December 1917. For years the Ottoman Turks have been trying to spark a jihad of the world’s Sunni Muslims, hoping that Muslim subjects of the British Empire in India will rise in revolt. Now that Tsarist power in Russia has collapsed, the roads through central Asia are open and the war-weary British have virtually no resources left to prevent the Turkish empire from expanding into India.
Edward Noel, an aristocratic Catholic political officer who is supposed to be in Persia, sends a telegram to his betters from the city of Baku, perched on the western shore of the Caspian Sea and the source of half the world’s oil. He wants to plug the strategic gap in central Asia by raising a force of local troops. He deems it but an inconvenience that everyone around him is fighting everyone else to the point of pogrom.
Single-handedly reshaping the geopolitics of the Caspian Sea lands Noel in a world of trouble. Captured by Persian rebels, he is falsely accused of organising a massacre of Muslims, is tied to a tree and faces a firing squad. He won’t confess and at the last minute a messenger arrives with a stay of execution.
Now even Noel, ‘brave to the point of recklessness’, gets the message. He slips out in the middle of the night, forcing his way through ten miles of dense, thorny, waterlogged forest until his legs become a ‘bleeding pulp’. After 24 hours of continuous effort, he is recaptured, flogged and placed in heavy chains in a vermin-infested hut. He keeps himself sane by reciting poetry and studying bugs. Released after five months, he straight away asks to be reposted to Baku.
It would be a crabbed and bitter heart indeed that did not swell to such a tale of British pluck and fortitude. And the stirring stories come thick and fast, as the former BBC correspondent Nick Higham describes the six-week long Battle of Baku – arguably the least remembered engagement of the first world war.
Thrilling and sardonic by turns, the book weaves together the stories of half a dozen British imperial agents and adventurers as they furiously extemporise a future for the very edges of their overstretched empire. Higham is no pushover. He knows that his heroes are all raconteurs who tended to embellish their stories. He says he has checked their accounts against official archives wherever he can but cheerfully concedes that ‘sometimes I strongly suspect they made stuff up’. He highlights inconsistencies and, so far as he can, traces how different versions of the same story emerge: how field reports turn first into anecdotes and then into family myths. Facts can be lost in the process; but the light of hindsight encourages other truths to emerge.
Captured by Persian rebels, Edward Noel was tied to a tree and faced a firing squad
Lionel Dunsterville, whose tiny British force defended Baku against the Turks, knew all about such matters. He was fast friends with Rudyard Kipling at the United Services College, and the stories in Kipling’s Stalky & Co. were lightly disguised accounts of their schoolboy adventures. Dunsterville spends his whole time in Baku and elsewhere having to live up to his fictional alter-ego. It hardly needs saying that he does so splendidly.
Ranald MacDonell, an oil executive turned spy and smuggler, and Reginald Teague-Jones, an intelligence officer who spent his life under an assumed name for fear of assassination, round out Higham’s cast. And over the lot of them Baku casts its sticky shadow. In this opulent wreck of a city, minute droplets of oil escape in clouds and slowly settle on everything, while constant well fires pump thick, choking smoke into the air. ‘The road to hell, I thought, would be very similar to the one we were driving on,’ writes one Russian revolutionary correspondent. A more prosaic British soldier describes the place as one gigantic and very dirty garage.
Efforts to hold Baku against Ottoman forces culminated in the North Staffordshire Regiment’s last stand on ‘Dirty Volcano’, fighting with incredible courage while the local Armenian volunteers they were supporting ‘stuck to their usual role of interested spectators’, as one embittered British general had it. The picket on the very top of the hill was completely wiped out. ‘We were obliged to kill them all,’ a Turkish officer recalled.
Once the city fell to the Turks, the British had to evacuate. Lieutenant-Colonel Toby Rawlinson took command of a steamer laden with high explosives, barricaded the bridge with cases of dynamite and warned his hostile crew that one stray bullet would blow them all to kingdom come.
These stories of British soldiers demonstrating immense bravery and commitment against overwhelming odds and in appalling conditions amount to an almost Palinesque pile-up of Imperial Virtues Worth Emulating. ‘Empires are out of fashion nowadays,’ Higham remarks, but, thank goodness, his reasonableness and intelligence prove more than a match for all our current post-colonial posturing. He’s no especial apologist for empire, but he knows that waiting for the end of empires would be like waiting for an end to the weather. And as for those who say there’s no such thing as a good imperialist, these half-dozen lives suggest they’re wrong.
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