When I was on my college study-abroad program in Oxford, my desperate boredom lead me to rediscover reading, a past-time I had once been consumed by, but abandoned upon discovering things such as girls.
As I recall, I was in the Blackwell's in Oxford, and while in line to buy some absurd text on the philosophy of mathematics, stumbled across a book called "The Great Game", the back cover of which fetchingly promised tales of intrigue and adventure that would comprise the rough opposite of my life at St Catherine's at that time.
The book describes the history of the 19th-century struggle between the British (in India) and the Russians. The British were concerned that the Russians would invade India through Central Asia, and the Russians were obsessed with trying to do just that (while expanding their own territories in every direction possible). The situation was complicated somewhat by no one knowing anything about the region-- at the outset, most of it was just a white spot on the maps.
Both sides played the "Great Game" of sending out young officers to explore the region and try to win treaties of friendship and trade with the many local Shahs and Emirs. These were dashing affairs: they disguised themselves as holymen or local horse traders to avoid robbery or arrest, only unveiling themselves as agents of the Tsar or Queen at the very last minute. Of course, never having heard of any kingdom beyond their horizons, this unveiling often failed to impress, and ended in beheadings or worse.
Regardless of their ultimate efficacy, these tales of fabulous frontier exploits made for great publicity; the British and Russian publics eagerly awaited the latest dispatches from the frontier, and the players were often welcomed home as heroes, if they did return. One of the most famous such players was Alexander Burnes, a Scot who entered the Indian Army and quickly rose to prominence as a linguist and policital officer. In addition to his many exploits in aiding the British to annex much of what is now Pakistan, he was most famous for reaching the city of Bukhara, in modern Uzbekistan, which had been a center of eastern learning and had been closed to westerns since time immemorial. Two earlier great game players, Connoly and Stoddart, had been been cruelly imprisoned and executed. He was thenceforth known as Bukhara Burnes.
Burnes added to his fame by becoming the political officer attached to the first British invasion of Afghanistan, an undertaking he initially opposed. When the Afgans rose against their initially victorious conquerors he was among the first to die.
It wasn't until the second British invasion of Aghanistan, a few decades later, that the spirit of the era was marked down by it's bard, Rudyard Kipling, in the poem "The Arithmetic of the Frontier":
A great and glorious thing it is
To learn, for seven years or so,
The Lord knows what of that and this,
Ere reckoned fit to face the foe--
The flying bullet down the Pass,
That whistles clear: "All flesh is grass."
Three hundred pounds per annum spent
On making brain and body meeter
For all the murderous intent
Comprised in "villainous saltpetre!"
And after--ask the Yusufzaies
What comes of all our 'ologies.
A scrimmage in a Border Station--
A canter down some dark defile--
Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee jezail--
The Crammer's boast, the Squadron's pride,
Shot like a rabbit in a ride!
No proposition Euclid wrote,
No formulae the text-books know,
Will turn the bullet from your coat,
Or ward the tulwar's downward blow
Strike hard who cares--shoot straight who can--
The odds are on the cheaper man.
One sword-knot stolen from the camp
Will pay for all the school expenses
Of any Kurrum Valley scamp
Who knows no word of moods and tenses,
But, being blessed with perfect sight,
Picks off our messmates left and right.
With home-bred hordes the hillsides teem,
The troop-ships bring us one by one,
At vast expense of time and steam,
To slay Afridis where they run.
Are cheap--alas! as we are dear.
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