The Bloody White Baron Read Free

might lick its lips at any moment. A rural Mongolian couple were kneeling on the floor before it, chanting and kowtowing; they’d brought oranges to feed the god, and cash to bribe him. Even after the pilgrims had left, I didn’t want to stand in front of the thing, let alone examine it closely; it was the first time I’d had any concrete sense of the word ‘idol’.
    Elsewhere in the temple, small-denomination notes were tucked into the armpits and behind the ears of most of the gods, and ageing fruit lay before them. I wondered whether the purpose was prayer or appeasement. The assembled gods trampled bodies, gripped weapons and had fixed, bloody smiles. The last time I’d visited a Chinese temple I’d spent my time wisecracking about the ‘war umbrellas’ the gods carried, much to the horror of my Chinese companion, who, despite being Muslim, was convinced I was drawing some awful curse down on myself. I was raised Anglican, which takes most of the fear out of religion, but I wasn’t making any jokes in this place. I could see chipped paint and worm-eaten wood, the cracks and hollows of years of neglect. It didn’t make me feel any more at ease; it just made the gods seem older and darker and angrier.

    The temple’s gift shop sold plastic versions of the monstrosities inside, grinning horror reduced to plastic kitsch. I bought some oranges and a few sticks of incense before returning inside with a bunch of schoolchildren, their laughter and joking soon silenced in the shadows before the gods. I stuck the incense in the sandbox before the biggest and grisliest of the lot and placed a five-yuan note alongside the oranges at its feet. Better safe than sorry, after all.
    Such a temple, with its close, fearful atmosphere would surely have made a deep and lasting impression on Ungern. He had not come to it a blank slate - he was a cruel and ruthless man long before his arrival in Mongolia - but the images of Mongolian Buddhism, filtered through the perspective of the equally murky world of Russian and European mysticism and its fascination with the ‘Orient’, had shaped his thinking and his actions. This fascination was mingled, in Ungern’s time, with deep fears of the ‘inevitable’ rise of the East, creating the myth of the ‘Yellow Peril’, the hordes of sinister Orientals who threatened the West.
    Beyond the religious aspects, Ungern’s actions had to be understood as part of the regional clashes in the first half of the twentieth century between Russia, Japan and China. Mongolia and Manchuria had been the fault line for conflict between the old and crumbling tsarist and Chinese empires, but also the focus of the new imperialism of the Soviets and Japanese. Mongolia, an impoverished, seemingly unimportant country of fewer than two million people, became a key part of these struggles, and Ungern’s thinking and strategy made sense only in the context of these conflicts.
    I was beginning to develop a sense of what lay behind the Baron’s terrible deeds, but definite information was still hard to come by. Even in the 1930s the Russian-French writer Vladimir Pozner had found that Ungern Nobody died while I was tracking Ungern, but he remained elusive.
    kept on escaping me. He confused the catalogues of books in the libraries. He muddled up the addresses of people who had once known him. He afflicted some of them with loss of memory. He struck others dead: for example, ‘Prince’ Tumbair-Malinovski, who was felled by paralysis and shot himself in a Nice hospital. He allowed no one to identify him. 5

    My own travels through Mongolia, Russia and China made many aspects of Ungern’s campaign clearer to me, as did the work of Russian and Mongolian scholars. I began to see how a small, brutal war in Mongolia fitted into the larger patterns of history, and how Ungern’s actions had had a far greater impact than I had ever