Sabres on the Steppes Read online

  In a book devoted to recounting the exploits of intrepid Englishman confronting tsarist Russia in defiance of their own government’s policies and instructions, it may seem as strange to come across the name of Captain Charles Christie as it was to find his body on the battlefield. He was – by his background and previous record – the very model of an exemplary and disciplined servant of the British Raj.

  He came from a family that was rapidly emerging in London as a byword for reliable and trustworthy business. For the first time, the wealthy citizens of London were entrusting their most precious possessions to a newly founded auction house which not only valued their family pictures, silver and furniture, but which attracted buyers from among the nouveau riche and even – a daring thought – from among rich foreigners. The house of Christie, Manson and Woods had been founded in 1766, only a few years before Charles Christie was born. But as a young man he rejected the possibility of a career in the family business and enlisted at the usual early age – scarcely out of school – in the army of the East India Company in Bombay.

  His first notable adventure was a signal of his later adventurousness. Together with a fellow officer, Lieutenant Henry Pottinger, he had been assigned the challenging task of reconnoitring the terrain between the western frontier of India (now Pakistan) and the eastern frontier of Persia (now Iran). This region, known as Beluchistan, was perceived as the likely line of advance for any invading army – from Napoleon’s France or Russia – intent on seizing the rich prize of Britain’s recently acquired Indian empire. He and Pottinger disguised themselves as Indian horse-dealers and, using their military training and experience, assessed the defensive potential of the forts and settlements in Baluchistan, and the rigours of the intervening steppes.

  During their travels, for tactical reasons, the two men split up and each had his own adventures.1 Christie’s prime destination was the citadel and oasis-city of Herat, on the frontier between Afghanistan and Persia. There was only one Englishman still alive who had dared to visit this remote but strategically important junction. It was here that caravan routes from such exotic destinations as Samarkand and Bokhara, Kashgar and Khiva, Meshed and Isfahan converged and Herat was known as the gateway to India, its rich valley providing both pastures and provisions for an invading army, and also access to the vital Khyber and Bolan Passes.

  Having parted from his companion, Christie faced not only the physical hazards of a desert and mountain journey, but also the human hazards of the bandit-infested region. Armed gangs of Afghans roamed the desert tracks in the hope of robbing travellers rash enough to venture into their terrain. The disguise of a Hindu horse-dealer, effective as it might be in allaying the suspicions of local elders and communities in Baluchistan, who would have dealt roughly and probably lethally with any detected spy, was no protection against predatory brigands. Indeed, it was a positive invitation to their attentions, as any merchant was assumed to be rich and vulnerable.

  So Christie abandoned his horse-dealer pose and adopted that of a Moslem holy man returning from a pilgrimage; such a traveller would appear less of an inviting target. But the new disguise had a different set of problems: everywhere he went, people would accost him and engage him in religious conversation. This was a Moslem world where everyone was interested in the niceties of Islamic lore and behaviour, and a holy man was expected to pronounce on doctrine. Christie only evaded embarrassing and dangerous penetration of his fake role by purporting to be a Sunni Moslem to Shiites, and a Shiite to Sunnis; while the subterfuge did not endear him to his interlocutors, it provided an excuse for retreating into silence on theological matters. Thus he survived the twin risks of ambush and exposure.

  When he approached the massive walls, moats and outer defences of Herat, however, Christie found it more convenient to revert to his Hindu horse-dealer guise. This gave him readier access to those who could inform him about the local resources necessary to sustain an army. He spent a month wandering around, covertly measuring walls and towers, and estimating how long such a desert stronghold could be expected to resist a modern, artillery-supported army. His conclusions were not reassuring, but were extremely valuable to his political and military masters in London and Calcutta. So far Christie’s career had followed a commendably dashing and useful course: he might be seen as a model for future Great Game players.

  But the very success of his mission was to lead him into uncharted waters as the European and Asian political scene was developing in unexpected ways. Soon after Christie’s journey across Baluchistan, Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I changed from being fast allies to deadly enemies as an unsurprising consequence of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. Russia thus became a valued ally of Britain in the concluding years of the Napoleonic wars. But it was still felt in London and Calcutta that the tsar and his imperial army remained the principal threat to the British Raj in India. The tsar’s boasts of his Cossacks one day watering their horses on the banks of the Indus resounded in the salons of Belgravia on his visit to London in 1814. To combat this threat, Britain was intent on consolidating good relations with the Shah. Persia, a friendly buffer state, was seen as a prerequisite for the security of the jewel in the crown of the British Empire.

  And consolidating good relations was not enough unless Persia was strengthened and given the wherewithal to resist Russian incursions. As early as 1807, General John Malcolm – the resident representative of the East India Company in Tehran – had written that ‘the English have an obvious and great interest in maintaining and improving the strength of Persia as a barrier to India’. It was for this reason that Lord Wellesley (the elder brother of the Duke of Wellington, a former governor-general of India, and now in 1812 the British foreign secretary) decided that it was necessary to send a substantial number of British officers, NCOs and private soldiers to train and raise the morale of the Shah’s army, and stiffen their resolve to contest any further Russian advance into the Shah’s domains. The Persian army was at the same time to be modernized by the supply of arms and equipment, including muskets and horse artillery. Britain was to make it possible for Persia to defend herself against Russia, but it was no part of Lord Wellesley’s policy for Britain herself to be directly involved in any confrontation between Tsar Alexander I and Fath Ali Shah.

  It was not altogether surprising that the man chosen to lead the team of British military advisers and trainers was a proven and locally experienced captain in the Bombay regiment of the East India Company – Charles Christie. While his former associate Henry Pottinger was allowed to go home and later pursue a high-flying career in the administration of the British Empire, Christie was sent to put some mettle into the Persian infantry. He was accompanied by Lieutenant Henry Lindsay of the Madras regiment, whose height (he was nearly seven foot tall) and commanding presence was said to remind the Persians of their own hero of antiquity – the giant Rustum.

  Under Christie’s gaze everything was done to bolster the Persians’ self-confidence. Cannons were manufactured with the Shah’s coat-of-arms emblazoned on their barrels; English-made uniforms in blue and scarlet replaced those earlier supplied by local or French sources, and almost gave the Shah’s troops the appearance of British soldiers – only with lambskin hats rather than bearskins. A drum-and-fife band was created to raise the spirit of the troops with martial music. Shaving was introduced and the formerly bewhiskered Persians began to look like European soldiers. The Persian crown prince, Abbas Mirza, saw himself (like Peter the Great of Russia a century earlier) as dragging his country out of Asia and into Europe and a new century.

  At first everything went well. The Persians managed to rout a small Russian force which was intruding across the Aras river in February 1812. The British guns proved as effective as hoped and the English officers had convinced the Persians that they could stand up to the Russians for the first time. The military advisers had won the respect of their Persian recruits and, for their part, had begun to feel affection towards and pride in the troops they
had trained. But there was a built-in flaw in the arrangements, and this was the line of command that was laid down: the British officers were to be responsible on a day-to-day basis to the Persian crown prince (who was head of the Shah’s army), but in the last resort they were to take their orders from the British Ambassador at Tehran.2

  This was a new appointment. Sir Gore Ouseley had been sent out from England in 1810 as the first ever ambassador to Tehran; the journey had taken him and his family, staff and escort more than six months by sea, in two Royal Naval warships via Bombay, to Bushire on the Persian Gulf. (A cow from England had been part of the entourage to provide milk for the party.) A further eight-month overland journey by rough caravan routes and mountain passes to Tehran was to follow, in the course of which Ouseley’s long-suffering young wife gave birth to a daughter at Shiraz – the first all-English child ever known to have been born in Persia. Now the ambassador was installed as a figure of prestige and authority. The authority over the British officers with the Persian army was to prove a crucial point when the Russians launched a serious offensive in the autumn of 1812. Aware of the sensitivity of Anglo-Russian relations, the British ambassador promptly forbade members of the British military training mission to take part in any further action against the Russians. The men were allowed to stay on in their training capacity but were ordered explicitly to leave the units to which they were attached in the event of hostilities breaking out again.

  As it turned out, the Russian attack was sudden and unexpected. The Persian crown prince wanted the British – and Christie in particular – to stay and fight with the troops they had instructed; he maintained that the newly trained Persian troops were still dependent on their British mentors, whom they saw as leaders and not merely as instructors. Christie wanted to stay too. To abandon those he had spent so long trying to inspire would let them down in their hour of need, and would destroy at a stroke the respect he had won for himself and his British compatriots. It was a fellow officer, Lieutenant William Monteith, who reported Christie as saying: ‘If he [Christie] was to face a court-martial for disobeying orders, it should be for fighting and not for running away.’

  Running away was what almost everyone else seemed to be doing. Even the crown prince at one stage ordered his men to retreat and, seizing his own banner, rode with it off the field of battle. Christie rallied his trainees around him and refused to withdraw; he finally fell where he stood, wounded in the neck. His Persian recruits saw their mentor fall and, as Monteith later reported, ‘more than half the battalion he had raised and disciplined himself’ were killed or wounded while trying to drag him to safety. They doubtless knew he would have done the same for them.

  The Englishman whom the Cossacks had tried to disarm and capture alive the following morning had died a hero’s death surrounded by the very soldiers in whom he had instilled a fighting spirit. But he was not a hero to his own government. He had put his sense of personal honour before his duty to comply with his orders. His death had embarrassed the Foreign Office in London and the British ambassador in Tehran, so much so that the latter – Sir Gore Ouseley – felt obliged to accept an invitation to negotiate a peace treaty between Russia and Persia the following year. The treaty was a most unfortunate one in that it formally ceded to Russia almost all the former Persian territory in the Caucasus north of the Aras river. This was the price for restoring Britain’s fragile diplomatic relations with the tsar after the disclosure of Christie’s involvement – against instructions – in the battle of Aslanduz. Russia had, as compensation for the affront, achieved a significant step further towards the frontier of her coveted destination – India. The Persians for their part were to resent the treaty to which they had been persuaded to acquiesce.

  Be that as it may, in the ultimate court-martial of public opinion in his own country, Christie was to stand acquitted. Insubordinate he may have been, but in death as in life he had behaved like an officer and a gentleman.

  1. For an account of Pottinger’s adventures, see the author’s book Shooting Leave: Spying Out Central Asia in the Great Game.

  2. Such complex lines of command and training duties are not unfamiliar even today, where NATO officers training the Afghan army wish to give as much status and authority as possible to the Afghan military hierarchy but are themselves ultimately under NATO (US and UK) command.

  Chapter 2

  William Moorcroft: The Uncontrollable

  Stud Manager

  ‘O! For a horse with wings!’

  – William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

  At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Honourable East India Company (‘John Company’ as it was widely known) not only employed a wide variety of traders and merchants (‘box wallahs’ as they were later to be dubbed) but also a large number of soldiers in its own army. Horses of good quality, with stamina, speed and manoeuvrability were much in demand, particularly for the cavalry, and in consequence the management of the company’s stud farm was an important and well-paid post. In 1808 the company took the unusual step of recruiting the most eminent horse vet in London and adviser to the royal mews to look after their stud farm at Pusa in northern India. They little knew what a problem they were landing themselves with.

  Before he set off for India William Moorcroft had already made and lost a fortune in England. He had become disillusioned London life, having launched a financially disastrous horseshoe business. He was exasperated by legal complications arising from negotiations to buy horses that turned out to be unsound. In addition he had embarked on a less-than-joyous marriage. In these circumstances, the offer of the job of manager of the East India Company’s stud farm at a salary of 30,000 rupees – an enormous sum on a par only with the salary of the governor-general and the commander-in-chief in India – was irresistible.

  From the beginning, however, he had his own agenda for his new job. This involved not just supervising the company’s stables, which was a difficult task in itself since horses, like men, suffered in health from the vagaries of the Indian climate on the plains, but also – Moorcroft decided – taking enterprising and unprecedented steps to improve the bloodstock line. He had heard, even before arriving, that somewhere in the hidden heart of the steppes of Central Asia was the homeland of a rare breed of spirited stallion which, if found and purchased, and brought safely to India, could transform the quality of the East India Company’s cavalry. To obtain such fresh blood was a challenge that appealed to him much more than his routine veterinarian duties.

  His first expedition in 1811, to Gurkha country in Nepal and returning through the Maratha region, took an unexpected eight months and was rather disappointing: he was more impressed with the emeralds he saw displayed by the local rajas than he was by the quality of their horses. To achieve his objective of robust cavalry stallions he would have to go further: beyond the limits of the company’s sway and protection. For the first time he aspired to reach the fabled city of Bokhara, a city unvisited by any Englishman since the Elizabethan envoy and trader Anthony Jenkinson in 1557, and which lay – as far as Moorcroft was concerned – inaccessibly far beyond Afghanistan and the Oxus river. This was to dominate the rest of his life.

  Moorcroft had hardly got back to Pusa from his first sojourn before he started lobbying for permission to make further trips. Of course the bloodstock question was the ostensible reason: he felt that for too long the stud had depended on unsuitable Arab horses. But there were other motives of which he was probably less consciously aware: at heart he was an adventurer and not an administrator. As a young man – he was already well over forty before he uprooted to India – he had put his life at risk by visiting France during the most turbulent times of the French Revolution. His itch to travel dangerously resulted in his setting off to Nepal again and to Tibet by the middle of 1812. He could not pretend that this was the most direct route to Bokhara and the home of the much-desired Turkoman horses, but the truth of it was that he had become almost equally obsessed by the prospect o
f opening a trade route between India and China, in particular the trade of goat’s-wool shawls that came from Kashmir and the surrounding territories.

  This time the Gurkhas were less friendly, and he and his companions were captured and held for several weeks on suspicion of being secret scouts for some invading force – why else should they be travelling without permission, apparently in disguise and so far from British India? Moorcroft was tempted to escape before his release, but calculated that the plentiful bears and tigers in the surrounding forests and mountains might prove more lethal than his Gurkha guards. Meanwhile, he made friends with his captors as best he could, mostly by treating them for venereal and other diseases; his veterinarian skills were versatile.

  After this trip, the East India Company board of directors – his masters – expressed their displeasure at the risks he had taken and at his tendency to disregard the company’s rules and follow his own interests and inclinations. He received a written reprimand from the governor-general himself along these lines, and afterwards the board took a lot of persuading that he should ever be allowed to take indefinite leave from the stud to travel in search of horses again. In fact it was eight years before Moorcroft managed to get the necessary consent to set off on his ultimate and most ambitious journey of all.