Mavericks is the story of Dunsterforce, a 1,200-strong assemblage of British and Dominion troops that defended the Caspian port city of Baku from the Turks in the closing months of the First World War. The expedition was one of several – collectively known as ‘the Intervention’ – sent to the peripheries of the collapsed Russian Empire in the summer of 1918. Almost simultaneously with Dunsterforce’s arrival at Baku, other Allied forces landed at the Arctic port of Archangel and at Vladivostok, terminus of the Trans-Siberian Railway. Though they faced different enemies (the embryo Red Army in the north and on the Pacific, the Ottoman one at Baku), all were despatched with the initial purpose of keeping vital assets out of German hands. In Archangel and Vladivostok these were enormous stocks of unused military equipment delivered to the now-defunct tsarist army; at Baku, hundreds of onshore oil wells. Post-Armistice, the aim broadened to overthrowing the subversion-spreading Bolsheviks in favour of whatever local forces seemed strongest. Initially, this was the electorally popular centre left; and after that foundered, a variety of revanchist former tsarist generals.

In this excellent book, Nick Higham covers the Caspian theatre alone. This skimps on context but makes for a simpler narrative and gives his leading men space to breathe. Mavericks is something of a misnomer because although their exploits were remarkable, they were very much products of their class and time. In command was Major General Lionel Dunsterville, a boyishly can-do Indian Army veteran who had been at school with Kipling and served as the model for the anarchic but Empire-bound Stalky. The daredevil of the group was Lieutenant Colonel Toby Rawlinson, in civilian life a pioneering aviator and racing-car driver.

When war broke out, he joined the British Expeditionary Force as a despatcher, driving his own car with a machine gun mounted on the bonnet and Pickelhaube helmets on the front mudguards. The romantic was Captain Edward Noel, a Lawrence-like adventurer who had been playing the Great Game among the nomadic tribes of northern Persia. The most hard-bitten was Reginald Teague-Jones, a political officer who had spent his early career pacifying the North-West Frontier with the military police. The only one who knew Baku well was a longtime expat oilman, British consul Ranald MacDonell.

All make great copy, and none, as Higham admits at the outset, was the type to let the facts stand in the way of a good story. He picks through conflicting sources to untangle fact from fiction and is admirably honest about where he has had to take tallish tales at face value. He is also torn between admiration for his subjects’ toughness and energy, and dismay at their baked-in superiority complex and racism. The former often prompted them to take foolish risks. For example, while Dunsterforce was still making its way north from Baghdad, Noel walked openly into then-Bolshevik-held Enzeli, on Persia’s Caspian coast. Seized, then starved and held in leg irons for six months, he made a superhuman escape attempt but was ‘never quite the same again’. 

Higham also acknowledges their typical-of-the-times anti-Semitism. Teague-Jones, he writes, was ‘profoundly anti-Semitic, to a degree which is quite shocking today … When quoting from his writings I have silently edited out some of his passing references to Jewish people, so as not to distract the contemporary reader’. This is something of a swerve given how widely believed the ‘Jew equals Bolshevik’ canard was, both by officers on the ground and by the Intervention’s supporters in the British Establishment. (Among the latter, Winston Churchill, booster-in-chief in Cabinet and author of a notorious Jewish-conspiracy-toting piece, in February 1920, for the Sunday Herald.) 

The rattling good tale comes, of course, to a downbeat end. Hampered by insufficient numbers and unreliable local allies, Dunsterforce held out in Baku for only six weeks. It suffered its worst blow on 26 August, on a sulphurous hill nicknamed ‘Dirty Volcano’. Let down by a scratch local ‘army’ of peasants and oil workers, a company of North Staffords held out alone for three hours before being overrun by the Ottoman cavalry. Three officers and seventy men were killed. On 14 September, as relations with the local government broke down and fighting reached the city’s outskirts, Dunsterville ordered an evacuation and, the same evening, managed to get almost his whole force back onto its ships and away. As they steamed over the horizon, the Turks’ Azeri auxiliaries entered the city and commenced a three-day massacre of its Armenian population – of which Dunsterville makes not a mention in his jolly-japes-inflected memoir.

A fortnight later, beaten in Syria and Palestine, Turkey sued for peace. The Allied navies sailed into the Black Sea and Baku was reoccupied by a new force under a different general. The Armistice with Germany would have been the logical point at which to wind the Intervention up. Instead it was reconfigured, with troops withdrawn from the north but new ones sent to southern Russia and Ukraine. Dunsterforce’s fate turned out to have been a portent. Through the first months of 1920, in Odessa, Novorossiysk and Vladivostok, Allied forces abandoned beaten (and, in the south, embarrassingly pogrom-happy) Russian partners, their last view of the country burning warehouses and quaysides packed with frantic civilian refugees. So recently victorious over mighty Germany, they had been put to flight by upstart Bolsheviks.

The Dunsterforce men led varied afterlives. In fear of court martial after sending blistering telegrams to the War Office during Baku’s last days, Dunsterville was allowed to return to the Indian Army. MacDonell turned to journalism, and later ran a shop in Swanage, on the Dorset coast. After a brief go at mushroom farming, Noel went back into government service as an agricultural development officer in Persia and what is now Pakistan. Rawlinson joined British occupation forces in Turkey. Sent to negotiate with the nationalist general later known as Kemal Atatürk, he was taken hostage and held in dreadful conditions for eighteen months. Afterwards he became chairman of a successful glass-making firm.

The mystery is Teague-Jones. During Dunsterforce’s occupation of Baku he had served as political officer to a British-backed regime at Askhabad, a town the other side of the Caspian, on the railway to Tashkent. In this role he connived in – or at the very least turned a blind eye to – the regime’s execution of twenty-six mostly Bolshevik members of an earlier Baku government who had fled across the Caspian from the Turks. When news of the murders got out, Teague-Jones found himself the target of a bloodthirsty Soviet propaganda campaign. Adopting an alias for fear of assassination, he spent the interwar years travelling the globe on what may have been a string of enviably cushy commercial filmmaking assignments, or cover for espionage work. He died in Plymouth in 1989, just after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Had he lived a little longer, he would have seen the collapse of the Soviet Union. As Higham reminds us at the close of his lively and judicious study, ‘there are no final endings in history.’