Talking of books
All in the game
Benny Green
There persists a certain fanciful image of the intrepid Englishman, an image hopelessly passé and perhaps even without much basis in fact. But it persists all the same. It is of the dauntless debonair hero smearing his face with berry Juice, donning the rags of intrigue and striding Ott into the perilous hinterlands of native life, or "going Fantee" as Kipling defines it in the story 'Miss Youghal's Sais'. You could perform this deed either in the style of Kipling's Strickland, who "stepped down into the brown crowd and was swallowed up for a while", or /ate A. E. Mason's Faversham, who infiltrated the Mahdi's camp to discharge a debt ot four white feathers, or like P. C. Wren's Beau Geste, who was actually willing to endure the company of Frenchmen in order to clear the family name. The ideal which motivated such men was a kind of code of rules, a vague yet distinctive pastime designed to demonstrate to lesser breeds without the law that one Englishman was worth five, ten, a hundred or a thousand foreigners, depending on the degree of rampant bellicosity mustered by the sedentary gentleman decribing the events.
Although Faversham used the Sudan to give his performance in fiction, and T. E. Lawrence b°rfowed Arabia to give his in reality, there was one arena more holy than all the others put together, where the ritual was honoured by the title of The Great Game. This was the North West Frontier of India, across whose passes the British played the imperial chess game with Afghanistan as the piece on the board which "bc'dY ever quite managed to capture, and Russia as the enigmatic presence sitting on the far side of the board. Enigmatic or non-existent? Whatever the answer, the British Played the Great Game with an intensity unsurpassable. Her young men got their throats cut, their toenails pulled out, their bodies bunged into snake pits, their eyes blinded by equatorial suns, their bones picked clean by the vultures and even, in a few cases too terrible to dwell on, their religion interfered With. They rode off on camels disguised as traders, making up their maps as they went along, they risked slavery or branding or decapitation in the dungeons of some barbaric satrap, they rode on horseback for years at a time without any hope of seeing a white woman. Many of them simply disappeared, never to be heard of again, muttering something about the Haileybury first eleven with their dying breath, or mocked by a mirage of a whisky-and-splash. If there really was no Russian presence anywhere between Teheran and Darjeeling, an awful lot of patriotic men endured an awful lot of trouble for nothing.
Michael Edwardes' carefully documented, Grnatter-of-fact account* of the playing of the
reat Game left me with the impression that ihe Russians did indeed end up playing it in the same way as a man will end up bathing in the sea if the screwball in the water keeps telling him the water is warm. The question will never even be settled, because the Russians burnt the relevant documents as part of their Revolution but the reader faced with the choice of either a British military caste suffering from the nineteenth century equivalent of Reds-UnderThe-Bed, or a British political caste desperately defending the outposts of Empire, may well end up convinced that the Russians, if they had no cognisance of the Great Game at first, soon learned that the British were playing it as though the fate of India depended on it, and joined in with some relish. From James Burnes at the start of the match to Sir Francis Younghusband at the end of it, the British battled on, achieving a kind of stalemate which, if it never eradicated the Russian bogey, at least preserved the jewel of the Empire for a while. And yet, in reading the fascinating,
testimonies** a the British in India as broadcast recently by the BBC, amid all the charming graphic detail of the daily lives of the empire-builders, we suddenly come up against
this: Kenneth Mason's uncle, who had taken part in the Great Game as an intelligence officer on the North-West Frontier, was said to be part of the make-up of Colonel Crichton in Kipling's Kim. The account of daily life in the twilight of the Raj is beautifully compiled and handsomely illustrated, and although it cannot compare for flamboyance and literary flourish with Dennis Kincaid's classic British Social Life in India, it leaves the reader with the identical impression of the pathos of lost allegiances which listeners to the recent series of broadcasts will recall. Somewhere between the swashbucklers of fiction and the dour sense of duty of the witnesses of the Raj, a sort of truth lies, and somehow the two aspects of the two latest narratives which moved me the most may not seem altogether relevant to those who have read neither book. One of the most eloquent and sober speakers in the Raj compilation is Spike Milligan, born in India the son of a roughrider in the British Army, who as a child saw England, as "a land of milk and honey that used to send us Cadbury's military chocolates in a sealed tin, that sent us the Daily Mirror and Tiger Tim comics, where you could get chocolate and cream together for a penny. That's what my mother told me. But it never happened like that". As for Edwardes, he returns in the end to Kipling's Strickland, who, if you remember, turns up again as nobody's fool in Kim. Here are Edwardes' closing lines: Perhaps after all Kipling was right when he made Hurree Mookerjee say to Kim, the newly recruited player, "When everyone is dead, the Great Game is finished. Not before". *Playing The Great Game Michael Edwardes (Hamish Hamilton £4.75) **Plain Tales from the Raj. Edited by Charles Allen (Andre Deutsch with the BBC £5.95)
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