Return of a king, p.24
Return of a King, page 24
If the British had won a remarkable victory against the odds, the Afghans had hardly disgraced themselves. They had shown their fighting skills, and the bravery of the defenders, even when all was lost, created legends that began to grow almost immediately. Mirza ‘Ata, who like many Afghans began to feel his own loyalties turning at this point, recorded that many believed that miracles attended the bodies of the fallen. ‘The dead ghazis, like the martyrs of Kerbela, were left on the battlefield without grave or shroud,’ he wrote,
and in spite of entreaties by pious Muslims to give them proper burial the English refused permission. But during the night, thanks to the Almighty, all the corpses of the martyrs disappeared and not a trace of their blood remained on the ground. Another curious story was of a ghazi who remained in a tower of the Fort for 3 days, sniping and killing all who came near – he accounted for 70 Company soldiers, then suddenly disappeared – and no one knew where he went. Inside the Ghazni Fort there are many large underground tunnels of which the English for some months were quite unaware, until, it is said, some 800 virgin girls and infants, 300 horses, 500 Afghan men suddenly appeared and walked away, and not one of the occupying troops making any attempt to stop or challenge them. So it was that English rule descended on Ghazni.100
News of the fall of Ghazni reached Dost Mohammad in Kabul in less than forty-eight hours. He had spent three months renovating and strengthening the greatest fortress in the land, and it had fallen to the Kafir [infidel] invaders within three hours. In the next few days there was further bad news that both eroded his own confidence and undermined the resolve of his supporters.
First, and most damagingly for the Amir, his favourite and most effective son Akbar Khan, whom he had deputed to guard the Khyber and block the advance of Wade and Prince Timur, had fallen suddenly sick. There were rumours of poison, and for two days Akbar Khan’s life hung in the balance. According to the Afghan sources, this more than anything else affected the spirits of Dost Mohammad: ‘When the Amir saw his son, as dear to him as his own liver, the pain of grief tore his heart to shreds and he beat his head with the hands of desperation.’101
The illness of Akbar Khan finally provided Wade with the opportunity he had been waiting for. In the confusion he decided to risk an assault on the Khyber although he had managed to gather fewer than 5,000 troops, and these of indifferent quality. The assault was fiercely opposed both by the local Afridis and by the tribesmen of Mohammad Shah Khan of the Babrak Khel Ghilzai, who was the father of Akbar Khan’s famously beautiful bride. But on 26 July Wade captured Ali Masjid below the summit of the pass, and before long was marching on towards Jalalabad, from which the prostrate Akbar Khan had to be hurriedly removed on a litter.
The capture of Ali Masjid and Ghazni within forty-eight hours of each other encouraged other disaffected tribesmen. In Istalif, thirty-five miles beyond Kabul, the Tajik Kohistanis rose up against the Barakzais under their religious leader, the Naqsbandi Pir and hereditary Imam of the Pul-i-Khishti mosque, Mir Haji, and expelled their Barakzai Governor, Dost Mohammad’s eldest son, Sardar Sher ‘Ali Khan. They pursued him into his mud-walled compound in Charikar which they then besieged, ‘tightening the noose around his neck’.102 As a young man, Dost Mohammad had had many of the Kohistani maliks killed when he ruled the area for his elder half-brother Fatteh Khan, and having been offered financial inducements by Wade, Mir Haji now encouraged his people to rise up and claim the revenge for which they had been waiting twenty years.103
With one army advancing on him from Ghazni, and another from Jalalabad, and with the Kohistanis rising in revolt to his rear, Dost Mohammad’s options were now rapidly diminishing. His first reaction was the traditional Pashtun response to a defeat – negotiations. Nawab Jabar Khan was the most pro-British of all the Kabul nobles: he had hosted Burnes and sponsored Charles Masson’s excavations as well as sending his son to be educated in the English fashion at Wade’s school in Ludhiana. Morever, during the face-off with Vitkevitch the previous year, the Nawab had worked hard to win over his brother to the British cause.
So Jabar Khan was sent to Ghazni with an offer – Shah Shuja could return to the throne, on the condition that under the Sadozai crown Dost Mohammad could continue as wazir, ‘which situation, by hereditary claim, he had a right to secure’. After all, his half-brother Fatteh Khan had been wazir to Shah Zaman, and his father Payindah Khan was wazir to Shuja’s father Timur Shah. To Pashtun eyes it was both the customary and the obvious solution to the problem, and Jabar Khan was amazed when the offer was peremptorily turned down by the British. He was also appalled at the rejection of his second request: ‘the deliverance of his niece, the wife of Haidar Khan’. As one young British officer, Henry Havelock, noticed, Jabar ‘felt or affected, the utmost indignation at the rejection’.104 Only Mohan Lal, with his long experience of Afghan notions of honour, understood how insulting this rejection was: ‘it was quite unnecessary to offend such a valuable friend as the Nawab at this critical time’, he wrote. As a result,
[Jabar] really lost confidence and hope in us. In the conversation which he had with us, the topic turned to Shah Shuja ul-Mulk whose name we mentioned with great deference; on which the Nawab smiled, and said to the Envoy, ‘If Shah Shuja is really a king, and come to the kingdom of his ancestors, what is the use of your army? You have brought him by your money and arms into Afghanistan, and you have behaved towards him in a friendly and liberal manner in every way. Leave him now with us Afghans, and let him rule us if he can.’ Such plain language was not palatable to us . . . and the good Nawab, sunk in disappointment and distress of mind by our unfriendly manner towards him, left our camp about noon on the 29th July. I was told to escort the Nawab beyond our piquets; and on the road we heard the shrieks of some woman captured from the fortress of Ghazni. The Nawab turned his face towards me, and nodded his head . . . The tone of the language of the Nawab, on his return to Kabul, was not friendly towards us.105
As negotiations had now failed, Dost Mohammad had only one remaining option: he gathered his supporters in Kabul and summoned a public meeting in the gardens surrounding the unfinished tomb of Timur Shah. There he made an emotional speech, several accounts of which have survived. ‘You have eaten my salt these last thirteen years,’ he told his last followers. ‘Grant me but one favour in return for that long period of maintenance and kindness – enable me to die with honour. Stand by the brother of Fatteh Khan while he executes one last charge against the cavalry of the Firangi dogs; if in that onset he will fall, then go and make your own terms with Shah Shuja.’106 The plea was met with silence. The fullest account of what happened next is that given by Maulana Hamid Kashmiri in the Akbarnama, who has Dost Mohammad debate his own legitimacy with his followers. The Amir claims to represent the rule of Islamic law and justice, but his followers, seeing which way the wind is blowing, reply that a crowned and legitimate king should always have the first call on their loyalty, not an amir. For this reason they dismiss Dost Mohammad’s argument that Shuja has lost the protection of law as he has chosen to ally himself with the Firangi infidels. ‘What has the world become in these times?’ asked the Amir.
‘When of a hundred friends not one remains a friend?
When men become more faithless than women
Why then should the faith of women be given a bad name?
I fear that the state will fall into the hand of the Firangis
Then laws, a creed and religion of their own they would place here
No one’s honour would remain intact
No one’s suffering would be spared.’
They said to him in reply: ‘O leader of this assembly
In this war, aid from us you will not find . . .
For rebelling against Kings is forbidden by God
To be an Amir and a Shah is quite different
We do not dare to draw swords upon him
Let whatever comes to us come.’
The Amir responded: ‘Obedience to a King is right
If he is on the rightly guided path of Shari’a
Not a king who has become faithless
The world from his oppression would be rendered terrible
Now with the aid of infidels
He has come prepared with a great army
The helpers of infidels, by the law of the hadith
Become kafirs, wicked and impure
The killing of such an impure Shah is right
Helping him is unrighteous and wrong’
He was answered by the Qizilbash leader, Khan Shirin Khan. Dost Mohammad had a Qizilbash mother and hoped the Qizilbash would stand and fight with him, but they, like everyone else, could see which way the wind was blowing.
‘Silence! [replied Khan Shirin Khan.] Do not speak words so wicked and infelicitous
For after all we have eaten the salt of the Shah
Stop your idle boasting! The time of your pretensions has gone
The time of your arrogance and vanity has passed.’
When night fell, with a hundred furies and much presumption
The Qizilbash and others worthy of the gibbet and cross . . .
Like fearless thieves plundered the treasury
They carried away much wealth and loot
Then within one night like the wind they flew
To join the Firangi army
The Amir, betrayed by his own forces, was heartbroken.
All his friends he saw become strangers to him
He became sunk in anxiety for his own cause
As the poet Sa’adi said, ‘When you see that your friends are no longer friendly
Look upon flight from the field as your gain’
So he plucked out of his heart all thoughts of war
From weapons, arms and those things dear to him
He took such that he could carry by himself, the rest he let be
Then he beat the kettledrums of departure and raised the flag
He set out with one thousand and five hundred
Of his own tribe, and went towards Khulm by way of Bamiyan107
News of Dost Mohammad’s flight arrived in the British camp on 3 August 1839. It took only three more days for the army to march the final few miles to Kabul. On 7 August, eight months after they had left Ferozepur, the Army of the Indus finally marched into the Afghan capital with Shah Shuja at its head, ‘dazzling in a coronet, jewelled girdle and bracelet’, and Macnaghten not to be outdone in ‘a cocked hat fringed with ostrich feathers, a blue frock coat with raised buttons, richly embroidered on the collar and cuffs, epaulettes not yielding in splendour to those of a field marshal, and trousers edged in very broad gold lace’. It was thirty years since the Shah had last seen his magnificent Timurid palace on the great rock of the Bala Hisar, which occupied nearly a quarter of the area of Kabul. Silent crowds filled the street, standing up as the Shah passed, and reseating themselves as the British officials followed; but there were no cheers and no rejoicing. According to George Lawrence, the Kabulis showed ‘the most complete indifference [at the return of the Shah], expressing no sign of welcome or satisfaction at his accession to the throne. Evidently their hearts and affections were with their previous sovereign, now a wanderer beyond the Hindu Kush.’108 Another young officer went further. ‘It was more like a funeral procession’, he wrote, ‘than the entry of a king into the capital of his restored dominions.’109
Only the Shah himself showed any pleasure or emotion. ‘His Majesty led the way into the palace and gardens,’ wrote Major Hough. ‘The former were so much dilapidated after the lapse of thirty years that the old man wept, while he explained to his grandsons and family the state of its former splendour.’ As he mounted the familiar staircase to the upper wards of the palace and could see Kabul spread out below him, his spirits rose as he realised that his dream, thwarted for three decades, had finally been fulfilled: ‘Ascending the great staircase, the Shah ran with childish eagerness from one small chamber to another of the well-remembered abode of royalty, deploring aloud the neglect and damage which was everywhere visible, and particularly lamented the removal of the panels of mirror from the sheesh mahal.’110
But, for all the complaints, Shah Shuja was happy. Finally, he was home.
5
The Flag of Holy War
On the morning of 8 May 1839, just as Shah Shuja was riding in triumph through the gates of Kandahar, the dead body of a man in his early thirties was discovered by a cleaning lady. The discovery took place in a top-floor room of the Paris Boarding House in the shuttered backstreets of St Petersburg. The man had apparently locked his door from within. He had then blown his brains out.
A short and matter-of-fact note lay on the desk beside the body. It read as follows:
Not knowing anyone who would care about my destiny in any way, I find it sufficient to explain that I am taking my own life voluntarily. As I am currently employed by the Asian Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I humbly beseech the said Department to dispose of the 2 years’ wages due to me from the 1st Orenburg Regiment in the following way: 1. Settle the bill for officer’s uniform articles, for the total sum of about 300 roubles; 2. Give 500 roubles to the tailor Markevitch for the dress I ordered from him but haven’t collected; 3. Allow my man Dmitry the use of all my belongings that I have with me at the moment. I have burnt all the papers relating to my last journey and, therefore, all search for them would be entirely useless. I have settled the bill with the landlord of the Paris Inn up until May 7, but should he have any other requests I humbly beseech the Department to satisfy him from the above-mentioned sum. May 8, 1839, 3 a.m. Vitkevitch1
Nothing about Ivan Viktorovitch Vitkevitch’s notably Dostoyevskian death made much sense, and almost from the moment the body was discovered the mysterious end of Russia’s first agent of the Great Game became the subject of speculation. The British believed the suicide was evidence of all that they most disliked and feared about the autocratic callousness of the Tsar’s regime. Vitkevitch had, after all, been barbarously exiled from his native Poland to a punishment posting on the distant steppe at the age of only fourteen. Then, having worked his way up against all the odds and excelled as an intelligence agent, at the moment of his triumph, when he had outmanoeuvred his rival Burnes and won over the Barakzais, he had been callously disowned and cast out by his Russian masters.
The British Ambassador in St Petersburg wrote to Palmerston that ‘the cause is said to have been the disapprobation & disavowal of his conduct in Afghanistan by the Russ. Govt. instead of the reward & promotion he expected’.2 According to Russian ‘refugees and émigrés’ contacted by Sir John Kaye when he was enquiring into the matter in the late 1840s, Vitkevitch had arrived in the capital ‘full of hope, for he had discharged the duty entrusted to him with admirable address’. But Count Nesselrode had refused to receive him, and when he presented himself at the Ministry he had been turned away. The Count had sent word that he ‘knew no Captain Vitkevitch, except an adventurer of that name, who it is reported, has lately been engaged in some unauthorised intrigues in Kabul and Kandahar’. Vitkevitch ‘understood at once the dire portent of the message. He knew the character of his government.’ Aware that in the apparently successful British invasion of Afghanistan he had already been checkmated by Burnes, he now ‘saw clearly’ that in addition ‘he was sacrificed’ by the politicians he had served so faithfully and effectively.3
The British agent and news-writer in Bukhara, Nazir Khan Ullah, independently confirmed this version of events in a secret despatch sent from Central Asia. Vitkevitch had felt himself compromised when his superiors failed to honour his promises of military support to the Barakzais, leaving them to face the British alone. ‘The Russian agent here is my acquaintance,’ wrote Nazir Khan to his handler, Burnes. ‘He said that when Vitkevitch returned from Kabul to Russia, he told the Russian authorities that he had sent them many letters soliciting Military and Pecuniary assistance and that they never sent him any reply, and delayed the business, and that this neglect had made him out a liar in the country of Kabul and Kandahar. He therefore felt disgraced, and on hearing of the answer of the Cabinet of St. Petersburg, he shot himself.’4
For many Russian observers, however, the mysterious death coupled with the suspicious disappearance of Vitkevitch’s Afghan papers bore all the hallmarks of British foul play. After all, Vitkevitch’s papers contained details of the British intelligence and news-writing networks in Central Asia that he had successfully penetrated. As L. G. Sinyavin, the new director of the Asiatic Department, noted in a letter shortly afterwards:
He burned our papers without handing them over. Those papers constituted various observations to assist him in drawing up a report on the affairs of Afghanistan and copies of the despatches of British agents to various individuals in Afghanistan. In a word, with him perished all the valuable information about Afghanistan which would now be particularly precious and useful to us and which, from his remarkable talents and gifts of observation, we have every reason to suppose his papers contained. Only what he personally managed to relate to me is known.5
All this led to speculation that Vitkevitch’s shooting was in fact a covert assassination by British intelligence agents. There was, after all, no reason why Vitkevitch should commit suicide, given that – according to the official Russian version of events – he had been received with honour, promoted, told he was in line for a medal, and was about to be received by Tsar Nicholas I for a personal interview on the very morning of his death. Why would such a man kill himself on the eve of his great moment of glory? Sinyavin for one was baffled. ‘Vitkevitch had only arrived in St Petersburg eight days previously,’ he wrote to Perovsky, Vitkevitch’s patron in Orenburg. ‘He was extremely well received by the Ministry and on the very day of his death the report came through authorising his transfer to the guards, and on top of that, rewards of promotion, honours and money.’ Sinyavin continued:
