The Bloody White Baron (23 page)

In mid-September, Ungern received unusual reinforcements. Mongolia and Tibet have a long shared history, both religious and political. The Mongolian religious hierarchy was dominated by Tibetans, and both had also been subjugated by the Qing, although the Tibetans had been able to maintain considerably more political autonomy. As the Chinese Empire collapsed in 1911, Mongolia and Tibet simultaneously recognised each other's independence. Article 4 of their 1913 treaty pledged mutual defence, promising that if one state were threatened - implicitly by China - the other would send military aid.

In addition, the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, Thubten Gyatso, had an unusually strong relationship with Mongolia. He was something of a tragic figure. For over a century the Dalai Lamas had been powerless figureheads, subordinate to the Chinese and to their own minders. Reincarnated lamas inherited their property from life to life, and until they reached maturity their often unscrupulous regents administered
their considerable estates for them. Gyatso's six predecessors had died of unknown causes while still young, while their regents lived to a happy and prosperous old age.

With the crumbling of the Qing empire Gyatso had been able to take power in his own country. Playing nobles and monks against each other, he had begun to restore discipline and centralised order. This was disrupted by the British invasion of 1904, when a military expedition was sent on a bizarre attempt to forestall a supposed Russian invasion of Tibet that was probably never coming.
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The British expedition was met by Tibetan soldiers determined to halt the foreign invaders, and one of the most one-sided massacres of imperial history ensued as the Tibetans, armed with swords and antique muskets, were mown down by the British Maxim guns. Tibet's isolation was shattered and, terrified of the foreigners' intentions, the Dalai Lama fled from Lhasa and took refuge in Mongolia under the protection of the Bogd Khan. The two incarnations of the god of compassion found it very hard to get on. They were politico-theological equals, which neither of them was used to, and the Dalai Lama was reported to be disgusted by the Bogd's excesses. Chinese accounts claimed that the Dalai was becoming more popular than the Bogd among the Mongolian people, and the Bogd was refusing to talk to him as a result. The Dalai was also nearly bankrupting his host. The British Legation in Peking reported that his visit was ‘ruining the [. . .] Bogdo Lama both in revenues and reputation'.
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Both sides breathed a sigh of relief when he left for China, and eventually returned to Tibet, but the Dalai Lama retained a special interest in the fate of the Mongolian people, and, despite their personal differences, a certain concern for his fellow theocrat.

He was also a convinced anti-communist, paranoid about the spread of revolutionary sentiment into Tibet. His dislike of communism was to lead him into some unpleasant company in the early thirties, when the Nazis were showing a peculiar interest in Tibet, and it pushed him into aiding Ungern now. The White expedition seemed tailor-made to his needs, and he sent several hundred men. Quite how the two forces found each other is unknown. It must have been a formidable task, the Tibetans coming down from the plateau into the vastness of the steppe, but the grapevine of nomads, lamas and merchants was surprisingly effective, even in a landscape where there was often two hundred miles between settlements. Ungern was always fascinated by Tibet
and by the Dalai, and would have been only too eager to accept help. These were not token forces, though. After the expedition of 1906 the British had begun training the Tibetan army, and they were a cut above the Mongol forces. Ungern was to make great use of the elite Tibetan cavalry, employing them on the most dangerous missions. Expert warriors with a fierce hatred of the Chinese, they were soon to have a chance to put their killing skills to use in the defence of Buddhism.

Ungern gloried in his visibility in battle. In Siberia he had worn a bright red Chinese jacket and blue trousers, but after the army moved into Mongolia he wore an elaborate yellow silk
deel
, a long robe, with the markings of noble rank, so ‘as to be visible to [my] troops'.
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It reminded his Russian troops of a dressing gown. Many thought he went into battle drugged, or high on mystical exhilaration; he had the disconcerting habit of skipping in battle on the rare occasions when he dismounted. He usually rode a pure white mare, presented to him by Semenov. The general on the white horse traditionally represented Bonapartism and military dictatorship, an image Ungern deliberately evoked. White horses were the traditional bearers of triumphal generals - but also a symbol of doom.
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In Russian artistic symbolism, horses stood for war, tyranny and the Apocalypse.

Omens were on his mind as the army moved towards Urga. He had acquired several soothsayers - a wandering Buddhist fortune-teller here, a Buriat shaman there. As ever, he was intrigued by oracles, predictions, any way in which he might interpret the grand patterns of fate. As in Mongolia and China today, fortune-tellers were often destitute vagrants who had turned to predicting fate as a way of scraping a living, and they made a poor impression upon his Russian officers, who described them as ‘impudent, dirty, ignorant and bandy-legged'. Among the Cossacks and Mongolians, however, the prophets were more respected. Soldiers are often superstitious, the Mongolian soldiers very much so, and his appeals to prophecy reassured his troops. Ungern trusted them implicitly, and often made strategic decisions based upon their predictions. Very few of these turned out well.

One of the most popular fortune-telling methods was to heat the shoulder bones of sheep and interpret the resulting cracks, and Ungern
heeded the oracular bones when time came for the attack, choosing what was supposed to be a ‘propitious day', 26 October. He split his forces into two groups, one under his command and one under Rezuhin, but both aiming for the same target, Upper Maimaichen (the name means ‘buy-sell town'), the Chinese settlement down the valley just west of the main city of Urga. Unlike central Urga, with its felt gers and high temples, this was a proper, walled town, built with the crooked streets and courtyard buildings of China. The main Chinese garrison was here, though another group occupied the Russian buildings and central barracks down the road. Urga was surrounded by wooded hills, which concealed approaching troops but which rose and fell confusingly, with many gorges, sudden cliffs, and dead ends. Even from the top of the hills it was impossible to see which way the city lay, since there were few lights at night. The plan was to attack from the south, but the troops got lost in the moonless dark. Ungern mistook the location of Maimaichen, they spent the night stumbling around uselessly, and the only engagement was a skirmish with the Chinese in the early dawn. Several of the artillery pieces had to be abandoned in the night, and were taken by the Chinese.

Ungern delayed, waiting for another auspicious day, and then five days later charged forward with his men again, this time from the north-east, only to be beaten off once more. He had been confident enough to leave a large proportion of his troops, along with most of the army's supplies, at a base near the Onon river only twenty miles from the city, but the troops he took with him proved grievously inadequate. The attack was ill thought-out and poorly planned, and the dug-in Chinese were in strong positions.

It was close, though. The Chinese had only a couple of thousand men in the city, slightly fewer than Ungern's force, and Ungern's soldiers fought with the desperation of a homeless army on the brink of winter, and the outer defence of Upper Maimaichen was an archaic, crumbling wall, built in the preceding century from larch logs, earth and brick. Ungern was always behind his men, beating them on the back with his bamboo stick when they faltered in the face of machine-gun fire, yelling shrill encouragement. The initial attacks broke the Chinese perimeter, driving them back to the temples on the edge of Maimaichen, but they were rallied by some brave but nameless young officer and forced Ungern's men back from the city.

There followed two days of close-quarters fighting in the hills, with Ungern urging his tired men on to attack after attack. His cavalry made probing lunges around the city's perimeter, looking for some weak spot in the defences, but finding none. The Chinese hated the berserk rushes by Ungern's followers. These dirty, half-starved men fought with a deadly seriousness that was completely unlike the bullying and skirmishing the Chinese soldiers were used to, and killed with an ease that terrified them. With no medical facilities or supplies, wounded men were left to die where they lay. The Russians began to run short of bullets, and the Cossacks made increasing use of their sabres. When the Chinese, never very competent with their artillery, finally managed to range the Russian positions, it was too much, and Ungern called off the attacks.

There were rumours that they had succeeded, though. On 30 October Lenin and the other Bolshevik leaders received a panicked telegram from Irkutsk, drawing upon Bolshevik spies in China and Mongolia, which stated that ‘after the rout of the Chinese armies, Ungern has taken Urga with three thousand fighters, and around 3000-6000 of Semenov's men expelled from Chita are hastening to him'.
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The Russian leadership began to take the threat of Ungern seriously, and to consider a move against Mongolia in the future, though for the moment they had no plans to force a confrontation with China over the country. They even wrote to the Chinese government in Peking, urging them to consider a joint military expedition against Ungern, after which Russian forces would leave Mongolia. The Chinese haughtily declined, maintaining that they were capable of dealing with Ungern on their own.

The attacks caused a wave of anti-foreign feeling among the Chinese in Urga. After Ungern's first attacks on the city, the Chinese soldiers began to suspect every foreigner of collusion with the invaders, and to treat them with increasing contempt and aggression. Under pressure from the American consulate, the Peking government guaranteed the safety of foreigners, but this had little effect in practice. Chinese soldiers began looting houses on the pretext that they were searching for weapons. Soon enough they ceased using even this excuse and began simply to take whatever they fancied from the non-Chinese. Russians were particularly targeted, and many were summarily executed or imprisoned. It was luridly claimed by an American officer that ‘scarcely
a day passed without one or more cases of rape by Chinese soldiers upon white women and girls'.
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One witness of the soldiers' harassment was Dmitri Petrovich Pershin, the humane, ironic director of a Russian-Mongolian bank, formerly an ethnographer and journalist. He had lived in Urga for some years, spoke Chinese and Mongolian, and had friends among every community in the city. A regretful Chinese friend, a bank employee, explained to him that ‘nails aren't made of good iron, soldiers aren't made from kind people'. Pershin described how the Chinese leaders were ‘skilled and practical' in evaluating which foreigners were worth squeezing for money. The Mongols suffered even more than the Russians. Around Urga, their barns and shelters were burnt on the grounds that they might give cover to an attacking army. The Chinese soldiers stole hundreds of animals from herders accused of having aided Ungern's soldiers. For a people dependent upon livestock, this was a deep wound. Martial law was declared throughout Urga and a curfew imposed. The powerful monastery of Dambadarjaa, just outside of Urga, was attacked by soldiers amid accusations that the monks had harboured Ungern, and several lamas were shot on the spot. At least fifty Mongolians were killed in Urga, more or less at random.

Most critically, the Bogd Khan and several other prominent Mongolian nobles were arrested. After being imprisoned in a Chinese house for some weeks - for his own protection, according to the Chinese - the Bogd was placed under humiliating house arrest in his palace; the others remained in a Chinese prison, along with dozens of other Mongolians and Russians. He began to plot revenge against his captors, through both mundane and supernatural methods. With the help of divination he discovered that the source of his misfortune was presents given to him by a Chinese-friendly Mongol leader. He ordered them ceremonially burnt, along with the hair of a Chinese soldier, obtained with some difficulty, and declared that this would free him within fifty days of the ritual.

Ungern had made an indelible impression upon the Chinese, and an equally strong one upon the Mongols. To the Chinese he was a mysterious and terrifying enemy. They had been used to the sporadic raids of other White bandits, but this fierce attack seemed to come out of nowhere. To the Mongols he was now the chief symbol of anti-Chinese resistance. Beyond that, though, he was near-invulnerable.
He had seemed to be everywhere during the battle, but had never been wounded. Mongolians saw the marks of karma everywhere and somebody with such formidable luck was clearly not entirely of this world. He started to wear charms and amulets around his neck. It was said that he was bulletproof, protected by his talismans. The legends of a foreign saviour began to carry more weight.