The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia (71 page)

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Where Three Empires Meet

Moulded in what Curzon later termed ‘the frontier school of character’, Lieutenant Francis Younghusband of the 1st King’s Dragoon Guards seemed to possess all the virtues required by a romantic hero of those times. Indeed he might almost have been a model for such John Buchan heroes as Richard Hannay and Sandy Arbuthnot – men who pitted themselves single-handed and in lonely places against those threatening the British Empire. Born into a military family at Murree, a hill-station on the North-West Frontier, he was commissioned in 1882, aged 19, and sent to join his regiment, then serving in India. Early in his career he was spotted by his superiors as a natural for intelligence work, and while still in his twenties he carried out a number of successful reconnaissances on and beyond the frontier. Such activities, however, were in his blood, for he was the nephew of that earlier player in the Great Game, Robert Shaw, whose career he had dreamed since boyhood of emulating. In the event, he was destined to eclipse it. By the age of 28 he would be a veteran of the game, sharing the confidences of men in high places with whom few subalterns ever came into contact. His secret work made him privy to the latest intelligence reaching India on Russian moves to the far north, while it was his boast that he knew General MacGregor’s
Defence of India,
then the bible of the forward school, by heart.

The great Asian journey from which Lieutenant Younghusband had just returned when Curzon was making his more leisurely one by railway, was a 1,200-mile crossing of China from east to west by a route never before attempted by a European. It had happened almost by chance. In the spring of 1877, after travelling through Manchuria on leave (in reality in pursuit of intelligence), he found himself in Peking at the same moment as Colonel Mark Bell, VC, his immediate chief. Bell was about to set out on an immense journey of his own across China. His object was to try to ascertain whether its Manchu rulers would be able to withstand a Russian invasion. Younghusband at once asked the colonel if he might accompany him on his mission. Bell refused, arguing that this was a waste of valuable manpower. It would be far better, he suggested, if Younghusband returned to India across China, but by a different route. This would avoid duplication of effort, and enable them to gain between them a more complete picture of the country’s military capabilities. On his return, Young-husband could then present a separate report on his own findings and conclusions.

It was a generous offer, and Younghusband needed no second bidding. With that, Bell set out, leaving Younghusband to seek the necessary extension to his leave by telegraphing to India. Approval was granted by the Viceroy himself, and on April 4, 1887, the young officer rode out of Peking on the first leg of his long march westwards across China’s deserts and mountains. It was to take him seven months and to end with a dramatic winter crossing of the then unexplored Mustagh Pass, leading over the Karakorams – a formidable achievement for someone ill-equipped for climbing, and with no previous mountaineering experience. The valuable information he brought back delighted his chiefs. Ostensibly the purpose of his journey was purely geographical, and on his return to India he was granted a further three months’ leave by General Roberts, the Commander-in-Chief, so that he could travel to London and lecture on the scientific results of his journey to the august Royal Geographical Society. Elected its youngest ever member, at 24, he was not long afterwards awarded its highly coveted gold medal. At an age when most young officers were regarded by senior officers with ill-disguised disdain, Francis Younghusband was already accepted by those who mattered as a member of the Great Game elite.

During the next few years he was to be kept extremely busy. The Tsar’s generals had begun to show an alarming interest in that lofty no-man’s-land where the Hindu Kush, Pamirs, Karakorams and Himalayas converged, and where three great empires – those of Britain, Russia and China – met. Russian military surveyors and explorers like Colonel Nikolai Prejevalsky were probing further and further into the still largely unmapped regions around the upper Oxus, and even into northern Tibet. In 1888, one Russian explorer had got as far south as the remote, mountain-girt kingdom of Hunza, which the British regarded as lying within their sphere of influence, and well outside that of Russia. The next year another Russian explorer, the formidable Captain Gromchevsky, had the temerity to enter Hunza accompanied by a six-man Cossack escort. He was reported to have been cordially received by the ruler, and to have promised to return the following year with some interesting proposals from St Petersburg. To British officers stationed on the frontier, and their masters in Calcutta, it looked as though the long feared Russian penetration of the passes had now begun.

Not long afterwards it was learned that three travellers, all believed to be Russians, had crossed the highly sensitive Baroghil Pass and entered Chitral after a gruelling journey. The ruler, now on the British payroll, had the men seized and sent under escort to Simla, where they were interviewed in person by Lord Dufferin, the Viceroy. To everyone’s relief it turned out that they were not Russians but French, led by the well-known explorer Gabriel Bonvalot. Indeed, their account of their misadventures, including the loss of their horses and baggage, was listened to with some satisfaction by the British. The Frenchmen had made their crossing in the spring, when the passes were supposedly at their most vulnerable, yet they had very nearly come to grief. The severe hardships they had encountered were a welcome foretaste of what Russian troops might expect. Nonetheless, the British were beginning to feel increasingly uneasy at the prospect of Russian political penetration of the region – especially of officers like Gromchevsky seeking to establish friendly relations with the rulers of the small northern states lying in the path of their advancing armies. Kipling made use of this theme in his classic spy story
Kim,
in which Tsarist agents posing as hunters are sent to infiltrate and suborn the ‘five kingdoms of the north’. John Buchan used it, too, in his now little-known Great Game novel,
The Half-Hearted,
written a year earlier, in 1901. In this the hero dies a lonely death in the Hunza region, defending with his rifle and a large boulder a secret pass which the Russians have discovered and are swarming through.

In response to the (real-life) Russian moves in the ill-guarded far north, the Viceroy took a number of urgent steps to counter any threat of infiltration or other interference – at least until the Pamir region boundaries had been agreed with Russia, Afghanistan and China. He dispatched to Gilgit, at the northern extremity of the Maharajah of Kashmir’s domains, an experienced political officer. This was Colonel Algernon Durand, whose brother, Sir Mortimer Durand, was Foreign Secretary to the Government of India. From this safe and friendly vantage-point he was to monitor any Russian movements to the north, and at the same time to try to establish good relations with local rulers there. Simultaneously the Viceroy announced the establishment of a new, 20,000-strong force, which was to be contributed by the Indian princes and others possessing private armies. Known as Imperial Service troops, these were intended primarily for the defence of India’s frontiers. Finally General Roberts, the Commander-in-Chief, visited Kashmir in person to advise the Maharajah on how best to strengthen and modernise his armed forces. It was thus hoped that the latter would be able to hold the passes against the Russians until help could arrive in the form of Imperial Service troops or Indian Army units.

More immediately, though, there was the problem of Captain Gromchevsky, known to be skulking somewhere in the Pamirs, and said to be planning to return to Hunza shortly to renew his acquaintance, made the previous year, with its ruler. And that was not the only worry involving Hunza. For years, using a secret pass known only to themselves, raiders from Hunza had been plundering the caravans which plied the lonely trail across the mountains between Leh and Yarkand. Not only was this strangling what little traffic there was in British goods, but, much more disturbing to India’s defence chiefs, if armed raiders could slip in and out of Hunza that way, so too could the Russians. The secret pass, it was decided in Calcutta, had to be located. And who better to attempt this than Lieutenant – recently promoted to Captain – Francis Younghusband? ‘The game’, Colonel Durand noted at Gilgit with satisfaction, ‘has begun’.

In the summer of 1889, Younghusband received a telegram ordering him to Simla, the headquarters of the Intelligence Department, to be briefed in person by the Foreign Secretary, Sir Mortimer Durand. It could hardly have come at a better moment, for he had just had turned down a request to be allowed to visit Lhasa – on which Russian military explorers were known to have set their sights – disguised as a Yarkandi trader. One reason for this refusal was the news that another lone traveller, the enterprising Scottish trader Andrew Dalgleish, had been brutally hacked to death while on his way to Yarkand. For his new mission, which would take him past the spot where Dalgleish had been murdered, Younghusband was to be accompanied by an escort of six Gurkhas and a party of Kashmiri soldiers from Leh. In addition to locating the secret pass used by the Hunza raiders, he was to visit the capital and warn their ruler that the British government was no longer prepared to tolerate such activities against innocent traders, many of whom were the Empress of India’s subjects, carrying British goods. He was also to warn him off having anything to do with the Russians.

Younghusband and his party left Leh on August 8, 1889, heading northwards across the Karakoram Pass towards the remote village of Shahidula. Here, at 12,000 feet, lived many of the traders who plied the Leh–Yarkand caravan route and suffered at the hands of the raiders. From them Younghusband hoped to learn the whereabouts of the secret pass – the mysterious Shimshal – leading westwards into Hunza. It was his plan to block it by posting his Kashmiri troops there, before entering Hunza himself for his audience with its ruler. Fifteen days after leaving Leh, Younghusband and his party reached the village, a bleak spot consisting of a dilapidated fort and some nomadic tents in which the traders lived. From their chief, Younghusband learned that appeals to the Chinese authorities for protection against the Hunzas had fallen on deaf ears. Peking, it was clear, had no wish to encourage trade between India and Sinkiang, especially in tea, since it threatened their own trade. Although the village, nominally anyway, lay in Chinese territory, its chief offered to transfer his allegiance to the British government if it would protect them. Explaining that he was not empowered to accept this offer, Younghusband nonetheless promised to refer it to the Viceroy. However, there was one thing which he could do for them he told the chief, and that was to station a detachment of well-armed Kashmiri troops in the pass, which would help to curb the activities of the raiders. Furthermore, he had instructions from his government to enter Hunza and convey a warning to its ruler of the serious consequences for himself if the raids continued.

The Shimshal Pass, Younghusband learned from the villagers, was dominated by a fort currently occupied by the raiders. Colonel Durand, based at Gilgit, had been instructed by Calcutta to advise the ruler of Hunza — officially allied to Britain’s friend the Maharajah of Kashmir by treaty – that Younghusband was on his way. But the latter had no way of being sure that the raiders, in their stronghold, had been warned of this. Nonetheless, as there was no other way of entering Hunza from where he was, Younghusband decided to proceed directly to the fortress and see what sort of a reception he and his Gurkhas got. Led by the village chief in person, they set off up the narrow, precipitous pass towards the fortress. It was a desolate landscape. ‘A fitter place for a robbers’ den could not be imagined,’ Younghusband wrote, observing that, apart from the villagers, they had not seen another soul for forty-one days. Suddenly, high above them, they spotted the raiders’ lair. It was perched dramatically at the top of a near-vertical cliff, and was known locally as ‘the Gateway to Hunza’. Leaving the rest of his Gurkhas to give covering fire in case they had to withdraw rapidly, he and two others, together with an interpreter, crossed the still frozen river at the bottom of the gorge and began to ascend the zigzag pathway winding up the precipitous rock face. It was a bold move, but Younghusband knew that audacity usually paid off in Central Asia.