The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia

by Peter Hopkirk

  Convinced that the letter, which turned out to be little more than a message of goodwill, was indeed from Tsar Nicholas, Burnes said as much to Dost Mohammed. Masson, on the other hand, was convinced that it was a forgery, and that it had been composed by Simonich, or perhaps even by Vitkevich himself, to give the Russian mission more weight in its trial of strength with the British. When Burnes pointed to the impressive-looking imperial Russian seal it bore, Masson sent a messenger to the bazaar to buy a packet of Russian sugar – ‘at the bottom of which’, he claimed ‘we found precisely the same kind of seal.’ But by then, Masson added, it was too late. Burnes had thrown away his one and only chance of spiking his rival’s guns by not allowing the Afghans – as Masson sardonically put it – ‘the benefit of their doubts’.

  Following the arrival of Auckland’s ultimatum, everything began to change. Although Dost Mohammed officially continued to cold-shoulder the Russian mission, Burnes knew that his own position was daily becoming weaker and that of Vitkevich more promising. It was even whispered in Kabul that Vitkevich had offered to approach Ranjit Singh on Dost Mohammed’s behalf, while Burnes faced the unenviable task of demanding, at Lord Auckland’s insistence, that his old friend write to the Sikh ruler formally renouncing his claim to Peshawar. If Masson is a reliable witness, Burnes was by this time in utter despair at what he saw as India’s failure to realise the long-term value of Dost Mohammed’s friendship. But what neither he nor Masson knew was that the Governor-General and his advisers already had other plans in mind for Afghanistan, and that in none of these did Dost Mohammed now feature.

  By April 21, 1838, the die was cast. Instead of sending Vitkevich on his way as Auckland was insisting, Dost Mohammed received the Russian with every mark of respect and friendship at his palace within the walls of the Bala Hissar. Vitkevich, who was prepared to offer the Afghans the moon in order to displace the British in Kabul, had routed his rival simply by biding his time. Nothing remained now for Burnes but to leave Kabul and report to his chiefs in India on what he saw as the failure of his mission. On April 27, after a final audience with Dost Mohammed at which deep personal regrets were expressed by both sides, and with the Afghan insisting that his esteem for his British friend was unaffected by what had happened, Burnes and his companions departed for home. When he next returned to the Afghan capital it would be under very different circumstances.

  But if Vitkevich appeared to have won the day in Kabul, elsewhere in Afghanistan Russian machinations were proving less successful. Despite the confident assurances of Simonich to the Shah, after weeks of bitter fighting the city of Herat was obstinately refusing to surrender. For there was one thing which the Count had not reckoned with. Shortly before the Persians had taken up position around it, a young British subaltern had slipped into the city in disguise and had quietly set about organising its defence.

  ·14·

  Hero of Herat

  His skin darkened with dye, and posing as a Muslim holy man, Lieutenant Eldred Pottinger of the Company’s political service entered Herat on a routine Great Game reconnaissance on August 18, 1837, little suspecting that he would be there for more than a year. Aged 26, and the nephew of that veteran of the game Colonel Henry Pottinger, he had been sent into Afghanistan to gather intelligence. He had already visited Peshawar and, shortly before Burnes’s arrival there, Kabul, without his disguise being penetrated. He had been in Kamran’s capital for only three days when alarming rumours began to circulate in the bazaars that a powerful Persian force, led by the Shah in person, was marching from Teheran to attack the city. To an ambitious and adventurous young officer like Pottinger, the situation seemed to be full of possibilities. He decided to stay on and watch developments.

  When word of the Persian advance reached Kamran he was campaigning in the south, and he hastened back to defend his capital. In his youth he had been a great warrior. With a single stroke of his sword, it was said, he could cut a sheep clean in half, while an arrow from his bow would go straight through a cow. But subsequently he had become dissolute, taking heavily to drink, and effective power now rested with his vizier, Yar Mohammed, whose reputation for cruelty exceeded even his. Orders were immediately issued for the seizure and incarceration of all those of doubtful loyalty, especially anyone with Persian connections. Villagers were ordered to gather in their crops, and to transport all grain and other foodstuffs into the city. Anything else which might prove useful to the enemy, including fruit-trees, was to be destroyed, and troops were sent to ensure that this was done. Simultaneously intensive work began on Herat’s massive ramparts, built mainly of earth, which had been allowed to fall into dangerous disrepair. Finally, all exits to the city were closed to prevent spies from leaving and conveying news of its defences to the enemy.

  Until now Pottinger had not disclosed his presence to the authorities, happy to maintain his discreet role as an observer. But then one day in the bazaar he felt a gentle hand on his sleeve. ‘You are an Englishman!’ a voice whispered. By luck the man who had penetrated his disguise turned out to be an old friend of Arthur Conolly’s, a Herati doctor who had travelled with him seven years earlier. He had been to Calcutta, moreover, and could spot European features, even when darkened with dye. The doctor strongly advised Pottinger to go to Yar Mohammed and put his services, including his knowledge of modern siegecraft, at his disposal. The vizier received the Englishman enthusiastically, for although the Heratis had successfully beaten off earlier Persian attacks, it was clear that this one was much more serious. Not only was the Shah believed to have a Russian general in his service, but also a unit composed of Russian deserters who had fled to Persia. Herati cavalry sent to harass the advancing enemy returned complaining that this time they were using unfair tactics. Instead of the usual straggling mass of troops who in the past had been so vulnerable to the Afghan horsemen, under Russian direction they were advancing in compact bodies protected by artillery.

  Pottinger’s determining role in the defence of Herat emerged only afterwards when other British officers entered the city and spoke to those who had lived through the ten-month siege. In his own official report to his superiors he played down his contribution, not to mention his own gallantry, although he wrote critically of the part played by others, especially Yar Mohammed. But he also kept a journal, and it was from this that the historian Sir John Kaye was later to piece together his graphic account of these stirring events in his celebrated History of the War in Afghanistan. Subsequently this journal was lost in a fire which swept through Kaye’s study.

  Hostilities began on November 23 when the Shah’s forces, supported by artillery, launched a vigorous attack on the city from the west. ‘The garrison sallied out as they advanced,’ recorded Kaye. ‘The Afghan infantry disputed every inch of the ground, and the cavalry hung on the flanks of the Persian army. But they could not dislodge the enemy from the position they had taken up.’ And so the siege commenced. It was to be conducted, wrote Kaye, ‘in a spirit of unsparing hatred and savage inhumanity . . . what was wanting on either side in science would be made up for in cruelty and vindictiveness.’ One barbaric practice introduced by Yar Mohammed was to encourage his troops to cut off the heads of the Persian dead and bring these to him for inspection. His aim was to spread fear among the enemy, for the heads were displayed in rows along the ramparts for all to see. ‘As rewards were always given for these bloody trophies,’ Pottinger noted, ‘the garrison were naturally very active in their endeavours to obtain them.’ But as a soldier he considered this not only abhorrent but also counter-productive, for the Afghan sorties invariably petered out, the defenders being too busy severing heads to follow up their advantage.

  It also led to temptation. On one occasion, after a sortie, an Afghan brought to Yar Mohammed a pair of ears. ‘A cloak and some ducats’, Pottinger recounted, ‘were given him as a reward for his butchery.’ However before he could be further questioned he vanished. Half an hour later another man appeared, this time carrying a mud-enc
rusted head. ‘The Vizier, thinking it looked as though it had no ears, ordered one of his retainers to examine it,’ Pottinger reported. ‘On this, the bearer of the ghastly trophy threw it down and ran away with all the speed he could command.’ When the head was more closely inspected it was discovered to belong to a defender who had died during the sortie. The man who had produced it was pursued, caught and brought back before Yar Mohammed, who ordered him to be severely beaten. But the man who had brought the ears and disappeared with his reward was never found, although Yar Mohammed promised the cloak and money to anyone who produced him. The Afghans were not alone in their barbarism, however. In the Shah’s camp Afghans unfortunate enough to fall into Persian hands were subjected to similar atrocities, including disembowelling.

  So the siege dragged on, week after week, month after month, with neither side making any progress. Although the Persians had managed to break through the city’s outer defences, they never totally surrounded it. Even at the height of the fighting some fields close to the walls were still used for crops and grazing. Every night the beleaguered Afghans sallied out against the Persian positions, but were unable to dislodge them. Meanwhile the Persians kept up their bombardment of the ramparts, and the defenders continued to repair them. In addition to their cannons, the attackers had rockets, whose ‘fiery flight as they passed over the city’, Kaye recounts, ‘struck terror into the hearts of the people, who clustered on the roofs of the houses, praying and crying by turns.’ More accurate than either the cannons or the rockets were the mortars, which reduced many homes, shops and other buildings to rubble as the weeks passed. One mortar bomb, its fuse spluttering, plunged through the roof of the house next to Pottinger’s, landing near a sleeping baby. The child’s panic-stricken mother threw herself between it and her offspring, but seconds later it exploded, decapitating her and flinging her body on top of the baby, who was suffocated.

  There were moments, too, of near farce. On one occasion the defenders were greatly disturbed by a mysterious drilling sound which appeared to come from the enemy lines where Russian soldiers could be seen digging a large hole. Immediately it was assumed that they were drilling a tunnel beneath the ramparts in order to plant mines under them. As the sound persisted, anxiety increased, and desperate attempts were made to find the tunnel and flood it. It was only later that the real source of the noise was discovered – ‘a poor woman’, Pottinger recounts, ‘who was in the habit of using a hand-mill to grind her wheat.’ Alarm again spread through the city’s 70,000 inhabitants when, in the New Year, the besiegers brought up a massive cannon capable of hurling devastating eight-inch shells against the ramparts, and bigger than anything ever seen in Central Asia before. But after only half a dozen rounds had been fired from it the carriage collapsed beneath it and it was never used again. Yet in spite of their Russian advisers, even when the Persians did succeed in breaching the ramparts they failed to take advantage of it – discouraged perhaps by the sight of their late comrades grinning down at them from above.

  All this time Pottinger had been working tirelessly, stiffening the defenders’ resolve whenever it failed, which was often, and giving technical advice according to the latest European military precepts. ‘His activity was unfailing,’ wrote Kaye. ‘He was always on the ramparts; always ready to assist with his counsel . . . and to inspire with his animating presence new heart into the Afghan soldiery.’ Pottinger himself, however, attributed the city’s survival to the incompetence of the Persians and their Russian advisers. A single British regiment, he argued, could have taken Herat without much difficulty.

  The Shah, who had been led by Count Simonich and his Russian advisers to expect a quick victory, was now becoming desperate over his failure to capture the city with his vastly superior force. He even sent Yar Mohammed’s own brother, Shere Mohammed, who had earlier surrendered to him, to try to persuade the Heratis to submit. But the vizier refused to see him, denouncing him as a traitor and disowning him as a brother. Before returning to the Persian lines, however, Shere sent his brother a message warning him that when the Shah’s troops stormed Herat he would be hanged like a dog and his women and children publicly dishonoured by the muleteers. Moreover, if the city continued to defy the Shah he himself would be put to death by the Persians. To this Yar Mohammed replied that he would be delighted if the Shah were to execute him as this would save him the trouble of having to do so himself.

  Now and again, during lulls in the fighting, attempts were made by both sides to negotiate some kind of settlement. One of the Shah’s proposals was that if Herat accepted nominal Persian suzerainty he would not interfere in the government of the province. All he would require of the Heratis was that they should supply him with troops. The present campaign, he insisted, was directed not so much against Herat as against British India. If the Heratis would unite with him, then he himself would lead them against India, whose riches they would then share between them. It was a proposal which to Pottinger sounded suspiciously like the voice of Simonich. But Yar Mohammed was not that easily fooled, and he suggested that the best proof of Persian sincerity would be for them to lift their siege. A meeting was arranged between Yar Mohammed and the Shah’s chief negotiator which took place on the edge of the ditch beneath the ramparts. It ended abruptly, however, when Yar Mohammed learned that the Shah expected both him and Kamran (who most of the time was too inebriated to take much interest in the proceedings) to make formal submission to him in front of the entire Persian army.

  By now Sir John McNeill and Count Simonich, both of whom had expected Herat to fall quickly to the Persians, had arrived from Teheran and were staying in the royal camp. Officially they were there as neutral observers, but each was working overtime to spoil the other’s game. McNeill was trying to persuade the Shah to abandon the siege, while Simonich was endeavouring to find a way of hastening the city’s surrender. The Persian troops, McNeill reported to Palmerston on April 11, nearly five months after the siege began, were in desperate need of supplies, and were being forced to survive on what wild plants they could find. ‘Without pay, without sufficient clothing, without any rations whatsoever,’ he wrote, ‘the same troops remain night and day in the trenches.’ These, at times, were knee-deep in water or mud, and with the death toll running at between ten and twenty a day the men’s morale and powers of endurance were beginning to fail. Unless the Shah was able to arrange regular supplies of food and clothing for his troops, McNeill believed, then the siege would eventually have to be abandoned.

  Within Herat itself, however, the plight of the defenders was, if anything, worse. They faced grave food and fuel shortages, which increased as the siege dragged on, while sickness and starvation were beginning to claim as many lives as the Persian artillery. Houses were being torn down to provide fuel, and horses slaughtered for food. Everywhere there were huge mounds of refuse, while the unburied dead added to the stench and to the risk of pestilence. To try to ease the plight of the overcrowded city it was decided to let some of the population leave, the perils they faced outside the walls being considered no greater than those inside. Because they would have refused to agree to anything which would relieve the pressure on the garrison, the besiegers were not consulted. A batch of 600 elderly men, women and children were accordingly allowed out through the gates to chance their luck with the Persians. ‘The enemy’, Pottinger reported, ‘opened a heavy fire on them until they found out who they were, when they tried to drive them back with sticks and stones.’ To prevent this, however, the Herati official in charge of the operation fired on them from the ramparts, causing more casualties than the Persians, who finally let them pass.

  Meanwhile, in the Persian camp, Count Simonich cast aside any remaining pretence of being there simply as a diplomatic observer and personally took over direction of the faltering siege. Word that Simonich, telescope in hand, had reconnoitred the beleaguered city soon reached the defenders, while a new vigour and an increased professionalism became apparent, causing Herati moral
e to plummet. To Pottinger’s dismay they began to consider submitting, not to the Persians but to the Russians. To his relief a rumour reached the defenders the very next day which brought hopes of British intervention. McNeill, it was said, had warned the Shah that were Herat to fall the British would not only go to war with him but would also drive his troops out of the city, whatever the cost. Arrangements were already being made, moreover, to rush supplies of desperately needed food to Herat from British India. The rumour happened to be untrue, but it miraculously saved the city, so crucial to India’s defence, from being handed over to the Tsar by its inhabitants.

  By the time the Heratis discovered the truth it was too late for them to turn to the Russians, for on June 24, 1838, Count Simonich launched his great attack. It was destined to be Lieutenant Pottinger’s hour of glory. The assault began with a heavy artillery barrage directed against the city from every side, and was followed by a massed infantry attack delivered at five different points simultaneously. At four of these the Afghans, fighting desperately for their lives, managed to drive the Persians back, but at the fifth the enemy succeeded in gaining the breach made in the ramparts by their artillery. ‘The struggle was brief but bloody,’ wrote Kaye, the defenders falling at their post to a man. ‘A few of the most daring of the assailants, pushing on in advance of their comrades, gained the head of the breach,’ he went on. But the Afghans rushed up reinforcements just in time to throw them back, although only temporarily. ‘Again and again, with desperate courage,’ wrote Kaye, the attackers tried to fight their way through the breach and into the city. One moment they were all but there, and the next they were forced back again. For a whole hour, as the fighting ebbed and flowed, the fate of Herat hung in the balance.