Playing away and winning
Philip Glazebrook
FRANCIS YOUNGHUSBAND AND THE GREAT GAME by Anthony Verrier
Cape, £18, pp. 238
Francis Younghusband, who lived until 1942, was the last in a line of travellers and adventurers who had fought a Cold War against Russian advances in Central Asia since the 1830s, and his character is a fine summary of them all: cocky, self-reliant, exceedingly brave, he had also that rather simple mystical sense often developed by Europeans much on their own in the wildernesses of the world.
If Younghusband typified the top-order batsmen in the Great Game, Lord Curzon outshone all previous Viceroys as captain of the team in India. By wide Asiatic travel he had prepared himself as no other Viceroy had ever troubled to do; he had trained his mind out of that Eurocentric rut which cramped the outlook of Whitehall, so that he understood what was forgotten in London (but not in St Petersburg) that upon the single fact of England's posses- sion of India rested her status as a first- class power. Take India from her (the Rus- sians knew this) and England is at once of no more consequence than Holland. The Great Game, to defend India from the Russian threat often and openly repeated, was not a Second XI fixture but a vital match for Great Britain's survival. These two, Curzon and Younghusband, came together in the late Nineties to assert British prestige on India's northern front- ier, in Tibet, where Chinese weakness and Russian strength had encouraged the Tibetans into the kind of disrespect and treaty-breaking which cannot be tolerated by an Imperial power, as dependent on 'face' as was the handful of Englishmen ruling India. The interesting and pregnant confluence of this Viceroy and this agent is the nub of Anthony Verrier's book.
Already, when Curzon picked him for Lhasa, Younghusband had made several immense Central Asian journeys, knew Chinese Turkestan, and had been much nettled by finding himself turned off the Pamirs by a Russian agent who claimed the entire region for the Tsar. His sense of des- tiny, 'the feeling that I was born for some great thing', found in Curzon's proposal (`this magnificent business I have dropped in for') what it had long sought. The mis- sion to Tibet was to be the test and vindica- tion of all his capabilities and ambitions.
And the event, from his point of view, went off swimmingly. 'Supremely fitted for his task, Younghusband's fine qualities brought his mission to a successful conclu- sion with a minimum of strife', says the DNB. On quitting Lhasa in triumph he experienced a moment of ecstasy, 'an intox- icating sense of elation and goodwill', and wrote home that 'the greatest success of my life has been accomplished and I don't sup- pose I shall ever have the chance to do any- thing bigger'. In London he talked alone with the King 'as I would have spoken to my own father', and, though immediately awarded a lesser honour than expected (there was a reaction in Parliament against the mission), he was given a plum Residen- cy, Kashmir, which he called 'the most delightful appointment in the whole world', and lived out a long life in peace there-
'Let's leave the treasurer's report till last. No sense in spoiling the whole afternoon.'
after. Perhaps he should always have felt miserable that confusion at Guru on the road to Lhasa had precipitated a massacre, or always have felt 'betrayed' by Curzon and Brodrick, but his serenity was not thus affected. Before embarking on the mission, he had written: 'I know governments well enough to be aware that this pinnacle of trust does not last'.
This book's blurb claims to 'reveal for the first time the motives which lay behind Younghusband's foolhardy explorations and rash intelligence operations'. As there is no bibliography, and the notes refer to almost none of the books one would expect Mr Verrier to have read, the basis for this claim is unclear. The author's thesis appears to be that Younghusband was seduced and duped by Curzon, and then sacrificed, a broken man, as a political scapegoat by a government which hustled him into disgraced obscurity; but this theo- ry is never sustained by anything more than a wilful interpretation of events, and by a tendentious use of epithets. What is revealed is the author's unease with a man like Younghusband. 'Reassured' by accounts of 'tasks faithfully executed' (by a pedestrian surveyor whose response to the Himalayas was to record that 'the day was fine and the view splendid'), Mr Verrier admits to finding Younghusband's 'every action curiously unnerving'.
As a result of this temperamental cau- tion Mr Verrier ridicules the 'forward poli- cy' against the Russian threat — a policy supported by Curson and Younghusband and by most others who had seen the Rus- sians in action in Central Asia — calling Russophobia 'irrational'. It was not: indeed, the only rational explanation of the Russian presence in the wastes of Turk- estan, which cost them vast sums, was that they were en route to the wealth of India. The threat existed, and is well documented, but is never satisfactorily discussed here.
I wonder if Mr Verrier has perhaps mulled over what he knows of this subject so long that he has come to treat the events and their chronology, in his own mind, in a kind of private shorthand which leaves out much of the infrastructure needed for the book to stand on its own. I am sure he has the history of the period — the First Afghan War, for instance — clear to him- self, but he does not convey a clear picture of it. I found the book hard, awkward- going, in the hands of a guide who keeps promising a view of the wood, but shows us nothing but a confusion of trees.
Fortunately, on these interesting events Peter Fleming (Bayonets to Lhasa) and Peter Hopkirk (The Great Game) are won- derfully lucid. Even more fortunately, scarcely a man amongst these adventurers did not write down his own brilliant narra- tive — Younghusband's own The Heart of a Continent is outstanding — so that we can enjoy reading the traveller's own words whilst making up our minds as to his motives.
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