The war in the East, meanwhile, had been going badly for the Russians. When, seven months earlier, the Japanese launched their surprise attack on Port Arthur, few people believed that they stood a chance against the awesome might of Tsar Nicholas. In addition to his powerful Pacific fleet, he had a million-strong regular army, supported by twice that number of reservists, to call on, while Japan had only 270,000 regulars and 530,000 reservists. The Russians were quite confident, therefore, that they could swiftly crush this upstart Asiatic nation of ‘yellow apes’, as they called the Japanese, which had dared to challenge them. After all, they had immense experience of warfare in Asia, and no one there had managed to withstand their onslaught.
In their initial attack on the great Russian naval base of Port Arthur, the Japanese had clearly hoped to destroy their fleet, as they were to do with the American Pacific fleet thirty-seven years later at Pearl Harbor. In the event, their ten destroyers only managed to damage three battleships, albeit one seriously, as they lay at anchor in the roads. In a second attack a few hours later another battleship and three cruisers were damaged, while off the Korean coast a fourth cruiser and a gunboat were sunk. Despite heavy fire from the Russian shore batteries, the Japanese warships, led by the brilliant Admiral Togo, got off singularly lightly. But even if they had failed to sink the Russian Pacific fleet, they had gravely undermined its morale. The following day both governments declared war on one another. The conflict was to last eighteen months, and lead indirectly to the fall, thirteen years later, of the Russian monarchy.
From then on, little seemed to go right for the Russians. Very early on they lost both their commander-in-chief and their flagship when the latter struck a mine which the Japanese had laid in the approaches to Port Arthur. Soon the Russians found themselves virtually imprisoned in the heavily defended naval base, as the Japanese, through superior tactics and leadership, made themselves masters of the sea. On land, too, the Japanese rapidly began to gain the upper hand, inflicting a series of defeats on the Russians, albeit often at great cost to themselves in lives. In May Russian troops were defeated on the Yalu river, and the following month the Japanese occupied the commercial port of Dalny, only twenty miles from Port Arthur. At St Petersburg, meanwhile, it had been decided to send the Russian Baltic fleet half-way round the world to the Far East in a desperate attempt to relieve beleaguered Port Arthur.
It was during this epic voyage that the Russian warships became involved in a bizarre international incident which raised Russophobia in Britain to fever pitch and very nearly led to war between the two powers. As a result of faulty intelligence, nervousness and inexperience, Russian sailors opened fire in fog in the North Sea on a fleet of Hull trawlers, believing them, incredibly, to be Japanese torpedo boats. One was sunk, five others were hit, and there were a number of casualties. In the panic of the moment, the Russian warships even fired on one another. Then, convinced that they had successfully fought off a Japanese attack, they continued on their way. While London remonstrated angrily with St Petersburg over what became known as the Dogger Bank incident, four British cruisers shadowed the Russian fleet across the Bay of Biscay. Meanwhile a large British naval force was hastily got ready for action. There were anti-Russian demonstrations in Trafalgar Square and outside Downing Street, while Count Benckendorff was booed as he left his embassy. In the end an abject apology by Tsar Nicholas, and promises of generous compensation, cooled British tempers, and war was averted. It was an inauspicious start, however, to this great Russian relief expedition designed to save Port Arthur,
By now the savage land battle for the naval base had begun. The first Japanese attack was driven back with heavy loss. Two more followed, which were also repulsed. But gradually the Japanese troops closed in on the Russian positions, using sappers to tunnel beneath the defences, and observers in balloons to spot the garrison’s weaknesses. Moreover, the capture of a hill overlooking Port Arthur enabled the Japanese to direct a murderous artillery barrage against the defenders below. With nearly half the garrison either dead or wounded, and with little or no hope of relief reaching them in time, morale among the Russian rank and file had reached rock bottom. Although many of the officers still wanted to fight to the bitter end, the Governor, fearing a mutiny among the troops, decided to discuss surrender terms with the Japanese commander. On January 2, 1905, after a siege lasting 154 days, Port Arthur capitulated. Before doing so, the Governor sent a last message to Tsar Nicholas. ‘Great Sovereign, Forgive!’ it declared. ‘We have done all that was humanly possible. Judge us, but be merciful.’
The loss of the great eastern stronghold to the ‘yellow apes’ was an appalling blow to Russian prestige throughout the world, but particularly in Asia. However, it was merely the start of St Petersburg’s humiliation at the hands of the Japanese. On February 18 the biggest and bloodiest battle of the war began. The prize was the heavily defended railway centre of Mukden, today call Shenyang, which lay 250 miles north of Port Arthur. Russian military experts considered its defences virtually impenetrable. However, while the number of troops engaged on either side was roughly equal, around 300,000, the Japanese enjoyed a number of advantages. For a start, their troops had just won a resounding victory. Despite very heavy casualties, they were utterly determined to defeat the Russians, against whom they displayed a fanatical courage in close quarters combat with bayonet and grenade. No one questioned the bravery of the Russian troops, despite their recent defeat, but what counted in the end was the superiority of the Japanese commanders. In less than a month, after one of the longest and most savage battles of modern times, Mukden fell to the Japanese, although most of the Russian garrison managed to escape northwards. However, they left behind them 27,000 dead in what has been described as the most disastrous battle in Russian history. Yet their humiliation was still not over, though this time it was to be the turn of the navy.
News of the fall of Port Arthur and of Mukden reached the Russian Baltic fleet as it halted at Madagascar on its long voyage eastwards. The surrender of the former removed the main purpose of the expedition. Nonetheless it was decided to allow it to proceed, with the aim of winning back mastery of the seas from the Japanese, thereby preventing them from reinforcing or supplying their forces on the mainland. Shadowed from now on by Japanese agents, the armada finally entered the war zone in the middle of May. There Admiral Togo lay in wait for the weary Russians. On the morning of May 26, the two fleets met in the Tsushima Straits, which divide Japan from Korea. The outcome was catastrophic for the Russians. In the space of a few hours they suffered one of the worst defeats in naval history, losing eight battleships, four cruisers, five minelayers and three transports. Four more battleships were forced to surrender, while three cruisers which sought sanctuary in neutral ports were interned together with their crews. Nearly 5,000 Russian sailors perished. The Japanese lost just 3 torpedo boats and 110 lives. It was an astounding victory. St Petersburg’s humiliation was complete, and Tsar Nicholas’s dreams of building a great new empire in the East had been destroyed for ever.
To all intents and purposes, the war was over, although Russia, with its vast reserves of troops, was far from defeated. But the will to continue with this highly unpopular war was no longer there. Economic hardship, the succession of disasters on the battlefield and at sea, and general disillusionment with Tsar Nicholas’s autocratic rule had given birth to widespread political and social unrest at home. The government therefore needed all the troops it possessed to put down the rising tide of revolution which threatened the very throne. St Petersburg was not alone in wishing to end hostilities in the Far East. Despite their spectacular victories, the Japanese knew that they could not win a long drawn-out war against the Russian colossus, with its inexhaustible manpower. Already the war was imposing a critical strain on their resources which could not be sustained indefinitely.
Both governments were therefore grateful when the United States offered to act as mediator between them. As a result, on September 5, 1905, a peace treaty was signed at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, between the warring powers. It effectively brought to an end Tsarist Russia’s forward policy in Asia. Under its terms both countries agreed to evacuate Manchuria, which was restored to Chinese rule. Port Arthur and its immediate hinterland, including control of the Russian-built railway, was transferred to Japan. Korea was declared to be independent, albeit within Japan’s sphere of influence. For their part, the Japanese were persuaded to drop their earlier demands for huge indemnities, while, apart from the southern half of Sakhalin Island which went to Japan, the Russians were not required to surrender any of their sovereign territory. Nevertheless St Petersburg had lost virtually everything it had gained in the region during ten years of vigorous military and diplomatic endeavour. The war, moreover, had exploded forever the myth of the white man’s superiority over Asiatic peoples.
But if the Japanese had blocked Russia’s last forward move in Asia, the Tibetans had signally failed to halt Britain in hers. In the summer of 1904, it will be recalled, Colonel Francis Younghusband had ridden unopposed into Lhasa at the head of a small army. However, if he and Lord Curzon, the Viceroy, had expected to find damning evidence of Russian intrigue there they were to be disappointed. Not only were there no arsenals of Russian weapons, no political advisers, no drill sergeants, but there was also no sign of any treaty of friendship between Tsar Nicholas and the Dalai Lama. Nonetheless, it does appear from other evidence that some sort of a promise may have been made by Nicholas, possibly through Dorjief, to the Dalai Lama whereby he would come to his assistance if the British ever invaded Tibet. This was claimed at the time by a senior Chinese Foreign Ministry official in conversation with the British ambassador to Peking, and later repeated in the memoirs, published after the Revolution, of a former Tsarist diplomat. If Nicholas did, in fact, give such an undertaking, it was very likely in the belief that Britain would never invade Tibet, and that therefore he would not be called upon to honour it.
Of more immediate concern to Younghusband was the question of what to do next. He had been sent all this way not merely to look for evidence of Russian skulduggery, but also to extract political and commercial concessions from the Tibetans. And here arose an unexpected problem. As everyone knew, only the Dalai Lama could negotiate on behalf of his country, and he was nowhere to be found. He had fled the Potala Palace, from where he ruled Tibet, at the approach of the British, and was rumoured at that moment to be on his way to Mongolia. Younghusband considered giving chase, but no Tibetan could be found who was willing to disclose the God-king’s escape route. The situation was eventually saved, somewhat unexpectedly, by the Chinese, who were still recognised by Britain as the sovereign power in Tibet (albeit in little more than name). Peking, like St Petersburg, had protested strongly when the British announced their intention of entering Tibet. However, having no means of driving the British out themselves, they were anxious to give them no excuse for staying on. They therefore formally deposed the Dalai Lama for deserting his post during his people’s hour of need, and appointed the benign and elderly Regent as the country’s ruler. The negotiations for Britain’s withdrawal from Tibet were thus able to proceed.
I have already described what followed in Trespassers on the Roof of the World, an account of the forcible opening up of Tibet, and will not therefore dwell on it here. Sufficient to say, the British mission left for home on September 23, having gained its objectives, or at least as these were perceived by Younghusband. However, partly due to Russia’s defeat in the Far East, which had revealed it to have feet of clay, the mood at home had begun to change during Younghusband’s absence. The old fear of Russia was at last waning in the face of a new spectre – that of an aggressively expansionist Germany. Indeed, as Germany’s ambitions in Asia began to assume threatening aspects, Russia was already being seen by some as a potential ally against this new power. What had to be avoided at all costs was anything which might drive St Petersburg into the arms of the Germans. Consequently, for fear of alarming Russia, most of the gains which Younghusband had painfully wrung from the Tibetans – including the exclusive right of access to Lhasa by a British official – were considerably watered down. Younghusband, furthermore, was publicly censured for exceeding his instructions. Quite what the Tibetans made of this remarkable climb-down is not recorded.
Then, in December 1905, the Liberals drove the Tories from power. The new Cabinet, headed by Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, was genuinely determined to reach a permanent accommodation with the Russians. Shortly after coming to office, the new Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, began to put out feelers towards St Petersburg on the question of the two powers’ long-standing differences in Asia. Decades of mutual suspicion had to be overcome. The British government was under powerful pressure from the hawks, and from the authorities in India, to treat any Russian proposals with the utmost suspicion, while St Petersburg was under similar pressure from its Anglophobes, especially the military. Indeed, following the débâcle in the Far East, there had been wild talk in some Russian circles of invading India to try to expunge the shame of defeat, for many were convinced that the British had incited the Japanese to attack them. One major obstacle so far as British public opinion was concerned was the autocratic nature of Nicholas’s rule. Attitudes softened somewhat when, following the short-lived 1905 Revolution, he introduced Russia’s first parliament, the Duma, but hardened again when he dissolved it shortly afterwards. Despite this, though, both governments were eager to settle once and for all the Asian question, which over the years had absorbed so much of their energy and resources.
The negotiations, spread over many wearisome months, confined themselves to just three countries – Tibet, Afghanistan and Persia – all of which were crucial to India’s defence. In August 1907, after repeated disagreements and setbacks, accord was finally reached between Sir Edward Grey and the Russian Foreign Minister, Count Alexander Izvolsky. The Great Game was now rapidly drawing to a close. The agreement was designed not only to resolve permanently the regional differences between the two powers, but also to curb Germany’s eastward march (although it carefully made no mention of this). At the same time St Petersburg was advised that in future Britain would no longer oppose its wish to control the Turkish straits. It was a German presence there which Britain now feared most.
On August 31, amid great secrecy, the historic Anglo-Russian Convention was signed in St Petersburg by Count Izvolsky and Sir Arthur Nicolson, the British ambassador. With regard to Tibet, the two powers agreed to abstain from all interference in its internal affairs, to seek no concessions for railways, roads, mines or telegraphs, to send no representatives there, but to deal with Lhasa only through China, the suzerain power. Afghanistan the Russians formally recognised as lying within Britain’s sphere of influence and outside their own. They pledged themselves to send no agents there, and to conduct all political relations with Kabul through London, though they would be free to trade there. For their part, the British guaranteed not to change the political status of Afghanistan. Acknowledging, moreover, St Petersburg’s fear of Britain and Afghanistan combining against Tsarist rule in Central Asia, the British solemnly undertook never to do so and also to discourage Kabul from ever behaving in a hostile manner.
The agreement over Persia was more complicated. While both powers pledged themselves to respect its independence and allow other countries to trade freely there, they agreed to divide it into two spheres of influence, with a neutral zone between. Russia was assigned the north and centre, including Teheran, Tabriz and Isfahan, while Britain was granted the south, which included the vital entrance to the Gulf. As Sir Edward Grey put it: ‘On paper it was an equal bargain. The part of Persia by which India could be approached was made secure from Russian penetration. The part of Persia by which Russia could be approached was secured from British penetration.’ Nonetheless, he argued, Britain got the better deal. ‘In practice,’ he wrote, ‘we gave up nothing. We did not wish to pursue a forward policy in Persia. Nor could a British advance in Persia have been the same menace to Russia that a Russian advance in Persia might have been to India.’ It was hardly surprising, he added, that Count Izvolsky had difficulty in persuading the Russian generals to surrender so much, ‘while we gave up what was of little or no practical value to us’.
But not everyone in Britain saw the new convention that way. The hawks, like their Russian opposite numbers, denounced it as a sell-out. Foremost among them was the congenital Russophobe Lord Curzon, now back in London after resigning as Viceroy following a row with the Cabinet. Already fuming at the way the government had emasculated Younghusband’s hard-won treaty with the Tibetans, he declared of the convention: ‘It gives up all we have been fighting for for years, and gives it up with a wholesale abandon that is truly cynical in its recklessness . . . the efforts of a century sacrificed, and nothing or next to nothing in return.’ The Russian sphere of Persia, he protested, was unduly large, and contained all the major cities, while that apportioned to Britain was small and economically valueless. As for the agreement over Afghanistan, Britain had gained nothing, while the Tibetan clauses of the convention amounted to ‘absolute surrender’. He was joined in his condemnation of it by another veteran Russophobe, Arminius Vambery, now aged 76. From Budapest he wrote to the British Foreign Office, which paid him a small pension for his services to the Crown: ‘I do not like it at all. You have paid too high a price for temporary peace, for such it is, and the humiliation will not enhance British prestige in Asia. You have shown excessive caution in the face of a sick adversary, although England was not in need of doing so.’
No less angered by the deal were the Persians and Afghans themselves when they learned that they had been shared out between London and St Petersburg in this ignominious fashion without even being consulted. Quite what the Tibetans felt is not known, for, with Younghusband gone, there was no one in Lhasa to take note. But whatever its critics thought of it, the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 finally brought the Great Game to an end. The two rival empires had at last reached the limits of their expansion. There nonetheless remained, in India and at home, lingering suspicions over Russian intentions, especially in Persia, on which St Petersburg continued to tighten its grip. These were not enough, however, to cause the authorities in India to feel seriously threatened. At last the Russian bogy had been laid to rest. It had taken the best part of a century, and cost the lives of many brave men on either side, but in the end it had been resolved by diplomacy.
Or had it? Certainly it seemed so in August 1914, when the British and Russians found themselves fighting as allies in both Asia and Europe. Any remaining suspicions were hastily forgotten as the two ancient rivals joined forces to keep the Germans and Turks out of their Asian territories and spheres of influence. For the first time, instead of glowering at one another across the mountains and deserts of innermost Asia, Sepoy and Cossack fought together. Their common aim was to exclude these new rivals from the Caucasus, Persia and Afghanistan – the fuse which led to both British India and the Tsar’s Central Asian domains.
But time was running out for Nicholas. The intolerable strain which the war effort placed on his people and on the Russian economy gave his own ‘enemy within’ the chance they had long been waiting for. In October 1917, the Russian Revolution led to the collapse of the entire eastern front, from the Baltic to the Caucasus. At once the Bolsheviks tore up all the treaties made by their predecessors. Overnight the Anglo-Russian Convention, on which such hopes had been staked by Britain, became a worthless piece of paper. Far from being over, the Great Game was destined to begin again in a new guise and with renewed vigour, as Lenin vowed to set the East ablaze with the heady gospel of Marxism. However, that is another story which I have already told elsewhere.
It is now more than eighty years since the imperial struggle between St Petersburg and London ended. Momentous changes have taken place in the vast arena in which it was contested. The political ones continue, as today’s headlines show, but they are too complex and fluid to dwell on here. A change which would have astonished the Great Game players, however, is the opening up of this once forbidden region to foreigners. It is comparatively easy now to reach Chitral, where the grey stone fortress still dominates the river bend, and Hunza, where Manners Smith won his Victoria Cross storming the vertical rockface. Bokhara, where Conolly and Stoddart are buried under the square before the citadel, can be visited thanks to Intourist, as too can Khiva, Samarkand and Tashkent – although the latter has been largely rebuilt following an earthquake. Also at the time of writing, the Chinese allow tourists to visit Kashgar, Yarkand and Lhasa, though for how long is anyone’s guess.
Some regions, once accessible, are now closed, like the skeleton-strewn Karakoram Pass, then the principal route through the mountains from northern India into China, but today superseded by the Karakoram Highway. Somewhere on the ancient pass stands a lonely monument to Andrew Dalgleish, brutally hacked to death there in 1888, although no one has seen it for many years, the last caravan having passed that way in 1949. The young Scotsman’s remains were retrieved at the time of his murder, however, and buried behind the British commissioner’s bungalow at Leh. Although some of the most celebrated players in the Great Game – notably Moorcroft, Burnes, Macnaghten and Cavagnari – have no known resting place, the graves of others can still be visited. General Kaufman, architect of the Russian conquest of Central Asia, is buried near the old Orthodox cathedral in Tashkent, George Hayward in the little-frequented European cemetery at Gilgit, while Francis Younghusband lies in the small Dorset churchyard of Lytchett Minster.
Men such as these, of either side, had few doubts about what they were doing. For those were the days of supreme imperial confidence, unashamed patriotism and an unswerving belief in the superiority of Christian civilisation over all others. With the benefit of hindsight, modern historians may question whether there was ever any real Russian threat to India, so immense were the obstacles that an invasion force would first have had to overcome. But to Burnes and the Pottingers, Burnaby and Rawlinson, it seemed real enough and ever present. Indeed, India’s history appeared to bear out their fears. As one Russian general pointed out with ill-concealed relish, of twenty-one attempted invasions of India over the centuries from the north and west, eighteen had been successful. Was there any reason to think that a powerful Russian force might be any less so? Equally, men like Kaufman and Skobelev, Alikhanov and Gromchevsky, feared that unless they staked Russia’s claim to the Central Asian khanates, the British would eventually absorb these into their Indian empire.
As for the Indians themselves, they were neither consulted nor considered in any of this. Yet, like their Muslim neighbours across the frontier, it was largely their blood which was spilt during the imperial struggle. All they ever wanted was to be left alone, something they achieved in 1947, when the British packed their bags and departed. But the peoples of Central Asia were less fortunate at their conquerors’ hands. For more than a century now the vast Russian empire there has served as a monument to the Tsarist heroes of the Great Game. How much longer it will continue to do so, in view of the violent turmoil threatening the Soviet Union, is impossible to forecast.
The British heroes of the Great Game have no such memorial, precarious or otherwise. There is little or nothing to show on the map for all their efforts and sacrifices. Today they live on only in unread memoirs, the occasional place name, and in the yellowing intelligence reports of that long-forgotten adventure.
London,
January 1990.