Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (16 page)

It was the dog days of October 1837, and the end to a long week for Lieutenant Henry Rawlinson. For three years, he had been drilling a new regiment of the Persian army in a remote barracks near Kirmanshah in western Persia. During this time he had become fascinated by the trilingual inscriptions carved on the orders of the Achaemenid King Darius at nearby Behistan, the Rosetta Stone of ancient Persia. Every evening he would clamber his way up the near-vertical rock face, or even have himself lowered in a laundry basket, to take rubbings, then return to his tent to labour away into the night in an ultimately successful attempt to decode the Persian cuneiform script on the cliff wall.
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But his studies had been interrupted when he had been sent on an urgent mission to north-east Persia, and since receiving his orders at the British Legation in Teheran he had ridden over 700 miles in six days. Normally the caravanserais lining the military road from Teheran to the shrine city of Mashhad on the Afghan border contained ample post-horses for travellers on official business. But the Shah of Persia was on his way to besiege Herat, and such was the volume of couriers passing between the camp and court that Rawlinson had been unable to change his mount for the entire journey.

Now, both his party and their horses were, as Rawlinson put it, ‘pretty knocked up, and in the dark, between sleeping and waking, we had managed to lose the road’. It was at this point, just as dawn was breaking over the jagged rim of the Kuh-e-Shah Jahan mountains, that Rawlinson saw another party of horsemen riding down on them through the half-light. ‘I was not anxious to accost these strangers,’ Rawlinson later reported, ‘but on cantering past them, I saw, to my astonishment, men in Cossack dresses, and one of my attendants recognised among the party, a servant of the Russian mission.’
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Rawlinson knew immediately he had stumbled on to something. There was no good reason for a party of armed Cossacks to be on these remote desert tracks heading for the Afghan frontier, and at this particular moment there was every reason for a British intelligence officer to be suspicious of any Russian activity in these crucial border marches. Rawlinson had been recruited from his regiment in India to the new intelligence corps and sent to Persia specifically to try to counteract growing Russian influence there. He had been in the country three years, training the Persian army and providing them with large quantities of British arms, as part of a calculated strategy to win back Persia into the British fold.

Within a few months of their arrival, Rawlinson and his party had realised they were being closely watched by the Russians. ‘A Russian officer, an aide de camp of Baron Von Rosen [the Russian Viceroy of the Caucasus], arrived in camp today,’ Rawlinson had reported in October 1834. ‘He was despatched by his General to pay his respects to the Ameer. His real object of course is to ascertain our position with the army, the state of the Persian troops, and such other objects as may fall under his observation affecting the interests of his country.’
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The cold war between Russia and Britain in 1830s Persia had turned particularly chilly in March 1833 with the arrival in Teheran of the suave Count Ivan Simonitch. Like the French officers who had come to the court of Ranjit Singh, Simonitch was a Napoleonic veteran who was looking for wider horizons after Waterloo and the exile of Napoleon. Originally a native of Zara, south of Trieste on the Dalmatian coast of modern Croatia, Simonitch had joined up with the Grand Armée just in time for the invasion of Russia, and like so many others was taken captive by Tsarist forces on the disastrous midwinter retreat from Moscow. By the time he was released, his homeland had been absorbed into the Austro-Hungarian Empire and he decided to switch sides and join the Russian army. He was given the rank of major, sent to the Georgian grenadier regiment and fought with bravery in the Russo-Persian Wars. Badly wounded in a bayonet charge against the Persian Royal Guard, he was promoted to major-general for his bravery in holding his ground despite his injuries. Soon afterwards, he married an eighteen-year-old widow, Princess Orbeliani, ‘the most beautiful woman in Georgia’, and in a short time became one of the leading figures in the Russian administration of Tiflis.
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Transferred as ambassador to Teheran, he soon made it his mission to outmanoeuvre his British counterpart, Sir John MacNeill, who was as resolutely Russophobic as Simonitch was doggedly anti-British.

Since the arrival of Rawlinson and his military mission, Simonitch had managed to gain the Shah’s confidence, and achieve far more access and influence than the stolid MacNeill, the former Legation doctor, originally from the Outer Hebrides, who proved no match for Simonitch in terms either of sophistication or of strategy. By 1837 Simonitch had helped nudge the newly crowned Shah to use his British-armed troops to make yet another attack on the disputed city of Herat, offering him a lure of 50,000 gold tomans and the remittance of debt, in return for the Shah’s promise to allow the establishment of a Russian legation in Herat once the conquest was completed. It was a brilliant stroke – encouraging the Shah’s ambitions in such a way that they threatened British interests in India – and turned the British-trained regiments directly against the interests of their trainers and suppliers. In this way, Simonitch hoped to use the Shah as a cat’s paw for the Tsar, though in fact the new Shah, Mohammad II, had anyway been long obsessed with the recapture of Herat – he even mentioned it in his Coronation speech – and needed little Russian encouragement to attempt to retake it.
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Simonitch also gave a Russian guarantee to a proposed treaty of mutual defence between the Shah and Dost Mohammad’s Barakzai half-brothers in Kandahar. Simonitch was well aware of the effect this would have on British paranoia. Looking back at this moment of triumph four years later, in 1841, he boasted in his memoirs that Persia had at this period become a ‘spectre’ which robbed the London Cabinet of sleep, knowing as they did the ease with which Russia could swoop down from Herat and ignite Hindustan. ‘In order to set India on fire, Russia had but to wish it,’ he wrote.
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MacNeill was left with no alternative but to sit in his Teheran study and scribble an alarmist polemic which he published anonymously as
The Progress and Present Position of Russia in the East
. ‘The only nation in Europe which attempts to aggrandize itself at the expense of its neighbours is Russia,’ he fumed. ‘Russia alone threatens to overturn thrones, subvert Empires, and subdue nations hitherto independent . . . The integrity and Independence of Persia is necessary to the security of India and of Europe; and any attempt to subvert the one is a blow struck at the other – an unequivocal act of hostility to England.’ This spirited diatribe ignored the obvious fact that the expansion of British possessions in India had continued without interruption throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, gobbling up far more land and overturning many more thrones than anything achieved by Russia; but the book was nevertheless well received and widely read in London, and added to the growing certainty in Westminster that a major clash with Russia was looming in Persia and Afghanistan.
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MacNeill was right however that, whatever the more cautious views of Tsar Nicholas and his ministers in St Petersburg, his rival Count Simonitch certainly did have strategic ambitions, at the heart of which lay his hopes of establishing a Russian base at Herat, a six-week march from the British frontier at Ludhiana. Recently, MacNeill’s spies at the Russian Legation in Teheran had passed on confusing intelligence – ‘absurd stories about a Muscovite prince’ who was said to be expected on the Iranian frontier at the head of a body of 10,000 men who would assist the Persians in their siege of Herat. The details of the intelligence sounded suspect; but they seemed to hint at the existence of some Russian move on Afghanistan via Persia. Rawlinson realised that the blond officer leading the  Cossack party he had just cantered past ‘could be the man alluded to . . . My curiosity was of course excited. In such a state of affairs as preceded the siege of Herat, the mere fact of a Russian gentleman travelling in Khorasan was suspicious. In the present case, however, there was evidently a desire for concealment . . . and I thought it my duty to try and unravel the mystery.’
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So Rawlinson wheeled his escort around: ‘Following the party, I tracked them for some distance along the high road, and then found that they had turned off at a gorge in the hills. There at length I came across the group seated at breakfast by the side of a clear, sparking rivulet. The officer, for such he evidently was, was a young man of light make, very fair complexion, with bright eyes and a look of great animation.’ The Russian, Rawlinson continued,

rose and bowed to me as I rode up, but said nothing. I addressed him in French – the general language of communication among Europeans in the East – but he shook his head. I then spoke in English, and he answered in Russian. When I tried Persian, he seemed not to understand a word; at last he expressed himself hesitatingly in Turcoman or Usbeg Turkish. I knew just sufficient of this language to carry on a very simple conversation, but not to be inquisitive. This was evidently what my friend wanted; for when he found that I was not strong enough in Jaghetai [Chagatai] to proceed very rapidly, he rattled on with his rough Turkish as rapidly as possible. All I could find out was that he was a
bona fide
Russian officer carrying presents from the [Russian] Emperor to [the Persian ruler] Mohammad Shah. More he would not admit; so after smoking another pipe with him, I remounted.
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Rudyard Kipling’s novel of the Great Game,
Kim
,
contains a celebrated scene in which the Raj spymaster, Colonel Creighton, trains Kim to remember detail by making him play the game subsequently known as Kim’s Game: being given a short period of time to memorise a tray of random objects, then to turn off the light, remove the tray, and make the student attempt to write a complete list of every detail. It will never be known if Rawlinson was ever trained in such a technique, but the remarkably detailed description of the mysterious officer which he later sent to Calcutta ‘lest he should attempt to penetrate in disguise into India’ suggests that he might have been. The officer, he wrote,

is a young man of middle stature, with a short neck, high square shoulders, and thin waist. He is extremely fair, and without any colour in his cheeks. He has a broad open forehead, very bright eyes and rather wide apart, a well formed nose, short upper lip, and smiling mouth. He wears a beard and moustachios of a light brown color. The moustachios are not long, but the beard which covers the lower part of his cheeks and his entire chin is particularly full, short and bushy . . . He wore a round white Cossack cap, a dark green Georgian coat, narrow cross belts ornamented with silver across his breast wearing
furshungs
or cartridges on his left side after the Georgian fashion, and a sword with steel scabbard attached to a black waist-belt which was fastened with a plain silver plate. He had full dark grey cloth
shulwars
and well-made Russian boots. He had two good looking large grey horses, one of which he rode and the other was led . . . He rode on a plain Persian saddle covered with dark cloth and had a short black cloth
shabrac
. He had Persian holsters and the stock of his pistols which appeared of Turkish workmanship were of ebony inlaid with silver. He spoke Persian fluently, but with a short, sharp foreign accent, never pronouncing the ‘a’ broad and full as the Persians do. He was a perfect master of Jagatai Turkish, but he did not speak the Constantinople or Persian dialects of that language.
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Rawlinson reached the Persian camp beyond Nishapur after dark, and asked for an immediate interview with the Shah. Admitted to Mohammad Shah’s tent, he told him about the Russians he had encountered on the road, and repeated their explanation of what they were doing. ‘Bringing presents to me!’ said the Shah in astonishment. ‘Why I have nothing to do with him; he is sent direct from the [Russian] Emperor to Dost Mohammad in Kabul, and I am merely asked to help him on his journey.’
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Rawlinson understood immediately the importance of what the Shah had just told him: it was the first proof of what British intelligence had long feared: that the Russians were trying to establish themselves in Afghanistan by forging an alliance with Dost Mohammad and the Barakzais, and to assist them and the Persians in extinguishing the last bastion of Shah Shuja’s Sadozai dynasty in Herat. Rawlinson also realised he needed to get back to Teheran as quickly as possible with this information.

Shortly afterwards, the Russians themselves arrived in the Persian camp. To the ordinary Persians of the army, the Russian officer ‘gave himself out to be a Musselman of the Soonee persuasion and declared his Musselman name to be Omar Beg. No one doubted in camp that he was actually a Musselman.’ Unaware that Rawlinson had discovered the truth about their mission, the officer, introduced now as ‘Captain Vitkevitch . . . addressed me at once in good French, and in allusion to our former meeting, merely observed with a smile that “it would not do to be too familiar with strangers in the desert”’.
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Later in life, Rawlinson would be famous for two things, firstly for deciphering cuneiform, and secondly, along with Arthur Conolly, for coining the phrase ‘the Great Game’. But now it was his skill as a rider which proved most useful. He was, after all, the son of a racehorse breeder in Newmarket and had grown up in the saddle; he was also a man of enormous physical strength: ‘six feet tall, with broad shoulders, strong limbs and excellent muscles and sinews’.
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