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Masterminded by Berlin but unleashed from Constantinople, with
tentacles spreading all the way to Kabul and Kashgar in the
East, the insurrection was to spill over into Tsarist Central
Asia. Farther to the East, British India and Burma were to be
the major theatres where smuggled arms, funds and crates of
revolutionary literature would suffice to rouse the restive
natives. Nor was that all, for the grand design embraced arms
dealers in the US, a remote island off Mexico’s Pacific coast
and a revolver range in London’s busy and always crowded
Tottenham Court Road!
Over a decade or
two prior to the war, the Kaiser had sedulously cultivated the
Ottoman Sultan-Caliph, Abdul Hamid who, notorious for his
pogroms of ethnic cleansing, had deservedly earned the sobriquet
of AH—"the dammed" To no one’s surprise, on the
morrow of the outbreak of hostilities, the Sultan was to give a
ringing call to the faithful "to rise and slay their
Christian oppressors" To save himself the embarrassment,
the German ruler, dame rumour had it, had secretly embraced
Islam!
Stretching across
neutral Persia and Afghanistan, the Holy War was to be waged
down the Khyber into India. Should the two "soft"
states yield to blandishments and promises galore a combined
Turko-German advanced would proclaim the final doom of the
British Empire?
Sadly for the
schemers not a few pieces failed to fall into place. For one,
the Turkish strongman and wartime military supremo Enver Pasha
backed out. For another, the young Persian Shah and the cagey
Afghan Emir were not fair game. The feeble Persian government
rent by disaffection was mortally afraid of the Russians seizing
Tehran. Nor was the Emir, squeezed between two giants British
India and Tsarist Russian easily tempted. And the Ghadrites,
Raja Mahendra Pratap, Hardayal and Barkatullah pulled no
punches. Above all, even though German intelligence agents were
professional veterans, their British counterparts proved a bit
cleverer. And had the last laugh.
The fascination of
Hopkirk’s narrative grows on the reader as he progresses for
his tale that has a deep resonance to our own times—Osama bin
Laden, al-Qaida and the 9/11 attacks. It is a riveting account
painstakingly pieced together from the half-forgotten memoirs of
the participants, diaries and secret intelligence reports of the
day.
Peter (now Sir
Peter) Hopkirk has written extensively on the Great Game. Among
a respectable output, including the book under review, his
Foreign Devils on the Silk Road, Setting the East Ablaze, The
Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia and Trespassers
on the Roof of the World have run into popular paperback
editions, which are a great draw.
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