PART 1 – THE CAUCASUS, 1917

 

 

Chapter 1

Armenia, 24 April 1918

The first explosion came out of the night without warning, just as the last of the water spilled over from the stationary locomotive’s tank.  There were no shouts, no whistles of incoming shells, no presage of an ambush through a premature rifle shot.  Vahe Petrosyan knew the horrifying sound of a hand grenade when he heard one.  He had seen first-hand the slaughter that a grenade could achieve in a confined space, first-hand.  The initial explosion was followed by a second, then a third.  Shrapnel ricocheted off the metal of the locomotive in a series of whistling, zinging clangs.  Then came the first shots.

Petrosyan threw down his cigarette and shouted to his fireman, Grigor Avakan, to clear the water hose.  The explosions had come from the opposite side of the train to where the driver and fireman had been enjoying a quiet smoke, as the locomotive took on water from the tower at the deserted siding.  They were deep in the gorge through which the Debet River had carved its way beside the railway line.  The shattering blasts echoed off the adjacent cliff, followed by shouts of the half dozen British soldiers who were the reason for the journey.

The fireman clambered frantically down from the tank atop the loco, water splashing around him as the big hose swung free.  Petrosyan hauled himself into the cab of the old Fairlie engine, dimly lit by the kerosene lamp hanging from the roof.  It gave only enough illumination to identify the levers and controls, although Petrosyan and Avakan could – and often did – work the engine in total darkness without a moment’s thought.

His hands shaking, Petrosyan leaned on the heavy levers that closed the valves to prevent the steam bypassing the pistons while they were stopped.  The loco shuddered and creaked as pressure built up.  Beside him, Avakan opened the door to the steam box and the cab lit up with the glow of the flames as he shovelled coal into the box.  Outside there were more shots and the sound of bullets zipping close to the engine.  The harried English Sergeant Nash appeared beside the cab.

“We have to go, Petro! Back! There are troops ahead – I think they’re Turks!” he yelled.

Petrosyan did not bother to consider whether they were Turks or Azeri bandits, nor did he care how many there were or where they were hiding.  In the darkness he just wanted to get his precious engine away from the danger.  He did not acknowledge the soldier but watched the dial as pressure built up sufficiently to move the great pistons that would drive the two sets of six wheels back the way they had come.

“Come on, dammit! Get going!”  The sergeant screamed at him.

Another explosion sounded close by.  Again, there was the rattle of shrapnel against the locomotive and the sounds of rifles from the single carriage that could only be the soldiers returning fire.  Petrosyan willed himself not to panic.  The horrific stories of atrocities against his people that were heard from the other side of the mountains were fresh in his mind.  He could not leave Sofi without a father…

 

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Chapter 2

Azerbaijan, three weeks earlier: 3 April 1918

It had taken nearly an hour for the two battered Ford vans to travel the 2 kilometres from the Metropol Hotel to the Baku Railway Station.  The most direct route had become a convoluted passage through debris-littered side streets as the English soldiers tried to avoid roaming bands of Armenians bent on the slaughter of Moslems or Azeris.

In the half light of dawn, the now quiet streets were strewn with bodies.  The stink of rotting corpses was overlain with the smell of smoke from burning buildings torched by mobs or blown apart by Bolshevik artillery supporting the Armenian Dashnak forces.  Vahe Petrosyan sat beside the driver of the lead vehicle - a young English captain named Clive Leyton - directing him and doing his best to pacify some of the violent militia groups still spoiling for a fight.

 

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At twenty-three, Clive Leyton was nearly two decades younger than Petrosyan, his formative years the product of the English suburbs of North London and his schooling at Harrow.  Leyton had been only seven when his father had been killed by a Boer bullet in the Battle of Rooiwal, just a month before the English had ground out their victory in South Africa.  The young Leyton had not seen his father since the Hampshire Regiment had sailed from Tilbury Docks in the first week of 1900, taking Major Arthur Leyton, aged 35, away from his wife and 5-year-old son for the last time. 

Clive Leyton had indelible memories of that day, of the smart military band playing stirring music, of the noise and the cheering.  The fact that he would never see his father again was yet to make itself apparent.  Far more significant was the thrill of seeing the soldiers in their smart uniforms, of the flags, streamers and the buzz of the embarkation.  Neither father nor son had any inkling that in little over a year, Queen Victoria – By the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland Queen, Defender of the Faith, Empress of India – would be dead, and that very Empire which she commanded would be beginning its imperceptible slide into the catastrophic wars of the new century.  Two years later had come the knock on the door, with the telegram reading:

“Deeply regret to inform you that Major A.P.Leyton died of wounds on 11 April 1902 at Rooiwal, South Africa.  Lord Kitchener expresses his sympathy.”

The loss of Arthur Leyton had been a poignant but distant event in Clive Leyton’s life.  His father had been an infrequent presence in the household, due to his posting at Aldershot Garrison, forty miles from London.  This inconvenient distance frequently left his wife and child alone, to experience the well-to-do life that his wife’s independent means could buy, but a British Army officer’s could not.  It was a prim relationship - one that had resulted in only a single son, who always appeared destined to follow in his father’s footsteps.  It was unsurprising that the young Clive Leyton had grown up in his own company, pre-occupied with sets of toy soldiers painted in their finery, and given to hours reading Conan Doyle’s Exploits of Brigadier Gerard. 

His mother became resigned to the fact that Clive - having started at Harrow School - opted to join the school’s Officer Cadet Corps as soon as he was able.  By the time he left school with an excellent record in the classics there was never any doubting the career he would pursue.  

By the outbreak of the Great War, it had been twelve years since the fateful knock on the Leyton’s front door, when Mary Leyton had received the dreadful telegram and had broken the news to her son.  Now, two years into his time in his father’s regiment, her son was also destined to be taken from her by the army.

An astute young man, Leyton was smart enough to foresee the consequences of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand – heir presumptive to the throne of Austria-Hungary – by a Bosnian-Serb, supported by a Serbian nationalist organisation.  Like a set of dominos, one after the other the European nations chose sides in an escalation of rhetoric.  As Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, so Serbia’s ally, Russia, faced off against Germany.  Political collapse was underway, and Leyton felt the exhilaration of an unstoppable force that would draw him in like a whirlpool.  On 1 August 1914, Germany declared war on the Tsarist empire.

The same day, Russia’s ally, France, long suspicious of German aggression, began its own mobilization, urging Great Britain—the third member, along with France and Russia, of the Triple Entente alliance—to declare its support.  The divided British government prevaricated, but events soon precipitated Britain’s move towards war as well. On August 2, the first German army units crossed into Luxembourg as part of a long-planned German strategy to invade France through neutral Belgium. France and Germany declared war against each other on August 3.  That night, Germany invaded Belgium, prompting Great Britain to declare war on Germany.

For the nineteen-year-old Leyton, war came with the dizzying opportunity to do what he had trained for, wrapped in an adventure the likes of which his Arthur Conan Doyle hero Brigadier Gerard could never have imagined.  Four years later, having survived Gallipoli and worked his way with the Hampshires through Egypt, Palestine, Mesopotamia and Persia, Leyton had gone from the obsessive young lieutenant intent on going by the book, to a captain prepared to do anything necessary to ease the daily burden on his troops. 

Through nearly four years of war, of routinely setting up camp in strange places punctuated by moments of pure terror, Clive Leyton had remained physically unscathed.  At times he had wondered why the man next to him had fallen to a bullet or a piece of random shrapnel rather than himself, but a voice told him to look the other way, not to question.  Keep busy, look after the men, look after supplies, logistics, where the next week’s rations were coming from. 

The life of a tenderfoot soldier in the fabled Bible lands was a succession of adventures that had stripped the puppy fat from the young man in both a literal and figurative sense.  Leyton’s boyish face became lean and tanned, his blond hair now combed back flat from his forehead with olive oil more frequently than brilliantine.  With all these things came confidence in himself and his capabilities, backed with the conviction that despite the horrors he had witnessed in pursuit of his duty, God remained on the side of the Empire, and ultimately, God would prevail.

Leyton’s school fluency in French, Latin and Greek had stood him in good stead, and he had quickly picked up enough Arabic and Persian to become an asset to those in the senior ranks smart enough to recognise his talent.  It was hardly surprising when early in 1918 he had been ordered to take the steamer from Persia northwards up the Caspian Sea to the oil-rich city of Baku.

After years of army food, accommodation and orders that frequently made no sense, Leyton had developed a cynicism absent from his early army career.  The tall, thin European was inevitably a curiosity amongst the local population - even more so when his fluency in the local tongue was revealed.  Despite the strange food, heat and discomfort, Leyton maintained the appearance expected of an officer representing His Britannic Majesty George V.  While fellow officers grew beards, Leyton remained clean shaven and was unafraid to frequent local barbers.  He remained unconcerned that man wielding the open razor might be sympathetic to the enemy. 

His sudden posting from Bagdad to Baku had not been explained to him in any detail, but having come personally from the British commander, General Lionel Dunsterville, it had made a big impression.  The General’s briefing had been long on rhetoric and short on facts, other than to say that the Senior British officer in Baku, Major Augustine Ellis, would explain it all.  Dunsterville’s take on the matter was the same that Leyton had heard before in the officers’ mess gossip.  The Hun and the Turk were preparing to take the Caucasus, now that the Russian Tsarist empire had collapsed in the wake of the Bolshevik revolution a few months before.  From there it would be a short hop across the Caspian Sea and on to the railway to British India.

“Not acceptable,” Dunsterville had stated brusquely.  “They need to be stopped.  That’s your job.  Yours and Ellis’s.  Rest assured our fighting men won’t be far behind.”

 

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Now the van crawled past the ruins of the burned out Kaspi newspaper office on Baku’s Nikolayevskaya Street.  More bodies lay in contorted positions along the base of one wall.  Dogs and crows made half-hearted attempts to scare each other away, although there was carrion enough for all.  Leyton had seen the horrific sights before, of men with missing limbs or with their entrails torn out.  The nightmares came sometimes in the dark sweating pre-dawn hours, when he awoke with shaking hands and pounding heart.  He had lost brother officers - friends – along the way, but he had survived, though whether by luck or God’s will, he could not be sure. 

The tension of the ethnic powder keg had enveloped them.  The Armenians were volatile at the best of times.  At that moment they were coming down from an orgy of bloodletting and any random spark – a mistaken gesture or remark – could set them off again.  Most of them could not recognise the English soldiers as such.  There were many uniforms in Baku – Bolsheviks, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, a few English soldiers, remnants of the Russian Caucasus Army, and the Muslim Musavat militia.  Many of the roving mobs wore uniforms that resembled all or none of the recognised forces, taken as they were from prisoners or the dead. 

Leyton had been in Baku nearly two months, and the learning curve had been steep.  He’d formed an instant liking for his commander, Major Augustine Ellis, who had welcomed Leyton’s small contingent with a mixture of open arms and wariness, since the British presence was something he wanted to downplay, except in the right circles.  Either of the local belligerents – the Muslim Azeris or the Christian Armenians – might view the British as potential allies who could offer help to their cause.  The British were, after all, an imperial world power.  Unfortunately, their nearest force of any consequence was a thousand miles away in Bagdad, beyond the unpredictable Caspian Sea, the treacherous defiles of the Elburz Mountains then the parched Zagros range.  Neither Ellis nor Leyton was under any illusion that help was close at hand, nor was there expectation that a show of Britannic Might would be forthcoming.  There were rumours that a British force was en-route, but both knew it would be token - a chance to fly the flag and maybe form an alliance with a local force that would see the Baku oil wells protected.

To Leyton, as the Ford truck lurched through a pothole and past a bloated, putrefying cadaver, the whole oil well protection show was looking less and less like happening at all, and more and more like another complete military debacle.  Leyton was close enough to the upper brass to understand the confusion that existed between the politicians in Westminster, the top army commanders and strategists, and the poor bastards on the ground who had to pull off the hare-brained schemes.  Leyton had seen first-hand the disaster at the Dardanelles and enough close-run actions through Syria and Mesopotamia to know that you only relied on that which you could control.  Now, in the chaos that was Baku, with a different, unpredictable militia on every block, Clive Leyton was both exhilarated and terrified.  He glanced at the man beside him.

As it had done to so many men, the war had aged Vahe Petrosyan.  Though not yet forty, his short black hair was turning prematurely grey.  The dark brown eyes sat deeply within his narrow, once-handsome face, the lines that had once been those of laughter were no set in a permanent expression of worry.  Unlike Leyton, Petrosyan had not shaved for several days, and the dark stubble on his cheeks and chin was an ash colour against the dark tan of his skin.  He looked as though he had not slept for several days.

Neither Leyton nor Petrosyan had managed much rest in the last week.  The strife had been brewing for months, as the ripples from the distant Bolshevik Revolution in Moscow and Saint Petersburg spread into the Caucasus.  The once-mighty Imperial Russian army now found itself leaderless as its Commander-in-Chief and the rest of the Romanov family lay dead in a basement in Yekaterinberg.  At the southern boundary of the empire, faced with the re-grouping Ottomans pressing east from Turkey, and the newly-forming Bolshevik revolutionaries from within its ranks, the Tsar’s Russian Army officers sought to distance themselves from the noble elite that they had once represented.   Almost overnight the Russian army had melted away, some of its soldiers choosing to side with local militias, some with the Bolshevik cause, and some disappearing into the mountains never to return.

In Baku the tension climbed, as without the oversight and order previously provided by the Russian Army, ethnic separation came to the fore.  The Imperial Russian Army had included both Caucasian Muslims and Armenian militia, loosely allied under the double-headed eagle of the Tsar’s banner.  Freed from the Imperial Russian yoke, the solders splintered into ethnic groups with diverse and often little-understood motives, other than to eliminate rivals because of ancient feuds that had existed over centuries of tit-for-tat retribution and random atrocities.

In the short time Clive Leyton had been in Baku working with Major Ellis, he had struggled to comprehend the convoluted and sinister politics that ruled the city in the power vacuum left by the dissolved Imperial Russian Army.  In its wake, the city was overseen by a fragile conclave that called itself the Baku Soviet, or more correctly the Committee of the Revolutionary Defence of Baku’s Soviet.  Leyton was no politician, and despite Major Ellis’s patient efforts to explain, the young captain barely grasped the different politics of the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, the Counter Revolutionary Muslim Musavat and the Armenian Dashnaks.  As an intelligent but practical soldier, he was out of his depth in this murky world of transitory collusion.  The city was a hot-bed of rumour and counter-rumour, each more extreme and outrageous than its predecessor, such that Leyton no longer knew what to believe about events allegedly occurring in other parts of Baku.  The situation was further complicated as news of the Turks’ advance towards the Caucasus sparked surges of panic amongst the Armenian populace, and joy amongst the Muslim Azerbaijanis.

Leyton had initially been sceptical when the Armenian engine driver, Petrosyan, had demanded an audience in the lobby of the Hotel Metropol.  The two had met several times previously, as the British sought to bolster Armenian resistance to the Turks three hundred miles to the west.  This was to be done by shipping secret supplies and money to the Armenian resistance fighters via the Transcaucasian Railway from Baku to Tiflis, and thence westwards into Armenia proper.  The Metropol had become the residence for Ellis, Leyton and the small group of British officers based in Baku, for they were amongst the few foreigners with sufficient funds to afford the hotel in a town where food costs were rising by the day.  The situation was changing almost hourly in the wake of the bloodbath, and it did not surprise Leyton when Major Ellis had knocked on his door.

“Sir?” said Leyton opening the door.

Ellis stood in the hallway.  Slightly stooped at the shoulders, he had shrewd brown eyes edged with crinkle lines that flowed downwards into a grey-dappled black beard.  He was half a head shorter than the lanky Leyton but carried his frame well, with his uniform pressed that morning by the hotel laundry.

“That engine driver is here,” he said.  “We need him, but whether he’s up for a trip is another matter.  Let’s see what story he has for us.  Downstairs in the lobby, two minutes.”

 

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Augustine Ellis’s knowledge of Central Asia had grown from an unlikely education pursuing languages at University College in London.  By several random twists of fate, he had found his calling in an army desperate for intelligence from the trade routes leading into and out of India, where Ellis’s fluency in Arabic, Turkic and Russian had proven invaluable.  He had taken to his missions with enthusiasm, relishing the solitary roles he adopted in exploring the markets and caravanserais, making contacts and testing the mood of the locals.  He had sought out other foreigners – Russians, Uzbeks, Tartars and Armenians – some of whom were genuine traders, and some of whom were spies for Imperial Russia.

When the Great War had broken out in Europe, Ellis was based in the British Legation in Tehran.  Here he was to spend time pursuing a delicate diplomatic dance as the Germans tried to coax a vacillating young Shah to lead Persia into the war on the German side.  It was to his credit that by the time the Russian Revolution had taken the Tsarist army out of the war, Persia – at the crossroads between the Russians, Ottomans and British India - had remained neutral.

As the Tsarist Empire had crumbled with the abdication of the Tsar in the spring of 1917, the vulnerability of the Caucasus and the open route to India was apparent to the War Cabinet and the Foreign Office.  The nightmarish prospect of a Turko-German army pouring through the Caucasian Gap found Ellis posted to Tiflis in the heart of Georgia, with the demand that extreme measures were required to shore up the British position. 

In Tiflis the intrigue deepened, as Ellis tried make sense of the polyglot community entrenched in their ancient hatreds of each other.  The city was a melange of Georgians, Armenians, Azerbaijanis, dissolute Russian troops with no army to serve, and those Russian soldiers who had elected to throw their weight in with the new Bolshevik Party.  Rumours abounded, and any sort of reliable news was so hard to come by that often the British mission had only the sketchiest notion of what was going on.  The few telegrams from sources within the Caucasus that reached them were frequently incomprehensible, while openly walking the winding cobbled streets were Turks, Germans and Bolsheviks making no attempt to hide their identities.

In the absence of any significant British army presence, Ellis’s most urgent task was to establish which ethnic group might be relied upon to resist the Ottoman advance from Eastern Turkey.  The Muslim Azerbaijanis with their pro-Turkish leanings could not be relied upon, nor could the Christian Georgians, who had worrying links to Germany dating back a century.  Following the Bolshevik withdrawal from the war, Russia – formerly allied with the British – could no longer be considered friendly, and the War Cabinet teetering on declaring them openly hostile.

The most obvious candidates for British support were the Christian Armenians, whose ancient homeland lay directly in the path of the Turkish advance eastwards.  Until the departure of the Tsar, the area had been known as Russian Armenia, part of the greater Russian Empire.  Armenians had tolerated this relationship, in part because it had offered a form of protection against the Muslim Ottomans to the west, but also because it brought new infrastructure, not least a railway.  Many Armenians who had fought against the Ottomans as part of the Tsarist Army found themselves isolated at the western extremity of their country.  There they faced overwhelming numbers of Turks determined not merely to drive them out of the Armenian Highlands, but to exterminate them.

As the Caucasus had gradually been absorbed into the southern extremity of the Russian Empire, so had Russian become the lingua franca of an area where dozens of mutually incomprehensible languages existed, many with their own convoluted alphabets.  Ellis had taken the transition into this chaotic world in his stride.  With his unprepossessing swarthy features and close-cropped beard, he blended easily into the population, and felt comfortable there.

With the need to contact what was left of Armenian military command after the dissolution of the Russian Imperial Army, Ellis had taken the train from Tiflis west to Alexandropol.  It was a journey that was to bring him in contact with two men in radically different roles, but each as influential in his own way.

Ellis had met Vahe Petrosyan at Tiflis Central Station, and over several glasses of chacha, the local grape brandy, Ellis had decided he liked the Armenian engine driver.  This was a man that His Majesty’s Government could do business with.  In his years of sitting opposite people from different ethnicities, cultures and occupations, Ellis prided himself that identifying a rogue came as second nature to him.  A man’s carriage, his tone, his eye movements and body language all told a story to Ellis, whether it was a nomadic shepherd beside a campfire in the Hindu Kush, a stout trader in the Lahore bazaars or a smooth Persian diplomat at a cocktail party.  Petrosyan appeared to be - if not scrupulously honest – at least respectful and smart.  In their several conversations in Tiflis, Petrosyan showed himself to have many contacts in the towns along the railway line, from Baku on the Caspian Sea, 350 miles to the east, to Batumi on the Black Sea, 200 miles to the northwest.  Most significantly, Petrosyan lived in Kars, the fortress city at the end of the spur 200 miles to the south west.  This was the end of the Russian-built railway line which had – until the collapse of the Russian army – been pivotal in its confrontation with the Ottomans.  The line to Kars passed through the Armenian highlands now besieged by the Turks, and Petrosyan had been confident that he could introduce Ellis to the Armenian commander, Sergei Sasuni.

So it had proved, for within a week Sasuni and Ellis had been seated beside a fire in the Black Fortress at Alexandropol.  The fortress had been built by the Russians, 80 years previously, from the black stone that had given the circular structure its name.  The pair had met as 1918 dawned, with no sign of a diminution of the slaughter on Europe’s Western Front.  In the South Caucasus, winter had arrived, and the weary snow-covered countryside had paused momentarily in its support of the warring powers.  From the highlands to the west had come endless stories of massacres of Armenians by the Ottomans, of town populations being slaughtered or driven south into the deserts of Syria.  Ellis’ return journey to Tiflis was to be on a train packed with these Armenian refugees from the cities of eastern Turkey.

Ellis had established a rapport with the gaunt Armenian Sasuni, who was wary of the Britisher offering to finance his military endeavours.  Sasuni was in his early forties – around Ellis’s age – and in some respects the men were similar.  Both with the first flakes of silver in their beards, they were hardened to conflict and to the duplicity and unreliability of the men that surrounded them.  They had overcome the distrust of the other with the help of chacha and their mutual dislike of most other foreigners in the region – the Russians, Turks, Germans, Georgians and Azerbaijanis.  Ellis was aware of the Armenians’ long history with quarrelsome neighbours, and skilfully exploited this to sell his proposal. 

Sasuni was smart and cautious, his face drawn with the fatigue of command, but his grey eyes displaying the intelligence that had brought him to that role.  Ellis was unsure whether the Armenian appreciated the big picture behind Britain’s apparent largesse – her interest in not merely stopping the Turks but in blocking the whole exposed Caucasus Gap.  He had concluded that Sasuni was too busy playing the short game of crisis management and survival of his people, to be concerned with Britain’s longer, ulterior plans.

The deal had been sealed, and within a fortnight, the first of the British cases of Russian gold roubles was making its way from Tehran by steamer to Baku, and thence by train to Alexandropol. 

Now Ellis was again meeting with this enigmatic engine driver who had seemed to have unexpectedly become a pivotal element in the whole British strategy in the Caucasus.

 

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