The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia (33 page)

November now gave way to December, and the snow began to fall. It was far heavier and more frequent than Perovsky and his staff had expected. Even the local Kirghiz could not recall so much falling so early in winter. Soon it began to obliterate the tracks of the preceding columns, making navigation treacherous in the flat, featureless terrain. ‘It was only now and again’, the report declares, ‘that the route pursued by the columns in front could be ascertained by the pillars of snow erected at some distance from each other by the Cossacks, by the snow heaps which marked the night camps, and by the camels, living and dead, some frozen and partly devoured by wild beasts, which lay along the line of march.’ The deep snow and frozen earth made it increasingly difficult to find food for the camels, and soon they began to die at an alarming rate. ‘Once a camel fell,’ the report tells us, ‘it rarely rose again.’ Constantly having to transfer the loads from fallen camels to others greatly slowed the expedition’s progress and exhausted the men. A subaltern was sent ahead to the Aral Sea region to try to buy fresh camels, but word came back that he had been captured by a Khivan patrol and carried off, bound hand and foot, to the capital.

By early January they had lost nearly half their camels, and the surviving beasts, crazed by hunger, began to gnaw through the wooden cases containing the men’s rations. To prevent this, every night some 19,000 boxes and sacks had to be unloaded, and loaded again the following morning. Before fires could be lit for cooking and for warmth, fuel had somehow to be found beneath the snow. This consisted of the roots of small shrubs which had to be dug from the frozen earth. Large areas of snow also had to be cleared at every halt so that the felts could be laid down, tents erected and lines prepared for the camels and horses. ‘Only towards 8 or 9 in the evening could the soldier or Cossack obtain a little repose,’ the official record recounts, ‘and by 2 or 3 the next morning he was obliged to rise and go through the same round of heavy duties.’ Nonetheless they still pressed stoically on.

The snow-drifts were now so deep that the men had to work up to their waists in them to clear the way for the camels and artillery. As the snow continued to fall and temperatures to drop, their suffering increased, testing their strength and morale to the limit.’ In such cold,’ the official report declares, ‘it was impossible to wash clothes or observe personal cleanliness. Many of the men, during the whole march, not only did not change their soiled linen, but did not take off their clothes. They were covered with vermin and their bodies engrained with dirt.’ Sickness now became a serious problem, with scurvy beginning to take an increasing toll. Yet they were still less than half-way to Khiva.

As January drew to a close, it became increasingly clear that the expedition was heading for disaster. More than 200 men had already died of sickness, while more than twice that number were too ill to fight. The camels, on which they were so dependent, were now dying at the rate of 100 a day. The weather was still deteriorating, and the Cossack scouts reported that ahead the snow lay even deeper, making it almost impossible to find fuel and forage of any kind, and reducing their likely progress to no more than a few miles a day, if that. On January 29, General Perovsky visited each of the columns to see for himself whether men and beasts were capable of continuing the march for another month – the minimum time it would take them to reach the nearest inhabited parts of the Khivan khanate. It was the unanimous view of his column commanders that, if a catastrophe was to be averted, any further advance was now out of the question. From what he himself had seen of the men, Perovsky knew that they were right.

It must have been a moment of bitter disappointment, not to say humiliation, for them all, but especially for the general. By sheer ill-luck they had chosen to attack Khiva during the worst winter that anyone living on the steppe could remember. Had they only set out a little earlier they might have missed the worst of its fury and reached the rich and sheltered oasis of Khiva in safety. As it was, they had not so much as seen the enemy, let alone engaged him. On February 1, 1840, the general gave orders for the exhausted and depleted columns to turn about and head back to Orenburg. It had taken them the best part of three months to struggle this far, and the return march was unlikely to take them any less. Putting as brave a face on things as possible, Perovsky told his men: ‘Comrades! Ever since we started out we have had to struggle against obstacles of the severest character, and a winter of unprecedented ferocity. These difficulties we have successfully overcome, but we have been denied the satisfaction of meeting the foe.’ He assured them that their victory had merely been delayed, and that ‘our next expedition will be more fortunate’.

But Perovsky’s immediate problem was to extricate his force from its perilous situation with as little further loss of life as possible – not to mention loss of face. For this was the second time in little more than a century that a Russian expedition to Khiva had met with failure and humiliation. However, in the words of the official report: ‘It was preferable to succumb to the insurmountable obstacles of nature, and to retreat at once, than to give the miserable opponents of Russia any pretext for exultation over an imaginary victory.’ Nonetheless, those obstacles were to prove no less hazardous during the retreat than during the advance. In addition to the snow-drifts and blizzards, food shortages and sickness, there was the grisly trail of rotting camel carcasses, half eaten by wolves and foxes, to remind them of their plight. Having scented the carrion from far off, packs of wolves now plagued the columns when they halted at night.

In a misguided attempt to halt the ravages of scurvy, Perovsky managed with great difficulty to obtain supplies of fresh meat, believing that the deficiency of this, and not of fresh vegetables, was its cause. Sadly but not surprisingly, ‘in spite of these preventive measures’, the official report tells us, ‘the scurvy, instead of diminishing, grew worse’. This was blamed on the men’s general ill-health, and the filthy condition of their clothes and bodies. With the arrival of March, however, there was a slight but welcome improvement in the weather, though this gave rise to a new hazard – snow-blindness. Many of the men, their eyes weakened by months of vitamin deficiency, found themselves badly affected by the glare of the bright spring sunlight off the snow. Even improvised sun-glasses made from lattices of horsehair did little to ease the pain, which was aggravated by the acrid smoke from the green twigs used for fuel.

Throughout March and April, men and camels continued to drop, and by the time the last of the columns struggled into Orenburg in May, nearly seven months after their confident departure, the full magnitude of the catastrophe had become apparent. Of the 5,200 officers and men who had set out for Khiva, more than 1,000 had perished without a shot being fired, or the loss of one Khivan soldier. Fewer than 1,500 of the 10,000 camels which had accompanied the force were to return alive. Not one of the Russian slaves had been freed, the Turcoman caravan raiders remained unpunished, and the Khan who was to have been replaced was still firmly on his throne. Yet across the Oxus, for the whole world to see, the British had successfully carried out a not dissimilar operation with textbook professionalism. It could not have been more galling for the Russians, coming so soon after their setback at Herat, where again the British had outmanoeuvred them, in full view of everyone, on the Great Game battlefield. Furthermore, it was no secret that their campaign against the Circassians and Shamyl’s Daghestanis in the Caucasus was going far from well.

One need hardly add that the Russophobe press in Britain and on the Continent was rubbing its hands in satisfaction at this triple misfortune. For their part the St Petersburg newspapers sought to justify the Khivan adventure, rebuking the foreign press for denouncing it, and accusing the editors of hypocrisy. The Russians argued that the British, with considerably less justification, had occupied India, much of Burma, the Cape of Good Hope, Gibraltar, Malta, and now Afghanistan, while the French had summarily annexed the whole of Algeria on the dubious pretext that its Muslim ruler had insulted their consul. ‘The guilt of the Algerian Bey’, the official Russian report on the Khivan expedition was to argue, ‘shrinks into insignificance when compared with that of the Khivan khans. For many years they have tempted the patience of Russia with their treachery, outrages, robberies and the detention of thousands of the Tsar’s subjects as slaves and bondsmen.’ Referring to the failure of the expedition, the report’s anonymous authors declared that it was to be hoped that this would finally prove to the world ‘the impracticability of all ideas of conquest in this region – even if they had existed’, and would end, once and for all, such ‘erroneous interpretations’ of Russian policy in the East.

It was, of course, to do nothing of the sort, even if a further thirty years were to pass before the Russians dispatched another expedition to Khiva. By now suspicions and misunderstandings had progressed too far for that. Few in Britain or India were willing to see that it was largely panic over Britain’s own forward move in Afghanistan which had driven St Petersburg into such precipitate action over Khiva. Russophobe propaganda was in full spate. British travellers returning from Russia insisted that Tsar Nicholas was aiming at nothing less than world domination. Robert Bremmer, in his
Excursions in the Interior of Russia,
published in 1839, warned that Nicholas was simply waiting for the most opportune moment to strike. ‘That he will ultimately do so when Poland is more secure, Circassia conquered, and internal factions appeased, there can be little doubt,’ he declared. Another British visitor, Thomas Raikes, writing in 1838, drew attention to the menace of Russia’s rapidly growing military and naval power, and forecast that Britain and Russia would very soon be at war.

Nor were such views confined to the British: A celebrated French observer, the Marquis de Custine, who toured Russia in 1839, returned with similar forebodings about St Petersburg’s ambitions. In his
La Russe en 1839,
a work still quoted by Kremlinologists today, he warned: ‘They wish to rule the world by conquest. They mean to seize by armed force the countries accessible to them, and thence to oppress the rest of the world by terror. The extension of power they dream of . . . if God grants it to them, will be for the woe of the world.’

The British press largely shared this sense of doom. In an editorial written shortly before the fate of the Khivan expedition was known,
The Times
declared: ‘The Russians have well nigh mastered the whole of the northern kingdoms of Central Asia . . . they are in possession of the great lines of inland traffic which once made Samarkand, and now make Bokhara, a position of first rate commercial importance; and . . . having crossed a vast tract of horrid desert, they now stand preparing or prepared . . . to launch their armed hordes towards the more fertile regions of Hindustan.’ It blamed Palmerston for encouraging the Russians to indulge in such dreams by failing to deal firmly with them in the past. However, it had little doubt that when the inevitable collision came British arms would prevail. The news that the Russians had failed miserably to annex Khiva, and were back where they had begun, did little to moderate the newspaper’s views. Despite the insistence of St Petersburg that the attempt would not be repeated, and that it had anyway intended to withdraw after its objectives had been achieved, it was generally assumed that it would only be a matter of time before a larger expedition set out for Khiva, at a more carefully chosen season of the year.

Another influential journal, the
Foreign Quarterly Review,
which hitherto had always preached restraint, now joined the ranks of the Russophobes, warning its readers of the ‘extreme danger’ posed by St Petersburg in both Asia and Europe. ‘The silent and yet alarming progression of Russia in every direction’, it declared, ‘is quite evident now, and we do not know of one European or Asiatic power on which she does not meditate incursions. Poor Turkey is almost her own, and so is Greece. Circassia holds her at bay, but will share the fate of Poland if not assisted. Persia is already with her, India and China are obviously next in contemplation. Prussia and Austria must keep a sharp look-out, and even France is narrowly watched in the hope of some convulsion in the unpopular dynasty of Orleans to push forward a candidate for the throne, such as Prince Louis Napoleon.’

Such then was the low state of Anglo-Russian relations when, in late January 1840, Captain James Abbott approached Khiva, oblivious to any of this. He was unaware even that the Russian expedition had met with catastrophe, and that therefore he had won the race. However, as he was soon to discover, his own reception in this Muslim stronghold would be far from rapturous.

·17·
The Freeing of the Slaves

When Captain Abbott rode through the gates of Khiva, having first changed from his Afghan disguise into British uniform, he found that alarming rumours about his real purpose in coming had already reached the capital. One of these maintained that he was a Russian spy, posing as an Englishman, who had been sent by General Perovsky to report on the city’s defences. Not long before, he was disturbed to learn, two mysterious European travellers, claiming to be British but suspected by the Khan of being Russians, had been tortured with red-hot skewers in an effort to make them confess. This apparently having been achieved, their throats had been cut and their remains tossed into the desert as a dire warning to others. And here was he, also claiming to be British, turning up at a time when Khiva was gravely threatened. It was hardly surprising that Abbott found himself treated with the utmost suspicion.