The Bloody White Baron (22 page)

Xu was genuinely concerned with improving the Mongolian economy, planning an extensive programme of reforms and attempting grandiose building projects, such as the construction of a large radio station to ensure regular communications with Peking. He was also a classical Chinese warlord, however, and the Mongolians found themselves presented with demands for back tax, forced to pay a duty on all exports and impressed into service with Xu's army. Xu's bullying of the Mongolian aristocracy was mirrored by the bullying of his soldiers. Everyday brutality by the Chinese hurt Mongolian pride, and risked reprisal. American intelligence reported that ‘it is no uncommon sight to see a Chinese policeman-soldier beating a Mongol child on the streets here, although you can bet that they let the grown ones alone unless they are in force'.
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The Mongolian nobility began to put out tentative feelers for foreign support, and to make discreet enquiries as to where a new arsenal might be obtained.

There was also tension between the Chinese soldiers and the monasteries. Tibetan Buddhism made some inroads into China, but
had a poor reputation. Popular stories often associated it with sexual rituals, human sacrifice, corruption, and a host of other evils. Buddhism as a whole was often stuck with this reputation, but the Tibetan branch got it worst. Most of this was due to religious jealousy, prurience, and xenophobia; the equivalent of English anti-Catholic fantasies of the lurid
Maria Monk
type. (I heard a few examples of such prejudice even today in China; a nice modern touch was added by the supposedly high percentage of ex-convicts - or ex-soldiers, to Chinese thinking almost as bad - among Buddhist monks, ever ready, according to the Chinese, to slip back into their old ways.) Xu's soldiers frequently harassed monks and pilgrims and stole from the temples.

Xu was suspicious of the foreigners in Urga, particularly the European merchants. Only the Japanese found it easy to do business, and the rest of the foreign community in Urga, swollen with Russian refugees, was also regularly squeezed for money. Families who had fled the Bolsheviks with whatever they could carry found themselves stripped of their few remaining possessions by the Chinese soldiers. Even the Chinese merchants suffered from the high-handed manner of their compatriots, organising a self-defence group to protect their own property. Buddhist ritual, the lifeblood of Urga, was curtailed, causing great resentment. It reminded the Mongols of centuries-old stories of seventeenth-century Chinese punitive expeditions, when temples had been burnt and ransacked across the country, leaving still-visible ruins.
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The Bogd Khan complained that Chinese greediness had ‘become unbearable day by day, hurting our land, people, and wealth'. He was no longer allowed to drive his beloved cars during festivals and had to heave himself through the crowds of pilgrims on foot.

Resentment was growing day by day, but the military stranglehold of the Chinese army was too tight for the Mongolians to take action by themselves. Ungern offered the possibility of freedom. He contacted the Bogd by secret messenger, asking for entrance to Urga and declaring that ‘I, Baron Ungern, of the Russian imperial lineage, intend to enter Khuree (Urga) according to the Mongolian customs of friendship, accompanied by soldiers, to provide assistance to the Bogd Khan, to protect Mongolia, and to set it free from ruthless Chinese oppression.'
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His ambitions were grander than that, though, after ‘providing to the Mongolians seven cannons and four thousand rifles'
he and his men would become the nucleus of a new Mongolia, which would bring together ‘an army made up of all the nations formerly under the rule of Genghis Khan.'
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The Bogd responded eagerly, requesting that Ungern come to Urga as quickly as possible. A cannier and more realistic political operative than Ungern, he hoped for independence but the dream-talk of a revived Mongolian Empire probably meant little to him. Perhaps he thought that it was just bluster, the empty boasts of a man desperate to impress a potential ally.

For Ungern, though, it was deadly serious. And among ordinary Mongolians, too, old prophecies of a foreign saviour were being spread once more, dreams of white kings, Shambhala, liberation from the enemies of the faith. Some parts of the prophecies seemed to have already come to pass. As one prophecy circulated twenty years earlier had put it, the Mongolians were being ‘tortured by enemy armies [. . .] the arms of the enemy will be in the city [. . .] the people of the great Khan will be killed'.
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But they would have to endure worse before the liberation, and the heavenly kingdom which followed, could come. The prophecies said so - fire, torture and blood.

Armies have a pleasing look on military charts, neat little boxes that suggest orderliness, discipline, drill. Ungern's army was a straggling, ungainly mess, a long way from this image. Nobody even seemed to be clear how many soldiers there were. Ungern's habit of burning paperwork and his hatred of red tape made things unclear even to him. Later legends spoke of a tiny band of brothers, thirty-five men dedicated to Ungern-Sternberg, but this was wild fantasy - probably, as with some other stories about Ungern, a confusion of his career with Semenov, who had started the Siberian counter-revolution with just a handful of officers. Even before Ungern arrived there were White forces roaming the further reaches of Mongolia, clusters of renegade soldiers barely surviving on the charity provided by the locals, or who had turned to banditry in order to survive.

One of the largest, with two hundred or so men, was led by Colonel Kazagrandi, a ‘decent and honourable man' who had led his group of refugees since spring 1920, when they had escaped from the Red
conquest of Irkutsk and practised guerrilla warfare against the Bolsheviks from the taiga. When this became too dangerous, they had fled from place to place, scraping a living and surviving in terrible conditions, eventually ending up in Mongolia. Now Ungern, whom Kazagrandi had never met, represented a new, faint hope for the White cause. Despite hearing disturbing stories of the Baron's ‘wild temper and improbable cruelty', he reluctantly sent messengers to Ungern and accepted his command, hoping that the rumours were exaggerated or untrue. His hopes were to be proved sadly wrong.

Imagine a nomad family, somewhere in the plains of northern Mongolia in the autumn of 1920, making their autumn camp. There are probably seven or eight people in the family, and their nearest neighbours are an hour's ride away.
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Over the course of the last year they have seen, at the most, a hundred people; their nomadic neighbours, some traders visiting to buy furs, a wandering fortune-teller, travellers stopping to spend the night, a refugee Russian family grateful for the freely offered shelter and food. If they were particularly unlucky, maybe a group of Chinese soldiers, passing to garrison duty on the new frontier, stopped to seize some of their livestock. Perhaps a couple of them once made a pilgrimage to the capital, saw the great gatherings there, but it is hard for them to imagine such a crowd in the stark isolation of the steppe.

Away from the herds and the ger, the landscape is dead silent, only the occasional cry of a falcon breaking the stillness. But not today. Now they can hear the familiar sound of horses approaching, but in numbers never before conceived; a thunderous storm of hooves beating the ground, audible well before the first riders can be seen. At first only a few scouts break the horizon, then dozens of horsemen, then hundreds, riding two abreast so that their numbers seem even greater than they are. As they canter they leave the ground marked with the imprint of thousands of hooves. This is the great army the family have heard spoken of for weeks, the holy northern force that will liberate the country for Buddhism.

By the standards of the day, Ungern's army was not particularly large. When he crossed the border into Mongolia, Ungern had only
fifteen hundred or so men with him. A couple of months later his forces had grown, but by how much is hard to judge. He probably had around two and a half thousand men, but intelligence reports were prone to exaggeration, particularly those of the Chinese, who were always unwilling to admit how small the forces opposing them were. Insignificant by the standards of the civil war, it was a stunning sight for Mongolia. There had not been such a cavalry army in Mongolia since the wars of the great western Mongolian leader Galdan Khan in the seventeenth century, when the Mongolians had challenged China and Russia for dominance in central Asia. Just the sight of it, even though many of the soldiers were non-Mongols, stirred Mongolian pride.

It was still, in theory, the Asian Cavalry Division, and one thing that was never in short supply was horses. Even an impoverished Mongolian family kept two or three horses for every adult, and better-off nomads had herds of hundreds. It's hard to conceive of the horse as a herd animal before witnessing a cluster of them moving together, turning and running with some collective will. They gave Ungern's army its chief advantage, mobility; the Chinese, few of whom were skilled horsemen, had no chance of catching them. Even the machine-guns and artillery were moved by horsepower, placed on an odd wooden construction slung between two horses.

The core of the army was still the Asian Cavalry Division, which was split into three separate regiments; Cossack, Mongol-Buriat and Tatar. Ungern was exceptionally close to the Buriats, pitching his tent in the middle of their encampment. He had some Japanese with him, about sixty men, mostly artillery officers, commanded by Colonel Hiro Yama. They were almost certainly adventurers rather than a formal contingent from the Japanese army, but they had received professional training, and were among his most efficient troops. His machine-gun and artillery sections comprised some of his best men, reflecting the Russian army's traditionally strong emphasis on fire support.

Despite the impression the army made, initial support for Ungern among the local Mongolians was surprisingly lacking. According to his own account only two hundred signed up, although he received the backing of several prominent nobles. For the moment, though, most Mongolians seemed to be hedging their bets until Ungern could demonstrate that he wasn't simply another wandering marauder.
Ungern's army was even joined by a Mongolian delegation freshly returned from the Soviet Union, suggesting that the Mongolian commitment to his force was far more pragmatic than ideological. If the two great powers, China and Russia, could be encouraged to fight each other, Mongolian independence might be possible after all.

The banners under which the army rode were nearly as varied as the soldiers themselves, but two symbols were particularly prominent. One was a curly capital M, with II below it and a crown above. This stood for Michael II, the missing but, Ungern hoped, future monarch of Russia. He was, we now know, nearly three years dead, and even the most optimistic monarchists were having doubts by this point, but a vanished prince, who might then return like a fairy-tale king, was a fitting symbol for Ungern's dreams of Russian revival. One surviving banner shows this symbol on one side and the face of Christ on the other; the colour, however, was Buddhist yellow, thus appealing to both aspects of Ungern's beliefs. The other popular symbol was the swastika, often matched with the Mongolian
soyombo
. This was, of course, an old and valued Buddhist motif, but Ungern would also have been aware of its anti-Semitic interpretation, as would most of the Whites.