The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia (73 page)

Inside the marquee, in silent rows beside the throne, squatted the leading men of Hunza, all eyeing the newcomer with the keenest interest. Younghusband was quick to see that, apart from the throne, there was no other chair. Clearly he too was expected to kneel respectfully at Safdar Ali’s feet. Keeping the courtesies going while both parties were still standing, Younghusband hastily dispatched one of his Gurkhas, now all dressed in smart green regimentals, to fetch his own camp chair. When this arrived, he had it placed alongside the ruler’s throne. He wanted it made plain from the start that he was there as the representative of the greatest sovereign on earth, and that he expected to be treated as such. Indeed, as Younghusband soon discovered, the principal difficulty in dealing with Safdar Ali arose from his misconception of his own importance. ‘He was under the impression’, Younghusband reported, ‘that the Empress of India, the Czar of Russia and the Emperor of China were chiefs of neighbouring tribes.’ When envoys such as himself and Gromchevsky arrived at his court, he took it that they were competing for his friendship. In fact, by and large, this was what they were doing. Younghusband, however, was determined to cut him down to size, although aware of the danger of pushing him further into the arms of the Russians.

For a start, Younghusband let it be known to Safdar Ali that the British government was aware of his secret dealings with Gromchevsky. No doubt this point would have been made even more forcefully had it been realised just how far these had gone. For not long afterwards it reached the ears of Colonel Durand in Gilgit that Safdar Ali had agreed with Gromchevsky to allow the Russians to establish a military outpost in Hunza and to train his troops, although this never appears to have been confirmed. However, it was the permanent task of Durand, rather than that of Younghusband, to foil such intrigues. Younghusband’s primary concern was to stop the caravan raiding, so that trade with Sinkiang could be expanded. Safdar Ali admitted freely that the raids were carried out on his instructions. His kingdom, he said, as his visitor must have seen for himself, ‘was nothing but stones and ice’, possessing little pasturage or cultivable land. Raiding was its only source of revenue. If the British wanted this stopped, then they must compensate him with a subsidy, or his people would have nothing to eat. The only flaw in this argument, Younghusband observed, was that Safdar Ali took most of the proceeds of the raids for himself– just as he would do with any subsidy.

Younghusband told the ruler that the British government would never agree to subsidise him for ceasing to rob its caravans. ‘I said that the Queen was not in the habit of paying blackmail,’ Younghusband wrote, ‘that I had left soldiers for the protection of the trade route, and that he might see for himself how much revenue he would get now from a raid.’ To Younghusband’s surprise, Safdar Ali shook with laughter at this, congratulating his visitor on his candour. With the aim of impressing on his Hunza host just how useless his own matchlock-wielding soldiers would be against modern, European-trained infantry, Younghusband decided to lay on a demonstration of his Gurkhas’ fire-power. He ordered them to discharge a volley at a rock 700 yards away across the valley (though not before Safdar Ali had first demanded that a cordon of his own men should surround him). When everyone was ready, Younghusband gave the order to fire. The Gurkhas’ six bullets struck the rock simultaneously, and impressively close together. ‘This’, noted Younghusband, ‘caused quite a sensation.’

But it did not have the effect on Safdar Ali that he had hoped. Entering into this new game with gusto, the ruler decided that shooting at rocks was tame. Spotting a man descending the cliff path opposite, he asked Younghusband to order his Gurkhas to fire at him. Younghusband laughed, but explained that he could not do this as they would almost certainly hit the man. ‘But what does it matter if they do?’ the ruler declared. ‘After all, he belongs to me.’ This merely confirmed the highly unfavourable opinion of Safdar Ali that Younghusband had acquired during their discussions. ‘I knew that he was a cur at heart,’ he wrote afterwards, ‘and unworthy of ruling so fine a race as the people of Hunza.’ By now Younghusband had had more than enough of him, as he became increasingly arrogant and demanding. He had delivered his warnings, and was anxious to head south before the snow closed the passes, trapping him and his men in Hunza for the winter. The British party left for Gilgit on November 23, with Younghusband hardly on speaking terms with Safdar Ali. It is conceivable that the latter, persuaded by Gromchevsky that he enjoyed Russian protection, felt safe in pursuing his demands to the limit. If so, he would not be the first Asiatic ruler to put such misplaced trust in an emissary of the Tsar.

Younghusband and his men reached India shortly before Christmas 1889. During nearly five months away they had crossed seventeen passes, including two previously unknown ones, and found several, including the Shimshal, to be easily accessible to determined parties and to individuals like Gromchevsky. Younghusband now had to part from his six Gurkhas, whom he had come so much to admire. The sergeant and corporal were on his strong recommendation promoted, while the others were financially rewarded. ‘Tears were in their eyes’, he wrote, ‘as we said goodbye.’ He next settled down to prepare a detailed confidential report on the results of his journey. In this he said he saw no alternative to military action against the wayward Safdar AH, lest he invite the Russians into Hunza. His other concern was over how to close the fifty-mile-wide Pamir gap, through which Gromchevsky had entered Hunza from the north the previous year. At present there was little to prevent the Russians from planting their flag there and claiming it as theirs. But if the frontiers of Afghanistan and Chinese Central Asia could be made to meet, thus eliminating this stretch of no-man’s-land altogether, then any such danger would be forestalled. Younghusband suggested that he should be sent to investigate the gap, and then try to resolve the problem with senior Chinese officials in Kashgar. To his delight the proposal met with Calcutta’s approval, for the authorities there were becoming increasingly nervous about the security of the northern states. In the summer of 1890 he once again left for the frontier. He was to be away for more than a year, and before it was over he was to be caught up in a confrontation with the Russians which was very nearly to lead to a war in Central Asia.

Younghusband was accompanied this time by a young Chinese-speaking colleague from the Political Department named George Macartney. Aged 24, he was two years Younghusband’s junior. Like him, he was destined to become a legend in the Great Game. For the next two months they were to travel together through the whole of the Pamir region, filling in the blanks on the British maps, and trying to discover to whom the few small tribes living there owed their allegiance, whether to Afghanistan or to China. More often than not, in this inhospitable realm where neither Afghan nor Chinese trod, they owed allegiance to no one. At times, even in autumn, it was so cold that the water froze in the basins in the two men’s tents, while dwelling at a high altitude for long periods caused them to suffer badly from physical weakness and lassitude, or what today would be called mountain sickness. Younghusband remarked that he did not envy Russian troops sent to occupy this region for any length of time. The temptation, he added, would be for them to continue southwards in search of an easier climate.

In November, as further work in the Pamirs became impossible, he and Macartney rode down into Kashgar. Relations between London and Peking had improved considerably since Ney Elias’s ill-fated mission five years earlier, and the Chinese had agreed to allow the two men to winter in Kashgar, even providing them with a residence. Known as Chini-Bagh, or Chinese Garden, this was eventually to become the British consulate, and an important listening-post during the closing years of the Anglo-Russian struggle. It was also to be George Macartney’s home for the next twenty-six years. But if the Chinese were willing to forget Britain’s flirtation with Yakub Beg and welcome the two Englishmen, there was one man in Kashgar who looked upon their arrival with the utmost suspicion. This was Nikolai Petrovsky, the Russian consul, who for eight years had successfully kept the British out of Sinkiang.

If Petrovsky felt hostility towards the two newcomers, he was careful to conceal it. His sole concern was to discover what they were up to, and what they were discussing with Chinese officials. He entertained them generously, and discoursed expansively on the roles of their respective governments in Asia, in the evident if vain hope of drawing them out. ‘He was agreeable enough company in a place where there was no other,’ wrote Younghusband of him. ‘But he was the type of Russian diplomatic agent that we had to fight hard against.’ He shocked Younghusband with his complete lack of scruples, admitting frankly that he lied whenever it suited him, and declaring that he thought the British naive for not doing likewise. However, Younghusband and Macartney found him singularly well-informed, not only about Sinkiang but also about British India. He had a network of spies, moreover, whose tentacles reached everywhere.

Younghusband had instructions to try to persuade the Chinese to send troops into the Pamirs to claim and occupy the undemarcated lands lying immediately to the west of their present outposts, thereby filling part, at least, of the gap. So well did the talks appear to be going that he felt able to report to his superiors that the gap would very soon be closed, and that the Russians would then be unable to advance through the Pamirs ‘without committing an act of very open aggression’. He had naturally hoped to keep his discussions with the Chinese secret. But he had not reckoned with Petrovsky. Just as Younghusband could have outmanoeuvred his Russian adversary in the Pamir passes, here, on his own home ground, Petrovsky was master. Later he was to boast that everything that passed between Younghusband and the Taotai, the Chinese governor, was immediately communicated to him. This was supported many years later by N.A. Khalfin, the Soviet historian of this period, who claimed that Petrovsky had discovered what the British were up to, and had alerted St Petersburg accordingly. What followed next certainly appears to bear this out.

In July 1891, while Younghusband and Macartney were still in Kashgar, reports began to reach London that the Russians were planning to send a force to the Pamirs to annex them. These were strongly denied by the Russian Foreign Minister, who declared them to be totally false. However, only a week later he admitted that a detachment of troops was on its way to the Pamirs ‘to note and report what the Chinese and Afghans are doing in these regions’. Very soon rumours of the Russian move reached the ears of Younghusband and Macartney. Although they thoroughly distrusted Petrovsky, they had no suspicion of what he had been up to behind their backs. Nonetheless Younghusband at once set out for the Pamirs to try to discover the truth, leaving Macartney behind in Kashgar to keep an eye on things there, not least on Petrovsky. But as we know, they were too late. Younghusband quickly found out that the rumours were true. The Russians had got there before the troops the Chinese had promised to send. A force of 400 Cossacks had entered the Pamir gap from the north with orders to seize it in the name of the Tsar. On August 13, at a lonely spot high up in the Pamirs, Younghusband came face to face with the invaders.

·34·
Flashpoint in the High Pamirs

‘As I looked out of the doors of my tent,’ Francis Younghusband wrote afterwards, ‘I saw some twenty Cossacks with six officers riding by, and the Russian flag carried in front.’ Apart from the new arrivals, and his own small party, the place was uninhabited. Situated 150 miles south of the Russian frontier, and known to the wandering tribes of the region as Bozai Gumbaz, it belonged, so far as the British were concerned, to Afghanistan. Younghusband at once sent one of his men, bearing his card, to where the Russians had pitched their camp, half a mile away, and invited their officers over for refreshments. They were not long in taking up the invitation, for they were clearly keen to know what he was up to. Shortly afterwards, led by a colonel wearing the coveted Order of St George, the nearest Tsarist equivalent to the Victoria Cross, several of their officers rode across to Younghusband’s modest camp.

The meeting was friendly, even convivial. The Englishman had no vodka to offer his guests, only Russian wine which he had brought from Kashgar. He told the colonel, who was called Yanov, that he had heard that the Russians were annexing the whole of the Pamir region. Explaining that he was anxious not to cause unnecessary alarm in Calcutta and London by reporting mere native rumours on so serious a matter, he asked Yanov whether in fact this was true. The Russian’s answer was unequivocal. ‘He took out a map,’ Younghusband recounted, ‘and showed me, marked in green, a large area extending right down to our Indian watershed.’ It included much which was unquestionably Afghan or Chinese territory. Yet all of it was now being claimed as belonging to the Tsar. Carefully avoiding discussion of the implications of the move, Younghusband merely remarked to Yanov that the Russians were ‘opening their mouths pretty wide’. At this the colonel laughed, but added that it was ‘just a beginning’. The Russians remained in Younghusband’s camp for about an hour before excusing themselves, saying that they had their own camp to prepare. On leaving, however, Colonel Yanov invited Younghusband to join them for dinner that evening.