The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia (66 page)

Telegraphing the news to Tsar Alexander III, the Governor of Transcaspia declared: ‘I have the honour to inform Your Majesty that the khans of the four tribes of the Merv Turcomans, each representing 2,000 tents, have this day formally taken the oath of allegiance to Your Majesty.’ They had done so, he added, ‘being conscious of their inability to govern themselves, and convinced that Your Majesty’s powerful authority alone can establish order and prosperity in Merv.’ Shortly afterwards, a column of troops from Tejend entered Merv and took possession of the great fortress. Thanks to the audacious, if none too scrupulous diplomacy of Alikhanov, the Russian victory had been entirely bloodless, and had cost almost nothing. On the personal orders of the Tsar, Alikhanov was immediately restored to the rank of major, and his medals, stripped from him at his court martial, were pinned back on his tunic. Not long afterwards he was promoted to colonel, and fittingly made governor of the city which, virtually single-handed, he had annexed for his Tsar and country.

News of Merv’s fall was broken, almost casually, to the British ambassador by Nikolai Giers, now Foreign Minister, on February 15, the day after Alexander had been told. It was painfully clear to the British that St Petersburg, with its repeated reassurances, had been hoodwinking them all along. Once again the Russians were gambling on Gladstone’s Liberals not going beyond their customary remonstrances on finding themselves confronted by a
fait accompli.
The announcement, however, did not take the British government entirely by surprise, even if it was in no position, with a major crisis on its hands in the Sudan, to do much about it. Early the previous year, Lord Granville, the Foreign Secretary, had advised Queen Victoria that the Russians were ‘moving and feeling their way towards the border of Afghanistan’, while only a month before Merv’s surrender a senior Foreign Office official had warned that the uprising in the Sudan served as ‘an encouragement to the Russians, as it is to every enemy of this country’.

The capitulation of Merv was almost as much a triumph for the Russophobes as it was for the Russians, for it was precisely as they had forecast. General Roberts, shortly to become Commander-in-Chief, India, described the move as ‘by far the most important step ever made by Russia on her march towards India’. It would not be long now, warned the hawks, before the Cossacks were watering their horses on the banks of the Indus. Even the government had to recognise that Russia’s seizure of Merv posed a greater menace to India than its earlier annexation of Bokhara, Khiva and Khokand. For whereas vast mountain ranges and deserts lay between the conquered khanates and India’s frontiers, no such obstacles blocked the line of march from Merv, via Herat and Kandahar, to the Indus. Moreover, now that the tribes of Transcaspia had been crushed, there was nothing to stop the Tsar’s armies in the Caucasus and in Turkestan from acting together, under a joint command, against India. To add to British worries, the Russians had begun to build a railway eastwards across Transcaspia towards Merv, which clearly, when completed, could be used to bring troops up to the Afghan frontier region, and eventually to link the garrison towns and oases of Central Asia.

Its patience and credulity finally at an end, the British government once again protested to St Petersburg about the broken promises and false assurances which had led to the seizure of Merv. In a long memorandum, the Foreign Office accused the Russians of acting with cynical disregard for the solemn and frequently repeated pledges of both the Tsar and his ministers. Ignoring the question of the broken promises, the Russians replied that their annexation of Merv had not been premeditated, insisting that it had been at the request of the Turcomans themselves, who wished to end their state of anarchy and enjoy the benefits of civilisation. Having got what it wanted, however, St Petersburg now showed itself anxious to let the matter cool. It therefore proposed that to prevent any such problem from happening in the future, the two governments should get together amicably and work out a permanent frontier between northern Afghanistan and Russia’s Central Asian territories. Disregarding warnings that the Russians were not to be trusted, the Cabinet decided that any settlement with St Petersburg was better than none at all and welcomed the proposal. Once a line had been formally agreed, then any Russian move across it would amount to a hostile act against Afghanistan. Because, under her treaty with Abdur Rahman, Britain was responsible for Afghanistan’s foreign policy, such a step would be tantamount to a hostile act against her too. The Russians, or so the Cabinet was convinced, would consequently think twice before making any further move towards Herat.

After lengthy official correspondence, and much quibbling, it was finally agreed that representatives of both powers – together known as the Joint Afghan Boundary Commission – would rendezvous on October 13, 1884, at the oasis of Sarakhs. This lay in the remote and desolate region, to the southwest of Merv, where Afghanistan, Persia and Transcaspia met. Their task was to delineate the frontier scientifically and permanently, thereby replacing the old 1873 line which had merely been drawn from maps, and extremely vague ones at that. The Russians appeared to be in no hurry to begin work, however, and a series of delays occurred, including the illness, almost certainly tactical, of their chief commissioner, General Zelenoy. Finally the grim Central Asian winter began to close in, making it impossible – or so the Russians insisted – for the general and his staff to reach the spot before the spring. Nonetheless, the chief British commissioner, General Sir Peter Lumsden, managed to get to the rendezvous on time, only to find considerable Russian military activity going on. It immediately became clear what they were up to. Whatever St Petersburg might have decided, the Russian military were determined to extend their southern frontier with Afghanistan as close as possible to Herat before the Commission began its work. They were gambling on the belief that with the Liberals in power, and with the British already heavily committed in the Sudan, London would be unwilling to go to war over a worthless stretch of desert in Asia’s back-of-beyond. But for once, the Russians soon discovered, they had misjudged their adversary.

·31·
To the Brink of War

Russia’s annexation of Merv, and the deceitful manner in which this had been carried out, had already set the presses rolling in Britain, as a new generation of Wilsons, Urquharts and Rawlinsons took up their pens. General Lumsden’s warning that the Russians were on the move once more was followed shortly by a report from the British military attaché at St Petersburg that the Tsar’s generals planned to seize Herat on some pretext in the spring – ‘or as soon as a large portion of our forces are locked up in Egypt and the Sudan’. Then came the news that General Gordon had been butchered on the steps of the Residency at Khartoum by a fanatical mob. It put the nation in a belligerent mood. With the hawks convinced that their moment had come, the year 1885 was destined to be a vintage one for Great Game literature.

Of the new breed of forward school commentators, the most prolific was probably Charles Marvin, already the author of several works on the Russian menace, including
The Russian Advance Towards India,
and
The Russians at Merv and Herat and Their Power of Invading India.
Another,
Reconnoitring Central Asia,
detailed secret missions and journeys made by Russian officers in the regions surrounding British India. A former correspondent in St Petersburg for the London
Globe,
he had the advantage over his rivals of being fluent in Russian, and knowing a number of the Tsar’s leading generals personally. A facile and persuasive writer, he also turned out countless newspaper articles on Russian aims in Central Asia, and how best these could be thwarted.

Marvin had first come to the attention of the public, not to mention the authorities, in May 1878, when he was involved in a
cause célébre
concerning a Whitehall leak. It occurred at the time of the Congress of Berlin, following the Russo-Turkish War of 1877, when Marvin was working as a part-r time official at the Foreign Office, as well as contributing to the
Globe.
Discovering that the government intended to leak details of agreements reached between Britain and Russia to
The Times,
he decided instead to pass them to his own newspaper. The result was a world scoop, although the story was hastily denied by the government. However, the following day the
Globe
published the text of the agreements. Soon afterwards Marvin, the most obvious suspect, was arrested and charged with stealing a top-secret document. When a search of his home failed to find any trace of this, he was acquitted, the court ruling that he had broken no law – there being no Official Secrets Act at that time. In fact, Marvin had committed the entire text to memory as he copied it. The affair was to do Marvin no harm, for within five years, while still only in his late twenties, he was to become the most widely read writer on Anglo-Russian matters of his day.

In 1885, that
annus mirabilis
for all who addressed themselves to the Russian menace, Marvin published no fewer than three books on various aspects of the subject, including one on the threat posed to India by the new Transcaspian Railway. Another,
The Russians at the Gates of Herat,
was written and published in the space of one week (demonstrating that there is nothing new in the ‘instant’ book). Like other works by Marvin, it was to become a bestseller, 65,000 copies being sold in all. In general, Marvin’s line was that successive British governments, especially Liberal ones, had brought the problem upon themselves by their spineless and vacillating policies towards St Petersburg. Of the present administration he declared: ‘Mr Gladstone’s Cabinet is notoriously given to making concessions, and Russia, well aware of this, is resorting to every artifice to squeeze it.’ Other Great Game works appearing that year included Demetrius Boulger’s
Central
Asian Questions,
Colonel G. B. Malleson’s
The Russo-Afghan Question and the Invasion of India,
and H. Sutherland Edwards’s
Russian Projects against India
– to name just three. In addition there were innumerable pamphlets, articles, reviews and letters to the editor by these and other commentators, mostly backing the Russophobe cause.

But perhaps the best known of the writers on the Russian peril, after Charles Marvin, was not an Englishman at all. He was an Anglophile Hungarian orientalist named Arminius Vambery, who had taken up the cudgels on behalf of Britain, Twenty years earlier, disguised as a ragged dervish, or Muslim holy man, he had made a long and daring journey through Central Asia, drawn by the belief that the Hungarians originally came from there. A brilliant linguist, who already spoke Arabic and Turkish, he quickly mastered the languages of the region, which enabled him to visit Khiva, Samarkand and Bokhara without detection. At that time all three still enjoyed independence, but Vambery returned to Budapest convinced that they would very soon be seized by Russia. Finding little interest in Central Asia among his own countrymen, Vambery turned his attention to Britain, hoping that people there would heed his warnings, particularly over India. When he arrived in London in 1864, he discovered that word of his remarkable exploits in Central Asia had preceded him, and he was immediately lionised. The son of a poor Jewish family, he was overwhelmed by the warmth of his reception, which had included meetings with the Prince of Wales, Palmerston and Disraeli. Although everyone wanted to hear at first hand of his adventures as a dervish, in one thing he failed. It will be recalled that forward policies were out of favour at this time, as Sir Henry Rawlinson was finding, and Vambery likewise was unable to persuade anyone other than the hawks to take his warnings seriously.

On returning to Budapest, where he became Professor of Turkish, Arabic and Persian at the university, Vambery proceeded to bombard
The Times and
other British newspapers with letters urging the government to take a far tougher line with the Russians, as one by one the Central Asian khanates fell to them, bringing them ever closer to what he considered to be their ultimate goal, India. But now, with the fall of Merv, and with the Russians showing no real signs of halting, Vambery sensed that his moment had come, and in the spring of 1885 he set out for London intent on expounding his views on St Petersburg’s ambitions towards India. Once again he was lionised, but this time people listened to his warnings at a series of packed meetings which he addressed up and down the country. He received so many invitations that he was forced to turn most of them down. One admirer placed at his disposal, during his stay in London, a luxurious apartment, complete with cook, servants and wine cellar. More than once during his travels in the provinces luncheon baskets filled with expensive delicacies were thrust into his railway carriage, their donors signing themselves simply ‘an admirer’ or ‘a grateful Englishman’. After three exhausting but triumphant weeks, during which he met many leading figures of the day, Vambery returned to Budapest to work on a book entitled
The Coming Struggle for India.
Completed in twenty days, it contained very little that he had not said before. But this time both mood and moment were right. With its eye-catching, vivid yellow cover, it was quickly to join Charles Marvin’s latest work among the year’s bestsellers.