While the world’s newspapers and statesmen were predicting that the two greatest powers on earth were about to go to war over a remote Central Asian village, the ruler in whose domains it lay was temporarily absent from his throne on a state visit to India. Indeed, it may well have been Russian fears that Abdur Rahman and his British hosts were scheming against them, plus the fact that he was away from his kingdom, that had precipitated their seizure of Pandjeh. The prospect of the British, with the Emir’s blessing, occupying Herat was a worrying one to St Petersburg. For just as their own annexation of Merv, and now Pandjeh, menaced India, a strong British military presence at Herat would similarly threaten Russia’s new Central Asian possessions. The spectre might then arise of the British and Afghans joining forces to liberate the Muslim khanates from Russian rule. By occupying Pandjeh, however, the Tsar’s generals knew that if it came to a race for Herat they could be certain of getting there first.
The news of Pandjeh’s fall, and the massacre of the Afghan garrison, was broken to Abdur Rahman by Sir Mortimer Durand, Foreign Secretary to the Indian government and, as it happened, the son of Henry Durand, the subaltern who had blown up the gates of Ghazni during the First Afghan War. No one was sure how the Emir, who was both hot-tempered and ruthless, would take the ill tidings. It was thought very likely that he would demand that the affront be expunged by the spilling of Russian blood and, under the terms of the Anglo-Afghan agreement, with British help. If so, it was hard to see how war was to be avoided, unless Britain was prepared to abandon its buffer state, so painfully and expensively acquired, to the tender mercies of the Russians.
‘We received the news about dinner time,’ Durand reported, ‘and I drove at once to tell him of the slaughter of his people.’ To Durand’s relief and astonishment, the Emir took it quite calmly, considering the alarm it was generating in Britain, India and elsewhere. ‘He begged me not to be troubled,’ Durand wrote. ‘He said that the loss of two hundred or two thousand men was a mere nothing.’ As for the death of their commander, ‘that was less than nothing.’ Lord Dufferin, the former British ambassador to Russia, who had recently become Viceroy of India, was to observe later: ‘But for the accidental circumstances of the Amir being in my camp at Rawalpindi, and the fortunate fact of his being a prince of great capacity, experience and calm judgement, the incident at Pandjeh alone, in the strained condition of the relations which then existed between Russia and ourselves, might in itself have proved the occasion of a long and miserable war.’
The plain truth was that the Emir had no wish to see his country turned once more into a battlefield, this time by his two quarrelling neighbours. Some authorities have even doubted whether, until then, he had ever heard of the village of Pandjeh. Nonetheless, his restraint did much to defuse a highly incendiary situation. Even so, for the next few weeks, the outbreak of war was expected daily, with the British newspapers demanding that the Russians be taught a lesson, and those of St Petersburg and Moscow insisting that their government annex Herat, and warning Britain to keep away. But there were other restraining influences, besides Abdur Rahman, at work behind the scenes. The fact was that it was in neither side’s interest to go to war over Pandjeh, although Herat was another matter. This time, moreover, the Russians could see that if they advanced any further the British were prepared to fight, even with the Liberals in power. Throughout the crisis, a line was kept open between Lord Granville, the British Foreign Secretary, and Giers. Gradually calm was restored. Pandjeh, it was agreed, should be neutralised until its future could be decided by all three powers. Until then Russian troops would withdraw a short distance from the village. It was further agreed that negotiations over the frontier should commence as soon as possible. In the meantime, the immediate threat of war having faded, both the Royal Navy and British troops in India were stood down.
The Joint Afghan Boundary Commission now commenced its work, which was to drag on, with numerous disagreements, until the summer of 1887, when the protocols for the settlement of all except the eastern part of the frontier were finally signed. Under these the Russians retained Pandjeh, which they exchanged with Abdur Rahman for a strategic pass lying further west which he and his British advisers were anxious to control. But once again the Russians had got more or less what they wanted (even if their generals were opposed to the restraints imposed on them by a frontier), showing themselves to be the masters of the fait accompli. Very roughly the new frontier followed the line originally agreed in 1873, except for the southward bulge in the Pandjeh region which brought it much closer to Herat. War, nevertheless, had been averted. Moreover, the Russians had been shown, by the vigour of Britain’s response, that any further move towards Herat would be taken as a declaration of war. Even so, many commentators were far from convinced that any of this would halt the Russian advance for long. Yet history was to prove them wrong. Almost a century would pass before Russian troops and tanks crossed the Oxus into Afghanistan in the winter of 1979.
But further to the east, in the Pamir region, the frontier had still to be fixed. It was to this desolate region, where today Afghanistan and Pakistan share a border, that the focus of the Great Game was now to switch, as for the next ten years Britain and Russia manoeuvred against one another for military and political ascendancy. There was another development, though, which was to make for a further change in the rules of the game. During the Pandjeh crisis, depending upon one’s point of view, Gladstone’s government had displayed ‘consummate statecraft, lamentable vacillation, or abject surrender’ – as one commentator put it. Many of the British electorate evidently judged it to be the latter, especially as it came so soon after Gordon’s death at Khartoum, which was widely blamed on the government. As a result, in August 1886, the Tories swept back into office under Lord Salisbury, a man intensely interested in India’s defence.
Thanks largely to courageous travellers like George Hayward and Robert Shaw, the British had been aware for some time of the vulnerability of the passes leading across the Pamirs, the Hindu Rush and the Karakorams into northern India. Even so, despite the pioneering journeys of a few such individuals, and the brief reconnaissance of Sir Douglas Forsyth’s party in 1874, very little was known militarily about India’s far north, where it merged with Afghanistan and China. Yet already Russian explorers, invariably soldiers, were busy mapping and probing well south of the Oxus in this vast no-man’s-land, while at least one of their generals was reported to have drawn up plans for invading Kashmir via the Pamirs. To remedy this deficiency, in the summer of 1885 a British military survey party was dispatched to the region to explore and map a large swathe of terrain stretching from Chitral in the west to Hunza and beyond in the east. One of its most urgent tasks was to explore the passes leading northwards towards the upper Oxus, and settle once and for all the worrying question of whether or not they represented a threat to India’s defence.
Leading the party was Colonel William Lockhart, a highly regarded officer from MacGregor’s Intelligence Department, who was eventually destined to become Commander-in-Chief of India’s armed forces. Accompanying him were three other officers, five native surveyors and a military escort. During the remainder of that year and in the first few months of the next, they were to map 12,000 square miles of previously unsurveyed territory beyond India’s northern frontiers. In a lengthy report written on his return, Lockhart argued that earlier fears attached to the region, especially to the Baroghil Pass, were exaggerated, although a secondary Russian thrust might be directed across the Pamirs in support of a full-scale invasion via the Khyber and Bolan. But because the Pamir passes were closed every winter by snow, while in summer the numerous rivers became raging torrents, only during the short spring and autumn would the region be vulnerable. Even then a military road would first have to be built if a sizeable force, including artillery and other heavy equipment and supplies, was employed. A more likely strategy, Lockhart thought, would be for four small, highly mobile units to be used.
Lockhart’s initial study of the passes leading northwards suggested that such a force would very likely come via Chitral. In a region entirely without roads or railways, it would take some time to get British troops to the spot, and then they might well find themselves fighting the Chitralis as well as the Russians. With the Viceroy’s full approval, therefore, Lockhart had signed a defensive agreement with Chitral’s ageing ruler, Aman-al-Mulk, a man once suspected of complicity in Hay-ward’s murder. In return for a generous subsidy, plus a guarantee that the throne would always remain in his family’s possession, the ruler undertook to unleash his fierce tribesmen against an advancing Russian force until British troops could come to their assistance.
This reconnaissance by Lockhart was not the only forward move ordered at this time by Lord Dufferin. For the fall of the Liberal government at home had lifted the taboo on dispatching officers and politicals on missions beyond India’s frontiers. One area the Viceroy was particularly anxious about was Sinkiang, where the Russians appeared to have stolen a considerable march on the British. Under the Treaty of St Petersburg, which had restored Kuldja, or Hi, to China, the latter had agreed to the Russians having a consul in Kashgar. The man chosen by St Petersburg to fill this post was a formidable individual named Nikolai Petrovsky. A militant Anglophobe, he had vowed at all costs to keep the British out of Sinkiang, both politically and commercially. During the three years he had been there, by sheer force of character he had already made himself virtual ruler of Kashgar, intimidating Chinese officials and terrorising the Muslim population. The Chinese, only too aware that the nearest Russian garrisons lay just across the frontier, went in perpetual fear of annexation by St Petersburg – something which the Russian consul was not averse to threatening them with. They were most careful in their dealings with him never to cause him offence, or to give the Russians any other excuse for wresting Kashgar from them. Petrovsky’s hand was considerably strengthened by the fact that there was no British representative there. He had the field to himself, and fully intended to keep it that way.
Lord Dufferin was determined to end Petrovsky’s monopoly in Kashgar before it spread throughout the whole of Sinkiang. For a start the Viceroy wished to obtain for Indian merchants the right to trade with Sinkiang on equal terms with their Russian rivals. Although the market was a far smaller one than had once been believed, it was dominated by cheap but shoddy Russian goods, there being no alternative. Dufferin also wanted to see a permanent Indian government official stationed there. Ostensibly his function would be to safeguard the interests of British-Indian subjects living in Sinkiang, many of them Hindu money-lenders and their families. His real role, though, would be to keep a close eye on Petrovsky, and to report back on his and other Russian activities in the region. At present this was done unofficially by an enterprising young Scottish trader named Andrew Dalgleish, who travelled regularly between Leh and Kashgar. However, the Viceroy wanted to see this put on a firmer footing.
The man chosen by Dufferin for the task of trying to secure for Britain equal rights with Russia in Kashgar was an experienced political officer and Central Asian traveller with the somewhat curious name of Ney Elias. Currently he was serving as the Indian government’s representative at Leh, where for six years he had been engaged in gathering political and other intelligence from travellers arriving from all parts of Central Asia, especially from Kashgar and Yarkand. Dalgleish was one of his principal and most reliable sources. The British Legation in Peking was asked by the Viceroy to obtain diplomatic accreditation for Elias, and to arrange for him to be received in Kashgar by a senior Chinese official with whom he could conduct discussions on both British representation and trading rights there. To Dufferin’s intense annoyance, however, the Chinese refused his request, arguing that the volume of trade between India and Sinkiang was too small to justify a special treaty or arrangement of any kind. Nonetheless, they agreed to grant Elias a passport, although this gave him no diplomatic status. There were two possible explanations for this rebuff. One was that Peking was still smarting from Britain’s attempts, during Yakub Beg’s years as Sinkiang’s ruler, to ally herself with him. The other was that the scheming Petrovsky, with his usual mixture of threats and bribes, was leaning hard on the Chinese to keep Elias out.
Despite this setback to his plans, the Viceroy ordered Elias to proceed, even without diplomatic accreditation, for he might at least be able to discover at first hand something of what was going on across the Karakorams, and what threat this might represent to British India. But even before he left Leh, a second piece of bad news reached Elias from Kashgar. The Chinese authorities had ordered Dalgleish to leave, pointing out that he had no passport. Previously they had turned a blind eye to this, and had always welcomed him. He told Elias that he was pretty certain that the Russian consul was behind his expulsion. If so, it certainly did not bode well for Elias’s own prospects. And so it turned out, for he was to get no further than Yarkand. Although he was received there by a guard of honour of sorts, Elias found the Amban, or senior Chinese official, openly hostile. Barred, despite his passport, from proceeding to Kashgar, Elias quickly saw that any hopes of his negotiating what the Viceroy wanted were in vain. He also learned of a third possible reason for the obstructiveness of the Chinese. At one time they would have welcomed a British presence in Kashgar to counter the powerful influence of Petrovsky. But now, unnerved by the painful experience of having one bullying Westerner in their midst, they had no wish to saddle themselves with another.
Although his mission had proved abortive, Elias was not a man to return empty-handed from Yarkand, using the opportunity to check at first hand on various political and military matters, news of which normally reached him via often dubious sources in the bazaars of Ladakh. The Viceroy had been hoping, for example, that in the event of a Russian advance into Sinkiang, or even the eastern Pamirs, there might be some kind of military co-operation between Britain and China to halt this. Indian Army officers, it was thought, might be used as advisers, or perhaps even to command Chinese units. One glance, though, at the guard of honour which had lined the way as he rode into Yarkand, together with subsequent observations, showed Elias the hopelessness of this. Ill-armed, poorly trained and undisciplined, the troops slouched, chatted, joked, ate fruit and commentated loudly on the ‘foreign devil’ as he passed by. ‘These are the people’, Elias noted with exasperation in his diary, ‘we are asked to ally ourselves with against the Russians. Ye Gods!’
But the tasks which Elias had been set were not yet over. It was the Viceroy’s hope that he would be able, on his return to India, to travel via the eastern Pamirs and upper Oxus, including regions lying beyond those explored and mapped by Lock-hart’s party. Having little interest themselves in this godforsaken area, where Russia, Afghanistan and Kashmir merged with their own territories, the Chinese raised no objection. In addition to surveying this previously unexplored (except by the Russians) terrain, Elias had been asked to discover all he could about the locally recognised frontiers there, whether Russian, Chinese, Afghan or merely tribal. Finally, he was to examine the worrying gap, formed of undemarcated and as yet unclaimed lands, known to lie between the easternmost part of Afghanistan and the westernmost part of Sin-kiang. Its existence had first been reported by Sir Douglas Forsyth following his mission to the court of Yakub Beg, and subsequent reconnaissance, twelve years earlier. India’s defence chiefs had hoped that the Russians would not spot it until a way could be found of sealing it against an invader.
Elias’s task, much of it undertaken in the middle of winter, took him seventeen months. During this time, although dogged by illness, he covered 3,000 miles and explored no fewer than forty passes. His conclusion, like that of Lockhart, was that the Russians were unlikely to launch a full-scale invasion across a region incapable of supporting a large body of men. Political penetration, however, was another matter, and this he saw as the principal threat posed by the Russians in this far northern region. As for the vulnerable gap between the Afghan and Chinese frontiers, he recommended that the two powers should be persuaded to join their frontiers up, thereby making any Russian incursions an act of violation. Thus far, Elias and Lockhart were broadly in agreement. However, on the question of how best to keep the Russians out of Chitral, the soldier and the political differed strongly. Elias considered the Chitrali ruler, with whom Lockhart had just signed a treaty, to be totally untrustworthy, and certainly not to be relied upon if faced by Russian blandishments. ‘No guarantee given by an irresponsible barbarian of this kind could ever be effective,’ Elias warned. The only way to prevent Britain’s new ally from selling out to the Russians, he suggested, would be to garrison troops on his southern border, so that the threat from behind would be greater than that from in front. Such differences of opinion between the Viceroy’s military and political staffs were a familiar theme of the Great Game, there being little love lost between the two. But of more immediate concern than Chitral to India’s defence chiefs at that moment was the Transcaspian Railway. With its obvious capacity for transporting troops and artillery, this was being extended eastwards by Russian engineers at an alarming rate.
Work on this line had begun in 1880 on the orders of General Skobelev when he was preparing for his advance on Geok-Tepe. He had originally envisaged it merely as a means of moving ammunition and other supplies across the desert from the Caspian port of Krasnovodsk. It was intended to be no more than a light, narrow-gauge track, along which heavy equipment could be hauled by traction engine, or even by camels, and which could be dragged forward as the force advanced. This had very soon been dropped, however, for a more ambitious and permanent rail link. One hundred miles of standard track from European Russia was shipped across the Caspian, and a special railway battalion, commanded by a general, was formed to lay it. In the event, Skobelev moved faster than the railway builders, and he stormed Geok-Tepe without waiting for them. But the railway had continued to creep forward as the neighbouring tribes were pacified, reaching Merv only a year after its capitulation to Lieutenant Alikhanov. The ensuing threat of war with Britain over Pandjeh led to the formation of a second railway battalion, and a rapid increase in the line’s rate of advance. By the middle of 1888, it had reached Bokhara and Samarkand, and work on the final leg of its journey to Tashkent had begun.
Among the first to sound the alarm over the new Russian railway, and the strategic threat it posed to India, was Charles Marvin. In 1882, when the line had still not progressed very far eastwards, and long before the Pandjeh crisis, he had warned of the railway’s threat, and particularly of the Russians seizing Herat and then consolidating their position there by extending the line to it. This, he argued, could be completed by Russian military engineers in a few short months. Since then the threat to Herat had been lifted following the Afghan boundary settlement. Even so, in the event of hostilities at some future date, the nearest Russian railhead was considerably closer to Herat than the nearest British one. Indeed, a few years later, not long after Marvin’s death, the Russians were to close the gap even further, by advancing their rail network southwards to well below Pandjeh.
The glaring inadequacy of India’s frontier communications, particularly its roads and railways, was now beginning to dawn on Calcutta and London. Foremost of those calling for Russia’s railway encirclement of northern India and Afghanistan to be matched by a similar construction programme within India’s frontiers was General Roberts, Commander-in-Chief of its armed forces. Following a thorough study made by him on the spot, he argued that India’s defence budget, which was always tight, would be better spent on enabling commanders to rush troops to a threatened sector of the frontier, than on building forts and entrenchments which might never have to be defended. ‘We must have roads, and we must have railways,’ he wrote in a secret report to the Viceroy. ‘They cannot be made at short notice, and every rupee spent upon them now will repay us tenfold hereafter . . . There are no better civilisers than roads and railways, and although some of those recommended to be made may never be required for military purposes, they will be of the greatest assistance to the civil power in the administration of the country.’ In the longer term, if Abdur Rahman could be persuaded to agree, Roberts favoured the extension of the railway into Afghanistan, with lines to Jalalabad and Kandahar, and the stationing of British troops there. Without this, Roberts believed, the Russians would gradually occupy the whole of Afghanistan, absorbing it bit by bit as they already had Pandjeh. And when Abdur Rahman died, St Petersburg was likely to take every advantage of the ensuing power struggle.
But even extending the railway up to the Afghan frontier was to prove difficult, for not every member of the India Council was persuaded of the need for such heavy expenditure. Several years later, despite continuous pressure from the military, there were still fewer than fifty miles of track in the frontier region, although the road network was improved. To force through the expansion in railways, roads and telegraphs which Roberts deemed vital for India’s defence called for someone at the very top who was not only convinced of the long-term Russian threat but who also possessed the power and determination to sweep aside all obstacles and objections. And such an individual had yet to occupy Government House. However, at around this time, the man who was destined to achieve precisely that was travelling eastwards across Russian Central Asia at a steady fifteen miles an hour on the very railway which was causing so much concern to Roberts and his fellow generals.
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.