Sabres on the Steppes Page 10

  It was at this point, in 1818, that Gardner met up with two travelling companions who were equally disenchanted with Russia and set out with them intending to go through Persia and Afghanistan to the Punjab. But he was deflected from his route and eventually set off on what turned out to be twelve years of apparently aimless wandering through the wilder parts of Central Asia. He tells his own troubled story in his memoirs, written much later and – possibly for that reason – full of the sort of inaccuracies, vagueness of specifics and surprising omissions that have led later critics to doubt their authenticity.

  Gardner pretended to be a native of Arabia, as he felt this assumed nationality made him less conspicuous and less likely to be sold for ransom (he had survived one attempt to do this already) than if he had claimed to be a European. Also, he met very few Arabic speakers and when he did he always pretended to come from the opposite corner of Arabia and, for this reason, to speak the language in his own peculiar way.

  When they were about ten days’ journey from Khiva, Gardner and his caravan had their first really serious encounter. They had brushed off a marauding party of some twenty horsemen, telling them to get lost ‘like dogs’, only to find that the horsemen were the advance guard of a much larger troop of Turkoman warriors who duly plundered their possessions – Gardner losing his pony. They were however relieved that ‘our lives were to be spared, and we and our women were not to be sold into slavery, the ordinary doom on such occasions’. One of the Jewish merchants in the caravan sought to protect his own interests by suggesting that Gardner was a Russian spy – something that was much feared in an area where Russian incursions were already beginning to be a feature. The Khan of Khiva sent ‘three learned men who had travelled over half the world’ to cross-examine Gardner and get to the bottom of the accusations.

  Gardner thought it best in these circumstances to forget his Arab disguise and declare himself an American. He was then asked ‘could I go by land from America to England?’ When he said firmly ‘No!’, this was considered sufficient proof of his American identity. His original travelling companion, Mr Stursky, who had gone separately to Khiva, had been less fortunate: this ‘hapless man had only bought his escape from Khiva at the price of circumcision in a public ceremonial’. Nothing daunted by all these escapades, Gardner and Stursky pressed on to the Aral Sea, crossed the steppe to Alexandrovsk, and took ship across the Caspian Sea to Astrakhan.

  Gardner stayed in Astrakhan for more than a year, but here ‘imbibed a prejudice against the Russian method of conducting business, and preferred to remain his own master’. His dislike of Russians was also probably enhanced by the fact that he spent or lost all the small fortune left to him by his brother. In 1823 he set off on his travels again – once more across the Caspian and the steppes – declaring that ‘he could not rest in civilized countries’. He exchanged his Russian furs for the garb of an Uzbek – a black sheepskin coat and black boots and puttees – and was joined by another footloose traveller whom he suspected of being an escaped convict from Siberia.

  As they approached Samarkand, where one of Gardner’s party claimed to have good connections, they were confronted by a band of freebooters who ‘on the pretext we had intruded without leave in their territory’ first made a demand for the handover of their horses and a share of all their goods, and then – when this was not forthcoming – stole these things from their camp. Gardner organized a reprisal raid and prowled around the camp of the robbers for two nights ‘being fired on once or twice in mistake for wild animals’. Eventually they managed to recapture their own horses. When some pursuers ordered them to yield up their booty ‘in the name of the government’, Gardner recorded that ‘we slew them and fled on’. By now the whole surrounding steppe was up in arms. It was little wonder that at this point they decided that, despite any promising introductions, Samarkand had become too hot a destination for their safety.

  They decided instead to strike south, crossing the Oxus, making their way to Kabul, in the hope of offering their services to Dost Mohammad, who was in the violent process of establishing himself as ruler of most of Afghanistan. En route they were living off the country in the most literal way: ‘Food we obtained by levying contributions from everyone we could master, but we did not slaughter unless in self-defence’. One such self-styled defence involved the killing of three armed men.

  When approaching Kabul and before they had any opportunity of offering their services to Dost Mohammad, Gardner and his party were intercepted by a mounted guard representing the ruler’s rival – a certain Habib-ulla Khan who was a nephew of the ruler. Realizing that ‘nothing but audacity and tact could save us’, Gardner appealed for this rival’s protection, which was generously granted. It transpired that Habib-ulla Khan was himself an outlaw, but a very charismatic one with a large and strong following. He was in fact the perfect patron for Gardner, who declared that ‘being favourably impressed by his appearance and manner, I proffered the services of myself and my followers, which were readily accepted, and I was engaged as commandant of 180 picked horse to be employed in forays into the enemy’s country’. Gardner had in fact signed up with the opponent of the man he had intended to serve, but with the sort of remit to range, rove and plunder which suited him well.

  In his memoirs, Gardner records that: ‘From this date for a period of two and a half years I led a life in the saddle, one of active warfare and continual forays’. Habib-ulla Khan (or ‘the chief’ as he was henceforth labelled by Gardner) and his warriors managed to dominate all the mountainous region to within twenty miles north of Kabul; his followers were not paid a salary, but expected to live off their takings and share the proceeds of such loot as they could acquire. The chief was their leader in every struggle and every fight; his war cries struck terror into his opponents; he had personally saved the lives of most of his followers by his courageous interventions; he was clearly Gardner’s hero.

  One of the chief’s objectives was to settle old scores with his uncle Dost Mohammad. He saw an opportunity for this when his spies informed him that one of the ladies of Dost Mohammad’s harem with an escort of some fifty horsemen was about to return from pilgrimage to Kabul, passing through territory dominated by the chief. (The purpose of her pilgrimage had been to seek holy intercession for her fertility.) Dost Mohammad had sent additional troops to secure most of the passes to protect his wife, the princess. Gardner takes up the tale: ‘By a clever ruse [. . .] we induced the lady’s escort to divert their route to the Ghorband Pass where Habib-ulla lay in wait [. . .] we attacked them front and rear [. . .] eventually we made off with the camels laden with treasure and those on which the lady and her attendants were carried’.

  The chief entrusted this entire prize caravan to Gardner while he himself covered their retreat. They were soon engaged in fierce conflict with ‘the Kabul cavalry’, but the chief’s courage and dash extricated them from their pursuers.

  In the course of all this marauding and fighting, Gardner caught sight of a beautiful girl who was one of the kidnapped princess’s attendants. When it came to dividing out the spoils, he refused his share of the gold and ‘begged this girl to be given to me in marriage as the only reward I desired’. She turned out to be of royal birth on her mother’s side, but notwithstanding that Gardner had his request granted, and was additionally given a fort in which to install his new bride. The kidnapped princess was also installed with dignity in a fort of her own and eventually ransomed for 3,000 gold pieces, five horses and three large falcons. She was returned for this price ‘with her personal honour untarnished’. But the rivalry and warfare between uncle and nephew persisted.

  The next major initiative in the conflict was taken by Dost Mohammad. He sent two mullahs to the chief’s camp, ostensibly to bring about a reconciliation and to convert the chief to ‘the right faith’. The mullahs stood on the road waving and accosting passers by and establishing a reputation for being crazy eccentrics with ‘fanatical airs’. But later they were seen
to be standing on the top of one of the turrets on Gardner’s fort and signalling to ‘armed strangers who had been skulking about the ravines’. Whistled responses were heard from the valleys. It was immediately clear that the mullahs were spies and traitors within the fort. One of Gardner’s fort wardens promptly shot them dead; thereafter the label of ‘saint-killers’ was added to the other insults heaped on the chief and Gardner by the Kabul government.

  Dost Mohammad now sent his whole army, some 12,000-strong, to destroy the chief’s raiding parties and his forts. In the course of a bloody campaign in March 1826 while the snow was still lying deeply around the Panjshir Valley north of Kabul, Gardner’s own fort was attacked and his wife and baby son killed – the former by her own hand to preserve her honour, and the latter (despite the efforts of a loyal mullah to protect the child at the cost of his own hand being severed) by a blow from an attacker’s sabre. On hearing the news, and shortly afterwards seeing for himself the bodies of his slaughtered family, Gardner sank to his knees and vowed vengeance. To the end of his life, he was never able to retell the story without shedding tears for his dearly loved wife and child. And to the end of his life he held a bitter grudge against Dost Mohammad which, as the latter became increasingly inclined to flirt with Russian patronage at the expense of British India, stoked his hatred of Russia and all things Russian.

  Habib-ulla Khan – Gardner’s chief – now withdrew in despair further into the mountains and slew his wives and female slaves with his own hands ‘to preserve them from dishonour’. He died shortly thereafter, and Gardner – severely wounded in the recent fights – was left once more without a protector. He set off, virtually destitute, with just eight companions. They slept in caves in the hills, frequently too frightened even to light a fire in case they gave their position away: it was all ‘a wild and sickening dream’. They were so desperate for food that they robbed anyone they encountered – often the only such people being other bands of equally unscrupulous robbers, but happily for him, Gardner and his mates proved faster on the draw than those they encountered. On one occasion the mouth of the cave where they were hiding was blocked by an avalanche, but the avalanche had also killed a ‘hyena-like animal’, which they considered as a godsend as they set about eating it half raw.

  Eventually things were getting so desperate that they decided their best hope of survival was heading for a place of sanctuary, a shrine on the south bank of the Oxus inhabited by hermits. They abandoned their Afghan disguises (which had replaced the earlier Arab ones) and dressed themselves as a bunch of itinerant Turkomans. When they reached the shrine, they were well received, had their feet washed in warm water and were fed and clothed, Gardner himself being given a leopardskin cloak by the leading hermit. They promptly joined the pious group of his disciples. But even here they did not feel safe from the long arm of Dost Mohammad’s pursuing squadrons of cavalry. Gardner, who had once again been confirmed as leader of the party, decided that they should move on, not least to protect their shelterers from reprisals by troops from Kabul.

  At no point in all his rambling tales of his adventures and travels is Gardner more elusive about precise locations. ‘I will not weary you with details of our marches’, he writes, drawing down on himself the suspicion of some subsequent travellers that his unwillingness to be specific about place names suggests that he had never undertaken some of the journeys and adventures he recounts. At this point, however, he tells us that he was on the way to a place called Takht-i-Sulaiman. His main problem was that while he wanted to put as much space as possible between himself and the forces of Dost Mohammad in Kabul, there was a considerable stretch of open land between the relative shelter of the Hindu Kush and the Oxus which was patrolled by roving bands of gunmen answering to Murad Beg, the ruler of Kunduz (also in Afghanistan), who was almost as menacing a figure for Gardner as the ruler of Kabul.

  So it was not surprising that when a considerable body of apparently hostile horsemen approached them, they galloped for the nearest pass at full speed, only to find it cut off by another body of horsemen who ordered them to halt in the name of Murad Beg. Gardner’s party laid into them with their spears and Afghan knives. But by then the earlier party of horsemen had caught up with them. Gardner recalls: ‘The fray now became general, as the main body charged us, trying to save their comrades. This fortunately prevented their using their matchlocks [. . .] their overwhelming numbers, however, soon broke our ranks [. . .] there was no room for orderly fighting, and it was a mere cut and thrust affair.’ Gardner himself was badly wounded again and reported that with his two new wounds, one of which was bleeding freely, and with two older wounds still raw, he was so weak that he nearly fell from the saddle; but he did manage to ride to safety through the pass with the five survivors of his party of thirteen. He concluded that the only reason their attackers had not pursued them further was that they were too preoccupied stripping the bodies of those who had fallen of any arms or other objects of value.

  As they proceeded on their haphazard flight, punctuated by skirmishes and robberies, they became aware of the extent to which the inhabitants of the territory around Kunduz were living in terror of Murad Beg’s raiding parties: whole villages had been carried off for sale in the slave markets of Kunduz, Khiva or Bokhara. Everyone was – understandably – suspicious and frightened of them: hospitality was rare. River crossings were a problem too: at one point where a bridge had been destroyed, he managed to ‘bind blocks of ice together with straw ropes, which when covered with grass formed a means of crossing for us and our horses’. At another point, they ran into a pack of wolves that were intent on stealing the carcass of a sheep shot by Gardner’s companion; even when they hid the carcass under a pile of rocks, the wolves managed to drag it out and devour it. It was all they could do to stop the wolves devouring them too. Doubtless this episode, like others, did not lose anything in the telling.

  The baffling feature of Gardner’s rambling and at times improbable stories is that some of them bear verification from other sources. His description of a tribal wedding among the Kirghiz people is a case in point. On the other hand his untraceably confusing journeys through the Pamirs and Kafiristan leave curious gaps and test the credulity of the reader. Despite his earlier dread of Dost Mohammad, he apparently reached Kabul at one stage on his travels, where he not surprisingly found that there were too many Afghans whose close relatives – fathers, brothers or sons – he had killed or wounded in his earlier escapades; in a country ‘where blood-feuds were a sacred duty’ this made it far too dangerous to linger longer than necessary: somebody would have found it necessary to settle an old score and he would have been the victim. But his capacity to survive and depend on no one but himself seems to have extricated him from a remarkable number of tight spots. As Sir Henry Durand (a one-time governor of the Punjab and hero of the First Afghan War) remarked: ‘Gardner seems to have been indebted for life, and that many a time over, to his cool audacity, which never failed him for a moment, be the straight what it might’.

  Indeed, Sir Henry Durand and Sir Henry Rawlinson (a president of both the Royal Asian Society and the Royal Geographical Society) were both clearly impressed with his story, despite the vagueness of some of the details of his travels; and Sir Alexander ‘Bokhara’ Burnes also might well have spoken up for him had he – Burnes – not been killed in Kabul in 1841, and had not many of Gardner’s papers (which were lent to Burnes at the time) been destroyed in the ensuing hostilities. Some of his papers which did survive, at least for a while, were the notes he scribbled on his travels and concealed by interleafing them with the pages of the Koran he carried on a cord round his neck while travelling in Islamic dress. Anyone who was brazen enough to look closely at these scribblings was accused of being disrespectful to his ‘additional prayers’.

  What we do know for certain is that after all his nefarious escapades Gardner settled in the Punjab, where he was entrusted with charge of the Maharaja’s artillery, though even in his c
apacity as an artillery officer he was skating on thin ice and – as confessed in his own memoirs – relying ‘on a small printed slip of paper giving instructions’ (which he conveniently found enclosed in a bundle of fuses and other material) to establish his reputation as a master gunner. Nothing with Gardner was quite as it appeared. Later still he was to return to Kashmir and settle there until his death in extreme old age.

  In this last stage of his life, his real or embroidered experience of Central Asia won him wide acclaim and ready audiences. He sat in Kashmir decked in tartan (bought from a visiting highland regiment) from head to foot – or more accurately from turban to spurs – in a curious uniform of his own design. He used his influence to warn against the dangers of Russian advances towards the vulnerable frontiers of British India, and to alert British and Indian authorities to the realities of Russian territorial ambitions. He speculated: ‘May it not be suggested [. . .] that Afghanistan may fall to Russia if attacked [. . .] an army might steal its way down the Chitral valley, and suddenly dash on the astounded and probably weak garrison of Jalalabad.’ He also wrote extensively on the theme of the Russian threat and was an advocate of a ‘forward’ policy to pre-empt incursions from the north. He pressed his views on Lord Lawrence when the latter was Viceroy of India in the 1860s. He had never forgotten or forgiven his harsh treatment by the Russians as a young man before he began his peripatetic and dubious career.

  While most of the protagonists in this book, although they may have acted occasionally outside their instructions, were essentially honourable officers or respectable professionals of one sort or another, Gardner was essentially a rogue and a chancer. British he was by descent; an adventurer he was by inclination; a confronter of tsarist Russian policies he was by conviction and reasons of personal animosity. But as Major Hugh Pearse, the retrospective editor of Gardner’s memoirs in 1898, concluded, ‘as a student of ‘‘the great game in Central Asia’’ he was in the front rank’.