The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia (69 page)

This reconnaissance by Lockhart was not the only forward move ordered at this time by Lord Dufferin. For the fall of the Liberal government at home had lifted the taboo on dispatching officers and politicals on missions beyond India’s frontiers. One area the Viceroy was particularly anxious about was Sinkiang, where the Russians appeared to have stolen a considerable march on the British. Under the Treaty of St Petersburg, which had restored Kuldja, or Hi, to China, the latter had agreed to the Russians having a consul in Kashgar. The man chosen by St Petersburg to fill this post was a formidable individual named Nikolai Petrovsky. A militant Anglophobe, he had vowed at all costs to keep the British out of Sinkiang, both politically and commercially. During the three years he had been there, by sheer force of character he had already made himself virtual ruler of Kashgar, intimidating Chinese officials and terrorising the Muslim population. The Chinese, only too aware that the nearest Russian garrisons lay just across the frontier, went in perpetual fear of annexation by St Petersburg – something which the Russian consul was not averse to threatening them with. They were most careful in their dealings with him never to cause him offence, or to give the Russians any other excuse for wresting Kashgar from them. Petrovsky’s hand was considerably strengthened by the fact that there was no British representative there. He had the field to himself, and fully intended to keep it that way.

Lord Dufferin was determined to end Petrovsky’s monopoly in Kashgar before it spread throughout the whole of Sinkiang. For a start the Viceroy wished to obtain for Indian merchants the right to trade with Sinkiang on equal terms with their Russian rivals. Although the market was a far smaller one than had once been believed, it was dominated by cheap but shoddy Russian goods, there being no alternative. Dufferin also wanted to see a permanent Indian government official stationed there. Ostensibly his function would be to safeguard the interests of British-Indian subjects living in Sinkiang, many of them Hindu money-lenders and their families. His real role, though, would be to keep a close eye on Petrovsky, and to report back on his and other Russian activities in the region. At present this was done unofficially by an enterprising young Scottish trader named Andrew Dalgleish, who travelled regularly between Leh and Kashgar. However, the Viceroy wanted to see this put on a firmer footing.

The man chosen by Dufferin for the task of trying to secure for Britain equal rights with Russia in Kashgar was an experienced political officer and Central Asian traveller with the somewhat curious name of Ney Elias. Currently he was serving as the Indian government’s representative at Leh, where for six years he had been engaged in gathering political and other intelligence from travellers arriving from all parts of Central Asia, especially from Kashgar and Yarkand. Dalgleish was one of his principal and most reliable sources. The British Legation in Peking was asked by the Viceroy to obtain diplomatic accreditation for Elias, and to arrange for him to be received in Kashgar by a senior Chinese official with whom he could conduct discussions on both British representation and trading rights there. To Dufferin’s intense annoyance, however, the Chinese refused his request, arguing that the volume of trade between India and Sinkiang was too small to justify a special treaty or arrangement of any kind. Nonetheless, they agreed to grant Elias a passport, although this gave him no diplomatic status. There were two possible explanations for this rebuff. One was that Peking was still smarting from Britain’s attempts, during Yakub Beg’s years as Sinkiang’s ruler, to ally herself with him. The other was that the scheming Petrovsky, with his usual mixture of threats and bribes, was leaning hard on the Chinese to keep Elias out.

Despite this setback to his plans, the Viceroy ordered Elias to proceed, even without diplomatic accreditation, for he might at least be able to discover at first hand something of what was going on across the Karakorams, and what threat this might represent to British India. But even before he left Leh, a second piece of bad news reached Elias from Kashgar. The Chinese authorities had ordered Dalgleish to leave, pointing out that he had no passport. Previously they had turned a blind eye to this, and had always welcomed him. He told Elias that he was pretty certain that the Russian consul was behind his expulsion. If so, it certainly did not bode well for Elias’s own prospects. And so it turned out, for he was to get no further than Yarkand. Although he was received there by a guard of honour of sorts, Elias found the Amban, or senior Chinese official, openly hostile. Barred, despite his passport, from proceeding to Kashgar, Elias quickly saw that any hopes of his negotiating what the Viceroy wanted were in vain. He also learned of a third possible reason for the obstructiveness of the Chinese. At one time they would have welcomed a British presence in Kashgar to counter the powerful influence of Petrovsky. But now, unnerved by the painful experience of having one bullying Westerner in their midst, they had no wish to saddle themselves with another.

Although his mission had proved abortive, Elias was not a man to return empty-handed from Yarkand, using the opportunity to check at first hand on various political and military matters, news of which normally reached him via often dubious sources in the bazaars of Ladakh. The Viceroy had been hoping, for example, that in the event of a Russian advance into Sinkiang, or even the eastern Pamirs, there might be some kind of military co-operation between Britain and China to halt this. Indian Army officers, it was thought, might be used as advisers, or perhaps even to command Chinese units. One glance, though, at the guard of honour which had lined the way as he rode into Yarkand, together with subsequent observations, showed Elias the hopelessness of this. Ill-armed, poorly trained and undisciplined, the troops slouched, chatted, joked, ate fruit and commentated loudly on the ‘foreign devil’ as he passed by. ‘These are the people’, Elias noted with exasperation in his diary, ‘we are asked to ally ourselves with against the Russians. Ye Gods!’

But the tasks which Elias had been set were not yet over. It was the Viceroy’s hope that he would be able, on his return to India, to travel via the eastern Pamirs and upper Oxus, including regions lying beyond those explored and mapped by Lock-hart’s party. Having little interest themselves in this godforsaken area, where Russia, Afghanistan and Kashmir merged with their own territories, the Chinese raised no objection. In addition to surveying this previously unexplored (except by the Russians) terrain, Elias had been asked to discover all he could about the locally recognised frontiers there, whether Russian, Chinese, Afghan or merely tribal. Finally, he was to examine the worrying gap, formed of undemarcated and as yet unclaimed lands, known to lie between the easternmost part of Afghanistan and the westernmost part of Sin-kiang. Its existence had first been reported by Sir Douglas Forsyth following his mission to the court of Yakub Beg, and subsequent reconnaissance, twelve years earlier. India’s defence chiefs had hoped that the Russians would not spot it until a way could be found of sealing it against an invader.

Elias’s task, much of it undertaken in the middle of winter, took him seventeen months. During this time, although dogged by illness, he covered 3,000 miles and explored no fewer than forty passes. His conclusion, like that of Lockhart, was that the Russians were unlikely to launch a full-scale invasion across a region incapable of supporting a large body of men. Political penetration, however, was another matter, and this he saw as the principal threat posed by the Russians in this far northern region. As for the vulnerable gap between the Afghan and Chinese frontiers, he recommended that the two powers should be persuaded to join their frontiers up, thereby making any Russian incursions an act of violation. Thus far, Elias and Lockhart were broadly in agreement. However, on the question of how best to keep the Russians out of Chitral, the soldier and the political differed strongly. Elias considered the Chitrali ruler, with whom Lockhart had just signed a treaty, to be totally untrustworthy, and certainly not to be relied upon if faced by Russian blandishments. ‘No guarantee given by an irresponsible barbarian of this kind could ever be effective,’ Elias warned. The only way to prevent Britain’s new ally from selling out to the Russians, he suggested, would be to garrison troops on his southern border, so that the threat from behind would be greater than that from in front. Such differences of opinion between the Viceroy’s military and political staffs were a familiar theme of the Great Game, there being little love lost between the two. But of more immediate concern than Chitral to India’s defence chiefs at that moment was the Transcaspian Railway. With its obvious capacity for transporting troops and artillery, this was being extended eastwards by Russian engineers at an alarming rate.

Work on this line had begun in 1880 on the orders of General Skobelev when he was preparing for his advance on Geok-Tepe. He had originally envisaged it merely as a means of moving ammunition and other supplies across the desert from the Caspian port of Krasnovodsk. It was intended to be no more than a light, narrow-gauge track, along which heavy equipment could be hauled by traction engine, or even by camels, and which could be dragged forward as the force advanced. This had very soon been dropped, however, for a more ambitious and permanent rail link. One hundred miles of standard track from European Russia was shipped across the Caspian, and a special railway battalion, commanded by a general, was formed to lay it. In the event, Skobelev moved faster than the railway builders, and he stormed Geok-Tepe without waiting for them. But the railway had continued to creep forward as the neighbouring tribes were pacified, reaching Merv only a year after its capitulation to Lieutenant Alikhanov. The ensuing threat of war with Britain over Pandjeh led to the formation of a second railway battalion, and a rapid increase in the line’s rate of advance. By the middle of 1888, it had reached Bokhara and Samarkand, and work on the final leg of its journey to Tashkent had begun.

Among the first to sound the alarm over the new Russian railway, and the strategic threat it posed to India, was Charles Marvin. In 1882, when the line had still not progressed very far eastwards, and long before the Pandjeh crisis, he had warned of the railway’s threat, and particularly of the Russians seizing Herat and then consolidating their position there by extending the line to it. This, he argued, could be completed by Russian military engineers in a few short months. Since then the threat to Herat had been lifted following the Afghan boundary settlement. Even so, in the event of hostilities at some future date, the nearest Russian railhead was considerably closer to Herat than the nearest British one. Indeed, a few years later, not long after Marvin’s death, the Russians were to close the gap even further, by advancing their rail network southwards to well below Pandjeh.

The glaring inadequacy of India’s frontier communications, particularly its roads and railways, was now beginning to dawn on Calcutta and London. Foremost of those calling for Russia’s railway encirclement of northern India and Afghanistan to be matched by a similar construction programme within India’s frontiers was General Roberts, Commander-in-Chief of its armed forces. Following a thorough study made by him on the spot, he argued that India’s defence budget, which was always tight, would be better spent on enabling commanders to rush troops to a threatened sector of the frontier, than on building forts and entrenchments which might never have to be defended. ‘We must have roads, and we must have railways,’ he wrote in a secret report to the Viceroy. ‘They cannot be made at short notice, and every rupee spent upon them now will repay us tenfold hereafter . . . There are no better civilisers than roads and railways, and although some of those recommended to be made may never be required for military purposes, they will be of the greatest assistance to the civil power in the administration of the country.’ In the longer term, if Abdur Rahman could be persuaded to agree, Roberts favoured the extension of the railway into Afghanistan, with lines to Jalalabad and Kandahar, and the stationing of British troops there. Without this, Roberts believed, the Russians would gradually occupy the whole of Afghanistan, absorbing it bit by bit as they already had Pandjeh. And when Abdur Rahman died, St Petersburg was likely to take every advantage of the ensuing power struggle.

But even extending the railway up to the Afghan frontier was to prove difficult, for not every member of the India Council was persuaded of the need for such heavy expenditure. Several years later, despite continuous pressure from the military, there were still fewer than fifty miles of track in the frontier region, although the road network was improved. To force through the expansion in railways, roads and telegraphs which Roberts deemed vital for India’s defence called for someone at the very top who was not only convinced of the long-term Russian threat but who also possessed the power and determination to sweep aside all obstacles and objections. And such an individual had yet to occupy Government House. However, at around this time, the man who was destined to achieve precisely that was travelling eastwards across Russian Central Asia at a steady fifteen miles an hour on the very railway which was causing so much concern to Roberts and his fellow generals.