W E cannot share the acute alarm of some of our
contemporaries as to the position of the force at Gyangtse. In the first place, the ultimate responsibility for the safety of that force, even if considered a mere escort for' the Mission, rests with Lord Kitchener ; and Lord Kitchener is not the kind of Commander-in-Chief who assumes that opponents will run away, or who out of shed optimism neglects all scientific precautions. We have no doubt that he has pushed and is pushing forward rein- forcements which he deems sufficient for the occasion, and is keeping up the supply of munitions, which is the indis- pensable requirement of an advanced guard, and the one most difficult to ensure. You can get food for a small body of men by menaces or money wherever there are resident inhabitants, but shells, cartridges, and good powder are neither stored nor sold in any agricultural or pastoral district. In the'second place, the Tibetans have evidently no competent general, or the passes would be held more resolutely, and the communications with India. would have been effectively cut long ago. Still, even if General Macdonald's little force—only seven hundred: and. fifty rifles—is reinforced with half a. regiment of Europeans and half a regiment of Pathans, and is Well supplied with munitions, the work which must be done begins to look serious. The fort of Gyangtse has still to be Carried before the march on Lhasa can be safe, and the fort is a vast structure of stone, built, like all the older' Tibetan buildings, with Egyptian solidity, and is defended by at least three thousand men, who are as brave as Japanese. They are clumsy soldiers, and their weapons' are antiquated, even their swords being too heavy ; but they have some firearms, they know bow to charge, and their daring is superb. No Englishmen or men of the Guides could have charged into a storm of bullets which slew them almost to a man better than the fifteen on black mules, with forty-five footmen behind them, who burst out of the Gyangtse fort to carry aid to comrades whom they thought too hardly pressed. We do hope' that incidents like this, like the storm of Nan-shan, like a score of feats performed by our own Ghoorkas, like the whole history of the Sikhs, will one day dissipate the absurd and dangerous delusion that all Asiatics are the inferiors as regards personal daring of all Europeans. They are not, and the quicker we recog- nise the fact the better, or we shall setae day have an awakening as sudden and as paralysing as that under which General Kuropatkin and Admiral Alexeieff are now suffering. We shall, when reinforcements arrive, no doubt carry the jong Or fort of Gyangtse ; but we shall lose men, possibly many men, in doing it, and have then to carry pass after pass,—all, be it remembered, at an altitude which the troops feel keenly, and all defended with huge stone walls. We have hitherto carried these walls and the stone stockades by their sides easily enough ; but the correspondents report that the Tibetans are building them in the right places ; and it is evident that as time goes on tribes of a hardier character are coming up to defend. Lhasa. One correspondent, indeed, reports the arrival of "cavalry," that is, no doubt, of one of the riding clans, whose presence will make the defence of communications a much harder business.
We shall get to Lhasa, we doubt not, in the end, for we always do reach the objective, even if we have to abandon it again, and the Indian Government just now could spare five thousand men ; but entrance to the city will be terribly contested, and the city itself defended, as the village of Palla was on May 26th, by house-to-house fighting, each house being a kind of stone fortalice; and when it is inside the Mission will be in air. The threats of the Novoe Vremya about Russian movements to defend Tibet or threaten India are positively silly, as no Government in the Russian position not stricken with madness would add the British Fleet to the Japanese; but the Novoe Vremya is right when it asks what, if the Dalai Lama flies to a distant monastery and takes the Chinese Amban with him, the British Mission will be able to do. There will be nobody to negotiate with. We cannot go hunting after the Grand Lama all over Tibet, which is three and a half times as large as France, or even send a Mission from Lhasa to negotiate with him. If Colonel Younghusband retires, he will be regarded by all Tibetans as a man defeated ; while if he remains, his Mission, and therefore his Government, which will have to supply and resupply the garrison, will be in a position of the utmost danger. The• city will be perpetually threatened from without, and the citizens within cannot be trusted. We cannot conquer all Tibet ; and if we did conquer it, of what use would it be with its ruler seated at a distance from the capital revolving plans of vengeance and annoyance which, if carried out, would soon compel us to waste a brigade, or it might be a division, upon reprisals which would bring us nothing ? No doubt if the people declared in our favour the situation would be greatly modified, for we might induce them to accept a secular ruler, and make with him a working treaty which in his own interest he would observe; but what chance is there of that while Lamaism continues to be their creed ? The people, it is said, do not dislike us, and bring in provisions readily ; but there is not the slightest evidence that they are prepared to throw off the yoke of Lhasa, which for them would mean a change of religion as well as of political authority.
We must wait before any decision can be arrived at ; but the expedition so far seems one more illustration of our British habit of commencing great undertakings on inadequate information. We clearly did not know before our march began that the Lamas were so bitterly hostile to the entrance of Europeans into their country ; we did not know that they had so completely shaken off the suzerainty of China; we did not know that they had obtained any modern weapons ; and, above all, we did not know that the Lamas and their devotees were of the type of men who are reckless of life and will die in heaps when ordered, even though clearly aware that the invaders are, from the superiority of their weapons, irresistible. All we knew accurately from the native explorers despatched from time to time to survey the country was the route to Lhasa, and even of that we knew the features which strike a man interested in earning geographical medals rather than those which would strike a soldier as of importance. We, in fact, made a plunge into the unknown which was creditable to our courage and spirit of adventure, but not to the habit of prevision in our Indian Staff. We still hope we may come out of it without disaster, for we meant fairly well by the Tibetans as well as ourselves ; but how we are to gain anything commensurate with the energy expended on the enterprise we confess ourselves as yet unable to perceive.
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