THERE have been many pretexts during British colonial history for sending troops where they didn't belong, but Lord Curzon's official reason for ordering the invasion of Tibet in 1903 was among the most outlandish. 'We now learn that Tibetan troops attacked Nepalese yaks on the frontier and carried many of them off. This is an overt act of hostility,' wrote the Viceroy of India in a dispatch to London. The result was a military action that began with a British army force camped first over the border to persuade Tibetan officials to enter into talks and ended with that force marching pugnaciously into Lhasa after negotiations, to their delight, failed to even begin. At the head of this foray was Francis Younghusband, former explorer turned frustrated minor official in Imperial India, and, despite his relatively humble station, friend and adviser to the ambitious Curzon. Patrick French, at 29, a highly talented researcher and entertaining writer, uses this expedition as the centrepiece of his 400-page biography and as the most obvious of the many contradictions that pepper the story of a man he describes as the 'last great imperial adventurer'. By the end of his life, Younghusband was calling for self-rule for India, for tolerance for all religions and for the study by the West of Eastern ways which, as an old man, he found superior to much on offer in 1930s Britain. But in 1903 he held no such views and neither he nor the man who sent him blundering into an isolated secretive kingdom ever appear to have admitted the hypocrisy the expedition eventually illuminated. Younghusband and Curzon didn't give a damn about yaks; what they were really hunting were Russians. In this last throw of the jingoistically-titled Great Game, both men were convinced the Tsar's agents had installed themselves in the Tibetan capital as part of their plan to undermine India. It was necessary to force a way into Lhasa, flush them out and save the Raj. To Younghusband, this was a heaven-sent opportunity. He had hard-won experience of trekking through Manchuria, China, the Gobi and Turkestan; he had a deep and genuine love of the high plateaus of Asia and a paternalistic contempt for those who inhabited them: 'The Chitasis are children. But the people who treat children best are English nurses,' he wrote of an earlier expedition. His faith in imperialism went hand in hand with such views. His success on one expedition was 'mainly due to the fact that I was an Englishman that I stood for the British Empire and . . . the good name England during the centuries had established.' Thousands of Tibetans died, forlornly unable to beat the modern weaponry that faced them. Younghusband felt no remorse at the time. 'He wished me to stop and negotiate,' he wrote contemptuously of the general leading the British troops. 'Fancy a general saying this when with a loss of less than 40 killed in action we have killed 2,700 Tibetans.' A treaty was forced; an indemnity secured, but to Younghusband's disappointment, there wasn't a Russian in sight and, from what could be discerned, there never had been any. Within four years the Great Game was over. Russia and England brought their territorial rivalry to a close and Tibet became officially what it had always really been; an irrelevance to the ways of the great powers. In a work that avoids judgements and lets the facts speak for themselves, French does not condemn Younghusband, but the message is clear. The sabre-rattling had been for no good purpose and the deaths of many Tibetans had been in vain. If that is all Francis Younghusband achieved, a run-of-the-mill biography would have been sufficient to sum up his life. The contradictions of imperialism and the suffocating self-righteousness of late Victorian and Edwardian adventurers who came to typify it are well summed up in such an action. But there is more to Younghusband than that. Certainly, he was a product of his times, but he was also a man who took his all-embracing convictions about himself and put them to use in other spheres. Right from this start, he was no marauder; he believed in the mission of the imperialist; he was as contemptuous of his fellow soldiers who led immoral lives as he was of the peoples he felt destined to rule. It may have been this certain stand-offishness as well as his hot-headedness - his orders had not included an attack on Lhasa, but he knew what his superiors wanted - that frequently stalled his career. A man with little family money in a time when appearances were everything, he found it difficult to make his way in the Raj and the fame garnered from his Tibetan exploits only really paid dividends when he was back in Britain, on the lecture circuit and a leading light in the Royal Geographic Society. It was Younghusband who organised the first expeditions to Everest - a peaceful extension of the earlier invasion, French says. But increasingly he was troubled by matters of the soul as World War I got underway, he found a new role in defending the morality of this particular round of slaughter. Eventually he gave way to his obsession with mysticism and plunged into philosophical and sexual free-thinking, rubbing shoulders with Bertrand Russell and George Bernard Shaw; quite a contrast to the man who earlier in his life had paid a woman friend the greatest compliment he could then think of - she would have made a splendid colonel if she had been a man. To the end he was experimenting with new modes of thinking, some outlandish, some inspiring. He never lost his only peculiar faith, nor his faith in himself. French tackles all this with gusto and the tenacity necessary to unearth the details of such a varied life. If Younghusband has one fault, it is that French puts himself into the narrative, describing the research in some detail. It spoils the flow of a fascinating story which, otherwise, is handled with a skill that makes you hope he is already well on the way with his next biography. Younghusband by Patrick French HarperCollins $340