The Unveiling of Lhasa

by Edmund Candler

Arrived at Gyantse, we settled down with some sense of security. A bazaar was held outside the camp. The people seemed friendly, and brought in large quantities of supplies. Colonel Younghusband, in a despatch to the Foreign Office, reported that with the surrender of Gyantse Fort on April 12 resistance in that part of Tibet was ended. A letter was received from the Amban stating that he would certainly reach Gyantse within the next three weeks, and that competent and trustworthy Tibetan representatives would accompany him. The Lhasa officials, it was said, were in a state of panic, and had begged the Amban to visit the British camp and effect a settlement.

On April 20 General Macdonald's staff, with the 10-pounder guns, three companies of the 23rd Pioneers, and one and a half companies of the 8th Gurkhas, returned to Chumbi to relieve the strain on the transport and strengthen the line of communications. Gyantse Jong was evacuated, and we occupied a position in a group of houses, as we thought, well out of range of fire from the fort.

Everything was quiet until the end of April, when we heard that the Tibetans were occupying a wall in some strength near the Karo la, forty-two miles from Gyantse, on the road to Lhasa. Colonel Brander, of the 32nd Pioneers, who was left in command at Gyantse, sent a small party of mounted infantry and pioneers to reconnoitre the position. They discovered 2,000 of the enemy behind a strong loopholed wall stretching across the valley, a distance of nearly 600 yards. As the party explored the ravine they had a narrow escape from a booby-trap, a formidable device of Tibetan warfare, which was only employed against our troops on this occasion. An artificial avalanche of rocks and stones is so cunningly contrived that the removal of one stone sends the whole engine of destruction thundering down the hillside. Luckily, the Tibetans did not wait for our main body, but loosed the machine on an advance guard of mounted infantry, who were in extended order and able to take shelter behind rocks.

On the return of the reconnaissance Colonel Brander decided to attack, as he considered the gathering threatened the safety of the mission. The Karo Pass is an important strategical position, lying as it does at the junction of the two roads to India, one of which leads to Kangma, the other to Gyantse. A strong force holding the pass might at any moment pour troops down the valley to Kangma, cut us off in the rear, and destroy our line of communications. When Colonel Brander led his small force to take the pass, it was not with the object of clearing the road to Lhasa. The measure was purely defensive: the action was undertaken to keep the road open for convoys and reinforcements, and to protect isolated posts on the line. The force with the mission was still an 'escort,' and so far its operations had been confined to dispersing the armed levies that blocked the road.

On May 3 Colonel Brander left Gyantse with his column of 400 rifles, comprising three companies of the 32nd Pioneers, under Captains Bethune and Cullen and Lieutenant Hodgson; one company of the 8th, under Major Row and Lieutenant Coleridge, with two 7-pounder guns; the Maxim detachment of the Norfolks, under Lieutenant Hadow; and forty-five of the 1st Mounted Infantry, under Captain Ottley. On the first day the column marched eighteen miles, and halted at Gobshi. On the second day they reached Ralung, eleven miles further, and on the third marched up the pass and encamped on an open spot about two miles from where the Tibetans had built their wall. A reconnaissance that afternoon estimated the enemy at 2,000, and they were holding the strongest position on the road to Lhasa. They had built a wall the whole length of a narrow spur and up the hill on the other side of the stream, and in addition held detached sangars high up the steep hills, and well thrown forward. Their flanks rested on very high and nearly precipitous rocks. It was only possible to climb the ridge on our right from a mile behind, and on the left from nearly three-quarters of a mile. Colonel Brander at first considered the practicability of delaying the attack on the main wall until the Gurkhas had completed their flanking movements, cleared the Tibetans out of the sangars that enfiladed our advance in the valley, and reached a position on the hills beyond the wall, whence they could fire into the enemy's rear. But the cliffs were so sheer that the ascent was deemed impracticable, and the next morning it was decided to make a frontal attack without waiting for the Gurkhas to turn the flank. No one for a moment thought it could be done.

The troops marched out of camp at ten o'clock. One company of the 32nd Pioneers, under Captain Cullen, was detailed to attack on the right, and a second company, under Captain Bethune, to follow the river-bed, where they were under cover of the high bank until within 400 yards of the wall, and then rush the centre of the position. The 1st Mounted Infantry, under Captain Ottley, were to follow this company along the valley. The guns, Maxims, and one company of the 32nd in reserve, occupied a small plateau in the centre. Half a company of the 8th Gurkhas were left behind to guard the camp. A second half-company, under Major Row, were sent along the hillside on the left to attack the enemy's extreme right sangar, but their progress over the shifting shale slopes and jagged rocks was so slow that the front attack did not wait for them.

The fire from the wall was very heavy, and the advance of Cullen's and Bethune's companies was checked. Bethune sent half a company back, and signalled to the mounted infantry to retire. Then, compelled by some fatal impulse, he changed his mind, and with half a company left the cover of the river-bed and rushed out into the open within forty yards of the main wall, exposed to a withering fire from three sides. His half-company held back, and Bethune fell shot through the head with only four men by his side—a bugler, a store-office babu, and two devoted Sikhs. What the clerk was doing there no one knows, but evidently the soldier in the man had smouldered in suppression among the office files and triumphed splendidly. It was a gallant reckless charge against uncounted odds. Poor Bethune had learnt to despise the Tibetans' fire, and his contempt was not unnatural. On the march to Gyantse the enemy might have been firing blank cartridges for all the effect they had left on our men. At Dzama Tang Bethune had made a frontal attack on a strong position, and carried it without losing a man. Against a similar rabble it might have been possible to rush the wall with his handful of Sikhs, but these new Kham levies who held the Karo la were a very different type of soldier.

The frontal attack was a terrible mistake, as was shown four hours afterwards, when the enemy were driven from their position without further loss to ourselves by a flanking movement on the right.

At twelve o'clock Major Row, after a laborious climb, reached a point on a hillside level with the sangars, which were strongly held on a narrow ledge 200 yards in front of him. Here he sent up a section of his men under cover of projecting rocks to get above the sangars and fire down into them. In the meanwhile some of the enemy scrambled on to the rocks above, and began throwing down boulders at the Gurkhas, but these either broke up or fell harmless on the shale slopes above. After waiting an hour, Major Row went back himself and found his section checked half-way by the stone-throwing and shots from above; they had tried another way, but found it impracticable.

Keeping a few men back to fire on any stone-throwers who showed themselves, Row dribbled his men across the difficult place, and in half an hour reached the rocky ledge above the sangars and looked right down on the enemy. At the first few shots from the Gurkhas they began to bolt, and, coming into the fire of the men below, who now rushed forward, nearly every man—forty in all—was killed. One or two who escaped the fire found their flight cut off by a precipice, and in an abandonment of terror hurled themselves down on the rocks below. After clearing the sangar, the Gurkhas had only to surmount the natural difficulties of the rocky and steep hill; for though the enemy fired on them from the wall, their shooting was most erratic. When at last they reached a small spur that overlooked the Tibetan main position, they found, to their disgust, that each man was protected from their fire by a high stone traverse, on the right-hand of which he lay secure, and fired through loopholes barely a foot from the ground.