Proceed to Peshawar. George J. Hill
would move into Chitral if it could not be brought under stable rule, the senior British officer in Gilgit, Major George Robertson, set out for Chitral with four hundred troops. Robertson captured the citadel at Chitral, but was himself besieged. After enduring for six weeks, Robertson’s small force was relieved. Two weeks later, a much larger force under Major General Sir Richard Low reached Chitral from Peshawar, having fought its way through the Malakand Pass at 3,500 feet and then the snow-covered Lowari Pass. The campaign “included one future field-marshal, at least nine future generals and a number of knights. From a career point of view, Chitral was clearly a good place to have on one’s CV.”8 Winston Churchill saw action at Malakand as a young lieutenant, and wrote about it in his first book. As prime minister, he would later play the Great Game in earnest.9
In 1898 Curzon was appointed viceroy of India. Three years later, he created the NWFP from territory that was taken from Afghanistan when the Durand Line was drawn, and from the Punjab. In Afghanistan, Habibullah became emir; he would rule until 1919. The conflict between Russia and Britain got its name, the Great Game, in 1901 with the appearance of Rudyard Kipling’s novel, Kim. While it is true that a Russian foreign minister called the conflict the “tournament of shadows,” and Conolly had called it “a Great Game” in a letter from Bokhara in about 1842, the world would never have known the conflict as “the Great Game” except for Kipling and Kim. Some say the Great Game ended with a secret agreement that was signed by Russia and Britain in 1907, and what has happened since then is a “new Great Game.” Others say that Russia was duplicitous: it did not really plan to leave the Great Game in 1907, and it continued even after the Revolution in 1917, as Lenin threatened to “set the East ablaze.” By this calculation, the Great Game did not end until Britain withdrew from India in 1947. A “new Great Game,” if one exists, would therefore date from 1947.10
Because so many people involved in this book were readers and admirers of Kipling and Kim, it could be said that he was the godfather of the trip itself. Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) was one of the most famous writers of his time. He had a gift for capturing the dialects of ordinary people—those from the British Isles (as they were called in those days) and those from the Indian subcontinent. Nearly every book about the Great Game or India or Afghanistan in the nineteenth century (and many since then) includes a quotation or two from Kipling. The two Americans in this trip mentioned Kipling more than once, and all three had doubtless read Kim. Lord Wavell’s anthology, Other Men’s Flower’s, contains more poems by Kipling than by any other poet, and Wavell was president of the Kipling Society in his later years. Gordon Enders admired Kipling’s famous boy hero so much that he called himself “an American Kim.” Albert Zimmermann owned a complete collection of Kipling’s works. He referred to one of Kipling’s heroes, the brave, fictional Gunga Din, in describing the Swat Valley in a letter to his wife. And Zimmermann’s British friend in India, April Swayne-Thomas, referred in her letters to places that appear in poems written by Kipling.11
The boy hero of Kim was Kimball O’Hara, orphaned son of an Irish man who was a sergeant in the Indian army, and his Irish wife. The boy grew up as a preternaturally wise street urchin in Lahore, although he was, in fact, a “sahib, and the son of a sahib,” which gave him a special place in society. The Second Afghan War took place at about the time the events in the book took place, although it is not mentioned. At age thirteen Kim is recruited to be a successful spy in the Great Game. And the name of the young man, Kim, has become a metaphor for spies. That was true not only for Gordon Enders, whose travels are described in this book, but also for Harold A. R. Philby, known by his boyhood nickname as “Kim” Philby—the most successful spy of his generation, who played the game for the Soviet Union. It was also true for Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt Jr., grandson of the president, who played the game for America, against the Soviets. A copy of Kim is said to have been on the bedside of the chief American spy of his time, Allen Dulles, when he died.12
The viceroy, Curzon, feared that a secret treaty had been signed between Tibet and Russia. In 1904 he sent two expeditions into Tibet, and the British entered Lhasa on 3 August 1904. In 1919, desiring a greater degree of independence, Afghanistan declared war on the British in what is known as the Third Anglo-Afghan War. Zimmermann and Enders observed scenes of that war in November 1943. British military aircraft dropped bombs on Kabul and Jelalabad, and both sides then sued for peace. The war lasted only a month. The Treaty of Rawalpindi in August 1919 allowed Afghanistan to conduct its own foreign affairs.13
After the Russian Revolution in 1917, Lenin issued a call to set the East ablaze, hoping that the Communist Party of India would create a Socialist republic there. The British government issued stern warnings in 1922, and “the Soviets agreed to sign a declaration aimed at curbing once and for all their activities in India and elsewhere.” In spite of his agreement in the Atlantic Charter, Churchill fought to keep India in the empire, but after he was voted out of office India gained independence and partition in 1947.14
In 1933 Zahir Shah became king of Afghanistan at the age of nineteen, although for several years the actual rulers were the king’s uncles. In 1934 Afghanistan was admitted to the League of Nations, and in 1940 it proclaimed its neutrality in the war. Louis Goethe Dreyfus, envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary to Iran since 1939, was given an additional appointment with the same title to Kabul. The first representative of the U.S. government to reside in Kabul was Major Gordon Enders, military attaché, who arrived in December 1941, followed by the chargé d’affaires, Charles Thayer, in June 1942. The first resident minister, Cornelius Van H. Engert, arrived in July 1942. The Americans were welcomed, for they appeared to have no territorial interests in Afghanistan, whereas the Afghans remained wary of the British, with whom they had fought three wars. By 1943, however, as the Axis appeared to be losing World War II, the Afghans saw the British and Americans as useful antagonists to Russia, their ancient enemy to the north.
At the same time that Enders, Thayer, and Engert were creating an official role for the United States in Afghanistan, the United States was also engaging officially in Tibet for the first time. Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) had authorized an Office of Strategic Services (OSS) mission to Lhasa in 1942. Major Ilia Tolstoy, grandson of the famous author, and Captain Brooke Dolan II were dispatched with a framed photograph of FDR as a gift to the seven-year old Dalai Lama. They left Delhi in September 1942, assisted by the secretary of state for India, Sir Olaf Caroe, and FDR’s friend Suydam Cutting (then a captain in the OSS in Delhi), and arrived in Lhasa in December. The State Department sought to demonstrate American friendship and the War Department “was interested in a possible military supply route between India and China through the Tibetan mountains.” The mission was terminated in March 1943. The OSS chief in China, Milton Miles, was skeptical about the mission. Tolstoy and Dolan were operating independently, whereas he believed their mission should have been placed under his command. Perhaps because he understood China’s long-term interest in the territory of Tibet, he also thought the Chinese would oppose it.15
As viceroy, Wavell correctly saw that India would become independent, and he attempted to ameliorate the problems that he believed would (and did) ensue. Wavell was punished for his efforts by Clement Atlee, Churchill’s successor as prime minister, and was pushed into retirement. But independence could not be denied, and Lord Mountbatten presided over the final ceremonies of the handover from Britain and the partition of India on August 15, 1947. After Britain left India in 1947, “for the British, at least, the Great Game was well and truly over.” Sir Olaf Caroe, the last governor of the NWFP before the independence and partition of India, concurred.16
The Travelers, and Others Who Were Involved in the Trip
And I am reckoned something of a player of the Game myself!
—Rudyard Kipling, Kim
The Adventurer: Enders
Gordon Bandy Enders was the instigator and driving force behind the trip along the border of Afghanistan and India in