The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia (68 page)

On March 31, when General Komarov’s ultimatum expired, and the Afghans showed no sign of giving way, he ordered his troops to advance, but not to fire unless first fired upon. In the event, if Alikhanov is to be believed, the Afghans opened fire first, wounding the horse of one of his Cossacks. It was just what he was waiting for. ‘Blood has been shed,’ he declared, and gave orders for his troops to open fire on the Afghan cavalry, who were massed within easy range. Thrown into confusion by the murderous hail, they broke and fled. But the Afghan infantry fought with great bravery, Alikhanov recounted later, two entire companies dying to a man as the Russians gradually overran their positions. Finally they too fled, leaving behind them more than 800 dead, many of them drowned while trying to escape across a flooded river. Komarov’s casualties amounted to only 40 dead and wounded.

The news that the Russians had seized Pandjeh reached London a week later. It was received with a mixture of fury and dismay, and even the government admitted that a situation of ‘the utmost gravity’ had arisen. Most people, including foreign diplomats in London, assumed that war between the two great powers was now inevitable. Gladstone, who had been made a fool of by Giers, not to mention by the Tsar himself, denounced the slaughter of the Afghans as an act of unprovoked aggression, and accused the Russians of occupying territory which unquestionably belonged to Afghanistan. He told the House of Commons that the situation was grave, though not hopeless. As something approaching panic swept the Stock Exchange, he obtained an £11 million vote of credit from excited MPs of both parties, the largest such sum since the Crimean War. Official announcements of the outbreak of hostilities were prepared in readiness by the Foreign Office. The Royal Navy was placed on full alert, with instructions to monitor the movements of all Russian warships. In the Far East the fleet was ordered to occupy Port Hamilton in Korea, so that it might be used as a base for operations against the great Russian naval stronghold at Vladivostok and other targets in the North Pacific. At the same time, the possibility of striking at the Russians in the Caucasus, preferably with Turkish help, was being considered.

So that the Tsar and his ministers could have no doubt whatever about the government’s firmness of intent, the British ambassador in St Petersburg was instructed to warn Giers that any further advances towards Herat would definitely mean war. In case this failed to stop the Russians, the Viceroy prepared to move 25,000 troops to Quetta, where they would be held poised, awaiting Emir Abdur Rahman’s approval, ready to race to Herat. In Teheran meanwhile, the Shah of Persia, profoundly alarmed himself by these aggressive Russian moves so close to his own frontier with Afghanistan, was urging Britain to seize Herat before St Petersburg did, while declaring that he intended to remain strictly neutral in the event of a war between his two powerful neighbours.

By now the tremors from the crisis were being felt throughout the rest of the world. In America, where the news had rocked Wall Street, all talk was of the coming struggle between the two imperial giants. Beneath the banner headline
ENGLAND AND RUSSIA TO FIGHT,
the normally sober
New York Times
began its story with the words: ‘It is war.’ And so it might well have been, had not one man kept his head when all about him were beginning to lose theirs.

·32·
The Railway Race to the East

While the world’s newspapers and statesmen were predicting that the two greatest powers on earth were about to go to war over a remote Central Asian village, the ruler in whose domains it lay was temporarily absent from his throne on a state visit to India. Indeed, it may well have been Russian fears that Abdur Rahman and his British hosts were scheming against them, plus the fact that he was away from his kingdom, that had precipitated their seizure of Pandjeh. The prospect of the British, with the Emir’s blessing, occupying Herat was a worrying one to St Petersburg. For just as their own annexation of Merv, and now Pandjeh, menaced India, a strong British military presence at Herat would similarly threaten Russia’s new Central Asian possessions. The spectre might then arise of the British and Afghans joining forces to liberate the Muslim khanates from Russian rule. By occupying Pandjeh, however, the Tsar’s generals knew that if it came to a race for Herat they could be certain of getting there first.

The news of Pandjeh’s fall, and the massacre of the Afghan garrison, was broken to Abdur Rahman by Sir Mortimer Durand, Foreign Secretary to the Indian government and, as it happened, the son of Henry Durand, the subaltern who had blown up the gates of Ghazni during the First Afghan War. No one was sure how the Emir, who was both hot-tempered and ruthless, would take the ill tidings. It was thought very likely that he would demand that the affront be expunged by the spilling of Russian blood and, under the terms of the Anglo-Afghan agreement, with British help. If so, it was hard to see how war was to be avoided, unless Britain was prepared to abandon its buffer state, so painfully and expensively acquired, to the tender mercies of the Russians.

‘We received the news about dinner time,’ Durand reported, ‘and I drove at once to tell him of the slaughter of his people.’ To Durand’s relief and astonishment, the Emir took it quite calmly, considering the alarm it was generating in Britain, India and elsewhere. ‘He begged me not to be troubled,’ Durand wrote. ‘He said that the loss of two hundred or two thousand men was a mere nothing.’ As for the death of their commander, ‘that was less than nothing.’ Lord Dufferin, the former British ambassador to Russia, who had recently become Viceroy of India, was to observe later: ‘But for the accidental circumstances of the Amir being in my camp at Rawalpindi, and the fortunate fact of his being a prince of great capacity, experience and calm judgement, the incident at Pandjeh alone, in the strained condition of the relations which then existed between Russia and ourselves, might in itself have proved the occasion of a long and miserable war.’

The plain truth was that the Emir had no wish to see his country turned once more into a battlefield, this time by his two quarrelling neighbours. Some authorities have even doubted whether, until then, he had ever heard of the village of Pandjeh. Nonetheless, his restraint did much to defuse a highly incendiary situation. Even so, for the next few weeks, the outbreak of war was expected daily, with the British newspapers demanding that the Russians be taught a lesson, and those of St Petersburg and Moscow insisting that their government annex Herat, and warning Britain to keep away. But there were other restraining influences, besides Abdur Rahman, at work behind the scenes. The fact was that it was in neither side’s interest to go to war over Pandjeh, although Herat was another matter. This time, moreover, the Russians could see that if they advanced any further the British were prepared to fight, even with the Liberals in power. Throughout the crisis, a line was kept open between Lord Granville, the British Foreign Secretary, and Giers. Gradually calm was restored. Pandjeh, it was agreed, should be neutralised until its future could be decided by all three powers. Until then Russian troops would withdraw a short distance from the village. It was further agreed that negotiations over the frontier should commence as soon as possible. In the meantime, the immediate threat of war having faded, both the Royal Navy and British troops in India were stood down.

The Joint Afghan Boundary Commission now commenced its work, which was to drag on, with numerous disagreements, until the summer of 1887, when the protocols for the settlement of all except the eastern part of the frontier were finally signed. Under these the Russians retained Pandjeh, which they exchanged with Abdur Rahman for a strategic pass lying further west which he and his British advisers were anxious to control. But once again the Russians had got more or less what they wanted (even if their generals were opposed to the restraints imposed on them by a frontier), showing themselves to be the masters of the
fait accompli.
Very roughly the new frontier followed the line originally agreed in 1873, except for the southward bulge in the Pandjeh region which brought it much closer to Herat. War, nevertheless, had been averted. Moreover, the Russians had been shown, by the vigour of Britain’s response, that any further move towards Herat would be taken as a declaration of war. Even so, many commentators were far from convinced that any of this would halt the Russian advance for long. Yet history was to prove them wrong. Almost a century would pass before Russian troops and tanks crossed the Oxus into Afghanistan in the winter of 1979.

But further to the east, in the Pamir region, the frontier had still to be fixed. It was to this desolate region, where today Afghanistan and Pakistan share a border, that the focus of the Great Game was now to switch, as for the next ten years Britain and Russia manoeuvred against one another for military and political ascendancy. There was another development, though, which was to make for a further change in the rules of the game. During the Pandjeh crisis, depending upon one’s point of view, Gladstone’s government had displayed ‘consummate statecraft, lamentable vacillation, or abject surrender’ – as one commentator put it. Many of the British electorate evidently judged it to be the latter, especially as it came so soon after Gordon’s death at Khartoum, which was widely blamed on the government. As a result, in August 1886, the Tories swept back into office under Lord Salisbury, a man intensely interested in India’s defence.

Thanks largely to courageous travellers like George Hayward and Robert Shaw, the British had been aware for some time of the vulnerability of the passes leading across the Pamirs, the Hindu Rush and the Karakorams into northern India. Even so, despite the pioneering journeys of a few such individuals, and the brief reconnaissance of Sir Douglas Forsyth’s party in 1874, very little was known militarily about India’s far north, where it merged with Afghanistan and China. Yet already Russian explorers, invariably soldiers, were busy mapping and probing well south of the Oxus in this vast no-man’s-land, while at least one of their generals was reported to have drawn up plans for invading Kashmir via the Pamirs. To remedy this deficiency, in the summer of 1885 a British military survey party was dispatched to the region to explore and map a large swathe of terrain stretching from Chitral in the west to Hunza and beyond in the east. One of its most urgent tasks was to explore the passes leading northwards towards the upper Oxus, and settle once and for all the worrying question of whether or not they represented a threat to India’s defence.

Leading the party was Colonel William Lockhart, a highly regarded officer from MacGregor’s Intelligence Department, who was eventually destined to become Commander-in-Chief of India’s armed forces. Accompanying him were three other officers, five native surveyors and a military escort. During the remainder of that year and in the first few months of the next, they were to map 12,000 square miles of previously unsurveyed territory beyond India’s northern frontiers. In a lengthy report written on his return, Lockhart argued that earlier fears attached to the region, especially to the Baroghil Pass, were exaggerated, although a secondary Russian thrust might be directed across the Pamirs in support of a full-scale invasion via the Khyber and Bolan. But because the Pamir passes were closed every winter by snow, while in summer the numerous rivers became raging torrents, only during the short spring and autumn would the region be vulnerable. Even then a military road would first have to be built if a sizeable force, including artillery and other heavy equipment and supplies, was employed. A more likely strategy, Lockhart thought, would be for four small, highly mobile units to be used.

Lockhart’s initial study of the passes leading northwards suggested that such a force would very likely come via Chitral. In a region entirely without roads or railways, it would take some time to get British troops to the spot, and then they might well find themselves fighting the Chitralis as well as the Russians. With the Viceroy’s full approval, therefore, Lockhart had signed a defensive agreement with Chitral’s ageing ruler, Aman-al-Mulk, a man once suspected of complicity in Hay-ward’s murder. In return for a generous subsidy, plus a guarantee that the throne would always remain in his family’s possession, the ruler undertook to unleash his fierce tribesmen against an advancing Russian force until British troops could come to their assistance.