The Bloody White Baron (27 page)

Rescuing the Bogd Khan was one of Ungern's top priorities, but his palace was deep within the Chinese defences. Only one approach was
left unguarded, for the Chinese were confident that no attacker could strike from that direction. Behind the palace was Bogd Uhl, a sacred preserve, covered in virgin forest, created by the Buddhist monks three hundred years beforehand. Animals roamed there free from fear of the normally rapacious Mongolian hunters, since the penalty for trespass was execution. They included some strange creatures; the Bogd had a liking for exotic animals and the tranquillity of the forest was sometimes disturbed by tigers, cheetahs, even the Bogd's pet elephant. So strong was the prohibition that the wolves on the mountain had learnt to exploit it, streaming out of the forest to attack the locals' herds. When chased by the shepherds, they would retreat back over the line of sanctuary, regarding, according to the shepherds, their frustrated pursuers with a look of distinct smugness. For three centuries the mountain had remained inviolate.

The Chinese guards had no desire to risk supernatural wrath, especially after the mysterious night-fires of the winter, or to provoke further Mongolian anger, and they made no patrols on the mountainside. On that clear, cold winter morning they had no idea what was coming, although even Pershin saw the Tibetan cavalry moving down the mountainside, ‘like little black dots against the snow'.
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The Bogd was imprisoned inside his European-style house, which was in the centre of a complex of temples surrounded by a flimsy wall. When the horsemen burst through the gates, the Chinese didn't have a moment's warning. The outer sentries were either shot silently with arrows, or murdered by Tibetan infiltrators disguised as Mongolians bringing food and supplies. Some of the attackers seemed to gleam unnaturally and to have distorted, terrifying faces; the Chinese must have been uncertain, in their last moments, whether their assailants were men or gods. In truth, they were
dobdobs
, Tibetan monk-enforcers, their clothes lightly smeared with butter and their faces painted with soot to strike fear into the enemies of the faith. Although the attackers were outnumbered two or three to one, the terrified Chinese barely resisted. Of a hundred and fifty men, ninety-seven were dead within minutes, and the remainder were running for the main Chinese lines.

The liberators had brought spare horses for the Bogd Khan and his entourage, planning to take them to safety in a nearby hill monastery, but there was a small hitch. During his months of captivity the Bogd's already formidable bulk had grown to the point where he could
no longer sit on a horse without overbalancing. After a couple of panicked minutes, a solution was found. Two muscular Tibetans hauled him on to the horse and rode either side of him, balancing his weight between them. Ten Tibetans remained behind to cover their escape, exchanging sporadic fire with the Chinese before making their own getaway. An American merchant, A. M. Guptill, witnessed the whole attack and commentated that ‘the entire action consumed exactly one half-hour and was the prettiest piece of cavalry work that one could desire to witness'.
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When Ungern heard the news, he yelled exuberantly, ‘Now Urga is ours!' His Mongolian ally Togtokh was able to raise a two-hundred-strong personal bodyguard for the Bogd to ensure that he would not fall back into the clutches of the Chinese.

The fighting at the eastern end of the city had reached a temporary stalemate. The plan was gradually to squeeze the Chinese inwards from both sides. Japanese artillerists had brought their guns up to the hills in the north-east that the Whites had seized the previous day, and had begun to pound the Chinese positions. But the Chinese had consolidated their forces in their trenches and, although fighting continued throughout the day, neither side made any significant advance.

The Russians and other foreigners sealed up their homes, barricading their doors and arming themselves with whatever weapons they could find. They stored food and organised twenty-four-hour watches, praying that Ungern would take the city before the Chinese could begin a fresh wave of persecution. They need not have worried; the Chinese were too panicked to make reprisals. They had dreaded the attack all winter, and the seizure of the Bogd Khan was almost the final straw. On the morning of 1 February, the day following the Bogd's liberation, the Chinese officers grabbed all the motor vehicles and fuel they could find and roared north out of town, heading for Kiatkha and safety and leaving their men to cope as best they could. An American observer wrote contemptuously, ‘They left at daybreak, just in time to save their skins in the most approved Chinese manner, and will probably be made Field Marshals for their bravery and skill in retreating.'
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Years later the locals still sang ‘a Mongolian battle song whose text, dealing with Chinese Generals riding in
Muhor teleg
(motor-cars), bore witness to its modern origin'.
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The following night a soldier on the Russian side accidentally shot a rocket into the sky, causing the Chinese rump to open up with all the
firepower it had. Seized by some collective impulse, the main force of European soldiers rushed the Chinese positions. The Baron was equally carried away by the fervour of the attack, riding on his white horse between the trenches and pressing his troops forward over the wire. He inspired others to take suicidal risks; perhaps their fear of him outweighed their fear of the enemy.

At the same time some of the Mongolian cavalry had reached the Chinese rear, where fire was already being directed onto their enemies from the positions seized at the Bogd Khan's palace. Maimaichen was blazing; Alioshin claims that the fires were lit by sympathisers in the city, but this would have been unnecessary, given the artillery on both sides and the easy combustibility of old Chinese wooden buildings. The fighting became a series of running battles through the crooked, smoke-filled streets. There were no gutters worthy of the name, and the alleys quickly filled with slippery filth. It was impossible for either side to maintain any kind of order, but in the noisome, lethal scramble the attackers prevailed. The Chinese abandoned their trenches in disarray. A mass of them fled Maimaichen altogether, running for the relative safety of the old fortified Russian compound, but Ungern's men had set up machine-gun nests in the hills and woods on either side of the route. The fleeing Chinese were enfiladed and slaughtered.

The survivors of the Maimaichen garrison retreated into the Russian buildings, which occupied a substantial area, situated near the river on a slight rise. As ever, the Baron was omnipresent during the battle, riding among his men and leading them in insanely brave attacks on the walls. They used whatever they could to force the gates: battering-rams improvised from fence posts, mass charges, explosives.

Once the gates were breached, the fighting turned into a general killing spree. The main work was done with bayonets, but an extraordinary variety of knives, swords, and even cleavers were wielded by both sides. The Chinese made their last stand in three solid wooden buildings: the Russian barracks, the consulate, and the gold-mining company. These had been heavily fortified over the years, and had become a mass of trenches and barbed wire, but the Chinese had no time to set up their defences properly. The Baron's troops rushed the Chinese positions, using grenades to break through the windows and doors. When their ammunition ran out, the Chinese fired arrows and hurled stones at the attackers. In the chaos, groups of soldiers on the
same side sometimes fought each other, unable to understand the language of their allies. Neither side was taking prisoners, but many of the Chinese were stripping off their uniforms and hoping to pass as Mongolian.

By now Chinese morale had completely collapsed. Over two thousand fled the city, taking whatever they could carry into the bleak, cold hills. Of the three thousand Chinese soldiers left inside, barely eight hundred survived. Urga had been laid bare to the untender mercies of the war god's soldiers.

A couple of days later, one of the city's markets was burning. Nobody knew who had started the blaze, and nobody seemed to care. It became a bonfire, fresh fuel piled on by Ungern's men: paper money, tea, furs, hair, bone, flesh. A boy had been roasted alive in a baker's oven the day before, suspected of being ‘Red'. The Bolsheviks were being dealt with in Ungern's habitual fashion.

Maimaichen had descended into chaos and terror. To the Mongolian cavalry, pillaging and wrecking Chinese towns came naturally, and they took to it with enthusiasm. The atrocities committed by the Europeans, however, were worse. The Baron's soldiers had spent a desperate winter struggling to live off an alien landscape, and the last time any of them had been in a city was a year or more ago. They were veterans of two of the most brutalising wars in history, they were led by a madman, and they had very little prospect for the future. They went berserk, indulging in orgies of rape, torture and murder.

The Baron, always keen to gain the support of the local population, tried to limit the victims of the atrocities to the Europeans and Chinese. He failed. As one observer noted, ‘One wished to avert one's gaze from the hangings, all over the place, of the poor, lamas, men and women, old and young, even children,'
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although any soldier Ungern caught attacking Mongolians was summarily punished, sometimes executed. Suspected Bolshevik sympathisers were murdered on the spot, but no great excuse was needed for any killing. One Russian soldier reportedly made a speciality of strangling old women, seizing them off the street and choking them to death from behind. His fellows did nothing to stop him, nor, at first, to stop the Cossack soldier who decided that his own comrades were equally valid targets and began firing at them at random. Only after he had killed several did someone casually repay the compliment.

After three days Ungern ordered that the looting should cease, a command he enforced with iron rigidity. An American observer noted that ‘Baron Ungern is strictly prohibiting looting and is heavily punishing the slightest disobedience.'
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He even applied it to civilians; a Mongolian woman he caught rifling through looted Chinese stores was hanged on the spot by Ungern's own hand. The looting stopped. Ungern was keen to reinstate the rule of law and order.

The law, however, did not apply to all. Ungern ordered the harassment of civilians to stop, save for that of the Jews, because, ‘in my opinion, the Jews are not protected by any law'.
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An eternally foreign element, always working to undermine the rule of empire and true religion, they could not expect the protection that accompanied that rule. A systematic purge of Jews began. The capture of Urga was the first triumph in the building of Ungern's Holy Asian Empire, and Jews had no place in it. The murder of commissars and Jews had been a standard part of Ungern's military practice for the last year, but this victory gave him an unprecedented cluster of victims.

There were still a few hundred Jews left in the city, and Mongolia must have been the last place they expected a Cossack pogrom. Many of the Mongolians, who had no native tradition of anti-Semitism, were just as shocked by the Whites' behaviour, as were most other foreigners in the city. Mongolian friends of a kindly baker named Moshkovich asked vainly, ‘What harm has he done, this good old man?' as he was taken away. Extreme violence has a shocking playfulness, and the Cossack pogroms had always had a festive quality about them, a mixture of drunken indulgence and wilful murder; now, among the looting and the flames, the game was on again. Jews were hunted on horseback through the streets of Urga, lynched in their homes, tortured for amusement. Afterwards, the murderers took their property. The repulsive Dr Klingenberg, who had been responsible for the ‘mercy' killings of his own patients during the winter, led several of the mobs and took eager possession of much of the loot. He deliberately targeted one (non-Jewish) doctor, an American named Olay, so that he could seize his medical supplies.

The soldiers made no distinction of age or sex. Ungern had spoken, back in Dauria, of how ‘neither men, nor women, nor their seed should remain'.
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Now he had a chance to put theory into practice. Gang rape had always been part of pogroms, although traditionally the women's lives were spared, not from mercy but to gain additional amusement when they became pregnant with Cossack children.
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That was not the case here. The best to be hoped for were bizarre spasms of chivalry such as that shown by the Russian officer who allowed one young Jewish girl to commit suicide before the soldiers could have her. One Russian émigré returned to Urga a few days later to find ‘dozens of raped and mutilated women, slaughtered children, the bodies of old men'.
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There was little use in protesting. Togtokh, the Mongolian prince and anti-Chinese fighter who had been one of Ungern's strongest supporters, tried to hide some Jews in his own property, but they were discovered,
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wrenched out of their hiding places, and beaten to death on the street. Togtokh protested this violation of the sacred laws of Mongolian hospitality, and barely avoided being hanged himself. A Danish missionary named Olsen, who had lived in Mongolia for several years, also protested the atrocities. He was tied to a horse and dragged to his death through the city. A carload of Jews trying to flee was ridden down by the Cossacks and lynched.