The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia by Peter Hopkirk Read Free Book Online

Cossacks, who had spearheaded Russia’s conquest of Siberia and were soon to do the same in Central Asia, never thought to question the wisdom of the Tsar, least of all his sanity. Thus, ill-equipped and ill-provisioned for such a momentous undertaking, they rode out of Orenburg in the depths of winter and headed for distant Khiva, nearly 1,000 miles to the south. The going proved cruel, even for the hardened Cossacks. With great difficulty they got their artillery, 44,000 horses (for every man had a spare) and several weeks’ supply of food across the frozen Volga and struck into the snowy Kirghiz Steppe. Little is known about their journey, for the British only learned of it long afterwards, but in a month they had ridden nearly 400 miles, reaching a point just north of the Aral Sea.
    It was there one morning that one of the look-outs spotted in the distance a tiny figure against the snow. Minutes later a galloping horseman caught up with them. Utterly exhausted, he had ridden night and day to bring them the news. Tsar Paul, he told them breathlessly, was dead – assassinated. On March 23, at midnight, a group of court officials, alarmed at Paul’s worsening megalomania (he had shortly before ordered the arrest of the Tsarina and his son and heir Alexander), had entered his bedroom intending to force him to sign abdication papers. Paul had leapt from his bed and tried to escape by scrambling up the chimney, only to be dragged down by his feet. When he refused to sign the document, he was unceremoniously strangled. Alexander, strongly suspected of being privy to the plot, had been proclaimed Tsar the next day. Having no wish to be dragged into an unnecessary war with Britain because of a hair-brained scheme of his father’s, he had at once ordered the recall of the Cossacks.
    In dispatching a messenger to stop them at all costs, Alexander undoubtedly prevented a terrible catastrophe, for the 22,000 Cossacks were riding to almost certain death. Brave and disciplined though they were, it is unlikely that they could have got even half-way to the Indus before disaster struck. Already they were having difficulty in providing for themselves and their horses, and before long frost-bite and sickness would have begun to take their toll. Those who managed to survive these hazards had still to run the gauntlet of hostile Turcoman tribesmen waiting to fall upon anyone entering their domains, not to mention the armies of Khiva and Bokhara. If by a miracle any of them had come through all that alive, and ridden down through the passes to the first British outposts, then it was there that they would have had to face the most formidable foe of all – the well-trained, artillery-backed European and native regiments of the Company’s army. Thanks to Alexander’s promptness, however, they now turned back, just in time, thus living to fight another day.

     
    Wholly unaware of any of this, or of any malevolent intentions towards them by St Petersburg, the British in India were nonetheless becoming increasingly conscious of their vulnerability to outside attack. The more they extended their frontiers, the less well guarded these inevitably became. Although the immediate threat from Napoleon had receded, following his Egyptian setback, few doubted that sooner or later he would set his sights again on the East. Indeed, his agents were already rumoured to be active in Persia. Were that to fall under his influence, it would represent a far graver menace to India than his brief presence in Egypt had. Another potential aggressor was neighbouring Afghanistan, a warlike kingdom about which little was then known, except that in the past it had launched a number of devastating raids on India. Wellesley determined to neutralise both these threats with a single move.
    In the summer of 1800 there arrived at the royal court in Teheran a British diplomatic mission led by one of Wellesley’s ablest young officers, Captain John Malcolm. Commissioned at