first time the romance, mystery and excitement of Central Asia. It was to prove an immediate bestseller, 900 copies being sold on the first day, a huge number for those times. Sadly, Dr Gerard was unable to enjoy any of this acclaim, being far away in India. Indeed, within two years he was dead, his health broken by the illness which had struck him and his companions on the final march to Bokhara.

But amidst all this adulation, Burnes had not lost sight of the real purpose of their journey. In addition to his book, which had mainly been written on the sea voyage home, he produced for his superiors two secret reports – one military and the other political – and two more, less sensitive, on the topography and commercial prospects of the region. In his military report he argued that it would be as dangerous for Kabul to fall into Russian hands as Herat. A hostile army, he reported, could get there from Balkh in a month. The passes of the Hindu Kush, where so many of Alexander’s troops had frozen to death, would prove no obstacle to a well-equipped, modern army. Ferocious and courageous though they were in tribal warfare, the Afghans could not hope to defend Kabul for very long against a determined Russian army. Once in possession of Kabul, an invader would have little difficulty in advancing on India, there being several possible routes open to him.

As for reaching Balkh, this could be achieved by ferrying troops up the Oxus in barges towed by horses – ‘as on a canal’. The river, he and his companions had ascertained, was fully navigable to that point. Its banks were low and firm, and horses plentiful in the region. Artillery could either be carried up the river by barge, or be dragged along the river bank. If the invasion force were to set out from Orenburg, rather than from the eastern shore of the Caspian, it would not even be necessary to occupy Khiva first. Bokhara too could be bypassed, although both oases might serve as valuable sources of food and other supplies if their rulers’ co-operation could first be won. Because of the danger of Kabul thus falling into Russian hands, he argued, Britain should back Dost Mohammed rather than Kamran Shah for the throne of a united Afghanistan. Burnes made a Russian move against Kabul sound all too easy, and he, unlike Wilson, Kinneir or de Lacy Evans, had actually been there.

Eager to return to the region which had brought him such sudden fame, Burnes now lobbied vigorously to be allowed to establish a permanent mission in Kabul. Apart from maintaining close and friendly ties with Dost Mohammed, and keeping an eye on any Russian moves south of the Oxus, its purpose would be to ensure that British goods rather than Russian ones dominated the markets of Afghanistan and Turkestan. If the River Indus route, which he had shown to be navigable, was fully exploited by the Company, then British goods, being cheaper and better, would eventually drive out those of Russia. At first Burnes’s proposal for a British trade mission (albeit with strong political undertones) at Kabul was turned down by his superiors, for they feared that it might, as one put it, ‘degenerate into a political agency.’ However, the newly appointed Governor-General, Lord Auckland, thought otherwise, and on November 26, 1836, Burnes was dispatched once more to Kabul.

Like his earlier visit to Dost Mohammed, and the month he had spent in Bokhara, this did not go unnoticed in St Petersburg. For some time now, and with growing concern, the Russians had been keeping a close watch on the movements of British travellers in Central Asia. Not only were their own goods beginning to suffer from increasing British competition, but political rivalry also appeared to be intensifying. No longer was the Great Game confined to the khanates of Central Asia. Play had spread to the Caucasus, which the Russians had hitherto regarded as theirs. Reports were beginning to reach St Petersburg from Circassia, on the north-eastern shore of the Black Sea, that British agents were operating among the tribes there, supplying them with arms and inciting them to resist the infidels who had come to seize their lands.

·12·
The Greatest Fortress in the World

Although by now most of the Caucasian region, including Georgia and Armenia, was firmly in Tsar Nicholas’s hands, and officially incorporated in the Russian Empire, in the mountains of the north fierce resistance continued among the Muslim tribes. The two principal areas still remaining to be conquered were Circassia in the west and Daghestan in the east. No longer at war with the Turks or Persians, the Russian generals now devoted all their energies to crushing the warlike inhabitants in these two strongholds. It was to take them a great deal longer than they had expected, for the local commanders showed a brilliant aptitude for mountain and forest warfare. In addition, they had discovered an unexpected ally.

David Urquhart, then aged 28, had acquired a passionate attachment to the Turks as a result of his experiences as a volunteer during the Greek War of Independence. In 1827, together with some eighty other Britons, he had gone to Greece to help drive out the Turks, but had soon found himself thoroughly disillusioned by the Greeks. His new devotion to the Turks, whose courage and other qualities he greatly admired, was to give rise in him to an equally intense dislike of their ancient foes the Russians. Educated at a French military academy and at Oxford, Urquhart also possessed remarkable skills as a propagandist, which he now directed against St Petersburg. Before long he was to become Britain’s leading Russophobe. He enjoyed the added advantage of having friends in the highest realms of public life, including the King himself. As a result he was employed by the government on a number of secret diplomatic missions in the Near East, and it was during one of these, while in Constantinople, that he found himself caught up in the Circassian cause.

Not long before, with the ending of Mohammed Ali’s threat to the Sultan’s throne, the Russians had reluctantly agreed to withdraw their task-force from Constantinople, although not without first making the Turks pay heavily for their intervention. Under the terms of a treaty signed in the summer of 1833, Turkey had been reduced – at least in the eyes of Urquhart and his fellow Russophobes – to little more than a protectorate of the Tsar’s. To London’s alarm, it was soon discovered that under a secret clause the Turks were committed, if St Petersburg so demanded, to closing the Dardanelles to all foreign warships save those of Russia. Thus, in the event of war, the Russians would have exclusive rights of passage through the Turkish straits for their powerful Black Sea fleet.