Like Hidden Fire: The Plot to Bring Down the British Empire

An experienced historian uses secret intelligence reports and memoirs of participants to reconstruct the holy war conducted by Germany and Turkey against the British Empire in 1914, as the Great Game expanded into a quest for world domination.

Expertly assembled from memoirs, diaries and secret intelligence reports of the day, Hopkirk's book recounts the attempt of Germany's Wilhelm II to harness the forces of militant Islam against Britain's imperial interests in central Asia during WW I. His efforts to rally the peoples of the Ottoman Empire, the Caucasus, Persia and Afghanistan--and the counterefforts by the British and Russians--were carried out largely by intelligence agents. If the book has a flaw it is its plethora of riches: there are plots here to supply several spy novels. In the final third of his study, Hopkirk ( The Great Game ) focuses on the unsuccessful defense of Baku by British, Russian and Armenian troops against the German-backed Turkish "Army of God." Among those taken captive when the Azerbaijani capital fell in September 1918 were 26 Bolshevik commissars whose subsequent martyrdom became a staple of Soviet propaganda. Hopkirk's scholarly efforts, which included a visit to the remote massacre site, go a long way toward clearing up the mystery of their final hours. This little-known chapter of great-power rivalry in central Asia demonstrates that the region was no less volatile three-quarters of a century ago. Illustrations.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Another charge through the imperial past as Hopkirk deftly marshals facts, larger-than-life characters, and sweeping battles to demonstrate how close the Germans and their Turkish allies came to bringing down the mighty British Empire. The Anglo-Russian rivalry in Central Asia explored previously by Hopkirk in The Great Game (1992) is here overtaken by an even greater rivalry for power in the region as Germany, under the Kaiser, begins an aggressive search in the East--the infamous drang nach osten--for power and Lebensraum. This deadly rivalry would precipitate a world war, a revolution in Russia, and arbitrary divisions of land and peoples that continue to be contested today. And while Hopkirk never neglects events in western Europe, his focus is on the German campaign for the hearts and minds of Muslims in the moribund Ottoman Empire, British India, Persia, and Afghanistan. By fomenting a holy war in this volatile region, Germany hoped to destroy Britain, win an empire of its own, and gain access to such vital resources as oil and cotton. By 1911 the chief of the Indian Secret Service was warning his men that a mysterious and dangerous conspiracy aimed at overthrowing British rule was spreading across the subcontinent ``like some hidden fire.'' In locales as varied as Sikh revolutionary cells in San Francisco and the Summer Palace of the Emir of Afghanistan, Hopkirk, a master of suspense, details the twisting course of this conflict with all the pace of a thriller. He offers vivid sketches of the colorful figures involved: men as ingenious as the heroes of John Buchan's Greenmantle, a fictionalized account of this same period; as ambitious as Turkish supremo Enver Pasha; and as doomed as the erstwhile Soviet heroes, the Baku Commissars. Historical writing that is remarkably accessible as well as incisive. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The author of The Great Game (Kodansha, 1992) and other espionage narratives, Hopkirk tells a lively World War I story in this account of the Turco-German effort to move to the East and disrupt the British and Russian grip in Asia. The Turks dreamed of an expanded Ottoman Empire; the Germans planned to use the Turks and ultimately supplant them. A railroad heading east from Constantinople, a failed uprising in Calcutta, a wild race to Afghanistan, and a matching of wits with Lawrence of Arabia occurred simultaneously as Germany faltered in the West and the effort gradually lost steam. Libraries where Hopkirk's previous tales have been popular will want to add this one also.
Nancy C. Cridland, Indiana Univ. Libs., Bloomington
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This is in essence a sequel to Hopkirk's well-received Great Game (1990). It describes imperial Germany's strenuous efforts, before and during World War I, to raise the Islamic populations of India and the Middle East against the British. That these efforts failed was not for want of either German determination or British blunders. Reading like a novel, Hopkirk's latest is full of fascinating episodes and still more fascinating people who make Indiana Jones look like a stay-at-home. It also sheds, perhaps uncomfortably, much light on some contemporary rivalries in the Middle East and among ethnic groups of the former Soviet Union. Roland Green