Bayonets to Lhasa by Peter Fleming

Author:Peter Fleming [Fleming, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-85773-143-2
Publisher: I.B.Tauris
Published: 2012-03-07T16:00:00+00:00

XIV

The Mission Besieged

To Younghusband it seemed that luck was with him. ‘I think after the attack on us this morning,’ he had written to Ampthill on 5 May, ‘His Majesty’s Government must see that the necessity for going to Lhasa has now been proved beyond all doubt.’ He knew that Brander, with his force intact and a dashing victory to his credit, was on the heels of the Mounted Infantry and that his arrival would guarantee the Mission’s safety, which in any case nobody at Chang Lo regarded as seriously threatened. His hopes were high. In a letter to Curzon on 7 May he urged the unwisdom of withdrawing the expedition from Lhasa when it got there; to do so would play into the Russians’ hands, ‘and we shall have to return to Lhasa ten years hence as we had to return to Kabul and to Chitral.’ The future was still uncertain, but events were moulding Imperial policy into the pattern which Younghusband had known, all along, it must assume if it was to be fruitful.

Younghusband, though straightforward, was astute; it was perhaps this quality which Landon had in mind when he mentioned his ‘wariness.’ Yet he was never very good at gauging the effect on higher authority of his telegrams and reports. In some ways he was like a child dealing with grown-ups; he failed to realise how transparently, at times, his purposes showed through the arguments with which he buttressed his recommendations or justified his actions. To telegraph, for instance, as he did on 8 May, ‘Brander has most effectually carried out his object of removing threats to our line of communication’ was to enhance rather than to diminish the impression that the British Commissioner had sponsored, in the Karo La venture, a course of action which he had no business to sponsor; and his excuse for doing so, here gratuitously repeated, was not made more convincing by the fact that, whether or not the Mission’s rearward communications could justly be said to have been menaced by a force fifty miles in front of it, it was now entirely surrounded by hostile bands of Tibetans in the suburbs of Gyantse. Small points of this kind consistently eluded Younghusband’s attention.

But not the attention of his superiors. In a telegram to London Ampthill revealed (in a passage omitted from the Blue Book) that GHQ, on hearing of Brander’s departure for the Karo La, had sent an urgent signal ordering his recall; ‘we at once telegraphed to the same effect, and at the same time asked for an explanation from Colonel Younghusband.’ It is clear that the incident gave the Indian authorities a shock, and that their disquiet was further increased by news (received less than forty-eight hours later) of the unexpected attack on the Mission and its dangerously depleted escort.

Their reaction was prompt, and almost inevitable; on 8 May a telegram from Dane relegated Younghusband once more to the status of a passenger. ‘Owing to attack on Gyantse and serious

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