The Bloody White Baron (28 page)

A few Jews were saved. Pershin concealed several in his house, bluffing the Baron's men into not searching his basement, and smuggled them out of the city later. One baby who survived was hastily baptised at the Orthodox church at the former consulate, brought there by a heroic Mongolian nurse. The Cossacks would have killed the child regardless, but the priest, Father Parnjakov, well-known as a philanthropist, forced them to back down. Cheated of their prey, they murdered the nurse instead. Ungern regarded the massacre as a positive benefit for the new country, not only spiritually but financially. Writing on the ‘regrettable losses' of the Chinese merchants during his men's excesses, he remarked, ‘At least with the Jews gone, Chinese business will be freed from their stranglehold.'
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The struggle against the Chinese was by no means over, but now, deprived of their main camp and scattered throughout the country, the
Chinese forces were pathetically easy for the Baron's men to catch. Many were hunted down by the Cossacks, with the help of the Tibetans. Some of the Chinese had not even stopped to put their boots on, and were running barefoot through thick snow. Great mounds of dead Chinese, horses and camels could be seen for miles along the Tula river. In their desperation to escape the pursuing horsemen, the Chinese had discarded anything that might weigh them down, even those items most necessary for survival in the Mongolian winter. As a result ‘the road was strewn with overcoats, shirts, boots, caps and kettles'.
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Other survivors of Ungern's assault joined up with another group of Chinese soldiers, numbering somewhere from four to six thousand. They had come from the Chinese settlement opposite Kiatkha, on the Russian border, another trading town also called Maimaichen. Their original intent had been to reinforce or relieve Urga from the Baron's assault, but they were far too late. Tired, demoralised and disorganised, they were ambushed by Cossack and Tibetan soldiers under the command of Rezuhin, at Ude, twenty or so miles north of Urga. Living up to his name of ‘the Cutter', Rezuhin charged them from all sides, resulting in a general slaughter. Hundreds of bodies, covered in ‘terrible sword wounds', were left unburied, preserved for weeks by the cold. The local herders deserted the spot entirely, leaving the bodies to be eaten by packs of winter-hungry wolves.

After this battle nearly two thousand Chinese surrendered, upon which Ungern promptly ordered that they be formed into a new division. The prospect of a revived Chinese Empire was never far from his mind, and these troops, whose uniforms he ordered emblazoned with an imperial dragon, were the beginning. A force so used to changing sides at a moment's notice might be expected to take this in their stride, but Ungern's army was clearly too much even for them. That very night they deserted, breaking out en masse - but they were on foot, and the Cossacks and Tatars soon caught up to them. Relatively merciful for once, the Cossacks killed only a couple of hundred, surrounded the rest and herded them back to Urga, where they were put under tight watch. Some of the remainder enlisted with Ungern, others were hanged as suspected revolutionaries or managed to desert and drift back to the safety of Chinese territory.

Meanwhile, more thousands of Chinese soldiers were reported to be advancing from the south, but the slaughter and capture of the
garrison in Urga had been so complete that they had no idea of the disaster that had befallen their comrades. Simultaneously the cavalry sent north from Urga turned back to try to relieve the city. Both groups were easily overwhelmed over the course of the next few weeks, encircled by the superior White cavalry and killed or scattered. The Mongolian cavalry were all-terrain riders: when they pursued one group of Chinese into the desert they happily swapped their horses for camels.

The Danish explorer Henning Haslund stood, two years later, at the site of one of these final massacres:

SEVEN

Lord of the Steppe

For the Bogd Khan, Ungern's triumph was also his own. Safe in the hill monastery of Manzshir, where he had been spirited away by the Tibetans, he planned his glorious return to a newly liberated city. Before he might achieve this, however, there was some cleaning up to be done. A sacred peace had traditionally held in Urga, and its violation was all too clear in the aftermath of Ungern's conquest. The horrific depictions in the temples were now a reality on the streets. Maimaichen, in particular, was strewn with dead Chinese. Elsewhere in the city Ungern's soldiers' penchant for mutilating their victims had left the streets littered with hacked-up bodies. The ever-present dogs were growing fat off the remains.

For the Mongols, this was more or less business as usual. Corpses were traditionally disposed of through exposure on the steppe, eaten by wild dogs and birds, but even those of Ungern's men who had experienced the charnel fields around Dauria became uncomfortable spectators as packs of ‘growling and yapping creatures drew and tore at long bloodstained strings of entrails, and under the whirl of their many trampling feet the pale soles of the dead Mongol's boots shifted about as the corpse was dragged to and fro upon the ground'.
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Ungern's soldiers went to work cleaning up the city, burying the bodies and, disregarding Mongolian tradition, killing any dog they saw eating human flesh. Hardened soldiers spent the days sweeping streets and washing blood off doorsteps. Bloodletting ceased for a week, or was at least curtailed. The Bogd consulted his brother the state oracle, and determined that the most auspicious day for his restoration as Khan of Mongolia would be 22 February, which was
also the Lunar New Year. The Mongolian nobles were summoned to witness the coronation, and thousands of Mongols poured in from the countryside to celebrate their triumph over foreign oppression.

Ungern was determined to make a proper occasion of it. He had the textile factory in Urga whip up new uniforms for some of his men: dark blue hooded Mongolian coats, lined with silk. His interest in distinctions of race and status perhaps led him to pay close attention to the uniforms' accessories, for the hats, belts and epaulettes he stipulated differed in colour according to the rank and nationality of the wearer. A place of honour was taken by the Bogd's Tibetan rescuers, dressed in a fetching green. The Bogd had awarded noble Mongolian rank to their Buriat leader in appreciation.

Ungern himself was declared to be a reincarnation of the Fifth Bogd Gegen, the Bogd Khan's predecessor, a rather dull figure of the early nineteenth century. It was an odd choice, and exactly how both the Bogd and Ungern could be reincarnations of the same person simultaneously was a spiritual mystery (although multiple incarnations were not unknown in Tibetan Buddhism), but it suggested an unusual affinity between the two. He was also made a
khan
, as well as being granted a hereditary double princedom and the splendid title of Outstanding Prosperous-State Hero. There were rewards, too, for Ungern's fellow Russians and his Mongolian allies, most of whom became Heroes of some variety - roughly equivalent to the European ‘knight'.

Ungern's new title conferred sartorial benefits as well; he was now entitled to wear, according to the decree proclaiming his rank, ‘a green sleeveless jacket, a red and yellow coat, a yellow silk thread in his hat, and three peacock feathers'. The Bogd lavished praise upon him, declaring that he was

Ungern must have been especially pleased by the last sentence, confirming a religious sanction of his disciplinary methods.

Before the coronation there was a procession from the Bogd's palace to the central temple where the ceremony was to take place. Crowds
lined the route even before dawn, fighting for a good view and scrabbling up onto roofs and fences to witness the restoration of their old king. The procession began at about ten o'clock with Mongolian heralds riding out to announce the coming of the king. When they blew their horns, the crowd froze, and it was ‘as though a thousand people turned to stone sculptures'.
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Behind them came a procession of monks, chanting hymns of praise. In their centre was a horse-drawn wooden pyramid on a cart, from which a huge flag rose. On it, woven in gold thread, was the
soyombo
, a national symbol of Mongolia created by the first Bogd Gegen. It was a complicated fusion of images, chief among them a burning flame over the moon and the Chinese yin/yang symbol, but to the crowd it meant only one thing: independence.

At last came the Bogd himself, accompanied by his wife. He was huge and motionless, incongruously wearing dark glasses to shield his eyes against the low winter sun. He rode in a Chinese carriage, with guards to his left and right. Only one man rode behind the Bogd, in the place of honour; Baron Ungern, on his familiar white mare. Much to the shock of his men, their usually scruffy leader wore the full uniform of his new rank, peacock feathers bobbing slightly as he rode. His red Mongolian coat was still glossy; he had pinned on it his Cross of St George, and tightened his sword belt. It was a moment of pure, happy triumph. He had restored a king, and captured a country.

For Ungern, the restoration of the Bogd was no mere political act. In Dauria he had recreated medieval feudalism, but for the feudal order to work it had to be headed by a king, and a king blessed by the heavens. It was the first blow in the grand campaign of monarchy and good against revolution and evil. The revolutions sparked by the First World War had been disastrous, the people had lost belief in the truth, and he believed that there had been only two monarchies left: England and Japan.
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But ‘now Heaven has taken pity on the guilty, and there are kings in Bulgaria, Greece and Hungary again, and on the third of February the Bogd Khan was restored'.
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He saw the restoration of the Bogd as a turning point for Asia, writing that the news ‘was quickly carried to every part of the Middle Kingdom [China], and has caused
the hearts of all good people to tremble joyfully and see in it a new display of heavenly blessings'. Even towards the end of his life he fervently maintained that ‘until now everything had been in decline, and now everything is becoming better, and everywhere there will be monarchy, monarchy, monarchy'.
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There was still much work to be done, however, for the ‘restoration of the sacred Bogd' demanded ‘vigorous and self-denying work from all true monarchists of the East'.
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