A Person From England by Fitzroy Maclean

Author:Fitzroy Maclean
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Cities and the American Revolution
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 1958-04-11T05:00:00+00:00

KHAN OF MERV

EARLY on the morning of January 24th, 1881, that fateful day in the history of Central Asia, while General Skobelyov was assembling his forces for the final assault on the Turkoman stronghold of Gök Tepe, a small party of native horsemen led by a solitary European, might have been seen slowly making its way to the top of the mountain range which rose abruptly to a height of six thousand feet above the plain ten or twelve miles away to the south. On reaching the summit, their leader, a tall, good-looking Irishman of about thirty-six with a fair beard and an enormous sheepskin hat, pulled out his fieldglasses and turned them in the direction of the great Turkoman fortress twelve miles away across the plain.

From where he stood he could clearly see both the fortress and the Russian forces besieging it. As he watched, the smoke of the guns and the movements of the combatants showed that an attack had begun against the southern wall and soon a desperate battle was in progress. Fascinated, he saw the attackers overcome the defenders and force their way through the breach into the interior of the fortress. For a time all was confusion. Then there issued from the far side of the fortress a stream of horsemen who scattered in flight across the dusty plain. They were followed immediately by a great crowd of fugitives, men, women and children, fleeing as best they might before the fury of the invaders. Gök Tepe had fallen. All was over with the Akhal Tekkes.

For Edmund O’Donovan, special correspondent of the London Daily News, the dramatic events which he had just witnessed necessitated a rapid change of plan. After long months of waiting about in the little towns and villages on the Persian side of the frontier, after endless frustrating interviews with equivocating Persian officials, headmen and tribal chieftains, after laboriously circumventing, as he thought, the wiles of the innumerable Russian agents who haunted the border regions and who had done everything they could think of to impede his progress, he had a few days earlier finally completed his arrangements for entering Gök Tepe.

Originally his purpose had been to observe and report on the Turkoman campaign. With this object he had applied to General Skobelyov for permission to accompany his forces on their march from Krasnovodsk and had met with an uncompromising refusal. Undeterred, he had decided to observe the campaign from the Turkoman side and, making his way to the Turkoman-Persian border, had, from Persia, finally succeeded in establishing communication with Makdum Kuli Khan, the commander of the Turkoman forces, who, anxious to obtain British support and not distinguishing very clearly between a newspaper correspondent and an official envoy, had responded with a cordial invitation to visit Gök Tepe.

And, now that all the obstacles had been overcome and all the arrangements finally made, he had arrived just in time to witness the fall of the fortress through field-glasses from a mountain-top twelve miles away and to see what was left of Makdum Kuli’s army streaming in confusion from the stricken field.

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