Return of a king, p.45
Return of a King, page 45
The story was immediately retold by Afghan poets and singers, the numbers of casualties and the scale of the victory growing with each retelling. ‘It is said that 60,000 English troops – half from Bengal, half from other provinces, without counting servants and camp-followers – went to Afghanistan,’ wrote Mirza ‘Ata,
and only a handful came back alive, wounded and destitute. The rest fell with neither grave nor shroud to cover them, and lay scattered in that land like rotting donkeys. The English love gold and money so much that they cannot stop themselves from laying their hands on any area productive of wealth. But what prize did they find in Afghanistan except, on the one hand, the exhausting of their treasury and, on the other, the disgracing of their army? It is said that of the 40,000 English troops who had been in Kabul, many were taken captive en route, many remained as cripples and beggars in Kabul, and the rest perished in the mountains, like a ship sunk without trace; for it is no easy thing to invade or govern the Kingdom of Khurasan.66
9
The Death of a King
The news of the massacre of an entire British army spread quickly around the region.
In Bukhara, the Amir celebrated the good tidings by ordering the murder of his two British prisoners, Charles Conolly and Arthur Stoddart. In Herat, the Wazir Yar Mohammad took the opportunity of throttling his monarch, Kamran Shah Sadozai, knowing that neither the British nor Shah Shuja would now be in any position to stop him. The news caused more excitement still in India. In Delhi, the bankers of the Chandni Chowk bazaars heard the news a full two days before the colonial authorities: the letter-writing systems of traditional trade working far faster and more efficiently than the creaking colonial system of harkara runners.1 By the time the news reached Calcutta, it had already given hope and encouragement to the many opponents of Company rule across the length and breadth of Hindustan: it was no accident that when the Great Rebellion did break out in 1857, it did so in sepoy regiments which had been deserted by their British officers in the snows of the Khord Kabul, and in civilian centres such as Lucknow, Agra and Kanpur where the Persian presses had eagerly reprinted the Afghan epic poems and prose accounts of the British defeat.2
Lord Auckland was almost the last to hear about the catastrophe. It took a full two weeks for the express bearing Dr Brydon’s tale finally to reach Government House on 30 January 1842. The news, as Emily Eden noted, aged ‘poor George’ ten years in as many hours: he screamed and raged, then took to his bed. He emerged partially paralysed, and was believed to have suffered some kind of stroke.3 In the days that followed, his sisters became more and more anxious, watching helplessly as their brother paced pale-faced up and down the veranda by day and lay prostrate on the lawns at night, pressing his face against the cool turf for comfort. Only a few weeks earlier, his trusted adviser Macnaghten had been writing to him from Kabul, telling him not to believe the nay-sayers and assuring him that all was well. Now his entire Imperial strategy and all his ‘plans for public good and public security upon which I had staked so much have all broken under circumstances of horror and disaster of which history has few parallels’.4 Indeed the entire catastrophe was to Auckland himself ‘as inexplicable as it is appalling’. Worse still was the news that followed, that Akbar and the other leaders of the resistance were now moving to finish off the three remaining British garrisons in Jalalabad, Ghazni and Kandahar. Around India, rumours spread that, with much of the Indian army still absent in China fighting Auckland’s Opium War, the Afghans would soon be pouring down the Khyber Pass to loot the plains of Hindustan as they had done so often in the past.
It was one week more before London heard what had happened. The Times broke the news to the nation: ‘We regret to announce that the intelligence which this express has brought us is of the most disastrous and melancholy nature.’ In a typically Russophobic leading article published a few days later it hinted heavily – and quite inaccurately – at a Russian hand in the events, pointing out that the first to be targeted for assassination was none other than Sir Alexander Burnes, the great rival of Vitkevitch and ‘the keenest antagonist of the Russian agents’.5
The new Tory government of Sir Robert Peel had been all set to withdraw from Afghanistan and wash its hands of the mess created by its Whig predecessors. Now, however, it was agreed by the Cabinet that the nation’s military reputation had first to be salvaged. Lord Ellenborough, the founding ideologue of the Indus policy and the man the Tories had already sent out to replace Auckland as governor general, heard of the disaster when his ship docked off Madras on 21 February. From the Governor’s House he wrote immediately to Peel declaring that he intended to teach the Afghans a lesson they would never forget: ‘the honour of our arms must be re-established in Afghanistan . . . Every difficulty should be encountered and overcome for the preservation of India.’6 By the time Ellenborough reached Calcutta on the 28th – addressing barely a word to his disgraced and beleaguered predecessor or his sisters – the news had arrived that Ghazni too had fallen to the Ghilzai, and its garrison, like that of Kabul, had been either captured, slaughtered or enslaved.
By this time, a heavily armed relief force, six regiments strong, with the ominous title of the Army of Retribution had already been despatched from the cantonments of Meerut and Ferozepur with orders to cross the Sutlej and head to Peshawar, ready to wreak revenge. Auckland’s first choice of general had been another elderly veteran like Elphinstone, but luckily for the troops the frail and doddering Sir Harry Lumley was ruled out on medical advice. So the command went instead to Major-General George Pollock, who received his orders while smoking his breakfast cheroot on the veranda of his bungalow in Agra. Pollock was a precise, sensible and doggedly efficient Londoner who had been a Company officer in India more than thirty years. A veteran of the Nepal and Burmese Wars, he was, as George Lawrence’s younger brother Henry put it, ‘as good as any commander that could be sent’. When George Broadfoot heard the news inside the besieged walls of Jalalabad, he also approved. Though no Napoleon, he wrote, Pollock was ‘superior to any officer I have yet chanced to meet in these regions’.7
At the same time as Pollock received his appointment, orders were sent to Dost Mohammad’s keeper, Captain Nicholson, that their prisoner was to be moved from the Afghan frontier and placed in isolation and under surveillance. ‘You will be pleased to lose no time on receipt of this letter in adopting the most strict system for the custody of Dost Mohammad Khan,’ Nicholson was instructed by George Clerk, the agent for the North West Frontier, ‘making him a close prisoner and preventing all communication with him or his retinue by Afghans or Hindoostanis, except with your permission.’8
Within a few days, Dost Mohammad had been moved to an isolated property high in the hills beyond Mussoorie. Nicholson’s measures to secure his prisoner reveal the extreme fear and paranoia that overtook the British in India at this time. The small sepoy guard was replaced with no fewer than 110 Englishmen from a newly arrived Queen’s Regiment. Even Skinner’s Horse, one of whose battalions had just been wiped out – along with Skinner’s own son James – on the retreat from Kabul, was sent away from the area as ‘the proportion of Mohammadans in the Rissalah was so great that it seemed more prudent not to employ men whose religion (however well inclined to us the men may be) might be employed as a means to seduce them from their duty’.
Elaborate measures were taken to make sure that Dost Mohammad did not escape or enter into correspondence with the Afghan rebels. ‘The Ameer’s premises are guarded day and night by sentries,’ wrote Nicholson, ‘and the roads leading to it from Landour, as also from Rajpoor, are constantly watched by sentries. None of the Ameer’s followers will be allowed to pass out beyond the sentries, no strangers whatsoever admitted within them, except by my pass, which will only be granted when necessary, and the individuals going out will be accompanied by a European guard.’ Further precautions were taken to prevent correspondence:
. . . I am establishing a small thannah [police post] at the foot of the hills which will watch the advent of all strangers from the Westward, especially Afghans or Kashmiris, and give me instant notice of the arrival of any suspicious characters . . . At the head of this I propose placing an individual of my present establishment who speaks all the languages of the trans-Indus countries, and with him will be associated a Hindu chupprussie and four hillmen. Their orders are to accompany secretly any suspected individual up the hill, till he reaches the nearest sentry, and then to hand him over to the guard, which is to be posted close to the Ameer’s house.
As an additional measure, Nicholson recommended that all Kashmiris be banned from the Mussoorie hills, unless they had a special pass,
[because] an Afghan messenger would not be likely personally to attempt communicating with the prisoner so closely watched as Dost Mohammad Khan, but would have recourse to one less liable to suspicion; in all probability to a Kashmiri.
Their character as Cossids [messengers] is too well known to need mention and of them I am especially apprehensive. Hence I would suggest that orders be given at Ludhiana and Amballah, that no Kashmiri should be permitted to visit the Dhoon [Valley] or the hills without a pass from yourself. It would probably too aid my efforts if a note of any Kashmiri traveller were to be sent to me by dak by the police officers of the Amballah district, and this would be a check on my own thanna people.
Clerk approved of all Nicholson’s measures and in addition gave Nicholson special authority to ‘arrest and most closely search any suspicious individual’.9
In the meantime, everyone turned their fire on Auckland. In Jalalabad, the night Brydon rode in, Thomas Seaton had written in his diary: ‘That Elphinstone’s imbecility was the immediate cause of this disgrace and of these terrible disasters is beyond all doubt; but the real author was he who selected for a post of such difficulty and responsibility a man crippled by gout in his hands and feet, whose nerves had succumbed to bodily suffering, and who was in no way remarkable for capacity.’10 Soon everyone else, including the British press and many Members of Parliament, came to the same conclusion, especially a bright young Tory MP named Benjamin Disraeli, who began a sustained campaign against Auckland in Parliament.
On arrival in Calcutta, Ellenborough was so rude to his predecessor that George wrote to his friend Hobhouse in London wondering if Ellenborough were entirely sane.11 Auckland was left with little choice but to take most of the responsibility and return home in disgrace. His letters at this time were, understandably, full of despair. ‘I have been greatly depressed,’ he wrote to Hobhouse. ‘I look upon our affairs in Affghanistan as irretrievable, but we must encounter further risks in the endeavour to save what may be saved from the wreck . . . I fear that we are destined to hear of more horror and disaster.’12
What Auckland did not understand was that the regime which he had set up in Kabul was actually by no means finished.
The British had always ignored and underestimated Shah Shuja, and now, with both Burnes and Macnaghten dead and the frozen corpses of their Kabul army feeding the vultures of the snow-clogged Ghilzai passes, Shuja himself remained safe and secure behind the high walls of the Bala Hisar. Indeed, now that his British allies were no more, the Shah’s personal popularity was visibly increasing among the people and chiefs of Kabul. Without Macnaghten to give him bad advice, Shuja – as resolute as ever in the face of catastrophe – was able to demonstrate his deftness at handling Afghan tribal politics.
He now played on the jealousy felt by the two remaining original rebel leaders – Aminullah Khan Logari and Nawab Zaman Khan Barakzai – towards the recently arrived Akbar Khan, who had taken the leadership of the rebellion only after they had already defeated the British. He opened negotiations and within a few days – while Akbar was far from Kabul, first escorting his British prisoners of war to a secure fortress in Laghman, then returning to besiege Jalalabad – the Shah had managed to knit together a new alliance which he hoped would keep him in power and leave Akbar Khan isolated.
The two men Shuja reached out to brought very different assets to the table. As Akbar Khan’s uncle, Nawab Zaman Khan was a senior claimant to the Barakzai succession, and controlled the valuable asset of all the British sick and wounded left in Kabul; but he had few financial or intellectual resources and little military ability. The elderly but still canny Naib Aminullah Khan Logari, in contrast, had made a fortune through trade which he had recently augmented with the large sums he managed to extract from the Hindu bankers of Kabul on the basis of the bills given to him by the retreating British as part of their surrender. He used this to recruit a force of sepoys as well as pay his own tribesmen from Logar. He also had the prestige of being one of the two military leaders responsible for so comprehensively crushing the British in Kabul. But being neither a Sadozai nor a Barakzai, and of relatively humble origins, he was apparently unable to come to power without the support of one or other of the two leading clans. By allying with Nawab Zaman Khan and Shah Shuja he was able to gain the support of both.13 Naib Aminullah had always been a confirmed Sadozai loyalist, while Nawab Zaman Khan detested his charismatic cousin Akbar with all the embittered passion that the ambitiously mediocre sometimes feel towards those of genuine talent. The alliance looked durable as it gave something to all three of the parties involved and each brought something to it that the others needed.
According to his biographer Mohammad Husain Herati, Shuja had planned the whole strategy with flawless precision. ‘The Barakzai propaganda that His Majesty had become indistinguishable from the English invaders had taken root among great and small alike,’ he wrote.
In order to counter this, and following advice that the only way out of the present rebellion which threatened to destroy the monarchy was to conciliate the good graces of Aminullah Khan Logari, His Majesty decided to send his favourite and most gifted son Prince Shahpur to the house of Aminullah. He also promised a gift of 200,000 rupees to Nawab Zaman Khan Barakzai. So it was that Aminullah and most of the other Khans now came to support His Majesty, saying that the Nawab had been elected Amir while it seemed that His Majesty was subservient to foreign and infidel interests, but now that he had regained his independence, and was once again a true Muslim monarch, there was no need for an Amir, and Zaman Khan would have to be content with the post of Wazir which was a powerful enough position. Akbar Khan was not party to this new alliance.
To give formal shape to these agreements, on 17 January 1842 Shuja’s son Prince Shahpur, Aminullah Khan Logari and Zaman Khan Barakzai attended court at the Bala Hisar fort, ‘together with their banners and their horsemen and those of the khans of the Durranis, the Ghilzais, the Farsi-speakers of Kohistan and Kabul, to greet His Majesty and receive his orders’. Herati added, ‘From then on, the same ritual was observed every morning and evening, and His Majesty kept these newly co-opted rebels busy with promises of position, stipends and monetary rewards. Meanwhile he wrote to George MacGregor and the British commanders in Jalalabad that the situation was finally coming under control.’14
By the end of the first week of February, despite all the disasters of the previous three months, it was becoming increasingly clear that the apparent victory of Akbar Khan was by no means a forgone conclusion, and that Shuja still had everything to play for. Indeed, in one of the strange revivals of fortune which marked Shuja’s life, he was now arguably in more direct control of his ancestral lands than he had been at any other point in his reign. Seeing the way the winds were blowing, many of the remaining Durrani and Qizilbash chiefs now cast their lot with the Shah and one by one began coming to his durbar to offer their allegiance and beg his forgiveness. ‘As the new alliances grew firm,’ wrote Maulana Kashmiri, ‘the Shah held court and granted audience to all the Khans.’
He elevated all the high lords even higher
And showered his benevolence upon the soldiery
Kabul became free of violence and sedition
Governance was once again the business of the Shah
But he did not accord Akbar a place
The hatred in his heart had not grown cold . . .15
The situation was still delicate. Shuja did not yet dare leave the Bala Hisar, and he remained dependent on the support of his two new allies, especially the muscle of Aminullah Khan. According to Mirza ‘Ata, the Shah remained a little ‘suspicious, as these two Kabul chiefs had once been partisans of Amir Dost Mohammad Khan: could they be plotting to take his life? And now the English were said to be approaching again, and could well attempt to re-conquer Khurasan. Shuja was between a rock and a hard place. Nevertheless the King had at that time some 10,000 troops, 12 cannons, uncountable treasures, and plentiful stocks of gun-powder.’16 These figures were probably optimistic. But for all his problems, the Shah’s prospects were now brighter than they had been for months.17
On 7 February, Shuja wrote in his own hand a heartfelt message to ‘my beloved son’ Prince Timur who was with General Nott in Kandahar. Mohan Lal Kashmiri, who had remained in Kabul and so escaped the massacre, promised to get the letter through to the British garrison there using his network of spies and runners. Shuja opened by writing of his acceptance of the incomprehensible workings of divine will represented by fate, and of the shame and sadness he felt at what had taken place. ‘Here we have had a repetition of those scenes which the people of this place have so often enacted,’ he wrote. ‘I frequently warned the English of what was coming – but they paid no regard to me. Fate has decreed that those scenes which I had hoped never to see again should take place. The people of Kabul sounded a war cry against Unbelievers and even withdrew themselves from me, saying, the Shah is with the English.’ He then explained to his son that he had been forced to dissimulate in order to survive: ‘I told them: “What can the English be to me? They certainly treated me with kindness, and I was a long time a guest of the nation – but what else?” This even was unworthy of me – may God shield me from the shame I feel [for disowning my friends]. If, by the blessing of God, I should ever see you again, I will unfold to you the secrets of my heart. It was my fate to act as I have done.’
