Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (15 page)

‘B
EFOR the Boer War’, wrote Sir Edward Grey, ‘we were spoiling for a fight. Any Government … could have had war by lifting a finger. The people would have shouted for it. Now this generation has had enough excitement….’

It was true. The militarism, so briefly summoned, was over already, and the crude aggression had gone out of the Empire. Since Black Week the British had been recognizably on the defensive, even in attack. They had already lost the violent bravado which had been an inescapable part of Victorian imperialism, and which Lord Salisbury had once grandly described as ‘but the surf that marks the edge of the wave of advancing civilization’. ‘The vast majority of the Cabinet’, wrote Lord George Hamilton, ‘look with apprehension and dislike on any movement or any action which is likely to produce war or disturbance in any part of the British Empire.’

One last aggression of the old sort was launched, but there was no heart to it. It was conceived in India, the most traditionalist of imperial possessions, by Lord Curzon, the most historically minded of pro-consuls; its purpose was the establishment of British influence in that last stronghold of obscurantism, Tibet; yet it never rang true, and brought no glory with it.

For generations the British in India had been obsessed with the Russian menace. This was understandable. During the last 400 years, it was estimated, the Russians’ own empire, on the other side of the Himalayan massif, had been growing at the rate of fifty-five square miles a day, and by the 1900s it was steadily advancing, with
railway lines and garrisons, through the deserts of Central Asia towards the Indian frontier, besides nibbling eastward into the borderlands of China. ‘We must be very careful’, the Queen wrote in 1900, ‘and well prepared, and have plenty of artillery.’ The Russians themselves realized that their putative threat to India was the one sure way of circumventing British command of the seas, and influencing British foreign policy, and they played the Great Game of the Indian approaches assiduously, to the satisfaction of the Tsar and the frequent consternation of Calcutta.

The British fluctuated in their responses. Sometimes they retreated behind their own frontiers, leaving an undefended No-Man’s-Land, sometimes they went to the opposite extreme, breaking out of India altogether to impose their authority in neighbouring States. They even toyed with the idea of countering a Russian invasion of India by an attack on Finland, then a Russian province, or the Caucasus. By the turn of the twentieth century they had achieved a mean. Their main defence lines were well within India, but they had established along their northern frontiers a series of neutral States, more or less subject to British policy, bound by treaty to allow no foreign influences within their borders, and thus providing a
cordon
sanitaire
along the Himalayas.
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One State in particular stood outside this system, and that the most inaccessible of all: Tibet, whose capital was virtually unknown to Europeans, whose inner affairs were plumbed only by spies and hearsay, but whose frontiers marched with India’s. To Curzon this exception was at once sinister and compelling. He profoundly distrusted the Russians. He watched with foreboding the slow progress of their railway lines, ever closer across the steppes, and their advance into Chinese Turkestan, and he took very seriously the incessant rumours of Russian intrigue and subversion gathered by his powerful intelligence system—that ever-present engine of suggestion and report, that sub-world of agents and informers, which Kipling immortalized in
Kim
. He believed that the Russians
really had designs upon India, and by 1903 he thought that the chief danger came by way of Tibet.

There was no British representative at the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, and the information that reached him from inside the country was dim but disturbing.
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Tibet’s Government was arcane, for its titular head, the Dalai Lama, was a monk called to office by destiny as a reincarnation of all his predecessors. The incumbent in 1903, Nga-Wang Lobsang Tupden Hyatso, The Precious Protector, the All-Knowing Presence, was one of the few Dalai Lamas to reach his majority, most of them being eliminated in childhood for the convenience of Regency Councils, but he was theoretically subject anyway to a higher political suzerainty: for 200 years the Chinese Empire had claimed authority over Tibet, and a representative of that dilapidated Power, called the Amban, was always resident in Lhasa as a kind of Viceroy. As for the everyday Government of the State, it was altogether in the hands of the country’s Buddhist lamas, who exercised despotic authority from their enormous high-walled monasteries, and were not only the priests, administrators and landlords of the country, but its policemen and soldiers too.

Tibet also marched with Russia, and it was repeatedly rumoured that the Russians had achieved some hold over Lhasa. Sometimes military missions were said to have reached the city, sometimes an ambassador was supposed to be in residence, sometimes the Russians had concluded a treaty of alliance with the Tibetans, or had definitively persuaded them that Russia was the legendary land of Shambala, the Source of Luck. The Dalai Lama’s tutor, a Mongol Buddhist who was in fact born in Russian territory, was generally assumed to be a Russian agent, while the Tsar was repeatedly rumoured to have become a Buddhist himself.

Shadowy and sometimes preposterous though these reports were, Curzon was legitimately concerned. His own advances to the Dalai
Lama had been twice rebuffed. Besides being insufferably impertinent—‘the most grotesque and indefensible thing’—this attitude seemed to suggest a deeper Tibetan hostility towards Britain. Relations between the two countries, vestigial at best, became at once remoter and testier. There were petty border disputes, between the frontier officers of the British Empire, far away in the last yak-meadows of the Raj, and the secretive priests who spoke for the Dalai Lama on his southern marches. Grazing rights were contested, trading arrangements were repudiated, and a British proposal to demarcate the frontier more exactly was murkily rejected.

But when Curzon suggested that some action should be taken over Tibet, London was unresponsive. Lord Lansdowne the Foreign Secretary was trying to improve relations with the Russians, and the last thing he wanted was any recrudescence of the Great Game. Besides, they did not take Tibetan dangers very seriously in Downing Street. Curzon was a notorious exponent of the Forward Policy—‘Let me beg you as a personal favour’, Sir William Harcourt had asked him when he had first gone to India, ‘not to make war on Russia in my lifetime’—and they suspected that he was now exploiting trivial episodes to achieve dramatic ends.

When, therefore, in the spring of 1903, the Viceroy of India resolved to impose the will of the British Empire upon the refractory Tibetans, he did so less in obedience to Balfour’s Government in London than to his own instincts in Calcutta. ‘Of course we do not want their country,’ he wrote, ‘but it is important that no one else should seize it’: and nothing could ever be done with Tibetans, he uncharacteristically added, until they were frightened.

He chose as his chief confidant in the scheme a man scarcely less ardent and impulsive than himself, Francis Younghusband of the King’s Dragoon Guards. The son of an Indian Army general, Younghusband was an Englishman who could trace his forebears to Saxon times, but he had discovered like Curzon romantic affinities with Central Asia, and had become famous in his twenties for an astonishing solitary journey overland from China to Kashmir.
Thereafter he had become a prominent player of the Great Game, as explorer, as theorist, as Political Agent in Chitral, and so it was that in May, 1903, he was summoned to Simla, the summer capital of India, into the presence of the Viceroy.

Younghusband was a kind of mystic. Very short, conventionally moustached, with clear blue eyes and a somewhat peremptory expression, he had been at Clifton with Henry Newbolt, married the daughter of an MP (‘I was not really suited to my wife’, he recorded blandly in old age) and often acted as correspondent for that daily tapestry of orthodoxy,
The
Times
. He was much concerned with ‘face’ and image, with other peoples’ opinions, and he was an eager puller of strings. He was ambitious, he could be double-faced, and in his fortieth year he was aggressively imperialist—the Tibetans, he said, were ‘not a fit people to be left to themselves between two great Empires’.

Behind this abrasive front, though, he was a dreamer. The landscapes and philosophies of Asia had profoundly, if hazily, affected his thought. He toyed with ideas of reconciliation and renunciation, the fusion of faiths, inner lights and brotherhoods. Not a very intellectual man, educated to practical tasks and not widely read, he approached these mysteries with an ingenuous wonder. The Himalayan presences, opaquely drifting through the high valleys of Sikkim and Chitral, expressing themselves it seemed in the marvellous snow-peaks of Pamir and Hindu Kush, deeply moved him, and when he crossed the northern frontiers he went not simply as soldier or explorer, but as slightly winsome pilgrim too.

It was to this impressionable man, part ‘
B.O.P.
’, part Light of Asia, that Lord Curzon confided his plan for the taming of Tibet. It was almost like a Curzonian Jameson Raid. Since London would sanction nothing bolder, the Viceroy proposed first to send a frontier commission to open negotiations with the Tibetans at Khamba Jong, an almost invisible settlement fifteen miles over the Tibetan frontier from Sikkim. There the British, the Tibetans and representatives of the Chinese Amban would meet, overtly to settle the frontier difficulties, tacitly to impress upon the Tibetans—‘these wretched little people’—the true strength and authority of the Empire. After that—who knew? An occupation? A permanent mission? At least,
both Curzon and Younghusband undoubtedly hoped, a sphere of influence once and for all.

Younghusband leaped at the chance to lead this venture, and viewed its purpose spaciously. It would, he thought, not merely keep the Russians out of Tibet, but would ‘prevent the junction of any future spheres of French and Russian influence north and south across Asia’. At Simla he and Curzon discussed the scheme. It was the height of the summer season, a gymkhana was in progress, and Simla was full of ponies, girls in summer dresses, handsome young subalterns, proud mothers and more than usually indulgent administrators. Always in sight, though, beyond the tower of the Anglican church and the flagstaffs of the Viceroy’s palace, beyond the last flower-potted villa, the furthest picnic ground, the highest thicket of pines, there shone the unimaginable mass of the mountains, the ramparts of Tibet.

Over there lay the minds of the two Englishmen, as they sat in their deck-chairs watching the competitions, straw hats tilted over their eyes, Curzon now and then interrupting their conversation with viceregal formalities—‘Well done Miss Leatherby, splendid round’—‘Such a nice boy of yours, General, I’m so glad to see him doing well.’ There was a rapport between the two men. They had last met in the mountains, when Younghusband had been Political Agent at Chitral, and Curzon had been his guest (‘both a pleasure and a trial’, he had reported home). Both loved the feel of the high places, both relished an adventure, both were active imperialists, both were convinced of Russian designs upon Tibet. An element of collusion sealed their understanding, Younghusband feeling flattered by the great man’s confidence, Curzon sensing that he had found a willing instrument. Their plans were settled among the deodars, to the laughter of memsahibs and the badinage of subalterns, and Younghusband left Simla in high spirits. ‘This is a really magnificent business’, he wrote to his father, home in retirement in England, ‘that I have dropped in for.’

The first part of the plan proved, as the two men perhaps hoped,
abortive. The mission crossed the frontier safely, and encamped upon a grassy knoll at Khamba Jong: but though they stayed there for five months, and Younghusband spent long hours in constructive meditation—for it was, he wrote, ‘high up among the loftiest mountain summits … that the very essence of sublimity must be sought for’—still they achieved nothing at all. After some weeks a delegation did arrive from Lhasa to see what was happening, but its lamas firmly declined to negotiate, shutting themselves up incommunicado in a nearby fort. The mission accordingly withdrew again, and in the winter of 1903 Curzon put into effect the next part of his scheme.

This was much more drastic. Now Younghusband was to occupy an entire Tibetan valley, the Chumbi, and take his mission far deeper into Tibet, some 150 miles to the town of Gyangtse. Balfour’s Government sanctioned this proposal even more reluctantly. The Prime Minister, it was minuted, ‘is incredulous as to the importance of Tibetan trade, and dislikes the idea of allowing ourselves to be permanently entangled in Tibet’. Sanctioned it was, nevertheless, and so a die was cast. When Younghusband went back to Simla for consultations, he asked Lord Kitchener, the Commander-in-Chief, if he could take some British soldiers with him, to reinforce the imperial message. Kitchener saw the point at once. ‘All right,’ he replied, ‘you shall have a section of a British mountain battery and two Maxim gun detachments, all of British soldiers, and I will give orders that not a single man is to be under six feet.’

So the British Government, far away, found themselves committed to an imperial military incursion into a neighbouring independent State. Curzon had won his point. It was to be one of the most bizarre and demanding such expeditions ever mounted. The idea of crossing the Himalayan passes in the middle of winter was dismissed by most strategists as lunatic, but Younghusband was convinced it was possible, and Curzon was determined to get into Tibet as soon as possible. The Jelap La, the main pass from Sikkim into Tibet, was rough and narrow, and no wheeled vehicle could cross it: instead everything the Mission had, all its food, all its supplies, all the tentage, equipment and ammunition for 1,200 men, had to be carried on the backs of animals and humans. Some 10,000
porters, men and women, were recruited, and nearly 20,000 animals—mules, bullocks, buffaloes, ponies, Nepalese yaks, Tibetan yaks, 6 camels and 2 ‘zebrules’, half zebra, half donkey, which were taken along as an experiment.
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Even the track had to be re-made, for it was blocked everywhere with ice and landslides and in its upper reaches was deep in snow.