The Bloody White Baron (8 page)

As Ungern passed into Mongolia he was riding through an other-worldly environment. Sometimes on the grasslands he could look in any direction and see no human sign all the way to the horizon, the blue of the sky like a vast ocean above him, broken only by the flicker of a bird of prey. Unless he ran across herders, or saw a marmot scurrying briefly above ground, the world would seem entirely devoid of life. The empty landscape was similar to that of Siberia. Perhaps he even found comfort in being only a speck on a vast expanse of nothingness - he never had great need of any company other than his own.

Not all of Mongolia is flat, particularly in the north-east, and much of the time he would have been travelling through long stretches of hills, rising sometimes into mountains, across swamps, or between thick forests where humans rarely intruded. Small clusters of rocky hills broke up the open countryside, as though the earth had been punched from beneath. Ungern regarded the landscape with a tactician's trained eye, looking for routes that a cavalry army could take; he could still remember them a decade later. Such terrain was also attractive to the builders of monasteries, the only permanent structures in most parts of Mongolia, the steep slopes and commanding views being excellent defensive features. Here travellers could find rest and safety; the monks were often trained fighters and the monastery walls thickly reinforced. Ungern would have been made welcome, for the monks paid little heed to race or religion and usually accepted Chinese, Russian and Mongolian visitors alike - a laudable generosity given the fact that the preceding few hundred years had seen several Chinese invasions of Mongolia, and many monastery-fortresses, which had been centres of resistance, had been either burnt down or stuffed with gunpowder and blown up. Destroyed monasteries were not the only ruins Ungern would have encountered; he might have stumbled upon remnants of pre-Mongol civilisations, perhaps the Ozymandian palace of a long-forgotten Turkic king. In the summer heat herds of horses pressed themselves against the old walls, or gathered under the rare bridges, desperate for shade.

Ungern could not have carried enough food and water to survive the entire journey self-sufficiently, so must have relied upon the everyday hospitality of the Mongolians. Mongolia's harsh terrain and climate, particularly in the winter, meant that feeding and housing travellers was considered a duty by every household. Even a foreigner would be given shelter for the night unquestioningly, and food for the next day. Ungern must have spent many nights in the cramped and dark interior of a Mongolian tent, with a barrel of fermented mare's milk by the door and the family sleeping on cushions inside. He must also have seen the regular devotions of the Mongols, sprinkling offerings to the spirits and praying to the gods and Buddhas.

As a foreigner travelling alone he would have drawn special attention from the locals. Many European visitors to Asia liked to wear traditional dress, often writing self-flatteringly that they were indistinguishable
from the locals. This seems hard to believe. Even today, any European male in rural China, regardless of dress, draws a crowd of open-mouthed children, middle-aged women cheerfully assessing his looks and young men shouting ‘
Hello!
' There were only a few hundred Europeans in the whole country at the time, among perhaps a million Mongolians; apart from the small Russian settlement around the consulate in Urga, which was the sole foreign enclave, they were guaranteed to attract attention from the locals, curious as to what exotic items or powerful magic they might possess. (Europeans were seen by many Mongols as being potentially powerful sorcerers. The explorer Henning Haslund described how a young woman had come to him and begged him to symbolically ‘adopt' her sick baby, since his powerful ‘white man's magic' would be able to drive away the spirits that plagued the child. He went through the ritual, and the child promptly recovered.) A traveller would never be without company, however unwelcome.

Ungern would certainly have stood out among the Mongolians, with his bullet-shaped head, stage-villain moustache and tufts of reddish-blond hair. He was in first-rate physical condition, lean and hard, but when he spoke his voice varied wildly in pitch, like that of a teenager, although he was almost thirty. Aleksei Burdukov, a Russian merchant, fell in with Ungern for a while. He left an unforgettable picture of him: ‘a scrawny, ragged, droopy man; on his face had grown a wispy blond beard, he had faded, blank blue eyes, and he looked about thirty years old. His military uniform was in abnormally poor condition, the trousers being considerably worn and torn at the knees. He carried a sword by his hip and a gun at his belt.'
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Ungern rode alongside Burdukov's coaches, a skilled, tireless horseman, shouting at the coachmen when he felt they were slacking and striking them with his whip. When the group stumbled into a swamp, Ungern ‘laid on the ground and refused to move, listening'. Then, going forward and ordering the others to follow, he led them from patch to patch through the bog, ‘finding the most convenient solid places with surprising dexterity and often getting into knee-deep water'. Eventually he sniffed at the air, ‘seeking the smell of smoke to find nearby settlements. At last he told us one was nearby. We followed him, and he was right - in the distance we heard the bark of dogs. This unusual persistence, cruelty, instinctive feelings amazed me.' Burdukov despaired of the quality of
young Russian officers in the country, if Ungern's bad manners and cruelty were typical of the breed.

The first thing Ungern would have noticed about Urga, Mongolia's most populous settlement, was the smell. Sewers were as unheard of as electricity, and human waste was simply thrown into the streets to be devoured by the packs of scavenging dogs that roamed the city. Anybody venturing outdoors at night took a stick to beat off the animals, but their main enemies were the hordes of beggars, mostly old women no longer able to bear the rigours of steppe life, driven to the town to live a few last miserable years fighting with the dogs for scraps. To add to the stench, the Mongolians were a notoriously unwashed people, believing the rare springs and streams in the country were home to territorial spirits who would inflict dreadful illness on trespassers.

Ungern arrived there in the autumn of 1913, but it was a strangely timeless city; apart from the rifles sometimes carried by hunters and soldiers, and the very occasional European motor car, it would have been hard to tell whether it was 1913 or 1193. Merchants rode in on camel or horse from China, bearing silks, drugs and teas; trappers hawked furs that would eventually be sold for a thousand times their initial price when they reached Moscow or London; fortune-tellers cast oracle bones on the street to determine the fates of young nobles.

It was a trading city, where Mongols, Chinese and Russians met to exchange goods worth over a million dollars a year. Its Chinese and Russian enclaves were well established, almost entirely separate from the Mongolian one. Urga lay at the centre of the Tea Road, the overland route to Russia, and originally the local currency had been bricks of tea, but now most traders preferred the brass cash of the Chinese, or even Mexican dollars (a common trading currency at the time). The markets were full of livestock, enlivened by the occasional Western wonder such as a gramophone or a camera, normally brought for the amusement of the Jebtsundamba Khutuktu, also known as the Bogd Gegen, Holy Shining One, Holy King or Living Buddha: the ever-reincarnating head of the Mongolian Buddhist orders and one of the very few Mongols
who could afford such toys.
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It was the closest that Mongolia had to a capital, being the nominal centre of the most dominant Mongolian group, the Khalkha,
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but the real power lay in foreign hands. Mongolia had been under Chinese control for three centuries, and the Chinese administration, including a small garrison, was based in Urga.

Primarily, it was a city of religion. Out of the roughly twenty-five thousand permanent Mongolian residents, an estimated ten thousand were either monks or had some sort of affiliation with the monasteries. There were a hundred and three reincarnated lamas in Mongolia, returning life after life, and many of them lived there. Urga had been founded in the seventeenth century as the Ikh Khuree, or ‘great monastery', to serve as the residence of the Bogd Gegen, and that remained its Mongolian name; ‘Urga' was used only by Russians and other foreigners. Temples were everywhere, dark and smoky, statues of their gods concealed in numerous alcoves. The gods were usually depicted in a warlike stance, brandishing weapons and trampling on corpses, but some were joined together in elaborate and implausibly athletic couplings, no doubt to the ribald amusement of the more elderly and worldly-wise female pilgrims.
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The statues were dressed by the temple's monks, some of whom would climb, agile as monkeys, over the larger examples, sometimes twenty metres tall, in order to change a goddess's scarf or repaint a cracked face. Most of the monks wore the conventional saffron robes of Buddhism, but some wore heavy wooden masks depicting the angry or ecstatic faces of the gods, dancing and singing in their honour. Yellow silk banners fluttered in the breeze outside the temples, emblazoned with the swastika, an ancient symbol of Buddhism and one particularly venerated by the Mongolians.

Being a monk was a relatively good life, compared with that of herder, scratching out a bare subsistence and ever fearful of a bad
zud
, a peculiar local combination of hard winter and quick-melting frost that could kill a quarter of the country's livestock. The vast majority of Mongolians lived as nomads, moving between camps according to the seasons and relying on their animals to survive. Monks were certain of a full bowl and a comfortable place to sleep, if nothing else, and the temples were major money makers, storing most of what wealth there was in Mongolia. The temples were visible for miles, since they were the only large buildings in Urga; most of the population lived in gers (felt tents). Important gers were surrounded by walled compounds,
marking an uneasy compromise between settled and nomadic life. Only in the Russian compound and the Chinese trading town of Maimaichen, a few miles from the main city, were permanent buildings common.

Throughout the year the population of the city would be bolstered by pious pilgrims, bringing offerings of food, money and incense. By local standards, Urga was a major site of religious tourism, sometimes drawing Buddhists from China and Tibet as well as from all the Mongol tribes. The Gandan Temple, the residence of the chief Mongolian oracles, was the most visited location, a steep and shadowy building designed to induce a suitable degree of fear and trembling in the approaching supplicant. The Bogd Khan's own palace, a couple of miles away, was a two-storeyed European-style affair, painted in lurid shades of green and yellow and greatly venerated. Today it seems a modest building, on the same scale as a decent sized English farm-house, but it was the first building in Mongolia to have more than one floor, and pilgrims would come to see the miracle of its staircase, treading gingerly upon each step.

Religion was not the only amusement. The ‘three manly sports' of wrestling, horse-riding and archery, the foundations of the Mongolian's old military might, were hugely popular. Men of all ages would come to compete against each other at tournaments, and informal matches were common; travellers reported young men racing on horseback through the city, or two bear-like amateur wrestlers grunting and shoving against each other in the street as their wives watched and cheered. The ‘three manly sports' were really five; drinking and boasting were considered equally important.
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The Mongolian assertion that ‘every man is Genghis Khan in his own tent' was surely heard as widely then as today, and if all the drunken claims of beasts slain, Chinese humiliated and women wooed were true, Mongolia was a nation of heroes.

Religious ceremonies, frequent and extravagant, were at the core of life in the city. At festival times the perimeter could expand to four or five times its normal size, acquiring a huge outer ring of gers and becoming a great campground with the city at its centre. New buildings would be hastily constructed to bear enormous statues or prayer-flags; rows of lamas danced through the streets; crowds cheered and clapped and prayed. Festivals were times of masks: skull-masks for the dancers of death, demon-masks stuck on poles to grin eerily in the sunlight like
disembodied heads, the great ox-mask of Erlik Kam, a legendary monk-turned-demon, curling horns dipped in blood and crown adorned with five skulls as eight terrible demons dance attendance around him.
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The smallpox god, his face red with buboes, and the blue-skinned, four-armed Yamantaka, God of Death, accompanied him. The heavy masks and robes turned the dancers into living marionettes, their strings pulled by the gods. Buddhist passion-plays, half spiritual metaphor and half kung-fu drama, were enacted before vast crowds, who would cheer and shout as the monk-actors fought battles of lama versus demon on stage, or wrestled with the temptations of the flesh - normally shown as a young woman, or at least a good-looking novice dressed as such. Despite the grand menace of the gathered demon-gods, and the awestruck respect shown to the great lamas, these were clearly crowd-pleasing events, a welcome respite from the daily grind of Mongolian life. The German traveller Rudolf Strasser describes one festival: