Free The Bloody White Baron by James Palmer

foreigner travelling alone he would have drawn special attention from the locals. Many European visitors to Asia liked to wear traditional dress, often writing self-flatteringly that they were indistinguishable
from the locals. This seems hard to believe. Even today, any European male in rural China, regardless of dress, draws a crowd of open-mouthed children, middle-aged women cheerfully assessing his looks and young men shouting ‘ Hello! ’ There were only a few hundred Europeans in the whole country at the time, among perhaps a million Mongolians; apart from the small Russian settlement around the consulate in Urga, which was the sole foreign enclave, they were guaranteed to attract attention from the locals, curious as to what exotic items or powerful magic they might possess. (Europeans were seen by many Mongols as being potentially powerful sorcerers. The explorer Henning Haslund described how a young woman had come to him and begged him to symbolically ‘adopt’ her sick baby, since his powerful ‘white man’s magic’ would be able to drive away the spirits that plagued the child. He went through the ritual, and the child promptly recovered.) A traveller would never be without company, however unwelcome.
    Ungern would certainly have stood out among the Mongolians, with his bullet-shaped head, stage-villain moustache and tufts of reddish-blond hair. He was in first-rate physical condition, lean and hard, but when he spoke his voice varied wildly in pitch, like that of a teenager, although he was almost thirty. Aleksei Burdukov, a Russian merchant, fell in with Ungern for a while. He left an unforgettable picture of him: ‘a scrawny, ragged, droopy man; on his face had grown a wispy blond beard, he had faded, blank blue eyes, and he looked about thirty years old. His military uniform was in abnormally poor condition, the trousers being considerably worn and torn at the knees. He carried a sword by his hip and a gun at his belt.’ 2 Ungern rode alongside Burdukov’s coaches, a skilled, tireless horseman, shouting at the coachmen when he felt they were slacking and striking them with his whip. When the group stumbled into a swamp, Ungern ‘laid on the ground and refused to move, listening’. Then, going forward and ordering the others to follow, he led them from patch to patch through the bog, ‘finding the most convenient solid places with surprising dexterity and often getting into knee-deep water’. Eventually he sniffed at the air, ‘seeking the smell of smoke to find nearby settlements. At last he told us one was nearby. We followed him, and he was right - in the distance we heard the bark of dogs. This unusual persistence, cruelty, instinctive feelings amazed me.’ Burdukov despaired of the quality of
young Russian officers in the country, if Ungern’s bad manners and cruelty were typical of the breed.

    The first thing Ungern would have noticed about Urga, Mongolia’s most populous settlement, was the smell. Sewers were as unheard of as electricity, and human waste was simply thrown into the streets to be devoured by the packs of scavenging dogs that roamed the city. Anybody venturing outdoors at night took a stick to beat off the animals, but their main enemies were the hordes of beggars, mostly old women no longer able to bear the rigours of steppe life, driven to the town to live a few last miserable years fighting with the dogs for scraps. To add to the stench, the Mongolians were a notoriously unwashed people, believing the rare springs and streams in the country were home to territorial spirits who would inflict dreadful illness on trespassers.
    Ungern arrived there in the autumn of 1913, but it was a strangely timeless city; apart from the rifles sometimes carried by hunters and soldiers, and the very occasional European motor car, it would have been hard to tell whether it was 1913 or 1193. Merchants rode in on camel or horse from China,