The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia (70 page)

The Honourable George Nathaniel Curzon, then a young and ambitious Tory backbencher, had set out for Central Asia in the summer of 1888 determined to see for himself what the Russians were really up to there, and to try to fathom their intentions towards British India. Already, at the age of 29, he had set his sights on one day becoming Viceroy. Turning his back on the London social scene, this aristocratic and eligible bachelor took a train across Europe to St Petersburg and Moscow, whose political mood he first wished to gauge, before heading south into the Caucasus. From Baku he caught the ageing paddle-steamer and sometime troopship, the
Prince Bariatinski,
across the Caspian to Krasnovodsk. It was here that Curzon’s personal reconnaissance of Central Asia, not to mention his lifelong passion for it, really began. For he now set off eastwards across the desert by the new Russian railway whose operations he was so keen to examine. His eventual destination was Tashkent, the nerve-centre of all Russian military operations in Central Asia, but the route took him via Geok-Tepe, Ashkhabad, Merv, Bokhara and Samarkand. At first, for nearly 300 miles, the line ran parallel, and close, to the Persian frontier. Because of its capacity for carrying troops and artillery, Curzon later observed, the railway represented to the Shah ‘a sword of Damocles perpetually suspended above his head’. Further east, where it curved northwards from Merv in the direction of Bokhara, it served as a similar reminder of the Russian military presence to Afghanistan and British India.

The journey to Samarkand, where the line currently ended, normally took three days and three nights. But Curzon broke the 900-mile run more than once, catching the next train onwards when he had seen all he wanted to. As he travelled, he filled his notebooks with everything he could gather about the railway itself and the oasis-towns along the route. When it came to discussing rolling-stock – in other words the railway’s capacity for transporting troops and equipment – he found the Russians particularly tight-lipped. Indeed, apart from what he could observe with his own eyes, information was difficult to come by. ‘It is as hard to extract accurate statistics . . . from a Russian’, he complained, ‘as to squeeze juice from a peach-stone.’ The authorities were perfectly aware of who he was, however, and it would have been surprising if they had not warned railway officials and others not to discuss certain matters with him. Nonetheless, Curzon was able to gather sufficient material on the workings of the Transcaspian Railway, and its strategic significance to British India, to fill a 478-page narrative entitled
Russia in Central Asia and the Anglo-Russian Question.

The first halt of note was at Geok-Tepe, where eight years earlier Skobelev’s men had blasted their way into the massive Turcoman stronghold and slaughtered so many of the fleeing inhabitants. As the train approached the barren spot from across the desert, Curzon could see the ruined fortress, its mud walls nearly three miles in circumference and pitted with shell holes. He also saw the huge breach which Skobelev’s engineers had blown in it, and through which his infantry had stormed. The train halted at Geok-Tepe station, built only sixty yards from the ghostly fortress, just long enough for Curzon to explore parts of it. ‘The bones of camels, and sometimes of men,’ he wrote, ‘may still be seen lying within the desolate enclosure, and for long after the assault it was impossible to ride over the plain without one’s horse-hooves crushing into human skulls.’ In the distance he could see the hills from whose vantage-point Edmund O’Donovan of the
Daily News
had witnessed the flight of the defeated Turcomans across the plain.

Ancient Merv, once known throughout Central Asia as the ‘Queen of the World’, proved disappointing, having lost all traces of its former glory. Four years of Russian occupation had stripped it of any romance, and reduced it to just another small garrison town, with shops selling cheap Russian goods and a club where a dance was held once a week. The once greatly feared Turcomans had been thoroughly tamed, and Curzon saw a number of Russia’s erstwhile enemies sporting the Tsar’s uniform as officers in his service. ‘I do not think that any sight could have impressed me more profoundly with the completeness of Russia’s conquest’, he wrote, ‘than the spectacle of these men, only eight years ago the bitter and determined enemies of Russia on the battlefield, but now wearing her uniform, standing high in her service, and crossing to Europe to salute as their sovereign the Great White Czar.’

From Merv the train toiled all day across the bleak solitude of the Karakum desert – ‘the sorriest waste that ever met the human eye’, Curzon called it – before coming to the great wooden bridge which carried it across the Oxus. Even today few foreigners have ever set eyes on this river, so remote is its course. Certainly the experience was not lost on Curzon, who wrote: ‘There in the moonlight gleamed before us the broad bosom of the mighty river that from the glaciers of the Pamir rolls its 1,500 miles of current down to the Aral Sea.’ He found himself haunted, moreover, by Matthew Arnold’s poem
Sohrab and Rustum,
which tells the story of the legendary Persian warrior who, by a dreadful mistake, slays his own son on the banks of the Oxus. As the train inched its way across the creaking structure, taking a full fifteen minutes to reach the far side, Curzon broke off from such musings to record in his notebook that it rested on more than 3,000 wooden piles, was over 2,000 yards long, and had taken 103 days to construct. He also learned that a permanent iron bridge, costing £2 million, was expected to replace it before long.

Both Bokhara and Samarkand came fully up to Curzon’s expectations. Few non-Russians had ever seen these fabled Silk Road cities, still redolent with romance and mystery, and Curzon was to devote many pages in his book to describing their dazzling mosques, tombs and other celebrated monuments. In Bokhara, where he remained for some days, he was accommodated, as a British VIP, at what the Russians officially called their embassy. For St Petersburg still maintained the fiction that the Emir was an independent ruler and not a vassal of the Tsar’s. In the city itself the only Russian presence, therefore, was the ambassador, together with a small escort and staff. However, only ten miles away, as if to remind the Emir of his position, a Russian garrison was stationed, ostensibly to protect the railway.

It was in Bokhara that nearly half a century earlier Conolly and Stoddart had been brutally put to death in the great square before the Ark, as the citadel was called. ‘Somewhere in this pile of buildings’, Curzon wrote, ‘was the horrible hole, or bug-pit, into which Stoddart and Conolly were thrown.’ He was assured that this had long ago been sealed up, but when he tried to enter the Ark to see for himself he was turned back by a crowd of natives who gesticulated him away. In view of the tales he heard of prisoners being held in the innermost parts of the Ark, ‘chained to each other by iron collars . . . so that they could neither stand, nor turn, nor scarcely move’, Curzon strongly suspected that the verminous pit was still in use. Certainly other barbaric methods of punishment were practised in the holy city. There was, for example, the notorious Minaret of Death. From the top of this, malefactors – including murderers, thieves and forgers – were regularly pushed to their deaths. ‘The execution’, Curzon reported, ‘is fixed for a bazaar day, when the adjoining streets and the square at the base of the tower are crowded with people. The public crier proclaims aloud the guilt of the condemned man and the avenging justice of the sovereign. The culprit is then hurled from the summit and, spinning through the air, is dashed to pieces on the hard ground at the base.’ To humour the Emir and the religious authorities, the Russians had interfered as little as possible with the people’s customs and traditions, although slavery had been stamped out. To annex the Emirate formally, however, would have meant needless expense and trouble. As it was, Curzon observed, ‘Russia can do in Bokhara what she pleases’.

In Samarkand, where the railway then ended, he found no such pretence of independence, although the Russians had repeatedly declared their intention of returning the city and its fertile lands to the Emir of Bokhara, from whom they had seized it. ‘It is unnecessary to say’, Curzon wrote, ‘that there was never the slightest intention of carrying out such an engagement.’ Only a Russian diplomat, he added sardonically, could have given such an undertaking, while only a British one would have believed him. Among the signs suggesting permanent Russian occupation were the large and pretentious governor’s residence, standing in its own park, the new Orthodox church, and the carefully planned European quarter lying at a comfortable distance from the noise and squalor of the old city.

When not pursuing his other enquiries, Curzon spent much time wandering among Samarkand’s many architectural treasures, their dazzling blue tiles now rapidly crumbling away. Like today’s tourists, more than a century later, he stood in awe in the mighty Registan, gazing up at the surrounding buildings, which include some of the finest architecture in Central Asia, if not anywhere. Even in its then derelict state, Curzon judged it to be ‘the noblest public square in the world’, while Samarkand itself he described as ‘the wonder of the Asiatic continent’. He chided the Russians for doing nothing to preserve its great monuments for future generations, something which happily has since been put right. From Samarkand, using that peculiarly Russian means of transport, the springless, horse-drawn
tarantass,
Curzon reached Tashkent by the post road in thirty uncomfortable hours. But the discomforts were soon forgotten amid the civilised amenities of Government House, where he stayed with the Governor-General, a successor to the formidable Kaufman, who had died six years earlier and is buried in Tashkent.

Curzon was now at the very heart of the Tsar’s vast Central Asian empire – a unique position from which to try to fathom Russian intentions towards India. During his stay in Tashkent, which he found to be one huge armed camp ruled entirely by the military, he took every opportunity to try to ascertain the views of senior officers, including his host, on Russia’s long-term ambitions in Asia. He was not surprised to discover their mood to be distinctly bellicose, especially towards Britain. He was aware, however, that not too much significance should be attached to this. ‘Where the ruling class is entirely military,’ he observed, ‘and where promotion is slow, it would be strange if war, the sole available avenue to distinction, were not popular.’ Tashkent, he reminded his readers, had long served as a refuge for those ‘of damaged reputations and shattered fortunes, whose only hope of recovery lay in the chances afforded on the battlefield’. Indeed, shortly before his arrival, promising rumours had been circulating the garrison of an impending invasion of Afghanistan. On the frontier such dreams helped to keep men sane.

Curzon returned to London by the route along which he had come, and at once sat down to write his book. He was forced to concede that Russian rule had brought considerable benefits to the Muslim peoples of Central Asia, while the new railway would serve to hasten the region’s economic development. But the existence of the Transcaspian line had dramatically altered the strategic balance in the region. Previously, Russian armies advancing towards India had faced the almost insuperable task of moving large bodies of troops, artillery and other heavy equipment across vast distances and nightmarish terrain. When the final 200-mile stretch of the railway, linking Samarkand and Tashkent, was completed, it would enable St Petersburg to concentrate as many as 100,000 troops on the Persian or Afghan frontiers. These could be drawn from as far away as the Caucasus and Siberia. Curzon was convinced that the full significance of the railway had been gravely underestimated in Britain. ‘This railway’, he wrote to a friend, ‘makes them prodigiously strong. And they mean business.’

He was not of the belief that their remorseless advance across Central Asia was part of some grand design, or in fulfilment (as some still thought) of Peter the Great’s supposed deathbed command. ‘In the absence of any physical obstacle,’ he wrote, ‘and in the presence of any enemy . . . who understood no diplomatic logic but defeat, Russia was as much compelled to go forward as the earth is to go round the sun.’ But while the prospect of invading India may not have been the original motive for their advance towards it, Curzon believed that the numerous plans worked out by their generals showed that ‘for an entire century the possibility of striking at India through Central Asia has been present in the minds of Russian statesmen.’ He concluded that although neither Russian statesmen nor generals dreamed of the
conquest
of India, ‘they do most seriously contemplate the invasion of India, and that with a very definite purpose which many of them are candid enough to avow’. Their real objective was not Calcutta but Constantinople. ‘To keep England quiet in Europe by keeping her employed in Asia,’ he declared, ‘That, briefly put, is the sum and substance of Russian policy.’

Others had said it before. However, what made it significant this time was that within ten years the man who uttered it was to realise his ambition by becoming, at the age of 39, the Viceroy of India. Even so, that was still a long way off. But his was not the only promising career taking shape at that time in what Curzon called ‘the Central Asian game’. For just back from a secret reconnaissance of Sinkiang was a young Indian Army officer whose exploits were before long to thrill a whole generation of Englishmen.