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.
On nearing the top they were surprised to find the gates of the fortress wide open. For a moment it seemed as though it was unoccupied. But this was merely an old Hunza trick. As Younghusband and his two Gurkhas cautiously approached the gates, these were suddenly slammed shut from within. In a split-second, Younghusband wrote, ‘the whole wall was lined with the wildest-looking men, shouting loudly and pointing their matchlocks at us from only fifty feet above.’ For a moment he feared that they were about to be mown down. However, although the clamour continued, the men on the wall held their fire. Trying to make himself heard above the uproar, Younghusband shouted back: ‘Bi Adam!’ Bi Adam!’ – ‘One man! One man!’ He held aloft one finger, indicating to those inside that they should send out a man to parley with him.
After an interval the gates opened and two men emerged and made their way over to where Younghusband and his men were waiting. He explained to them that he was on his way to Hunza to see their ruler. The two men returned to the fort to report to their chiefs, and shortly afterwards Younghusband and his companions were invited inside. It was almost the last thing the British officer ever did, for as he rode through the gateway a man suddenly stepped forward and seized his bridle. It looked like treachery, and the Gurkhas, although greatly outnumbered, raised their rifles, ready to sell their lives dearly. Their commanding officer, Younghusband learned later, had told them that if they allowed any harm to befall him they need not bother to return, as the honour of the regiment was at stake. Fortunately, however, it turned out to be a somewhat bizarre joke, albeit an extremely perilous one. The man who had grabbed his bridle began to shake with laughter, and soon everyone, including Younghusband, was joining in. They had merely wanted to test the Englishman’s courage, and see how he would react. It transpired, moreover, that they had been expecting him all along, but had no very precise orders as to how to receive him. The ice had now been broken, though, and after this the two sides got on famously, sitting round a huge fire which the raiders had built inside the fort. ‘And when the little Gurkhas produced some tobacco,’ Younghusband recalled afterwards, ‘and with their customary grins offered it to their hosts, they were completely won.’
Younghusband had begun to suspect that the raiders were in fact not there entirely of their own choice, but were acting on the orders of the ruler. ‘They had all the risks and danger,’ he wrote, ‘while their chief kept all the profits to himself. They raided because they were ordered to raid, and would have been killed if they refused.’ He explained to them therefore that his government was angry that the traders, who included some of its own subjects carrying goods from India, were being robbed, murdered or sold into slavery. He had been sent to discuss with their ruler how the raiding could be brought to an end. The men listened intently to all he had to say, but told him nervously that the question of raiding was not one they could discuss, which appeared to confirm Younghusband’s suspicions.
The next day, escorted by seven of their new Hunza friends, Younghusband and his Gurkhas set off up the pass, whose secrets Calcutta was so anxious to have explored and mapped. They had proceeded only about eight miles when they were met by an emissary sent by the ruler, Safdar Ali. He bore a letter welcoming Younghusband to Hunza, and informing him that he was free to travel anywhere he wished in the kingdom. When he had seen everything he wanted, the ruler hoped that Younghusband would visit the capital as his official guest. Younghusband gave the emissary gifts, including a fine Kashmir shawl, to take back to his master, together with a note thanking him for his generous offer of hospitality. The latter, Younghusband added, he would be delighted to accept shortly, when he had seen a little more of his renowned kingdom. For not only did Younghusband wish to explore the Shimshal Pass, but he also needed to discover whether there were any other passes in the region through which Russian troops or agents might enter Hunza.
Not long afterwards a second messenger arrived, this time bearing mail which had been carried by a runner all the way from India. It included an urgent note from Younghusband’s chiefs in Simla warning him that the Russian agent Gromchevsky was back in the area, making his way southwards towards Ladakh. Younghusband was instructed to keep a close eye on the Russian’s movements. This was followed a few days later by a third messenger, this time bearing a letter from Captain Gromchevsky himself. The Russian, who had somehow learned of his presence in the region, cordially invited his English rival to dine with him in his camp. Younghusband needed no urging, and the next morning set out for where the Russian had pitched his tents.
‘As I rode up,’ he wrote later, ‘a tall, fine-looking bearded man in Russian uniform came out to meet me.’ Gromchevsky, who had an escort of seven Cossacks, greeted his guest warmly, and that night, after the British officer had pitched his own camp nearby, the two men dined together. ‘The dinner was a very substantial meal,’ Younghusband reported, ‘and the Russian plied me generously with vodka.’ As the latter flowed freely, and the meal progressed, Gromchevsky talked more and more frankly about the rivalry between their two nations in Asia. He told Younghusband that the Russian army, both officers and men, thought of little else but the coming invasion of India. To make his point, he called his Cossacks over to the tent and asked them whether they would like to march against India. They answered him with a rousing cheer, swearing that there was nothing they would like more. It was much what Burnaby, Curzon and others had reported after returning from the Tsar’s Central Asian domains.
Younghusband could not help noticing that on Gromchevsky’s map the worrying Pamir ‘gap’ was picked out in red. There could be no hiding the fact that the Russians were aware of the existence of this stretch of no-man’s-land where Russia, China, Afghanistan and British India met. The British, Gromchevsky insisted, had invited Russian hostility towards themselves in Asia because they persisted in meddling in the Black Sea and Balkan region, and in trying to thwart what St Petersburg believed to be its legitimate interests there. When Russia did attack India – and Gromchevsky thought it only a question of time – then it would not involve a small force, as British strategists seemed to think, but one anything up to 400,000 strong. Younghusband was aware that British experts, including MacGregor, judged 100,000 to be the maximum number of men who could be deployed in this type of terrain. How, he asked Gromchevsky, were they proposing to transport and supply so vast an army once they had left the railway behind and found themselves crossing the great mountain barriers which protected northern India? His host replied that the Russian soldier was a stoical individual who went where he was told, and did not trouble his head too much about transport and supplies. He looked upon his commander as a child did its father, and if at the end of a gruelling day’s march or fighting he found neither water nor food he simply did without, carrying on cheerfully until he dropped.
The debate next turned to the question of Afghanistan, the linchpin of India’s defence, and whose side it would take if there was a war over India. The British, Gromchevsky declared, should long ago have annexed it for their own protection, together with the other, lesser kingdoms of the region. Their preferred use of subsidies and treaties, he argued, offered no safeguard against treachery. The Emir Abdur Rahman, he claimed, was no real friend of Britain’s. In the event of war the promise of a share of India’s riches would prove too much for him, and he would throw in his lot with the Russians, among whom he had lived for so long before coming to the throne. Furthermore, India’s native population would rise against its British oppressors if help seemed at hand. But that argument, Younghusband pointed out, was double-edged, for what was there to prevent the British from unleashing the Afghans and others against Russia’s Central Asian territories, with the legendary treasures of Bokhara and Samarkand as the prizes? The Tsar’s vast possessions to the east of the Caspian were highly vulnerable. While India’s weakest points were strongly fortified, Russia’s were not. And so the argument continued over the vodka and blinis until far into the night. It was conducted with more bombast perhaps than science, but nonetheless with much good humour. What made it memorable, however, was the fact that this was the first time that rival players had met face to face on the frontier while actively engaged in the Great Game. It would not be the last time.
Two days later, after sharing Younghusband’s remaining bottle of brandy, the two men prepared to go their own ways. Before parting, the Gurkhas saluted the Russian officer by presenting arms. The latter, Younghusband reported ‘was quite taken aback’ by the precision of their drill, for his own Cossacks, sturdy as they were, were irregulars. On being congratulated by the Russian, the Gurkha havildar, or sergeant, whispered anxiously to Younghusband that he should inform the towering Gromchevsky that they were unusually small and that most Gurkhas were even taller than he was. The Russian was immensely amused when Younghusband told him of this ingenuous attempt to deceive him. After ordering his Cossacks to ‘carry swords’, their equivalent of presenting arms, Gromchevsky bade Younghusband a cordial farewell, saying he hoped that one day they would meet again – in peace at St Petersburg, or in war on the frontier. He added, Younghusband recalled, ‘that in either case I might be sure of a warm welcome’.
While his British rival continued his exploration of the region prior to his meeting with the ruler of Hunza, Gromchevsky and his Cossacks set off southwards towards Ladakh and Kashmir. He hoped to obtain permission to spend the coming winter there from the British Resident, who had effective control over such matters. Younghusband had already warned him that the British would never allow a uniformed Russian officer and a party of seven armed Cossacks to enter Ladakh. Although he did not say as much, this was even more unlikely in the case of an officer known to be heavily engaged in the political game. However, this did not discourage Gromchevsky, a man used to getting his own way. While waiting at Shahidula for an answer from the British, the Russian decided to make good use of the time by heading eastwards and exploring the remote Ladakh-Tibetan border region. He failed, though, to foresee the severity of the winter at this altitude, and the reconnaissance was to prove catastrophic. His party lost all its ponies and baggage, while the Cossacks, stricken by frostbite and hunger, were finally too weak even to carry their own rifles. They were lucky to get back to Shahidula alive, and months later Gromchevsky was said still to be on crutches.
Although Gromchevsky himself blamed the British for his misfortunes by denying him permission to enter Ladakh, a certain amount of mystery surrounds the incident. Indeed, it appears that Younghusband may well have been partially responsible for the near-tragedy. In a confidential note written at the time he reported that he had conspired with his newly acquired friends at Shahidula to steer the Russians out of harm’s way by encouraging them to embark on this perilous journey. Perhaps he had not fully realised its dangers, although he frankly admitted that he aimed to ‘cause extreme hardship and loss to the party’. In his several subsequent accounts of his meeting with Gromchevsky, he significantly makes no mention of this. It goes to show, however, that the Great Game was not always the gentlemanly affair it is sometimes portrayed as being.
Many years later, after the Russian Revolution, Younghusband was surprised to receive from out of the blue a letter from his old rival. Accompanying it was a book he had written about his Central Asian adventures. Under the old regime, he told Younghusband, he had risen to the rank of Lieutenant-General and received numerous honours and high appointments. But in 1917 the Bolsheviks had seized all his property and thrown him into prison in Siberia. Thanks to the Japanese he had managed to escape and flee to Poland, from where his family had originally come. The contrast between the two men’s situations could hardly have been more stark. Younghusband, then at the height of his renown, had been knighted by his sovereign, was President of the Royal Geographical Society, and was laden with awards and honours. The unfortunate Gromchevsky was now destitute, alone in the world, and so ill that he could not leave his bed. Not long afterwards Younghusband learned that the man who had once struck fear into the hearts of India’s defence chiefs was dead. However, at the time which concerns us here, Gromchevsky still loomed large on the frontier.
After leaving his Russian rival, and completing his own exploration of the region, Younghusband crossed the mountains into Hunza for his meeting with Safdar Ali, the ruler. It was an unusually tricky and responsible task for a junior officer to be entrusted with, but he was held in exceptional esteem by his superiors in Calcutta and Simla. On his approach to the village of Gulmit, where the ruler awaited him, a thirteen-gun salute was fired (a court official having first been sent ahead to warn him not to be frightened), followed by the deafening beating of ceremonial drums. In the middle of the village, through which the tourist buses now race on their way up the Karakoram Highway to Kashgar, a large marquee had been erected. It was, in fact, an earlier gift from the British government. As Younghusband, who had changed into his scarlet, full-dress Dragoon Guards uniform, approached it, Safdar Ali emerged to meet him. This was the man, Younghusband knew, who in order to secure the throne had murdered both his father and mother, and tossed two of his brothers over a precipice. It was he who was responsible for the murderous attacks on the caravans. And now – the ultimate sin in Calcutta’s eyes – he had begun to intrigue with the Russians on India’s very doorstep.
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.