Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (12 page)

There remained the Dost, who in the summer of 1839 escaped from Bokhara and re-entered Afghanistan with a force of Uzbegs. For a time he did seem to threaten Macnaghten’s tranquillity—‘I am like a wooden spoon’, he had said, ‘you may throw me hither and thither, but I shall not be hurt’. But this worry was surprisingly soon removed. In the cool of the evening of November 4, 1840,
Macnaghten was taking an evening ride with his assistant George Lawrence, through the gardens near his Mission. They were approached by two Afghan horsemen. One stopped at a distance, the other came close and asked Lawrence ‘if that was the Lord Sahib’. Told that it was the British Envoy, the Afghan seized Macnaghten’s bridle and cried that ‘the Amir was there’. ‘What Amir?’ asked Macnaghten, taken aback. ‘Who? Who? Where?’ ‘Dost Mohammed Khan’, he was told: and presently the second horseman approached, and the Dost himself, dismounting, pressed the Envoy’s hand to his forehead and his lips, and offered his sword in token of surrender.

The Dost was a striking man, and he behaved with a dashing dignity—‘Every effort was made to soothe the Ameer’s feelings,’ we are told, ‘and he soon became serene and cheerful.’ After ten days he was sent away to exile in India, escorted by a troop of horse artillery and two regiments of infantry, and warmed by the admiration of his enemies.
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His departure seemed to set the seal upon the Afghan adventure, and before very long, it was thought, the British might return to India too, leaving Shah Shuja with his 6,000 soldiers to look after his own destinies.

Yet just as there lingered over the cantonment some suggestion of disquiet, so presently more sensitive minds in the occupying army were troubled by forebodings. The story of the war against the Afghans is full of omens and dark prophecies. ‘A signal catastrophe’, General Keane had forecast, and many of the soldiers, with their vulnerable lines of communication through the Ghilzai passes, sometimes felt a chill breath of isolation. William Nott, one of the most outspoken of the generals, wrote: ‘Unless several regiments be quickly sent, not a man will be left to note the fell of his comrades’. Colin Mackenzie, one of the most perceptive of the majors,
2
wrote:
‘Our gallant fellows in Afghanistan must be reinforced or
they
will
all
perish
.’ In Kabul Major Hamlet Wade, watching a ceremonial review of the 44th Regiment, suddenly saw the passing troops not as a parade at all, but as a funeral procession—‘What put such a thought in my head, I know not’. At Jalalabad, 150 miles to the east, Colonel Dennie of the 13th Light Infantry had an even more explicit vision. ‘You will see,’ he observed one day, ‘you will see: not a soul will reach here from Kabul except one man, who will come to tell us the rest are destroyed.’

A sense of uneasiness spread. As a ruler Shah Shuja was a poor substitute for the incisive Dost, surrounding himself with doddering and petulant advisers, and becoming ever more querulous himself. The British officers, though they made many friends in Kabul, made many secret enemies too, by their free and easy behaviour with the women—who, frustrated as they often were by their husbands’ pederastic preferences, were dangerously ready to oblige. Private soldiers were increasingly insulted and molested in the streets of the city. The keener professionals were concerned about the state of the cantonment: badly sited on the open plain, impossible to defend, with the main commissariat store actually outside the perimeter defences—‘a disgrace’, as one young artilleryman wrote, ‘to our military skill and judgement’.

Now rumours began to nag, of new plots among the Ghilzais, of a threatened rebellion in the north, of Persian intrigue in the west; and the army in its cantonment, after a year in the tense and oppressive atmosphere of Kabul, showed the early signs of communal neurosis—petty quarrels and rivalries, snobbishness, touchiness. ‘The whole country is as quiet as one of our Indian chiefships,’ wrote Macnaghten ever more resolutely, but fewer believed him now. ‘The Envoy is trying to deceive himself,’ wrote the formidable Lady Sale, whose husband General Bob had been having a tough time with the Ghilzais, ‘into an assurance that the country is in a quiescent state,’ while in London the Duke of Wellington was not deluded by the Envoy’s dispatches. It was impossible to read them,
he said, ‘without being sensible of the precarious and dangerous position of our affairs in Central Asia’.

Into this disturbing setting there hobbled, in April 1841, a new Commander-in-Chief—literally hobbled, for Major-General William Elphinstone was not merely, as one of his senior subordinates wrote, ‘the most incompetent soldier that was to be found among the officers of the requisite rank’, he was also so crippled by gout and other unidentified infirmities that he could hardly walk. Elphinstone was a delightful man, but hopeless. Everybody liked him—he was an old friend of Auckland and his sisters—but nobody thought him the slightest use as a general. Patrician, kind, beautifully mannered and nearly 60, he had last seen action at Waterloo, and though the son of an East India Company family, spoke not a word of Hindustani or any other oriental language. Why this gentle sick old gentleman should have been commanding an army in Afghanistan is difficult to imagine, when he might have been happily retired in England cherishing his memories, his Commandership of the Bath and his knighthood in the Order of St Anne of Austria: and indeed he apparently found it difficult to explain to himself, for he strenuously denied his fitness for the job—‘done up’, he said of himself, ‘done up in body and mind’.

The rougher of the senior officers treated the implausible newcomer with frank contempt, and he seems to have viewed the situation despairingly from the start. Even his rheumy eye observed the dangers of the cantonment, and he was anxious in his invalid way about the Kabul army’s direct line of communication with India—through the passes to Jalalabad to the east, and thence through the Khyber to Peshawar and the Indus. ‘If anything occurs,’ he said vaguely once to one of his officers, ‘for God’s sake clear the passes quickly, that I may get away.’ One senses that even in this incompetent’s mind, as the army loitered through its second year of the Afghan enterprise, a mood of premonition impended, an instinct that the inner forces of Afghanistan were assembling, out of sight and understanding, against the foreigners on the plain.

So they were. At dawn on November 2, 1841, a mob arrived at the gates of Burnes’ Residency in Kabul, shouting abuse and screaming for the Resident’s blood. Telling his guards to hold their fire,
Burnes walked on to his balcony with his assistant, William Broadfoot, and his own brother Charles. He tried to appeal for order, but was shouted down. Shooting broke out and Broadfoot, after picking off six of the Afghans in the garden below, was shot dead through the heart.
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The mob was now all around the Residency, the stables were burning, and a stranger appeared inside the house, urging the Burnes brothers to follow him quickly outside. They inexplicably trusted him, and throwing Afghan robes around their shoulders, followed him through the door into the chaotic garden. At once their guide shouted ‘Look, friends! This is Sekunder Burnes!’ —and the Afghans fell upon the brothers with their knives, and very quickly hacked them both to pieces.

‘My dear Sir William,’ wrote the General to the Envoy later that day, ‘since you have left me I have been considering what can be done tomorrow. Our dilemma is a difficult one … to march into the town, it seems, we should only have to come back again … we must see what the morning brings, and then decide what can be done.’

For partly by design, more by combustion, the riot in the Kabul had now become a rising. The Kabulis had first assumed that, the British Resident having been murdered and the British Residency burnt to the ground, the British Army would come marching up the road to exact a terrible revenge. All that happened, though, was the arrival of a modest infantry force to give the King some extra protection within the Bala Hissar. Encouraged by this feeble reponse, thousands of Afghans in and around the city broke into open revolt, and within a few days the Kabul region was in a state of war, and the British were in effect besieged within their cantonment.

General Elphinstone continued to consider what could be done tomorrow, but never did decide. He had fallen off his horse on the morning of the riot, and had never felt well again. His conferences of
war were painful to experience, the old general vacillating, wondering, changing his mind, and frequently embarking upon detailed reminiscences of the Peninsular War. Even his choice of phrase was lugubrious. ‘It behoves us to look to the consequences of failure’—‘Our case is not yet desperate, I do not mean to impress that’—‘I was unlucky in not understanding the state of things’. Since he seemed to have no opinion of his own, everybody else offered him theirs, subalterns to brigadiers. Some thought they should leave the cantonment and move into the Bala Hissar
en
masse
. Some thought they should abandon Kabul altogether, and retreat to Jalalabad. Some thought they should seek out the leaders of the insurrection, and negotiate terms.

Each day more Afghans joined the rising, until a guerilla army of several thousand artisans and tradesmen swarmed around the cantonment, becoming bolder by the hour. It was a raggle-taggle army, by the standards of the victors of Waterloo who watched it apprehensively from their fortifications, but it was both skilful and determined: it had its own cavalry, its long-muzzled
jezails
easily outranged the British muskets, and its marksmanship was horribly exact. Soon the road between the cantonment and the city was blocked; worse still, the Afghans had seized the commissariat fort, plundered it, burnt it, and thus deprived the British of nearly all their stores. All this in full sight of the cantonment, within whose perimeter the decrepit general rambled on, and the private soldiers kicked their heels in half-mutinous despair—‘Why, Lord, sir’, complained Elphinstone to Macnaghten one day, after reviewing some of his soldiers, ‘when I said to them “Eyes right”, they all looked the other way’.

They made a couple of sorties. Both failed ignominiously, the British infantry running away, and this was their last attempt at offensive action. They were beaten almost without a blow. Food was running short, winter was setting in, the troops were demoralized, the camp-followers were panic-stricken, the political officers were baffled or discredited, the commanding officer was all too often prostrate, the British Resident was dead. All the Afghans now seemed to be in arms against the British, and by the end of November Macnaghten had decided to negotiate a settlement.

At this climactic moment there arrived upon the scene a formidable Afghan leader—Akhbar Khan, the Dost’s son, who had been in exile in Turkestan, and who now returned to Kabul with a force of Uzbegs at his heels. With this fierce, sly but attractive potentate Macnaghten now opened negotiations. Arranging to meet him on the banks of the Kabul River on December 11th, the Envoy offered him the draft of a treaty of submission, couched in the most abject terms. The presence of the army in Afghanistan, it said, was apparently displeasing to the great majority of the Afghan nation; and since the only object of its presence there was the integrity, happiness and welfare of the Afghans, there was no point in its remaining. Macnaghten offered to evacuate the country at once, lock, stock and barrel, giving Shah Shuja the choice of going with them or remaining in Kabul, and promising to return Dost Mohammed to his country as soon as the army had safely passed through the Khyber on the road to India. In return, the Envoy suggested, the Afghans would guarantee the safe conduct of the British, and would immediately send provisions into the cantonment to keep them alive enough to march.

The Afghans understandably accepted. They must have been astonished. It was agreed that the Kabul garrison would march in three days’ time: but in the meantime Macnaghten, who had just been appointed Governor of Bombay, and faintly hoped still to extract some credit from Kabul, embarked upon a subtler course of conduct. There arrived in the cantonment on the following evening an unexpected messenger from Akhbar. Captain ‘Gentleman Jim’ Skinner, a member of the celebrated Anglo-Indian fighting family, had not been seen since the start of the uprising, when he had been caught in Kabul: it transpired now that he had been befriended by Akhbar, and he came with a secret additional proposal from the prince. It was this: that he and Macnaghten should deceive the other Afghan leaders with a hidden compact Shah Shuja would remain upon his throne; Akhbar would be his Vizier, and would receive a large fee from the British Government, and a pension for life; the British could stay in the country for another eight
months, and then leave apparently of their own free will. Face would be saved. Honour would be restored. Macnaghten would be Governor of Bombay. The original purpose of the invasion would be achieved.

Bringing such a message, remarked Gentleman Jim, was like being loaded with combustibles, but the distraught Macnaghten snatched at the offer, and signed a statement in Persian to say so. Nothing, in a country so hideously entangled with double-cross, could have been more dangerous. Several people warned the Envoy of treachery, and suggested that it might all be a plot. ‘A plot!’ Macnaghten cried—‘a plot! let me alone for that—trust me for that!’ Anyway, as he told George Lawrence, it was worth the risk. ‘The life I have led for the last six weeks you, Lawrence, know well; and rather than be disgraced and live it over again, I would risk a hundred deaths. Success will save our honour, and more than make up for all risks.’

So two days before Christmas, 1841, Sir William Macnaghten, with three British officers and a small detachment of Indian cavalry, rode out of camp once more to meet Akhbar Khan. They took with them a lovely Arab mare, as a present for the prince. There was snow on the ground, and they found Akhbar, with a group of chiefs and a hovering crowd of Ghazis, awaiting them some 360 yards from the cantonment. A carpet had been laid on the snow, and upon it Akhbar and Macnaghten, greeting each other courteously, sat down together. Akhbar spoke first. Was Macnaghten, he asked, ready to put into effect the proposition of the previous night? Why not? Macnaghten replied: and instantly Akhbar cried, ‘Seize them! Seize them!’, and the chiefs and onlookers fell upon the Englishmen to screams and imprecations from the Ghazis all around. Macnaghten’s Indian escort turned and fled. The three staff officers, almost before they knew what was happening, were bundled pillion on to horses and galloped away through the murderous Ghazis. One fell and was killed immediately. The other two were imprisoned in a nearby fort. Behind them, as they were swept away, they just had time to see the Envoy, his face ashen, being dragged head first down a snowy slope. ‘For God’s sake!’ they heard him cry in Persian, before they were out of earshot, and Macnaghten disappeared for ever.