Treachery in Tibet (17 page)

‘We pursued them for about a mile. Dismounted and gave them five volleys and sent them all packing. Ottley is still pursuing. One way or another, I think we’ve taught them a sharp lesson.’

Brander looked concerned. ‘Are you all right, Fonthill?’

‘Oh yes. Bit winded though and … er … we’ve both run out of ammunition. Ottley can pursue well enough. I’ve told him not to go too far, though. We are down to our last few cartridges. So I have told him to round up rather than kill.’

‘Yes, indeed. Well done, Simon, although I’m afraid we will not be able to keep many prisoners. I want to get back to Chang Lo as soon as I can. We’ve found the enemy’s camp, by the way. Cooking pots still on fires, tents still standing and so on. They pushed off in a terrible hurry.’

Brander frowned. ‘We’re looking at the weapons they used now. Considering the way they kept us down for three hours or so, I felt sure they had modern rifles this time. But so far up in the sangars and along the wall, we’ve only found old Martinis, made in Lhasa by the look of them. Nothing from Russia.’

Fonthill nodded wearily. ‘Yes, so Alice is right. She always is.’

‘What?’

‘Oh, nothing. I think we’ll have a cup of tea, or something, if you don’t want us immediately.’

‘Yes, of course. You and your chaps did very well again, Fonthill, and I shall report as much. Congratulations.’

‘Thank you. Come on, 352, let’s find a kettle and a pinch of tea.’

Ottley, in fact, pursued the broken Tibetan army for more than ten miles, he and his men firing from the saddle and inflicting more casualties, before the remnants of the Tibetan horde melted away into
the snows of the hills or the side valleys. On their way they dismantled several Tibetan camps and captured valuable ponies. This was done, however, at some cost, for the riders of the Mounted Infantry had indeed expended most of their ammunition and, by the time the British camp was regained at 9.30, their horses, which had been on half rations since they left Gyantse, were exhausted.

Brander was in a hurry to return to what sounded now like a beleaguered Chang Lo, and he deemed that there was no time to bury the Tibetan dead or even to treat their wounded, nor to dismantle the wall. The Tibetans were later to put their total casualties that day at more than six hundred but the British casualties were light: four killed and thirteen wounded, among them three of Fonthill’s Mounted Infantry. The bodies of Captain Bethune and his two Sikhs, who had disappeared in a lone and desperate attempt to slip round the wall, were retrieved from where they lay. The captain’s Sikhs made stretchers and bore the bodies back with them to Chang Lo.

It was an arduous march back, for a blinding blizzard sprung up, reducing visibility virtually down to nil and exhausting the troops, particularly Fonthill’s men, who had ridden forty-seven miles in eight hours. They had to lead their horses, two of whom died, for the last twelve miles and they were the last to arrive at the camp, slipping in under cover of darkness.

So began a difficult time for the beleaguered defenders of Chang Lo. Despite their three defeats, the Tibetan ‘tame sheep’, as Younghusband once described them, seemed now to have turned into wolves. Intelligence reports said that strong forces were now converging on Gyantse. Scattered buildings surrounding Chang Lo were now occupied by the enemy and a constant, if ineffective fire,
was being directed at the mission, both from these buildings and from the fort, 1,300 yards away, where
jingals
and snipers were particularly active.

The tables had been turned on the invaders. The garrison of Chang Lo was outnumbered by, it was later estimated, ten to one; they were about 150 miles away from their nearest supply base; and reinforcements were equally distant. Yet Fonthill found Younghusband quite sanguine.

He later explained to Alice the reason. ‘It’s the British in India thing,’ he said. ‘For years, the Raj has been used to having its outposts surrounded and under attack. But, with well-trained soldiers handling modern weapons manning the defences, it has usually been possible to hold out and then defeat the attacking natives.

‘You will remember that we were with Roberts in 1879 when his little force in Kabul was under huge pressure, surrounded by hordes of Afghans. He retreated behind the walls of Sherpur, quite confident that he could hold out and later counter-attack. He was proved right.’

Alice gave a sour smile. ‘Yes, but then Roberts had the wonderful pair of Fonthill and Jenkins with him when they were much younger. They were supreme then. Mind you …’ she pulled the ear of her husband, ‘they are still pretty magnificent – for pensioners, that is.’

Simon made to smack her bottom but she danced out of the way.

The amazing thing about the investment of Chang Lo by the Tibetans was that the telegraph line, that now had been extended to Gyantse, remained uncut. A rumour spread that it had been allowed to remain because, while engineers were working on the line, they had met two lamas who had asked the purpose of the wire. The engineers had carefully explained that the British were far from home and did
not want to stay in Tibet, so they had built a line to guide them home.

The telegraph had been used, of course, by Macdonald to issue an order demanding that Brander turn back from his expedition to attack the Tibetans at Karo La. The order had arrived too late to restrain the Colonel, but now Younghusband was being reprimanded for allowing the attack to go ahead. Further oblique criticisms came his way and, as he wearily confided to Fonthill, it was clear that the governments both in India and back home were beginning to regard him as a hothead, determined to force his way to Lhasa despite the British government’s anxiety not to upset the government of the Tsar.

The mission at Chang Lo was now being subjected to an incessant bombardment from the fort and its surroundings, a regular and sustained attack from the guns which, while they killed only a handful of sepoys, began to become more dangerous as the days went by and wore down the nerves of the defenders. They worked out that there were now more than twenty pieces of artillery on the
jong
capable of inflicting damage, particularly two large pieces of ordnance whose arrival had been greeted by cheers from the fort. The first of the defenders called ‘William’ and the other, ‘William the Second’. They both had a range in excess of 2,400 yards and were capable of causing serious damage. Suddenly, the expedition had, indeed, turned into a war.

Part of the problem was that there was little effective response that could be made. Fonthill and his Mounted Infantry consistently broke out from the perimeter wall and patrolled the surrounding countryside, bringing in livestock and fodder and, once, fighting a successful but fierce engagement with a party of Tibetan horsemen. But the shrapnel of Bubble and Squeak could not reach the fort and
ammunition both for them, the Maxims and the rifles of the troops was now running very low.

Since Macdonald had left a month before, the mission’s escort had sustained fifty-six men killed or wounded, while a further fifty had gone down with sickness. It was, then, a huge relief when, on 24th May, reinforcements arrived: two ten-pounders of the 7th Mountain Battery, eight men of the 1st Sappers and Miners, a detachment of Mounted Infantry to swell the ranks of Fonthill’s horsemen and the remaining men of the 32nd Pioneers. In all, then, the garrison now had an effective strength of 800 men.

The defenders of Chang Lo could now become more proactive and the fighting became more intense. A sortie was launched before dawn one day against Palla, a village some 1,000 yards to the south-east of the fort, on the road to Lhasa. If the British were expecting a walkover, they were quickly surprised, for the Tibetans resisted with a tenacity and savagery that had not been seen before. The fighting lasted for six hours and became a hand-to-hand battle from street to street and house to house, with walls being blown down and every brick contested. It was as if a new enemy had been created.

Fonthill and his Mounted Infantry took no part in the action, but Simon lay on a roof within the mission perimeter and watched part of the action through his field glasses. At one stage, he could see Tibetan warriors deliberately exposing themselves to British fire at the open windows of the houses and waving the sepoys on towards them. Others were dancing on the roofs of the building and hurling stones at the attackers. This was most unusual bravery from Tibetan troops and Simon was told that they were Khampa warriors, hard-bitten professional soldiers from the north-west
of Tibet and the core of what was left of the Tibetan standing army. Before the hamlet was finally cleared, the British had lost an officer and three sepoys, and two officers were wounded, a total far outnumbered by the number of Tibetan casualties.

Alice glumly but carefully recorded all these dead and wounded in her reports to
The Morning Post,
to which she now had daily access, thanks to the extended telegraph line. Her attitude towards the expedition had hardened even further, as though to match the Tibetans own resistance to it.

‘It’s as though nobody back home cares,’ she complained to Simon. ‘All this killing of these people – and of our own men – all for nothing. Why doesn’t anyone in Whitehall oppose it?’

Fonthill sighed. ‘Well, it’s not as though it’s a full-scale war, my love. The British public have been accustomed for years to these battles and skirmishes on the outposts of Empire. They like to have an empire, they are used to it and they have been fed for decades on the glories of it all – including the constant price we have to pay in terms of men’s lives to police it.’

‘Bah.’ Alice’s snort could surely have been heard in the fort. ‘This is not a police action. This is an
invasion,
as I keep saying, but no one will listen.’

The attack on and the besieging of Chang Lo, however, could not be ignored, either in Calcutta or London. Younghusband was instructed to issue an ultimatum to the
amban
in the fort that unless it was surrendered by 25th June there could be no question of conducting negotiations at Gyantse. However, he was also further reprimanded for his tart suggestions to his superiors that the attack on the mission should be regarded as an act of war, to end all attempts at
negotiations and head for Lhasa instead. He was warned that he was showing ‘undue eagerness’ and causing the British Cabinet ‘undue apprehension’. The exchange ended with an instruction for him to leave Chang Lo immediately, with a suitable escort, and journey to New Chumbi for consultations with General Macdonald, still sitting there, if not quite comfortably, because he was suffering from gastritis.

Fonthill immediately offered to form the escort for the Commissioner and to ride with him, but Younghusband declined, asking only for forty men of the Mounted Infantry to accompany him on the 150 mile journey back.

‘It’s madness,’ confided Simon to Alice. ‘He’s brave to the point of sanguinity. I hope the government will be suitably shamed if the man is killed on the journey.’

In fact, Fonthill’s dread nearly became fulfilled on the morning after Younghusband’s departure when, having taken shelter for the night at a fortified post on the road at Kangmar, garrisoned by a hundred men of the 23rd Pioneers, the Commissioner awoke to howls from some three hundred Tibetans who descended on the post. Younghusband just had time to seize a rifle and rouse the Pioneers to man the walls before the attackers were upon them. Luckily, however, the Lee Metfords once again triumphed over matchlocks and swords and the attack was beaten off. It was, however, another indication that the Tibetans were now determined to fight.

The Commissioner and his escort reached New Chumbi on 10th June and three days later set off back to Gyantse with a still unwell Macdonald (he had to be carried by coolies for the last two days of the journey), but with a vastly increased force, set on relieving the
garrison at Chang Lo, taking the fort there, and so opening the road to Lhasa – if, of course, ‘necessary’.

The force moved off in two columns. The first comprised 125 Mounted Infantry – the success of Fonthill and Ottley’s operations had demonstrated how useful cavalry could be, even in this land of mountains – 8 guns; 1,450 infantry, including, for the first time half a battalion of white troops from the Royal Fusiliers; 950 native support followers and 2,200 animals. In the second column, there were a further 500 infantry, 1,200 followers and 1,800 animals. In six months, the mission and its escort had more than doubled in size.

Along the way, Younghusband received an unexpected telegram. An important lama and one of the four state councillors from Lhasa were on their way to Gyantse to meet him. Did the Tibetans at last seriously intend to negotiate? It seemed so. Accordingly, the Commissioner was authorised to reply that the ultimatum to the
amban
at Gyantse would be extended by a further five days, to accommodate the meeting.

On the evening of the 26th June the relieving force arrived at Gyantse, and pitched its tents on the plain between Chang Lo and the fort itself, just beyond the range of the fort’s artillery, which kept up its firing at the mission, despite the imminent negotiations. It became clear, however, that ‘imminent’ did not translate well into the Tibetan tongue, for there was no sign of the arrival of the important negotiators from Lhasa.

It was a difficult period for the defenders. Younghusband was not at all optimistic about the outcome of this new round of talks and was anxious for Macdonald to attack the fort and remove it as a threat to the expedition’s line of communications, dominating, as it
did, the road to Lhasa. Fonthill had now withdrawn his Mounted Infantry from patrolling the plain and, with the rest of the mission and its escort, he awaited the arrival of the emissaries. The atmosphere within Chang Lo was tense, for the bombardment continued.

Some relief was provided on 28th June, when the Tsechen monastery at the rear of the fort was captured and the villages around it cleared. Reports began to come in that desertions were taking place from the fort, but the firing from it showed no sign of diminishing.