Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (11 page)

This was a dishonest proclamation. Far from being ill-fitted as an ally, Dost Mohammed was conceded by everyone who met him to be infinitely superior to Shah Shuja, and his subjection to Russian influence was at best uncertain. There was no sign that the Afghans wanted Shah Shuja back, and still less evidence that they would welcome a British army to protect him. The Perso-Russian siege of Herat presently failed anyway. From the start the Afghan enterprise was distrusted by many Britons at home. Lord Palmerston, Foreign Secretary in Lord Melbourne’s Whig Government, was convinced that the Russian threat was real and urgent, but the Court of Directors of the East India Company, when details of the invasion plan reached them in London, were horrified. The Duke of Wellington thought the difficulties would start when the military successes ended, and the Press, in London as in Calcutta, attacked the manifesto for its distortions and sophistries. In Parliament angry members demanded publication of the relevant documents: Palmerston obliged them, first cutting out, however, all the good things Burnes had reported about Dost Mohammed.

But Lord Auckland, in the way of undetermined men, was determined. He had made up his mind for once, and he would stand by his resolution. The British armies would enter Afghanistan early in 1839, and the Great Game would be settled once and for all. Besides, Lord Auckland thought, it would be an opportunity for Ranjit Singh the Sikh to demonstrate the reality of his new alliance with the British, by contributing a large proportion of the forces required: an opportunity of which, in the event, he wisely took no step to avail himself.

Some 9,500 Crown and Company troops, with 6,000 men under the febrile command of Shah Shuja, formed the Army of the Indus, the principal invasion force for Afghanistan. Before it went to war it was ceremonially paraded, by courtesy of Ranjit Singh, at Ferozepore on the Sutlej river, south-east of Lahore. Ranjit came down from his capital for the occasion, and Lord Auckland, as we already know,
travelled there with his sister Emily and his caravan of 12,000. The meeting between the two leaders was less than majestic, for their two lines of elephants collided and Ranjit fell flat on his face in front of two British nine-pounders—and the evening’s entertainments were less than decorous, for Ranjit presented a cabaret of dancing girls and bawdy buffoons, and drank too much—but the purely military functions were stately and impressive, and on December 10, 1838, the Army of the Indus moved off from the parade ground for its war against the Afghans.

Wars went slowly then, and the army took a circuitous route. Shah Shuja wished to take the opportunity of subduing some unuly Amirs of Sind, to the west, whose allegiance he claimed—a commission easily performed, for the unfortunate Amirs were told by the British commander that ‘neither the ready power to crush and annihilate them, nor the will to fall into action, were wanting if it appeared requisite, however remotely, for the safety of the British Empire’. The winter had gone, and the spring had arrived with its promise of flooded streams and heat-haze, before the troops crossed the Indus River and marched up the mountain valleys towards Quetta, Kandahar and Kabul. For the first time since the days of Alexander the Great, it was said, the ‘flags of a civilized nation’ flew across the Indus.

The soldiers’ progress was laborious, for behind them in an apparently endless stream there stumbled some 38,000 camp followers and 30,000 camels. The army was to live off the country, but took with it nevertheless thirty days’ rations of grain, and enough sheep and cattle for ten weeks’ meat. It also carried an astonishing supply of inessentials. Two hundred and sixty camels, it was said, were needed to carry the personal gear of the commanding general and his staff. One brigadier needed sixty. One regiment required two just for its Manila cigars. There were tons of soap, gallons of wine, crates of jam, crockery, linen, potted meats. Each officer was allowed a minimum of ten domestic servants—most had many more—not counting the grooms for his camels and the six bearers he needed if he took a palanquin.

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.

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.’

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 columns 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.’