by Jan Morris
Every regiment had 600 stretcher-bearers. Every platoon of every regiment had its water-carriers, its saddlers, its blacksmiths, its cobblers, its tailors, its laundry-men, and there were the men who polished brasses, and the men who put up tents, and the cooks, the orderlies, the stable-boys—together with all their wives, and all their children, and often aunts, uncles or grandparents—and troops of prostitutes from half India, with fiddlers, dancing-girls, fortune-tellers, metal-workers, wood-gatherers—with herdsmen to look after the cattle, sheep and goats, and butchers to slaughter them—and there were carts and wagons by the thousand, palanquins, drays, chargers, ponies, dogs—and so all this great multitude stumbled away to war, each corps with its band playing, a regiment of Queen’s cavalry, two of Company cavalry, nine regiments of infantry, engineers, gunners, Shah Shuja’s 6,000 hopeful sepoys and those splendid prancing banditti, the Yellow Boys. A mighty dust hung in the air behind them, as a sign that the Raj was marching.
6
As a military operation the invasion was a qualified success. The army presently ran short of supplies, as its lines of communication grew more tenuous, and it was repeatedly harassed by the Afghan marksmen of the passes. Its intelligence proved faulty, too, perhaps because it had no intelligence department. But Ghazni, the first place to offer formal resistance, was taken by storm in a neat little coup d’armes‚ and when Afghan forces consequently fell back in confusion, the Dost himself, refusing British terms of ‘honourable asylum’ in India, fled north to take refuge with the crazy Nasrullah Khan, Amir of Bokhara, who promptly locked him up. Organized opposition seemed to be at an end, and on August 6, 1839, Shah Shuja, supported by the full panoply of British imperial power, entered Kabul to re-assume his throne.
Aesthetically the King’s return was fine. A scramble of low mud buildings and roofed bazaars, dominated by the powerful silhouette of the Bala Hissar, Kabul was just the place for pageantry, and the King cut a sufficiently imposing figure. His coronet unfortunately no longer bore the diamond called the Koh-i-Nor, Light of the Universe, for that well-known gem had long before been extracted by Ranjit Singh as a fee for his hospitality, but in other respects the restored ruler of Afghanistan adequately looked the part. He was a good-looking man, dark of skin and stoutly built, with his luxuriant beard dyed black, and he was gorgeously dressed that day, and scintillated with jewelry, and rode a white charger accoutred in gold. Beside him rode the representatives of the British Empire, wearing the cocked hats, ostrich feathers and blue gold-laced trousers of the diplomatic uniform, and behind him the soldiers of the Raj, dusted down and fattened up after their year’s march from Ferozepore, demonstrated in simple terms the power behind his throne.
The Kabulis, it is true, watched the King ride by in sullen silence. They paid more attention to the British diplomatists than to Shah Shuja, and very few citizens showed him any royal respect at all. But the old man was childishly pleased to be back in his palace (though everything, he said, seemed smaller than it used to be), and his British bodyguard, firing him a royal salute and offering him their insincere congratulations, for they all despised him, left him there with his own soldiers and returned to their camp. ‘I trust,’ said General Keane the commanding officer in his dispatch to Lord Auckland next day, ‘that we have thus accomplished all the objects which your Lordship had in contemplation, when you planned and formed the Army of the Indus, and the expedition into Afghanistan’: but he did not really think so, for he expressed his thoughts very differently in a private letter to a friend. ‘Mark my words,’ he said then, ‘it will not be long before there is here some signal catastrophe.’
7
Much of the army was now sent back to India, and General Keane went with it, leaving a division of infantry, a regiment of cavalry and an artillery battery. The Russians had vanished from Kabul, and the capital in its baleful edgy way was apparently docile. The British settled in. Their chief representatives were an Ulsterman and a Scot—Sir William Macnaghten, ‘Envoy and Minister at the Court of Shah Soojahool-Moolk’, and Sir Alexander Burnes, unexpectedly back in Kabul as British Resident. These ware now the real rulers of Afghanistan, the puppet-masters.
Macnaghten had never been there before. He was 44, but looked much older—an Indian civil administrator, bespectacled, habitually top-hatted, with a dignified presence and plenty of ambition: ‘our Lord Palmerston’, Emily Eden called him, perhaps a little cattily. He was a great linguist, and though his talents were mostly of the bureaucratic kind, his manner could be pedantic, his views were often fatuous and his appearance was, in that anomalous setting, sometimes a little comic, still he had courage and was honest—if not always with himself, at least with others. Burnes was a more elusive character. A kinsman of Burns the poet, he had begun life in the Company’s armies, but in his twenties had made a famous series of journeys in Central Asia, penetrating as far as Bokhara and the Caspian. He was lionized in England, where they called him Bokhara Burnes, and William IV had once summoned him to Brighton Pavilion and made him talk for an hour and a half about his amazing adventures. It was Burnes’ reports from Kabul, during his mission there in 1837, that had turned Auckland’s mind to the idea of invasion: though he had admired the Dost, still he prudently adjusted his views to the Governor-General’s policies, and had accordingly been knighted shortly before the war began. He was still only 34, a wistful-looking man with a long nose, a sparse moustache and pouches under his big brown eyes.
Although the Dost was still alive, and there were signs that most of the Afghan tribal chiefs would never pledge allegiance to Shuja, the British set out to enjoy themselves in Kabul. The 16th Lancers had unfortunately taken their foxhounds back to India with them, but there were many other pleasures available. The climate in the autumn was pleasant, the natives, if undemonstrative, seemed friendly enough, and there was little work to do. They built a racetrack, and skated on frozen ponds, and played cricket in the dust, even persuading a few Kabulis to take up the game. They learnt to enjoy the wrestling matches and cock-fights that the Afghans loved, and they organized amateur dramatics. In the early mornings they went for rides over the hills: in the evenings they listened to band concerts; in the night, very often, they comforted themselves with seductive girls of Kabul. One or two married Afghans.1 Others, before very long, were joined by their wives and children from India. There was no shortage of food now, and the officers entertained each other lavishly. Burnes used to give weekly dinner parties at his house in the city, with champagnes, sherries, clarets, liqueurs, hermetically sealed salmon and Scottish hotch-potch (‘veritable hotch-potch, all the way frae Aberdeen’).
So safe did the British feel that presently the Army was moved out of Kabul proper, leaving the Shah protected only by his own levies in the Bala Hissar. Now the whole force was concentrated in a big cantonment on the low damp plain to the east, within sight of the citadel but about a mile from the city’s edge. It was a disturbing spot. The Kabul River ran across the plain, slate-grey and shaly, and between the camp and the city there were orchards and gardens, intersected by irrigation channels. In the spring the view could be beautiful enough, with the pinks and whites of the orchard blossoms, the shine of the water, the clutter of the bazaars and houses beyond, and the silhouette of the great fortress rising in tiers upon its hillock as a centre-piece to the scene. But all around the plain lay arid hills, one ridge beyond another, featureless and bare: and on their brown slopes stood here and there, relics of the centuries of Afghan feuding, small fortress-towers, some crumbled, some recently patched up, which gave to the whole place an ominous watchful air, as though even when one was thinking home-thoughts on the river bank, or hacking back to camp through the apple-orchards, one was never altogether unobserved.1
Here the Kabul Army ensconced itself, with all its camels and camp followers, all its appurtenance of stable, canteen, bazaar and married quarter. There were garrisons too at Kandahar and Ghazni to the west, and at Jalalabad to the east, and in the field col
umns were always on the move, and Macnaghten’s political officers were ubiquitous. The British hoped that by a combination of display, bribery and coercion all the factions of Afghanistan could be persuaded into cooperation, but they never succeeded. Some groups of the community gave no trouble. Others, particularly the Muslim fanatics called Ghazis, and the Ghilzai tribe which controlled the main mountain passes into India, had to be repeatedly subdued by punitive expeditions, fun for the officers and good experience for the troops. Generally the political officers were treated with wary respect: but in the south at Kelat the half-naked and terribly emaciated corpse of Lieutenant Loveday was found chained to a camel-pannier, while over the border to the north Colonel Charles Stoddart, on a more advanced mission of intelligence, was thrown by the mad Nasrullah into a deep pit full of bones, decomposing matter and especially bred reptiles.1
Yet Macnaghten and Burnes felt sanguine. In his comfortable gardened Residency in the heart of the city, down the road from the Bala Hissar, Burnes had little to do but quite enjoyed himself—‘I lead a very pleasant life, and if rotundity and heartiness be proofs of health, I have them’. Macnaghten, whose wife presided graciously over the social life of the cantonment, lived no less contentedly in the Mission Residence upon the plain. ‘All things considered,’ he thought, ‘the perfect tranquillity of the country is to my mind perfectly miraculous. Already our presence has been infinitely beneficial in allaying animosities and pointing out abuses. … We are gradually placing matters on a firm and satisfactory basis … the country is perfectly quiet from Dan to Beersheba.’
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.1 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.
8
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, b
ut 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.1 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.
9
‘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.