A Boys’ Own Forgotten Front of World War I
Mavericks: Empire, Oil, Revolution and the Forgotten Battle of World War One by Nick Higham (Bloomsbury, 2025)
Reviewed by Elizabeth Stice
The Western Front of the Great War ceased to be active over 100 years ago, but it remains familiar. We can envision the muddy trenches and we have seen the eerie films of men running up out of those trenches and into a smoke-filled no man’s land. We also feel familiar with the horror and sadness of the war and the sense of futility captured in poems by men like Wilfred Owen and books like All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. Yet there continue to be many unfamiliar aspects of the Great War, including the fighting in Africa, much of the naval war, and most of the eastern front. If the conflict in Mesopotamia and against the Ottomans is largely unknown, perhaps almost no one who does not study the war knows anything about the Caucasus, “Dunsterforce,” the Battle of Baku, or its aftermath. Nick Higham’s book sets out to change that.
The Battle of Baku was a six-week battle in 1918 on the western shore of the Caspian Sea. Baku, now the capital of Azerbaijan, was a very complicated Russian city in 1918. Baku was oil-rich, valuable, and a place of great interest to many powerful people around the world, including the Nobel family. There were people of many ethnic and political persuasions. The Bolsheviks had overthrown the Tsar and soviets were springing up, but White Russians and Socialist Revolutionaries were still on the scene. The Azerbaijanis and Armenians were far from getting along and there was serious ethnic violence. Among the provisional governments, oil interests, and agent provocateurs was a small British military force under General Lionel Dunsterville. “Dunsterforce” had some cars, some guns, a small contingent of men, some big ideas, poor communication with the Foreign Office, and very little ability to execute their ambitions. The British were in Baku because they worried that the Turks might press through to India and they wanted to halt any possible Ottoman advance, especially now that the Russians had quit the war.
The situation in Baku was chaotic and violent and, in many ways, tragic. It was also filled with some of the most interesting people you can imagine. And some of those people who took part, as Higham says, “enjoyed—and I use the word advisedly—a very different war” (5). Higham’s book highlights the experiences of five men, his titular “mavericks.” As he says of them: “They were enterprising and fearless, and some were downright reckless: mavericks and loners and eccentrics. Most had great charm, which they knew how to use on men and women alike, and uncommon reserves of ‘pluck’. None of them could be described as passive, or victims” (6). This is not the usual Great War tale. These are not nineteen-year-olds being slaughtered or slowly dying in No Man’s Land. These are grown men with a taste for intrigue and conflict, scheming and fighting in a place you probably know nothing about, for a cause they believe in.
Mavericks reads like a Boys’ Own adventure story of the war. There are high-risk endeavors, bold individuals, an unpredictable front of the war (and postwar), politics, explosives, money hidden in various places, POW experiences, and more. There are train battles and cuneiform inscriptions and opium. In so many ways, it seems like the setting of a Pynchon novel. Higham takes pains to remind the reader that some of the men’s own accounts are embellished, but the foundation of it all is factual and these five men were not the only fascinating figures on the scene. Some of them spent time and effort trying (and failing) to capture the “German Lawrence,” Wilhelm Wassmuss, who always eluded them, though Teague-Jones “somehow got hold of an atlas that had belonged to Wassmuss” which “he eventually donated to the Miami public library, when he lived in the city in retirement” (111). Even if some specific scenes are only “true-ish,” it is beyond doubt that the Caucasus were the site of a very interesting war. The atlas is real.
There are five men at the heart of Mavericks. Lionel Dunsterville had fought on many of the British Empire’s frontiers, had a “mercurial” character, and was a childhood friend of Kipling who inspired the character “Stalky.” If it seems impossible that the men and dramatic scenes in this book should so well resemble those in an adventure book, we should remember that some fictional characters in adventure books were written to resemble real men like this. Aeneas Ranald MacDonell was the vice-consul in Baku, but he had lived all over the world, knew Oscar Wilde, spoke Russian, and was more than capable of intrigue. Edward Noel had “extraordinary career as soldier, diplomat, adventurer, agricultural reformer, opium addict, plotter and spy” (36). He was in Petrograd during the Bolshevik Revolution. He also had an incredibly harrowing captivity experience when he was held by the Jangalis for 65 days.
The remaining mavericks were no less interesting. Toby Rawlinson was “too old” to enlist but had driven on the Western Front and helped provide for the defense of London against aerial attack, before he toured the Caucasus in Ford vans, crossed treacherous mountain passes, bribed tribal leaders, escaped Baku with a hostile boat crew, supervised alleged Ottoman disarmament and found himself imprisoned by the Turks. His older brother was a general on the Western Front and his father was Henry Rawlinson, an agent of empire who also helped translate cuneiform and was recently written about in The Mesopotamian Riddle by Joshua Hammer (2025). Reginald Teague-Jones came from a more middle-class background, learned several languages and spent time in Russia as a young man, worked in the Punjab police before serving on the North-West Frontier, then joined the Border Military Police, and ended up a spy and then some, blamed for decades by the Soviets for the deaths of the “26 Commissars.” After the war, he changed his name for his protection, continued in diplomatic service in other fashions, and somewhat mysteriously traveled and became wealthy in ways that suggest ongoing involvement with spy craft.
Higham’s book relies heavily on the mavericks’ own accounts, which are ultimately stories about empire as well as war and adventure. Higham writes that his subjects were “all servants of empire and, we can safely assume, convinced imperialists. The stories they told served a purpose, not only to record and make sense of what they themselves had done but also—and this was perhaps unconscious on their part—to burnish the imperial legend” (9). His goal in Mavericks is to “better understand” empire by examining narratives about empire. Mavericks is neither a defense nor an indictment of empire, it is an account. A very interesting one.
The links between the Great War and imperialism are not a historiographical trend. The battles and schemes on the edges of the Russian Empire in places like Azerbaijan, Georgia, Transcaspia (much of which is Turkmenistan today), Armenia, and Persia cannot be understood apart from imperialism. The Battle of Baku was also explicitly a battle over oil, which the British worried would fall into Ottoman hands and endanger India. Their main objective was not to thwart the Bolsheviks but to stop the Ottoman Empire. The five mavericks were all imperial hands. Edward Noel was a member of the Indian Political Service. Teague-Jones also came to the war from a police force in India. Dunsterville had served in India, as had a young Rawlinson before his civilian life. MacDonell was a vice-consul in Baku much like those back in the princely states of India. And men like these mavericks derived both enjoyment and fulfillment from much of their imperial soldiering, even if they also suffered because of it.
Mavericks is written for a general audience and it deserves a wide one. Higham has chosen to highlight five very interesting individuals and a complicated and largely unknown corner of the Great War. The fighting and scheming in the Caucasus deserves more attention and exceeds our traditional framing of the war. At the centenary of the war’s beginning in 2014, we had a rush of new books and public history about the Great War, but since then it has again receded in the public imagination. A book like Mavericks demonstrates that the stories have not all been told and there remain many that will be new and engaging for the public. (The team at The Rest is History would be fools not to do a bonus episode on this topic with Higham.)
Elizabeth Stice is a professor of history and assistant director of the honors program at Palm Beach Atlantic University. When she can, she reads and writes about World War I and she is the author of Empire Between the Lines: Imperial Culture in British and French Trench Newspapers of the Great War (2023).
