A curious tale of the 'Great Game' of 19th-century British spies in central Asia

BOOK OF THE DAY: Shooting LeaveBy John Ure Constable, 302pp, £16.99

THIS IS a most curious book. It consists of a series of 13 adventure stories about army officers who went on spying and hunting escapades in the steppes and mountains of Central Asia in the 19th century.

Some were in the British army, others served in the army and navy of the East India Company. Together they comprised a motley band of adventurers, explorers, spies, charlatans and chancers. Their treks were more the stuff of Boys' Ownand Bigglesthan James Bond, although they inhabited the latter's fantasy world as evident from the many travelogues they wrote.

Spying is one of those supremely vague activities. Being shrouded in secrecy, it is usually impossible to evaluate or assess its actual contribution to security or the national interest.

The author, who was himself a British diplomat, hints that he too gathered information for her majesty’s government on his travels in the region. However, he suffers from the handicap of heavy reliance on the heroic accounts of escapades written by the participants themselves and they are inevitably self-laudatory.

There is no doubting the courage of these adventurers or their ambition as they traversed deserts and frozen wasteland, confronted hostile tribes, predatory slavers and negotiated their passage with sceptical emirs, beys, khans and viziers. They really knew how to swash their buckles.

At this time, the threat to British India came first from Napoleon and later the tsar. John Bull and the Russian bear were constantly sparring and sizing each other up like two drunken men in a darkened room.

The British called this imperial venture the “Great Game”, as if it was a jolly prank designed for public schoolboys.

Among this motley crew was Irishman James Pottinger who nursed the illusion that he could pass himself off as an Islamic mullah. Later on he made a better fist of things, becoming the first governor of Hong Kong.

Alexander Burnes spied his way as far as Kabul, collecting ancient coins while tracing the route of Alexander the Great to India. James Abbott was fiercely and aggressively patriotic and, being greatly concerned with status and protocol, wore full dress uniform at every opportunity, even in the most remote spot. He called the khan of Khiva “Old King Cob” and the latter remained convinced his debonair guest was a Russian spy. He was half right: Abbott was a British spy.

Yet Abbott, like so many explorers, expected and even demanded hospitality from the very groups on which they were spying, even when their covert actions were blindingly transparent. Despite all the intelligence-gathering, Britain has yet to learn the folly of military engagement in a country like Afghanistan.

On the other side, the odd Russian was involved. Nikolai Przhevalsty set out to monitor frontier Cossack troops (they had been abandoned and were virtually starving) and to map the borders with Manchuria and Korea.

He looked like Stalin and behaved like him (some said he fathered the dictator) while in Manchuria he adopted an Inspector Clouseau-type disguise as a merchant which fooled no one.

He was also a fanatical hunter using an arsenal of cartridges to decimate every form of wildlife and to intimidate the locals.

Equally colourful was James Lewis who deserted from the army, changed his name to Charles Masson and passed himself off as an American.

This accomplished deceiver was well suited to low grade espionage and cut his teeth snooping around Kabul in time for the first Afghan war.

This mildly entertaining book is worth dipping into but the series of frontier exploits becomes fairly tedious after a while and one adventure with hostile tribesmen begins to sound remarkably like the next one. However, the endpaper map is useful and the line drawings are attractive.

Fergus Mulligan is the author of The Trinity Year(Gill Macmillan) and a contributor to The Dictionary of Irish Biography(The Royal Irish Academy and Cambridge University Press)