‘As I looked out of the doors of my tent,’ Francis Younghusband wrote afterwards, ‘I saw some twenty Cossacks with six officers riding by, and the Russian flag carried in front.’ Apart from the new arrivals, and his own small party, the place was uninhabited. Situated 150 miles south of the Russian frontier, and known to the wandering tribes of the region as Bozai Gumbaz, it belonged, so far as the British were concerned, to Afghanistan. Younghusband at once sent one of his men, bearing his card, to where the Russians had pitched their camp, half a mile away, and invited their officers over for refreshments. They were not long in taking up the invitation, for they were clearly keen to know what he was up to. Shortly afterwards, led by a colonel wearing the coveted Order of St George, the nearest Tsarist equivalent to the Victoria Cross, several of their officers rode across to Younghusband’s modest camp.
The meeting was friendly, even convivial. The Englishman had no vodka to offer his guests, only Russian wine which he had brought from Kashgar. He told the colonel, who was called Yanov, that he had heard that the Russians were annexing the whole of the Pamir region. Explaining that he was anxious not to cause unnecessary alarm in Calcutta and London by reporting mere native rumours on so serious a matter, he asked Yanov whether in fact this was true. The Russian’s answer was unequivocal. ‘He took out a map,’ Younghusband recounted, ‘and showed me, marked in green, a large area extending right down to our Indian watershed.’ It included much which was unquestionably Afghan or Chinese territory. Yet all of it was now being claimed as belonging to the Tsar. Carefully avoiding discussion of the implications of the move, Younghusband merely remarked to Yanov that the Russians were ‘opening their mouths pretty wide’. At this the colonel laughed, but added that it was ‘just a beginning’. The Russians remained in Younghusband’s camp for about an hour before excusing themselves, saying that they had their own camp to prepare. On leaving, however, Colonel Yanov invited Younghusband to join them for dinner that evening.
Once more it was a cordial affair, with the seven officers squatting round a tablecloth spread in the centre of one of the low-slung Russian tents, which at night three of them shared. Although Younghusband noted with satisfaction that his own tent, with its bed, table and chair, was considerably larger and more comfortable than those of his rivals, the Russians did not stint themselves when it came to eating. ‘There followed a dinner,’ he wrote, ‘which for its excellence astonished me quite as much as my camp arrangements had astonished the Russians.’ There were soups and stews ‘such as native servants from India never seem able to imitate’, together with relishes, sauces and fresh vegetables. The latter were an unbelievable luxury to Younghusband, just as they are today to travellers in Pakistan’s far north. Besides the inevitable vodka, there was a choice of wines, followed by brandy.
Younghusband soon discovered why his hosts were so elated. In addition to claiming the whole of the Pamir region for the Tsar, they had that very moment ‘returned from a raid across the Indian watershed into Chitral territory’, entering it by one pass and leaving by another, mapping as they proceeded. This was an area which India’s defence chiefs regarded as lying strictly within their sphere of influence. Yanov even expressed surprise to Younghusband that the British had no representative of any kind in Chitral, in view of its strategic importance to India, and seemed content to rely on a treaty with its ruler. The Russian pointed out to his guest on the map how they had ridden to the summit of the highly sensitive Darkot Pass, and peered down into the Yasin valley, which ledby an easy route towards Gilgit. It was, Younghusband knew, enough to make the blood of British generals run cold. But that was not all, as Younghusband was soon to discover.
At midnight, after toasts had been drunk to Queen Victoria and Tsar Alexander, the party broke up. The Russian officers, including Colonel Yanov, insisted on escorting the young British captain back to his camp. There, after exchanging compliments and amid protestations of friendship, they parted. Early next morning the Russians struck camp, before heading northwards to join their main force and report on their encounter in this desolate spot with a British intelligence officer. Younghusband himself stayed on, for unknown to the Russians he was expecting to be joined shortly at Bozai Gumbaz by a colleague. This was Lieutenant Davison, an adventurous subaltern in the Leinsters, whom he had met in Kashgar and co-opted to investigate Russian moves further to the west. He needed to know what Davison had discovered before racing for Gilgit, the nearest British outpost, to report to his chiefs in India on the Russian incursion.
Three nights later, just as he was turning in, Younghusband was surprised to hear the clatter of hoofs in the distance. Peering out of his tent, he saw in the bright moonlight some thirty Cossacks drawn up in line. While he slipped into his clothes, he sent one of his men to ask what had brought them. The man returned to say that Colonel Yanov wished to speak to him urgently. Invited into Younghusband’s tent, together with his adjutant, the Russian said that he had something disagreeable to tell his guest of a few days earlier. He had been given orders, he explained, to escort the British officer from what was now Russian territory. ‘But I am not in Russian territory,’ Younghusband protested, adding that Bozai Gumbaz belonged to Afghanistan. ‘You may think this Afghan territory,’ Yanov replied grimly, ‘but we consider it Russian.’ What if he refused to move, Younghusband asked. Then they would have to remove him by force, Yanov replied, looking extremely uncomfortable. ‘Well, you have thirty Cossacks, and I am alone,’ the Englishman told him, ‘so I must do as you wish.’ However, he would agree to leave only under the strongest protest, and would report the outrage to his government so that it could decide precisely what action to take.
The colonel thanked Younghusband for making his unpleasant task easier, and expressed his deep personal regret at having to carry out the order, particularly in view of the cordial relationship which they had established such a short time before. Younghusband assured the Russian that he would not hold it against him, but against those who had given this unlawful order. Meanwhile, having ridden so far, might not Yanov and his adjutant like something to eat? He would happily instruct his cook to produce some supper. Much moved by this gesture, the Russian colonel seized Younghusband in a bear hug, thanking him emotionally for the gracious way he had taken it all. It was, he declared, a most unpleasant task for one officer to have to act like this towards another in what was more properly a policeman’s job. He had hoped, he added, to find the Englishman gone, which would have saved them both considerable embarrassment.
To show his appreciation to Younghusband, Yanov suggested that he might like to proceed to the frontier by himself, instead of being escorted there. There was one proviso, however. He had been given strict instructions by his superiors that Younghusband, whom they regarded as a trespasser, must leave via the Chinese frontier and not the Indian one. Furthermore, he must not use certain passes. The reason for these requirements was not entirely clear, though it was presumably to delay for as long as possible news of the Russian moves, not to mention his own expulsion. There may also have been an element of revenge in it for the earlier British refusal to allow Captain Gromchevsky to winter in Ladakh, and perhaps Younghusband’s suspected role in the near disaster which had ensued. The British officer, who was quite confident that he would be able to discover passes unknown to the Russians, and therefore not on their list, undertook to abide by this, and signed a solemn statement to that effect.
It was now long past midnight, and the two Russians gratefully accepted Younghusband’s offer of a meal, although they did not linger long over what must have been a somewhat awkward occasion. The next morning, as Younghusband prepared to leave for the Chinese frontier, Yanov came over to his camp to thank him again for accepting the situation with such grace, and bearing with him a haunch of venison as a parting present. But if the colonel’s superiors had hoped to delay the news of Younghusband’s expulsion by making him return by a roundabout route, they were to be disappointed. For within an hour of parting from the Russians, the British officer had dispatched one of his men post-haste to Gilgit with a detailed report of what had happened, as well as of the latest moves by St Petersburg on the Roof of the World. He now rode eastwards towards the Chinese frontier, intending to find his way home from there across one of the passes not on Colonel Yanov’s proscribed list. He was in no hurry, though, and lingered on the Chinese frontier just north of Hunza, hoping to meet up with Lieutenant Davison, and meanwhile to monitor any further Russian moves. This was Great Game playing at its most enthralling, and the 28-year-old Younghusband was in his element.
Some days were to pass before Davison appeared. ‘Away in the distance,’ Younghusband wrote, ‘I saw a horseman approaching dressed in the peaked cap and high boots of the Russians, and at first I thought that another Russian was going to honour me with a visit. This, however, proved to be Davison. He had been treated in an even more cavalier manner than I had, and had been marched back to Turkestan.’ There he had been interrogated by the Russian governor in person, before being escorted to the Chinese frontier and released. His arrest and detention had, however, served one useful purpose. His captors, Younghusband noted, had taken him northwards by a route which no British officer or explorer had previously traversed. The two officers now made their way back to Gilgit across a pass whose existence was revealed to them by friendly shepherds. It was the last that Younghusband was to see of his friend, for Davison was to die of enteric fever during a subsequent reconnaissance. He was, Younghusband wrote afterwards, an officer of remarkable courage and determination, with ‘all the makings of a great explorer’.
By now news of the incident had reached London, and in Whitehall frantic efforts were being made to hush it up while the government decided how best to deal with this latest Russian forward move. Rumours soon began to reach Fleet Street via India, however, it even being reported in The Times that Younghusband had been killed in a clash with the intruders. This was hastily denied, but details of the Russians’ high-handed behaviour towards two British officers on Afghan territory could no longer be kept quiet. Press, Parliament and public were incensed, and once again anti-Russian feelings hit fever pitch. Lord Rosebery, the Liberal peer, who was shortly to become Foreign Secretary, went so far as to describe Bozai Gumbaz, the barren spot where Younghusband had been intercepted by the Russians, as ‘the Gibraltar of the Hindu Kush’. In India the Commander-in-Chief, General Roberts, told Younghusband he believed that the moment had come to strike the Russians. ‘We are ready’, he said, ‘and they are not.’ At the same time he ordered the mobilisation of a division of troops in case the Russian seizure of the Pamirs led to war.
Other hawks were quick to join the fray. ‘The Russians have broken all treaty regulations with impunity so far,’ wrote E. F. Knight, special correspondent of The Times, then travelling in Kashmir and Ladakh. ‘By marching their troops into the territory of Chitral, a state under our protection and subsidised by the Indian Government, they have deliberately taken steps which are generally looked upon as equivalent to a declaration of war.’ Were Britain to ignore such incursions into states which she guaranteed against foreign invasion, he warned, then ‘the natives cannot but lose faith in us’. They would conclude that Russia was the stronger power, ‘to which we are afraid to offer resistance’. Inevitably, therefore, they would turn towards the Russians. ‘We must’, he concluded, ‘expect intrigue against us, if not more open hostility, as the result of our apathy.’ His forebodings were seemingly confirmed by secret intelligence from Chitral. This suggested that the expulsion from Afghanistan of Younghusband had seriously undermined British prestige among the Chitralis, and that they were no longer to be trusted where the Russians were concerned. Similar doubts, as we have already seen, existed with regard to Safdar Ali, the ruler of Hunza, whose personal sympathies were known to lie with St Petersburg.
A strong protest over Russia’s aggressive moves in the Pamirs was delivered on Lord Salisbury’s orders by the British ambassador at St Petersburg, the forthright Sir Robert Morier. In addition to challenging Russia’s claims to the Pamirs, he demanded an outright apology for the illegal expulsion of Younghusband and Davison from the region, adding a warning that unless this was immediately forthcoming, ‘the question would assume very grave international proportions’. The unexpected vehemence of the British response, coupled with the knowledge that a division of the Indian Army had been placed on a war footing at Quetta, had the Tsar and his ministers rattled. At home things were in poor shape. Much of Russia was in the grip of famine and serious political unrest, and consequently the economy was in no position to sustain a full-scale conflict with Britain. St Petersburg therefore decided with reluctance to back down. To the indignation of the military, it withdrew its troops and its claim to the Pamirs pending a permanent settlement of the frontier. Blame for the entire incident was pinned on the unfortunate Colonel Yanov, who was accused of greatly exceeding his orders by proclaiming the annexation of the Pamirs, and in expelling Younghusband. Only later did it become known that by way of compensation for acting as a scapegoat he had been presented with a gold ring by Tsar Alexander in person, and quietly promoted to general. Nonetheless, Britain had got her apology, and for the time being at least the Pamirs were clear of Russian troops.
The Russian military held to the view that the British had brought the crisis upon themselves. Their decision to annex the Pamirs, they insisted, had been forced upon them by a British government determined to break up their Central Asian empire. As evidence of this they cited General MacGregor’s hawkish tome The Defence of India, supposedly secret, but a copy of which had somehow found its way into their hands and been translated into Russian. Indeed, as recently as 1987, a Russian scholar seized upon MacGregor’s long-forgotten work to prove what he calls ‘the age-old dreams of British strategists’. Leonid Mitrokhin, in his Failure of Three Missions, quotes MacGregor’s view that Britain should ‘dismember the Russian state into parts which would be unable to represent a danger to us for a long time’. In fact, if one turns to MacGregor’s original text, it is quite evident that he advocated such a move only if the Russians attacked India – something that Mitrokhin and his Tsarist predecessors found it convenient to ignore, or which may even have been omitted from the St Petersburg translation.
But even if determined British action, and St Petersburg’s fear of war, had this time forced the Russians to step back, the incursion by Yanov and his Cossacks to within a few hours’ march of Chitral and Gilgit had given India’s defence chiefs a nasty fright. If the past was anything to go by, the Russian military would perceive this as no more than a temporary reverse, and before long would once again begin to creep southwards into the Pamirs and eastern Hindu Kush in this unending game of Grandmother’s Footsteps. While no one in Calcutta saw the Pamirs any longer as a suitable route for an all-out invasion of India, the presence there of hostile agents or small bodies of troops could, as one commentator put it, cause ‘far-spreading mischief in the event of war between the two powers. The answer, wrote Knight of The Times, was ‘to lock the door on our side’, which was precisely what the British now set out to do, beginning with Hunza, which was regarded as the most vulnerable of the small northern states. From that moment, as Britain went over to the offensive, Safdar Ali’s fate was sealed.
The Viceroy did not have to look far for an excuse to remove him from his throne. For many months he had been giving trouble, in the evident belief that the Russians would come to his assistance if needed. Following the withdrawal of Younghusband’s Kashmiri detachment from the head of the Shimshal Pass, which became uninhabitable in winter, he had resumed his raids on the Leh–Yarkand caravan route, not to mention on other neighbouring communities. He had even been unwise enough to seize and sell into slavery a Kashmiri subject from a village lying well within Kashmir. Furthermore, he had let it be widely known that he regarded the British, who tried to curb his excesses, as foes, and the Russians and Chinese as his friends. Then, in the spring of 1891, shortly before Yanov’s appearance in the Pamirs to the north of Hunza, Colonel Durand at Gilgit learned that Safdar Ali was planning to seize the Kashmiri fort at Chalt, which he had long coveted. By sending men to cut the rope bridges on the Hunza side, and reinforcing the Kashmiri garrison there, Durand was able to foil this, though it was clear that sooner or later Safdar AH would try again, perhaps even with Russian help. As it was, he had managed to persuade the ruler of the small neighbouring state of Nagar to join forces with him against the meddlesome British and their Kashmiri clients.
In November 1891, amid great secrecy, a small force of Gurkhas and Kashmiri Imperial Service troops was assembled at Gilgit, under Colonel Durand’s command, preparatory to marching northwards against Hunza and Nagar. While this was going on, the Kashmiris succeeded in capturing a Hunza spy sent by Safdar AH to report on the strength of the British forces in Kashmir. Among other things, he revealed to his interrogators his master’s ingenious new plan for surprising the garrison at Chalt. A number of men from Hunza, carrying loads on their backs to make them appear like coolies from Gilgit (whom they closely resembled), but with weapons hidden about them, were to seek shelter in the fort for the night. Once inside, they would fall upon the unsuspecting defenders, engaging them for long enough to allow Safdar Ali’s troops, concealed nearby, to pour in after them.
Clearly it was time for Durand’s force to get moving. It consisted of nearly 1,000 Gurkhas and Kashmiris, all regulars, and several hundred Pathan road-building troops. They were accompanied by a battery of mountain artillery, seven engineers and sixteen British officers. The going was so difficult in places that it took them more than a week to reach Chalt, only twenty miles north of Gilgit, and their forward base for operations in Hunza and Nagar. Here Durand received a bizarre missive from Safdar AH, who by now had learned of the British advance towards his frontier. Declaring that Chalt was ‘even more precious to us than the strings of our wives’ pyjamas’, he demanded that it be handed over to him. He warned Durand, moreover, that if the British entered Hunza they should be prepared to take on three nations – ‘Hunza, Russia and China’. Already, he claimed, ‘the manly Russians’ had promised to come to his assistance against ‘the womanly British’. He added that he had given orders for Durand’s head to be brought to him on a platter if he and his troops dared to enter Hunza. At the same time, George Macartney learned in Kashgar, Safdar Ali dispatched envoys to Petrovsky, the Russian consul, reminding him of Gromchevsky’s promises of help. Similar pleas for arms and money were made to the Chinese governor.
On December 1, the British force crossed the Hunza river by an improvised bridge built by Durand’s engineers, and headed eastwards towards Safdar Ali’s mountain capital, today called Baltit, but then known simply as Hunza. Progress was slow, the columns having to ascend and descend the almost vertical sides of a succession of deep gorges. At the summits of these the enemy sharpshooters waited for them in sangars, or rock-built entrenchments, each of which had to be taken before the advance could safely continue. The first major obstacle to bar their way, however, was the formidable stone fortress at Nilt, belonging to the ruler of Nagar. With its massive walls and tiny loopholes, it was said, like so many Asiatic strongholds, to be impregnable. Certainly Durand’s seven-pounder mountain guns made little impression on it, while his Gurkha marksmen found themselves unable to pick off the defenders behind their narrow slits. To add to Durand’s difficulties, his only machine-gun kept jamming, while he himself was wounded, forcing him to hand over his command. But before doing so he gave orders for the main gate to be blown open by the sappers, led by Captain Fenton Aylmer. It was an extremely hazardous enterprise, singularly like the blasting of Ghazni’s gates by Durand’s father sixty years before. What followed, wrote E. F. Knight, who accompanied the expedition, ‘will long be remembered as one of the most gallant things recorded in Indian warfare’.
Covered by heavy fire from the rest of the force, intended to keep the defenders back from their loopholes, Captain Aylmer, his Pathan orderly and two subalterns succeeded in reaching the fortress wall safely. Close behind them were 100 Gurkhas, ready to pour inside the moment the gate was destroyed. Then, as the subalterns with Aylmer emptied their revolvers into the loopholes at point-blank range, he and his orderly, both carrying explosive charges, dashed through a hail of fire to the foot of the main gate. There they placed their gun-cotton slabs, carefully covering them with stones to concentrate the effect. Finally, after igniting the fuse, both men withdrew hurriedly along the wall to a safe distance to await the explosion. None came. The fuse had gone out.
At that moment Aylmer was hit – shot in the leg at such close range that both his trousers and his leg were burnt by the powder. Nonetheless, he crawled back to the gate to try once more to light the fuse. Trimming it with his knife, he struck a match and after several attempts managed to re-ignite it. The defenders, fully aware of what he was up to, began to shower heavy stones down on him from above, one of which crushed his hand severely. Again Aylmer crept back along the wall to await the explosion. This time the fuse did not let him down. ‘We heard a tremendous explosion above the din of guns and musketry, and perceived volumes of smoke rising high into the air,’ wrote Knight. As the entire gateway disintegrated in a huge cloud of dust and rubble, the Gurkhas, led by the wounded Aylmer and the two subalterns, charged into the fort, where fierce hand-to-hand fighting began for its possession. At first the storming party found itself greatly outnumbered and hard-pressed, for amid the smoke and confusion of the explosion the main force failed to realise that the Gurkhas were inside, and kept up a heavy fire against the walls and loopholes. Realising that they would be slaughtered if the others delayed much longer, Lieutenant Boisragon, one of the subalterns, ran back to the ruined gateway to call for help, exposing himself to the fire of both friend and foe. His action was to save the day, for moments later the rest of the force charged into the fortress.
Knight had a grandstand view of what followed. On hearing the explosion, he had clambered to the top of a high ridge, from where he peered down into the smoke-filled interior of the fortress, ‘spread out beneath us like a map’. He recounts in his book Where Three Empires Meet: ‘In the narrow lanes there was a confusion of men, scarcely distinguishable from the dust and smoke, but in a moment we realised that fighting was going on within the fort.’ It was clear, however, that those outside did not yet realise this. But then suddenly he and his companions heard cheer after cheer from below, in which they enthusiastically joined ‘with what breath we had left in us after our long climb’. From their vantage-point they now saw the main body of troops pour through the gateway, putting the defenders to flight over the walls and through small, secret exits known only to them.
For the loss of just six British lives, against eighty or more enemy dead, Nilt the impregnable had fallen. Not long afterwards, Knight ran into Aylmer. Covered with blood, and supported by one of his men, The Times reporter found him ‘as jolly as ever’, despite the further wound he had received inside the fortress. ‘When he set out for that gateway,’ wrote Knight, ‘he must have known that he was going to meet an almost certain death’, adding that his gallantry had made a deep impression on both sides. One local chief, friendly to the British, who had witnessed the assault on the gate, declared to Knight afterwards: ‘This is the fighting of giants, not of men.’ It was a view evidently shared by the authorities at home, for both Captain Aylmer and Lieutenant Boisragon were later awarded the Victoria Cross. But despite their unexpected loss of Nilt, the enemy continued to harass and defy the British as they fought their way towards the Hunza capital. Finally, in the middle of December, the invaders found their way blocked by an obstacle even more formidable than the fortress at Nilt.
This time an entire mountainside had been turned by the enemy into a stronghold. Covered with sangars, manned by an estimated 4,000 men, it totally dominated the valley, 1,200 feet below, along which the British had to pass. To attempt to proceed up the valley without first driving the enemy from the heights would clearly be little short of suicide. Yet repeated reconnaissances failed to discover a route by which these positions could be approached. As at Nilt, something drastic was called for if the British were not to be forced to abandon the campaign and withdraw, which was utterly unthinkable. The solution came from an unexpected quarter. One night, at grave risk to his life, a Kashmiri sepoy succeeded in scaling the precipitous rock face leading up to the enemy positions without being detected by them. A skilled cragsman himself, he told his officers that he believed that a determined party of Gurkhas and other experienced climbers could reach the enemy by this route. It was so sheer in places, he reported, that the defenders would have difficulty in seeing, or firing down on, the ascending troops. A very careful examination was made of his suggested route through binoculars, after which it was decided to go ahead with this daring plan – if only because there appeared to be no alternative.
Arrangements for the assault went ahead amid the greatest possible secrecy, for inside the British camp, which included large numbers of locally hired bearers, were thought to be enemy spies. To make it appear that the expedition was preparing to withdraw, 200 Pathans, used principally for road-building and not essential to the operation, were ordered to start packing up. Meanwhile the attack was scheduled for the night of December 19. Chosen to lead the scaling party was Lieutenant John Manners Smith, a skilled mountaineer of 27, who had been seconded to the force from the Political Department. Only the fifty Gurkhas and fifty Kashmiris, each hand-picked, who were to accompany him were briefed on the perilous mission they were shortly to undertake. On the night of the attack, before the moon was up, the best marksmen among the remaining troops were moved as silently as possible to a vantage-point 500 yards away from, and overlooking, the enemy positions. The two seven-pounder mountain guns were also placed there under cover of darkness. At the same time the scaling party made its way noiselessly across the valley to some dead ground at the base of the cliff they were to ascend. As it was, by a happy coincidence the enemy had chosen that night for one of their periodic celebrations, the sounds of which effectively drowned any noise resulting from these various troop movements.
As dawn broke, the marksmen and gunners began to direct a steady fire on to the enemy sangars across the valley. This was concentrated on those positions from which the climbers below were most likely to be spotted. The moment they were detected, however, as they clung perilously to the rock face, this was to be greatly intensified. Otherwise Manners Smith and his 100-strong force would have little hope of survival, let alone of reaching their objectives. Half an hour after the firing commenced, the scaling party began its long and hazardous climb. ‘From our ridge’, wrote Knight, ‘we could see the little stream of men gradually winding up, now turning to the right, now to the left, now going down for a little way when some insurmountable obstacle presented itself, to try again at some other point.’ They looked, he added, very much like ‘a scattered line of ants picking their way up a rugged wall’. At the front he could just make out Manners Smith, ‘as active as a cat’, scrambling ahead of his men. But then, 800 feet above the valley bottom, came a serious setback. Manners Smith halted. ‘It was obvious to him,’ wrote Knight, ‘and still more so to us who could see the whole situation, that the precipice above him was absolutely inaccessible.’ Somehow they had taken the wrong route. There was nothing else to do but to return to the starting point. Two hours had been wasted. Miraculously, however, the enemy had not yet spotted them.
Wasting no more time, Manners Smith scanned the rock face to see where they had gone wrong. Minutes later, unseen by the defenders, he semaphored back across the valley that he was going to make a fresh attempt. Hardly able to breathe, Knight and the rest of the force watched as once more the party began to work its way slowly upwards. This time the route proved right, and the climbers progressed uninterrupted. After what seemed like an eternity to their comrades across the valley, Manners Smith and a handful of the best climbers had got to within sixty yards of the nearest sangars. It was at this moment that the alarm was raised, and all hell was let loose. Someone, it appeared, who was friendly to the defenders, had seen what was going on from across the valley and had shouted a warning. Realising their danger, and disregarding the heavy fire which was concentrated against them, those in the sangars nearest to the cliff edge ran forward and began to rain heavy rocks down on the scaling party.
Several of the men were hit and seriously injured, though miraculously no one was swept into the abyss below. Fortunately the majority of the climbers had passed the points where they would have been most exposed to danger, and the boulders bounced harmlessly over their heads. By now Manners Smith had been joined by the other subaltern in the scaling party. ‘The two officers’, wrote Knight, ‘manoeuvred their men admirably, watching their opportunities, working their way from point to point with cool judgment between the avalanches, and slowly gaining the heights foot by foot.’ Then, The Times man recounts, ‘we saw Lieutenant Manners Smith make a sudden dash forward, reach the foot of the first sangar, clamber round to the right of it, and step on to the flat ground beside it.’ Seconds later he was joined by the first of the Gurkhas and Kashmiris, their kukris and bayonets glinting in the winter sunlight. Forming into small parties, they began to move from sangar to sangar, entering them from behind and slaughtering their occupants. At first the defenders fought bravely, but then, realising that they stood no chance against these highly trained troops, they began to slip away, in ones and twos, from their positions. Soon this turned to wholesale panic, and the entire enemy force took to its heels. Many of the fugitives were picked off as they ran by the scaling party, or by the marksmen and gunners across the valley, leaving the mountainside strewn with dead and wounded.
The fall of their second stronghold, and the realisation that neither the Russians nor the Chinese were coming to their assistance, proved too much for the enemy. All along the route to the capital, which lay less than twenty miles ahead, they threw down their arms and surrendered, or made for their homes. For his conspicuous role in the victory, Manners Smith was later awarded the Victoria Cross, the third of the three-week campaign, while a number of sepoys received the Indian Order of Merit, the highest award for bravery then open to native troops. Meanwhile, in his great palace overlooking the capital, Safdar Ali was frantically packing up his treasures preparatory to flight. It was clear to him, too, that Gromchevsky’s promises had been empty ones. As the British advance guard, its progress slowed by the mountainous terrain, got closer to the capital, the ruler slipped away northwards, setting fire to village after village as he fled. The victors had expected to find his palace, in Knight’s words, ‘full of the spoil of a hundred plundered caravans’. But they were to be disappointed. Accompanied by his wives and children, and those of his entourage remaining loyal to him, he had taken almost everything of value with him, carried on the backs of 400 coolies, it was said. A thorough search of the palace did reveal, however, a secret arsenal hidden behind a false wall, containing Russian-made rifles. Also in the palace were Russian household goods, including samovars and prints, and a portrait of Tsar Alexander III. Among a massive correspondence, much of it unopened, with the Russian and Chinese authorities, were letters between Younghusband and Gilgit which his agents had intercepted during the 1891 Pamir crisis.
Most anxious to capture Safdar Ali, lest he try to rally support or attempt other mischief, the British hurriedly dispatched a party of horsemen after him, hoping to cut him off before he crossed the frontier into China, or even Russia. But somewhere in the snow-filled passes, whose secrets he knew better than his pursuers, he managed to give them the slip and escape into Sinkiang, where the Chinese governor of Kashgar reported his arrival to Macartney. Having placed Safdar All’s more amenable half-brother on the throne, the British now had to decide what to do next. Should they stay on or withdraw? Fearing that to leave would be seen as weakness rather than magnanimity, they decided to stay. In addition to stationing a small garrison of Imperial Service troops there to keep out unwelcome intruders like Gromchevsky and Yanov, they appointed a permanent political officer to assist the new ruler with his decisions. To all intents and purposes Hunza and Nagar (whose elderly ruler had been allowed to remain on the throne) were part of British India. ‘They have slammed the door in our face,’ Giers, the Russian Foreign Minister, is reported to have complained indignantly on hearing the news.
For once the British had got there first. But any satisfaction, or peace of mind, which they might have gained over Hunza was to prove short-lived. Elsewhere in the extreme north the Russians were once more on the move. The military, it was becoming clear, had regained their ascendancy over the Foreign Ministry. Even Colonel Yanov, so recently carpeted by St Petersburg, was reported to be back in the Pamirs. By the summer of 1893 Russian troops had twice clashed with the Afghans, and torn down a Chinese fort on territory they claimed as theirs. Although this time the Russians avoided a confrontation with the British, to both Durand in Gilgit and Macartney in Kashgar one thing appeared certain. Regardless of the consequences, and before the British could prepare any counter-moves, the Russians were planning to occupy the Pamirs. Little comfort could be expected from the Afghans or the Chinese, moreover, whose will to resist these Russian incursions was rapidly crumbling.
Even Gladstone, who had been returned to power at home following the Tory defeat in the 1892 general election, began to get anxious. ‘Matters have now come to such a pass’, warned Lord Rosebery, his Foreign Secretary and subsequent successor, ‘that Her Majesty’s Government cannot remain purely passive.’ Gladstone’s solution was to press St Petersburg to agree to a joint boundary commission, an idea which the Russians professed to welcome. However, as Rosebery warned, the military were clearly trying to delay any settlement of the frontier until they had got all they wanted. In other words, it was Pandjeh all over again. His warning was underlined by the news that the Russians had occupied Bozai Gumbaz, flashpoint of the previous Pamir crisis. But that was not all. A serious crisis had arisen in Chitral, which many strategists had long regarded as more vulnerable to Russian penetration than Hunza. Following the death of its ageing ruler, it had been plunged into turmoil as family rivals fought for the throne. As a result, Chitral was to have five successive rulers in three years.
Hitherto, the British had been content to rely on their treaty with Chitral to keep out any Cossacks or other undesirables. With Aman-ul-Mulk’s death, however, the British were by no means confident that this arrangement would survive. That would depend upon which of his sixteen sons came out on top. In the meantime, or so some thought, there was a grave risk of the Cossacks filling the vacuum. ‘With Russian posts on the Pamirs,’ warned Durand from Gilgit, ‘a Chitral in anarchy is too dangerous a neighbour for us, and too tempting a field for Russian intrigues and interferences to be tolerated.’ Indeed, if the St Petersburg press was anything to go by, then the British had every reason for concern. Calling for a military highway to be built southwards across the Pamirs, and for the imperial Russian flag to be raised over the Pamir and Hindu Kush passes, the newspaper Svet demanded that Chitral be taken under the Tsar’s ‘protection’. Although conflicting sharply with what the Foreign Ministry was saying, it undoubtedly voiced the sympathies of every officer and man in the Russian army, and very likely those of the War Minister himself.
According to N.A. Khalfin, the Soviet historian of this period, the Tsar’s ministers and advisers were at loggerheads over what action they should take in the Pamir region. They had become genuinely alarmed, he insists, over the activities of British politicals like Durand and Younghusband, and the annexation of Hunza and Nagar, although the return of a Liberal government offered, as always, some comfort. While the hawks, headed by the War Minister, urged the Tsar to take an aggressive stance, the doves, led by Giers, favoured a diplomatic solution, arguing that Russia’s grave internal problems (the famine alone had cost half a million lives) ruled out any question of confrontation. And why quarrel with Britain now over territories which could always be seized in time of war? The British knew nothing of this, of course, and considering the bellicose tone of the Russian editorials, and St Petersburg’s record of saying one thing and doing another, they could hardly be blamed for their disquiet.
Meanwhile, in Chitral itself, the struggle for the throne continued, getting bloodier at every turn. At first the British remained neutral, hoping to patronise the eventual winner. But very soon they found themselves in the thick of it. Getting out again was to prove a good deal more difficult.