The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia (44 page)

On October 11 they hauled down the Union Jack over the Bala Hissar, and the next morning the first units marched away from Kabul. Once again they set out along the skeleton-strewn trail, the
via dolorosa
of the previous winter, leading towards the Khyber Pass, and home. Her honour nominally satisfied, Britain was content to leave Afghan politics to the Afghans – for the time being anyway. The First Afghan War, as historians now call it, was finally over. The British had received a terrible mauling, for all Lord Ellenborough’s pretences, including a massive victory celebration, that it had ended in triumph. But no amount of medal-giving, triumphal arches, regimental balls and other extravaganzas could conceal the final irony. No sooner had the British left Afghanistan than the blood began to flow once more. Within three months Shah Shujah’s son had been overthrown, and Dost Mohammed was allowed by the British to return unconditionally to the throne from which he had been removed at such terrible cost. No one now had any doubt that he was the only man capable of restoring order to Afghanistan. Events had come full circle.

But even now the Central Asian tragedy was not quite over for the British. Throughout that year the unfolding story had dominated the headlines both in India and at home. Deep anxiety had been felt over the fate of the hostages, particularly the women and children, and news of their release unharmed sent a wave of relief and rejoicing through the nation. Then, just as the celebrations ordered by Lord Ellenborough in India were getting under way, chilling news reached the British Mission in Teheran. It was brought by a young Persian, once employed by Arthur Conolly, who had just returned from Bokhara. Conolly and Stoddart, whose plight had been all but forgotten in the wake of the Kabul catastrophe, were, he reported, both dead. It had happened, he said, back in June, when Britain’s reputation as a power to be feared in Central Asia was at rock bottom. Furious at receiving no reply to his personal letter to Queen Victoria, and no longer worried by any fear of retribution, the Emir of Bokhara had ordered the two Englishmen, then enjoying a brief spell of freedom, to be seized and thrown back into prison. A few days later they had been taken from there, with their hands bound, and led into the great square before the Ark, or citadel, where stood the Emir’s palace. What followed next, the Persian swore, he had learned from the executioner’s own lips.

First, while a silent crowd looked on, the two British officers were made to dig their own graves. Then they were ordered to kneel down and prepare for death. Colonel Stoddart, after loudly denouncing the tyranny of the Emir, was the first to be beheaded. Next the executioner turned to Conolly and informed him that the Emir had offered to spare his life if he would renounce Christianity and embrace Islam. Aware that Stoddart’s forcible conversion had not saved him from imprisonment and death, Conolly, a devout Christian, replied: ‘Colonel Stoddart has been a Mussulman for three years and you have killed him. I will not become one, and I am ready to die.’ He then stretched out his neck for the executioner, and a moment later his head rolled in the dust beside that of his friend.

News of their brutal murder sent a wave of horror through the nation, but short of sending another expedition across Afghanistan to deal with this petty tyrant, there was precious little that could be done about it. Even at the risk of losing further face in Central Asia, the Cabinet decided that it would be better if the whole unfortunate affair were quietly forgotten. However, angry friends of the dead men, who blamed their deaths on the government’s abandonment of them, were determined not to let this happen. Some even believed that the Persian might have been lying, and that the two officers might, after all, still be alive. A subscription was raised, and a brave but highly eccentric clergyman, the Reverend Joseph Wolff from Richmond, Surrey, volunteered to travel to Bokhara to ascertain the truth. Unhappily, the Persian’s story was to prove true in all but a few details, and the intrepid Wolff himself was lucky to escape with his own life, only doing so, it is said, because his bizarre appearance, in full canonicals, made the unpredictable Emir ‘shake with uncontrollable laughter’. A detailed account of Wolff’s courageous journey, not strictly part of the Great Game, is given in his own book,
Narrative of a Mission to Bokhara,
published in 1845, after his return to London.

Twenty years later a poignant footnote was added to the story of Conolly and Stoddart. Through the post one day a small parcel arrived at the home of Conolly’s sister in London. It contained a battered prayer book which had been in her brother’s possession throughout his captivity, and had evidently brought comfort to him and Stoddart during their long and painful ordeal. On the end-papers and in the margins were penned in a tiny hand details of their misfortunes. The last of these entries ended abruptly in mid-sentence. The prayer book had eventually found its way into the hands of a Russian living in St Petersburg who had managed to track down Conolly’s sister. Sad to relate, this relic was subsequently lost.

For Conolly and Stoddart, like Burnes and Macnaghten, the Great Game was over. All had been victims of the forward policies which they themselves had so eagerly embraced and helped to shape. Within months, Eldred Pottinger, hero of Herat and Kabul, was also dead, struck down by fever at the age of 32. Another promising young player lost to the game was Lieutenant John Conolly, also of the political service. He had died of illness while Akbar’s hostage in Kabul, without ever learning of the fate which had befallen his idolised brother Arthur. Thus, in swift succession, six prominent British players had gone to join William Moorcroft and their Russian adversaries, Griboyedov and Vitkevich, in the Valhalla reserved for Great Game heroes. Nor would they be the last.

For a while, however, it seemed that both Britain and Russia, chastened by their costly adventures in Central Asia, had learned their lesson, and that henceforward more cautious counsels would prevail. The period of
détente
which followed was to last for a decade, despite mutual fears and suspicions. The two powers were to use it to consolidate their frontiers, but in the end it proved merely to be half-time in the struggle for ascendancy in Central Asia.

·22·
Half-time

Tsar Nicholas himself was the first to extend the olive branch. He did so when he came to Britain on a state visit in the summer of 1844. Queen Victoria, then aged 25, had expected her Russian guest to be little better than a savage, but found herself captivated by his striking good looks and graceful manners. ‘His profile is beautiful,’ she noted, ‘but the expression of his eyes is formidable and unlike anything I ever saw before.’ In his subsequent talks with Sir Robert Peel and the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Aberdeen, the Emperor assured them that he only wanted peace, and that he had no further territorial ambitions in Asia, and none whatsoever towards India. His principal concern was the future of the Ottoman Empire, or the ‘Sick Man of Europe’ as he called it. He professed to be deeply perturbed about what would happen when it broke up, something he judged to be imminent. But his real concern seemed to have more to do with ensuring that he got his share of the pieces when it did.

While Peel and Aberdeen were less convinced of the coming collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Nicholas found them sympathetic to his wish to avoid a free-for-all among the European powers, leading almost certainly to war, if it were to happen. Both sides also agreed on the desirability of maintaining the Sultan on his throne for as long as possible. Nicholas returned home under the impression that he had obtained an unequivocal commitment from Britain that, in the event of a crisis over Turkey, she would act in concert with him. To the British, however, the discussions, although most cordial, had produced little more than a vague statement of intent which could in no way be held to be binding on any future government. It was a misunderstanding which, in due course, would prove extremely costly to both sides.

In the meantime, while refraining from making any antagonistic or threatening moves towards one another’s Asiatic domains, then still separated by vast stretches of desert and mountain, the two powers set about consolidating their existing frontiers by subduing troublesome neighbours. The Russians pushed forward their line of fortresses across the lawless Kazakh Steppe as far as the banks of the Syr-Darya, northern twin of the Oxus. By 1853, these stretched from the Aral Sea to Ak-Mechet, 250 miles up river and towards the Central Asian heartland. Two small steamers for supplying these outposts were brought overland in sections and reassembled on the Aral Sea. The British were even more active during this period of
détente.
In 1843, following their humiliation in Afghanistan, they had seized Sind – ‘like a bully who has been kicked in the street and goes home to beat his wife in revenge,’ observed one critic. They next fought two minor but bloody wars against the Sikhs of the Punjab, who had become increasingly unruly since the death of Ranjit Singh, adding this large and valuable territory to their domains in 1849. The northern state of Kashmir was detached from the Punjab and placed under the control of a ruler considered to be amenable to Britain. These rearrangements gave British India a new neighbour in Dost Mohammed, now firmly back on his throne and showing himself to be cautiously friendly towards his former captors, whom he had apparently come to like during his exile among them.

Such then was the position of the two powers in Central Asia in 1853 when the
détente
so keenly sought by Tsar Nicholas suddenly collapsed. It had been showing signs of strain for some time. In 1848 revolutions had broken out simultaneously in a number of European capitals, including Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Rome, Prague and Budapest. ‘There is a general fight going on all over the Continent . . . between governors and governed, between law and disorder, between those who have and those who want to have,’ wrote Lord Palmerston, once more Foreign Secretary. Nicholas, who lived in perpetual fear of revolution at home, at once clamped down on the few freedoms which existed there. At the same time he dispatched an army under the able Paskievich to Hungary, which he believed to be the centre of the revolutionary movement and of a conspiracy against Russia. The uprising in Hungary was crushed, and its leaders executed. Nicholas had prevented the revolution from spreading to Russia, but had earned himself the enmity of liberals and others everywhere, as well as the title ‘the Gendarme of Europe’. When he wrote to Queen Victoria pointing out that only Britain and Russia had been spared from anarchy, and proposing that they join forces to fight it, he got no reply.

However, it was a quarrel in which Britain was not involved over the guardianship of the Christian sites of the Holy Land, then part of the Ottoman Empire, which finally led to the collapse often years of Anglo-Russian accord. The reasons for the squabble – between Russia, France and Turkey – are of no concern to us. But the ensuing crisis was to escalate to the point where Nicholas ordered his troops into the Sultan’s northern Balkan provinces, purportedly to protect the Christians there. Nicholas ignored an ultimatum from the Turks to withdraw, and once again the two nations were at war. The British and the French, determined to keep the Russians out of the Near East, allied themselves to the Sultan. Tsar Nicholas, who believed he had forged a special relationship with the British over the question of Turkey, realised too late that he had badly misjudged matters. The Crimean War, which no one really wanted and which could easily have been avoided, had begun.

The story of that bloody conflict is too familiar to need retelling here. Nor was it a part of the Great Game, being fought by large armies on the open battlefield, far from the grim deserts of Central Asia and the lonely passes leading down into India. Yet the ripples were soon to be felt by those responsible for India’s defence. For just as British hawks saw the war as an opportunity to prise the Russians from their Caucasian base, and thereby reduce the potential threat to India, there were Russian strategists who believed that a march on India would help speed their victory in the Crimea. Among the latter was Count Simonich’s successor at the Persian court, General Duhamel, who put forward a detailed invasion plan aimed at forcing Britain to switch troops to India from the Near Eastern theatre. Such an attack, he argued, need not involve a very large Russian force if the Afghans, and perhaps the Sikhs, could be enticed to join in by the promise of plunder and territorial gains. While the British regiments were manning the frontier, the ‘enemy within’, India’s vast native population, would require little encouragement to attack their masters in the rear.