The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia (75 page)

In November 1891, amid great secrecy, a small force of Gurkhas and Kashmiri Imperial Service troops was assembled at Gilgit, under Colonel Durand’s command, preparatory to marching northwards against Hunza and Nagar. While this was going on, the Kashmiris succeeded in capturing a Hunza spy sent by Safdar AH to report on the strength of the British forces in Kashmir. Among other things, he revealed to his interrogators his master’s ingenious new plan for surprising the garrison at Chalt. A number of men from Hunza, carrying loads on their backs to make them appear like coolies from Gilgit (whom they closely resembled), but with weapons hidden about them, were to seek shelter in the fort for the night. Once inside, they would fall upon the unsuspecting defenders, engaging them for long enough to allow Safdar Ali’s troops, concealed nearby, to pour in after them.

Clearly it was time for Durand’s force to get moving. It consisted of nearly 1,000 Gurkhas and Kashmiris, all regulars, and several hundred Pathan road-building troops. They were accompanied by a battery of mountain artillery, seven engineers and sixteen British officers. The going was so difficult in places that it took them more than a week to reach Chalt, only twenty miles north of Gilgit, and their forward base for operations in Hunza and Nagar. Here Durand received a bizarre missive from Safdar AH, who by now had learned of the British advance towards his frontier. Declaring that Chalt was ‘even more precious to us than the strings of our wives’ pyjamas’, he demanded that it be handed over to him. He warned Durand, moreover, that if the British entered Hunza they should be prepared to take on three nations – ‘Hunza, Russia and China’. Already, he claimed, ‘the manly Russians’ had promised to come to his assistance against ‘the womanly British’. He added that he had given orders for Durand’s head to be brought to him on a platter if he and his troops dared to enter Hunza. At the same time, George Macartney learned in Kashgar, Safdar Ali dispatched envoys to Petrovsky, the Russian consul, reminding him of Gromchevsky’s promises of help. Similar pleas for arms and money were made to the Chinese governor.

On December 1, the British force crossed the Hunza river by an improvised bridge built by Durand’s engineers, and headed eastwards towards Safdar Ali’s mountain capital, today called Baltit, but then known simply as Hunza. Progress was slow, the columns having to ascend and descend the almost vertical sides of a succession of deep gorges. At the summits of these the enemy sharpshooters waited for them in
sangars,
or rock-built entrenchments, each of which had to be taken before the advance could safely continue. The first major obstacle to bar their way, however, was the formidable stone fortress at Nilt, belonging to the ruler of Nagar. With its massive walls and tiny loopholes, it was said, like so many Asiatic strongholds, to be impregnable. Certainly Durand’s seven-pounder mountain guns made little impression on it, while his Gurkha marksmen found themselves unable to pick off the defenders behind their narrow slits. To add to Durand’s difficulties, his only machine-gun kept jamming, while he himself was wounded, forcing him to hand over his command. But before doing so he gave orders for the main gate to be blown open by the sappers, led by Captain Fenton Aylmer. It was an extremely hazardous enterprise, singularly like the blasting of Ghazni’s gates by Durand’s father sixty years before. What followed, wrote E. F. Knight, who accompanied the expedition, ‘will long be remembered as one of the most gallant things recorded in Indian warfare’.

Covered by heavy fire from the rest of the force, intended to keep the defenders back from their loopholes, Captain Aylmer, his Pathan orderly and two subalterns succeeded in reaching the fortress wall safely. Close behind them were 100 Gurkhas, ready to pour inside the moment the gate was destroyed. Then, as the subalterns with Aylmer emptied their revolvers into the loopholes at point-blank range, he and his orderly, both carrying explosive charges, dashed through a hail of fire to the foot of the main gate. There they placed their gun-cotton slabs, carefully covering them with stones to concentrate the effect. Finally, after igniting the fuse, both men withdrew hurriedly along the wall to a safe distance to await the explosion. None came. The fuse had gone out.

At that moment Aylmer was hit – shot in the leg at such close range that both his trousers and his leg were burnt by the powder. Nonetheless, he crawled back to the gate to try once more to light the fuse. Trimming it with his knife, he struck a match and after several attempts managed to re-ignite it. The defenders, fully aware of what he was up to, began to shower heavy stones down on him from above, one of which crushed his hand severely. Again Aylmer crept back along the wall to await the explosion. This time the fuse did not let him down. ‘We heard a tremendous explosion above the din of guns and musketry, and perceived volumes of smoke rising high into the air,’ wrote Knight. As the entire gateway disintegrated in a huge cloud of dust and rubble, the Gurkhas, led by the wounded Aylmer and the two subalterns, charged into the fort, where fierce hand-to-hand fighting began for its possession. At first the storming party found itself greatly outnumbered and hard-pressed, for amid the smoke and confusion of the explosion the main force failed to realise that the Gurkhas were inside, and kept up a heavy fire against the walls and loopholes. Realising that they would be slaughtered if the others delayed much longer, Lieutenant Boisragon, one of the subalterns, ran back to the ruined gateway to call for help, exposing himself to the fire of both friend and foe. His action was to save the day, for moments later the rest of the force charged into the fortress.

Knight had a grandstand view of what followed. On hearing the explosion, he had clambered to the top of a high ridge, from where he peered down into the smoke-filled interior of the fortress, ‘spread out beneath us like a map’. He recounts in his book
Where Three Empires Meet:
‘In the narrow lanes there was a confusion of men, scarcely distinguishable from the dust and smoke, but in a moment we realised that fighting was going on within the fort.’ It was clear, however, that those outside did not yet realise this. But then suddenly he and his companions heard cheer after cheer from below, in which they enthusiastically joined ‘with what breath we had left in us after our long climb’. From their vantage-point they now saw the main body of troops pour through the gateway, putting the defenders to flight over the walls and through small, secret exits known only to them.

For the loss of just six British lives, against eighty or more enemy dead, Nilt the impregnable had fallen. Not long afterwards, Knight ran into Aylmer. Covered with blood, and supported by one of his men,
The Times
reporter found him ‘as jolly as ever’, despite the further wound he had received inside the fortress. ‘When he set out for that gateway,’ wrote Knight, ‘he must have known that he was going to meet an almost certain death’, adding that his gallantry had made a deep impression on both sides. One local chief, friendly to the British, who had witnessed the assault on the gate, declared to Knight afterwards: ‘This is the fighting of giants, not of men.’ It was a view evidently shared by the authorities at home, for both Captain Aylmer and Lieutenant Boisragon were later awarded the Victoria Cross. But despite their unexpected loss of Nilt, the enemy continued to harass and defy the British as they fought their way towards the Hunza capital. Finally, in the middle of December, the invaders found their way blocked by an obstacle even more formidable than the fortress at Nilt.

This time an entire mountainside had been turned by the enemy into a stronghold. Covered with
sangars,
manned by an estimated 4,000 men, it totally dominated the valley, 1,200 feet below, along which the British had to pass. To attempt to proceed up the valley without first driving the enemy from the heights would clearly be little short of suicide. Yet repeated reconnaissances failed to discover a route by which these positions could be approached. As at Nilt, something drastic was called for if the British were not to be forced to abandon the campaign and withdraw, which was utterly unthinkable. The solution came from an unexpected quarter. One night, at grave risk to his life, a Kashmiri sepoy succeeded in scaling the precipitous rock face leading up to the enemy positions without being detected by them. A skilled cragsman himself, he told his officers that he believed that a determined party of Gurkhas and other experienced climbers could reach the enemy by this route. It was so sheer in places, he reported, that the defenders would have difficulty in seeing, or firing down on, the ascending troops. A very careful examination was made of his suggested route through binoculars, after which it was decided to go ahead with this daring plan – if only because there appeared to be no alternative.

Arrangements for the assault went ahead amid the greatest possible secrecy, for inside the British camp, which included large numbers of locally hired bearers, were thought to be enemy spies. To make it appear that the expedition was preparing to withdraw, 200 Pathans, used principally for road-building and not essential to the operation, were ordered to start packing up. Meanwhile the attack was scheduled for the night of December 19. Chosen to lead the scaling party was Lieutenant John Manners Smith, a skilled mountaineer of 27, who had been seconded to the force from the Political Department. Only the fifty Gurkhas and fifty Kashmiris, each hand-picked, who were to accompany him were briefed on the perilous mission they were shortly to undertake. On the night of the attack, before the moon was up, the best marksmen among the remaining troops were moved as silently as possible to a vantage-point 500 yards away from, and overlooking, the enemy positions. The two seven-pounder mountain guns were also placed there under cover of darkness. At the same time the scaling party made its way noiselessly across the valley to some dead ground at the base of the cliff they were to ascend. As it was, by a happy coincidence the enemy had chosen that night for one of their periodic celebrations, the sounds of which effectively drowned any noise resulting from these various troop movements.

As dawn broke, the marksmen and gunners began to direct a steady fire on to the enemy
sangars
across the valley. This was concentrated on those positions from which the climbers below were most likely to be spotted. The moment they were detected, however, as they clung perilously to the rock face, this was to be greatly intensified. Otherwise Manners Smith and his 100-strong force would have little hope of survival, let alone of reaching their objectives. Half an hour after the firing commenced, the scaling party began its long and hazardous climb. ‘From our ridge’, wrote Knight, ‘we could see the little stream of men gradually winding up, now turning to the right, now to the left, now going down for a little way when some insurmountable obstacle presented itself, to try again at some other point.’ They looked, he added, very much like ‘a scattered line of ants picking their way up a rugged wall’. At the front he could just make out Manners Smith, ‘as active as a cat’, scrambling ahead of his men. But then, 800 feet above the valley bottom, came a serious setback. Manners Smith halted. ‘It was obvious to him,’ wrote Knight, ‘and still more so to us who could see the whole situation, that the precipice above him was absolutely inaccessible.’ Somehow they had taken the wrong route. There was nothing else to do but to return to the starting point. Two hours had been wasted. Miraculously, however, the enemy had not yet spotted them.

Wasting no more time, Manners Smith scanned the rock face to see where they had gone wrong. Minutes later, unseen by the defenders, he semaphored back across the valley that he was going to make a fresh attempt. Hardly able to breathe, Knight and the rest of the force watched as once more the party began to work its way slowly upwards. This time the route proved right, and the climbers progressed uninterrupted. After what seemed like an eternity to their comrades across the valley, Manners Smith and a handful of the best climbers had got to within sixty yards of the nearest
sangars.
It was at this moment that the alarm was raised, and all hell was let loose. Someone, it appeared, who was friendly to the defenders, had seen what was going on from across the valley and had shouted a warning. Realising their danger, and disregarding the heavy fire which was concentrated against them, those in the
sangars
nearest to the cliff edge ran forward and began to rain heavy rocks down on the scaling party.

Several of the men were hit and seriously injured, though miraculously no one was swept into the abyss below. Fortunately the majority of the climbers had passed the points where they would have been most exposed to danger, and the boulders bounced harmlessly over their heads. By now Manners Smith had been joined by the other subaltern in the scaling party. ‘The two officers’, wrote Knight, ‘manoeuvred their men admirably, watching their opportunities, working their way from point to point with cool judgment between the avalanches, and slowly gaining the heights foot by foot.’ Then,
The Times
man recounts, ‘we saw Lieutenant Manners Smith make a sudden dash forward, reach the foot of the first
sangar,
clamber round to the right of it, and step on to the flat ground beside it.’ Seconds later he was joined by the first of the Gurkhas and Kashmiris, their
kukris
and bayonets glinting in the winter sunlight. Forming into small parties, they began to move from
sangar
to
sangar,
entering them from behind and slaughtering their occupants. At first the defenders fought bravely, but then, realising that they stood no chance against these highly trained troops, they began to slip away, in ones and twos, from their positions. Soon this turned to wholesale panic, and the entire enemy force took to its heels. Many of the fugitives were picked off as they ran by the scaling party, or by the marksmen and gunners across the valley, leaving the mountainside strewn with dead and wounded.

The fall of their second stronghold, and the realisation that neither the Russians nor the Chinese were coming to their assistance, proved too much for the enemy. All along the route to the capital, which lay less than twenty miles ahead, they threw down their arms and surrendered, or made for their homes. For his conspicuous role in the victory, Manners Smith was later awarded the Victoria Cross, the third of the three-week campaign, while a number of sepoys received the Indian Order of Merit, the highest award for bravery then open to native troops. Meanwhile, in his great palace overlooking the capital, Safdar Ali was frantically packing up his treasures preparatory to flight. It was clear to him, too, that Gromchevsky’s promises had been empty ones. As the British advance guard, its progress slowed by the mountainous terrain, got closer to the capital, the ruler slipped away northwards, setting fire to village after village as he fled. The victors had expected to find his palace, in Knight’s words, ‘full of the spoil of a hundred plundered caravans’. But they were to be disappointed. Accompanied by his wives and children, and those of his entourage remaining loyal to him, he had taken almost everything of value with him, carried on the backs of 400 coolies, it was said. A thorough search of the palace did reveal, however, a secret arsenal hidden behind a false wall, containing Russian-made rifles. Also in the palace were Russian household goods, including samovars and prints, and a portrait of Tsar Alexander III. Among a massive correspondence, much of it unopened, with the Russian and Chinese authorities, were letters between Younghusband and Gilgit which his agents had intercepted during the 1891 Pamir crisis.