Treachery in Tibet (10 page)

‘Oh yes, sahib. Don’t tread on skirt but stay close, yes.’

‘Splendid. You still have your Lee Metford rifle, I think?’

‘Oh yes. Jenkins Bach has given me lessons on shooting it.’

‘Good. As soon as we meet trouble, my wife will certainly want to go to the front to take notes about the battle or whatever. Now, she will certainly ignore any attempts by you to stop her from doing so. So don’t try it. But I would ask you to go with her, with your rifle, and protect her if it becomes necessary. Do you understand?’

Sunil’s chest visibly swelled. ‘Certainly, sahib. I will protect. Most certainly.’

‘Good man. I knew I could rely on you. Now, don’t tell her what I have asked you to do, because that will annoy her. Just accompany her casually, as though you are interested in all that she does. Which I think is true, anyway. Is it not?’

‘Oh yes, indeed sahib. I will be journalist when this journey is finished.’

‘Good. I am sure that you will make a good one.’

Simon looked into the earnest face before him and felt reassured. Alice could well look after herself but – and he frowned at the thought – she had a propensity for pushing herself into danger and, perhaps, with Sunil at her side, she might feel a sense of responsibility for him and so curtail her eagerness to get close to the action. He shook the boy’s hand and strode away.

The Chumbi Valley was situated at about 10,000 feet above sea level but the climb for the column began almost immediately after leaving the encampment at New Chumbi. Once again, as the trail led ever upwards and became steeper, the Mounted Infantry, ranging far ahead, were forced to dismount and lead their ponies. The route led
between masses of sharply cornered rocks, which merged later into great overhanging bare cliffs of blackened granite.

‘Oh, bloody ’ell,’ grunted Jenkins. ‘’Ere we go again.’

In fact, the trail, although steep up to the 15,200 feet high Tang La pass, was not as terrifying as that leading to the Jelep La, for it wound through rocks on either side, through which the wind howled like a thousand banshees, but offering no precipitate falls to an abyss below. Just beneath the pass, at about 14,000 feet, Fonthill and his advance guard debouched onto an open, barren stretch of upland, the first intimation that they were approaching the great northern plain, the Chang Tang, the fabled ‘roof of Tibet’. Here, on the advice of Ottley, who had ridden this way days before, they waited until the main force caught up with them and the whole column camped for the night.

Fonthill sought out Alice and Sunil and asked anxiously ‘any sign of mountain sickness?’ Both shook their heads negatively and Simon, who, with Jenkins, had felt nothing more than tremors in his stomach as they climbed, put this down to the fact that they had acclimatised to a large extent at New Chumbi. After dark, however, a different problem faced them.

That night the temperature plummeted to minus eleven degrees Fahrenheit and it became clear that every scrap of clothing would be needed to prevent frostbite attacking. Simon and Alice shared a tent, as before, with Jenkins and Sunil in the other. They all retained their sheepskins and felt boots within their sleeping bags and stretched canvas covers over the bags, soon learning to sleep on their backs, for turning over allowed a piercing shaft of bitterly cold air to penetrate into the bags. Little sleep was had that night.

Dawn, however, brought bright sunlight, a cloudless sky and a rejuvenation of spirits all around – particularly when the news reached everyone that an officer in the main column had unwisely placed his false teeth in a tumbler of water at his side to find them frozen solid by the morning.

A march of little more than a mile and a half over half-frozen greensward led to a bluff beyond which stood the impressive Fort of Phari, a castellated virtual castle, looking like some remnant from the Crusades, from which a row of prayer flags and a Union Jack streamed in the strong wind – showing that the two companies of Gurkhas were still in possession. Here, a halt was made while mules and ponies were laden with supplies for the new base, some fourteen miles ahead at Tuna.

Alice took advantage of this to visit the fort, a wide-eyed Sunil at her side, carrying his Lee Metford. The stronghold had earlier yielded its stock of gunpowder and bullets without firing a single shot as the soldiers had advanced through the huddle of miserable huts that stood at the foot of its walls. Now, however, Alice wrinkled her nose in disgust as she walked through the hamlet. Centuries of inhabitants had thrown their rubbish outside their doors so that it had grown so high that steps had had to be dug down through it to reach the ground floor of the dwellings. Inside the fort, she found that its courtyards were strewn with similar rubbish, including old armour, matchlocks, limbers and spears and the building itself was a warren of narrow passages and dingy cells, all empty.

She made notes and retreated to the village in the hope of finding some of its inhabitants. They proved to be as unprepossessing as their surroundings. The women, who extended their tongues in a gesture of
greeting, had covered their faces with a red paste that had blackened as it oxidised, obviously to protect their faces from the constant wind. From the pungent odour that accompanied them, Alice realised that they must have smeared their bodies with rancid butter. Yet everyone seemed to have a perfect set of white, gleaming teeth.

Through Sunil, she attempted to question them, to gain their opinion of this intrusion of alien soldiers from so far away. But the youth confessed that they seemed reluctant to talk and, she suspected, he was having difficulty in understanding their dialect. Shivering in the cold, she gave up and they walked back to the encampment, where she began writing a despatch to be cabled back by the new telegraph wires that had been set up as the column advanced, now linking Phari to the Indian border, Calcutta and the outside world.

She sat in the weak sun, drinking tea in an attempt to keep warm and sucking her pencil. There had been no military action to write about so far and, indeed, no enemy to describe. If this was a war, she confessed, it was a fake one, unreal – even spurious. Younghusband’s Mission, with its escort bristling with weaponry, had been allowed slowly to climb, slip and plod wearily into the Tibetan uplands without deterrence. The weather and the terrain had been the enemy.

In this context, she decided to lead her story with a sad fact that she had picked up from one of the Indian coolies, who spoke excellent English. One of the Indian Post Office men, working on the telegraph lines, had contracted frostbite in his foot because the Raj had ruled that only soldiers were to be issued with the Gilgit felt-lined boots, which offered protection from the biting cold. As a result, the man’s foot had to be amputated.

Alice licked her pencil with relish. This was just the sort of detail that
would illustrate so well the conditions under which the ‘little people’, the ordinary civilians, were being forced to work on this expedition and also the inflexible bureaucracy of the Indian government and its army where its rules were concerned. And she was fairly certain that she had this small but telling detail exclusively to herself. She began scribbling quickly.

Then, however, she frowned and tore up the sheet and threw it away. This was just the sort of story that some ham-fisted censor, selected by the unimaginative, newspaper-hating Macdonald, would delete without a second thought. He would remove it because it would, of course, reflect badly to a liberal-minded audience back home on the leadership of the expedition. No. She sucked the pencil again and stared unseeingly at the distant tip of Chomolhari shimmering in the distance. She would slip it in lower down in the story, so that it would not stand out so invitingly to the censor – and she was sure that the Tory-loving foreign editor back home would let it through, because, after all, it was fact and not opinion.

The next day an event occurred which raised the eager interest, not only of Alice and her fellow scribblers, but the whole column. A delegation arrived, completely unannounced, consisting of three monks from the three great Tibetan monasteries and a senior commander in the Tibetan army, named Depon Lhadang, plus their attendants. Younghusband, unsure of their seniority, declined to meet them and sent, instead, his close aide, adviser and fluent Tibetan speaker, Captain Frank O’Connor, to parley with them.

The meeting proved inconclusive, with the Tibetans giving no ground and refusing to enter into any formal negotiations until the
British Mission and its escort had turned back and returned to Yatung.

After the delegation had left, Fonthill sought out O’Connor, whom he had first met on the North-West Frontier, during the Pathan Revolt of 1897, when the latter was serving as a young subaltern. ‘Were the Tibetans ameliorative at all?’ he asked.

‘Not a bit. Oh, the General, whom I’ve met before, was studiously polite but the other three, all high lamas from the Kashag, the ruling body of the country, were aggressive, snarling and using most disrespectful language. I am just glad that the Colonel was not there.’

O’Connor leant forward. ‘I’ll tell you something else, Fonthill. I’ve just heard back from a lama from Sikkim, whom we sent the other day to Lhasa with a special message from Younghusband to the Dalai Lama. The feller turned back a few miles from Tuna when he met a large force of Tibetan warriors, numbering about 2,000, who, he said, are waiting to stop us. This feller kept whispering to me: “War! War! They mean war!” So perhaps we shall see some action soon, eh?’

‘Indeed.’ Fonthill nodded and frowned. ‘Well the sooner we get to Tuna and set up a properly defended camp the better.’

Within two days the column had crossed the Tang La without incident and arrived at Tuna, which turned out to be nothing more than three unremarkable stone buildings squatting in the middle of an empty, and quite flat plain, stretching out to the foothills of the dominating Mount Chomolhari to the south-east and encircled elsewhere by bleak hills. Tufted grass poked through the loose gravel that seemed to stretch for miles and no trees were to be seen.

Fonthill, in the vanguard, sat on his pony and looked around him in disbelief, his eyes watering in the cold wind. Apart from the three now
deserted stone dwellings, there were no physical features that could be used to defend the camp: no gullies, no hillocks, not even a clump of bushes to provide cover. The rock-hard plain stretched unrelievedly all around. Certainly an attacking force could be detected from some distance, unless it advanced in a snowstorm, which was unlikely. But the ground was clearly ice-bound and looked impervious to pick or shovel. There could be no trenches to give shelter to the camp’s defenders. He sucked in his frozen lips. Which idiot had chosen this godforsaken place as the site on which to see out the winter?

As the last mules arrived, the provisions were unloaded and the difficulties of the place were exposed. Efforts proved indeed that no trenches could be dug and, although a rough barricade of boxes and mealie bags were erected, if it was not for the rolls of barbed wire that had been providentially brought up from Chumbi and wound round the perimeter, there were no real defences that could be erected to protect the tented encampment. The walls of the three houses were promptly loopholed but they proved far too small to house more than a handful of defenders.

Fonthill took his Mounted Infantry out immediately to scout the surroundings and immediately found what he sought. He almost stumbled into a large force of armed Tibetans who were concealed behind piles of brushwood some twelve miles distant. Wheeling to the south, he encountered a second and larger group of the enemy encamped even nearer, at some hot springs beside the Bham Tso lake, near a small hamlet called Guru, guarding the ancient caravan trail that led to Gyantse.

Here, with Ottley and Jenkins, he left his men behind and trotted ahead to study what defences had been erected. He dismounted
within easy musket range, dismounted, climbed a rock and scanned the way ahead through his binoculars. Although he was now in plain sight of the Tibetans, none attempted to fire or otherwise molest him as he studied the way ahead.

The road led to where the plain narrowed between the lake, which was frozen, and to the outlying spur of one of the mountain ranges to the left. Here, a rough stone wall had been erected across the top of which rows of matchlocks and what looked liked primitive artillery pieces, long-barrelled
jingals
, were levelled. Above where the wall met the spur, stone sangars, or rifle emplacements, had been established up the hillside to command the approach to the wall. At the other side, the wall ended in a small stone house. Beyond was an open space which clearly had once been a marsh, extending from the lake and probably impassable in warmer weather. But now it was frozen hard.

‘The bloody fools,’ muttered Ottley. ‘They’ve left that side of the wall quite open and unprotected by the look of it. We could easily swing round there and take them by the rear.’

‘Except,’ said Jenkins, shielding his eyes and looking beyond the wall, ‘that there appears to be millions of the buggers massin’ there, look you.’

Fonthill lowered his glasses. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ve seen enough. This is the old caravan trail to Gyantse and so this is the way we shall have to advance, when and if,’ he emphasised the last two words scornfully, ‘we advance. We shall have to knock that wall down. But we might be attacked well before then. Let’s get back and report. I have to say that I think our camp is very vulnerable.’

His report produced one quite unsuspected and potentially dangerous turn of events. Younghusband decided, on what appeared
to be a sudden whim, to ride out to Guru, where the main force of Tibetans were camped, some ten miles away, to intercede with them personally. He took with him only O’Connor, to interpret, and a young subaltern, who was said to be learning the Tibetan language – no escort, not even an orderly to hold their horses while they entered the Tibetan camp.

On returning, O’Connor recounted to Fonthill that no progress had been made and that, as before, the Tibetan general had been courteously polite but that the three lamas, who were ensconced in the camp, had been even more adversarial, confirming that it was they who were behind the opposition to the opening of any meaningful negotiations. At one point, he said, they became menacing and refused to let the trio return to Tuna. O’Connor related that it was only the good humour and bland impassivity of Younghusband that saved the day.