Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (18 page)

Vitkevitch stumbled across Mirza Hussein Ali when he took lodgings in the same Bukhara caravanserai and, realising the opportunity, offered personally to escort the Ambassador first to Orenburg, then on to St Petersburg. ‘Dost Mohammed Khan, the ruler of Kabulistan, is seeking the patronage of Russia,’ he reported excitedly, ‘and is prepared to do anything we ask for.’

First, however, he had to fight his away out of Bukhara, as the Amir had abruptly placed sentries around his lodgings, confiscated his camels and refused him permission to leave. ‘I grabbed my pistols,’ he wrote later,

and thrust them beneath my belt, threw a coat over my shoulders, donned my travelling fur cap and ran to the Koosh Begee. As I entered, I realized they were talking about me and my departure, although I did not listen carefully. I ran straight into the room . . . [and said:] ‘I am telling you once again, and this is final, that for the life of me I shall not remain here and anyone who dares detain me on my way or even enquire of my destination, as I have already told you and a hundred of others who never stopped bothering me about it, anyone who stands in my way shall have the following reply’ – here I threw off the flap on my coat and pointed at the pistols. The Koosh Begee was so astonished he did not know what to say. I requested that he should give me a laissez-passer bearing his own seal, so that nobody would dare stop me, but he would not give me one, just said: go. I bid him farewell and left, repeating once again that a bullet would be my answer to anyone who provoked me on my way, be it with one word only. The Koosh Begee could not entirely keep up his pretence and said ‘We shall see’ – but he appeared pleased to see me leave.
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Over the months that followed, Vitkevitch and Hussein Ali made their way slowly through the steppe to Orenburg, and then on across the length of Russia to St Petersburg. Hussein Ali was struck down with dysentery on the road, but Vitkevitch nursed and encouraged him, using the enforced periods of rest to learn fluent Dari from his companion. The two finally arrived in the capital in March 1837. Vitkevitch had left Europe fourteen years earlier as a chained convict. This time, Tsar Nicholas personally sent him congratulations on his arrival in the city, promoting him to the rank of lieutenant, and he was ushered straight into the office of Count Nesselrode, the Russian Vice Chancellor and Foreign Minister.

News of Mirza Hussein Ali’s mission had been greeted with enormous excitement by all the officials concerned with the incipient Great Game. Count Simonitch had written from the Teheran Legation urging that this opportunity should not be lost. British influence in Persia was already on the wane, he wrote. Now the chance had come to include Afghanistan in a tripartite alliance of Russia, Persia and ‘Kabulistan’. In this way, an arc of Russian influence could be established from Kabul to Tabriz. With the Russians supreme in Afghanistan, the British would be on the back foot, struggling to maintain their position on the Indus, and would have no chance of creating more trouble in Russia’s natural zone of influence in Central Asia. Moreover, Russian political influence in Kabul would open up the markets of Afghanistan to Russian produce.
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The Governor of Orenburg agreed. It was, he wrote,

absolutely necessary to support the Kabul leader [Dost Mohammad Khan]. For if the British puppet Shuja becomes ruler of Afghanistan then the country will come under British influence, and the British will only have to take one step to be in Bukhara. Central Asia will then be altogether under British influence, our trade with Asia will cease, and the British will be able to arm the neighbouring Asian countries as well as provide them with power, arms and money against Russia. If the patronage of Russia can support Dost Mohammad on the throne, he will undoubtedly, in gratitude, remain a good friend of ours and an enemy to the English; he will cut them off from Central Asia, will place a barrier to their beloved trading power.
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The Governor also urged that Vitkevitch should be given the job of escorting the Afghan Ambassador back home as he was ‘an efficient, clever man who knows his job, is of a practical nature, more prone to act than to write or talk, and knows the steppe and its inhabitants better than any person living or dead’.
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On arrival in St Petersburg, the letter from Dost Mohammad was closely examined and proved to be all that was hoped. Dost Mohammad wrote that the British were on the verge of conquering all of India, and that he alone was capable of stopping their advance, if only he were to be supplied with arms and money in the way that the Russians were doing with the Persians: ‘We hope that the magnanimity and unparalleled bounties showered on the Persian court will also stream on the Afghan government and on our dynasty which, with the beneficent gaze of your imperial greatness, without doubt will return to its former favourable state.’
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So it was that Nesselrode recommended the Tsar to send what he described as a trade and diplomatic mission to Afghanistan: ‘No matter how far removed the above countries [Afghanistan and India] are from us,’ he wrote, ‘and how limited our knowledge of them, it is undeniable that any broadening of trade relations is profitable.’
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The only problem was that Mirza Hussein Ali showed no signs of recovering from his illness. So, after many meetings, it was finally decided that Vitkevitch should set off ahead of the Ambassador, who was too unwell to attempt the journey south without at least one month of rest.

On 14 May 1837, Vitkevitch was given a set of written instructions, which talked of opening trade relations with Dost Mohammad. According to one Russian source, he was also given a set of secret oral instructions about buying Dost Mohammad’s full support by offering him financial aid of two million roubles to be used against Ranjit Singh’s Sikhs, and the promise of military supplies with which the Afghans could reconquer their winter capital of Peshawar, lost since Shah Shuja’s failed expedition of 1834.
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In addition, he was to try to bring Dost Mohammad’s Barakzai half-brothers in Kandahar into the new alliance too and urge them to unify and act as one with their brother in Kabul. It was, he was told, of the utmost importance ‘to achieve peace between the Afghan rulers . . . and to make them understand the immense advantages of a close and amicable relationship between them, advantages for them personally and for their domains, which could thus be much better defended against external enemies as well as against internal disturbances’. Throughout, Vitkevitch was to take detailed notes and on his return write a full report on ‘the current state of Afghanistan, its trade, finances and army, and the attitude of the Afghan rulers towards the British’.
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Vitkevitch was to travel through the Caucasus, accompanied by Captain Ivan Blaramberg who had just been appointed to the Russian delegation in Teheran as Simonitch’s adjutant.
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After resting at Tiflis, they were to disguise themselves and, with the greatest secrecy and discretion, make their way to Teheran. ‘Once in Teheran,’ Vitkevitch was told, ‘you shall report to Count Simonitch, and place yourself under his orders. It will be up to him to decide whether to send you on to Afghanistan or to cancel your mission if he considers it incompatible with the political situation in Persia or impossible for any other reason. He will also decide on the further travel arrangements for the Afghan Ambassador Hussein Ali.’
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‘We need not remind you’, wrote Count Nesselrode, at the end of his instructions, ‘that all the aforesaid must be kept strictly confidential and nobody but our envoy to Persia, Count Simonitch, and Baron von Rosen should know of these instructions. Caution also requires that you leave all instructions with Count Simonitch when you set off to Afghanistan so that, should some misfortune befall you, nothing could reveal the secret of your mission.’ It was of particular importance, warned Nesselrode, that the British discover nothing of these plans, and there was an implicit warning that he could be disowned by St Petersburg if the British did so.

Vitkevitch’s notes for his journey south were burned just before his mysterious death, but Captain Blaramberg’s memoirs survive. ‘Having spent two months in St Petersburg and received my instructions,’ he wrote, ‘I was preparing to leave the city, but first I met my travelling companion Lieutenant Vitkevich. He turned out to be a pleasant young Pole, 28 years old, with an expressive face, well-educated and energetic . . . all the necessary qualities to play in Asia the role of Alexander Burnes.’
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The two travelled south in a carriage laden with presents and bribes for Persian and Afghan officials, and on arrival in Tiflis they met Baron von Rosen, the Commander-in-Chief, and visited Countess Simonitch, who ‘became a frequent guest; her charming daughters bore a great resemblance to their astonishing mother’.

The further south they went from Tiflis, the more idyllic the countryside became. The two travellers slept out under the stars, and spent nights in the camps of nomads. ‘On 11 July we crossed the border of the Yerivan province and the oppressive heat forced us to halt at a ruined mosque,’ wrote Blaramberg.

It was here that we saw the magnificent Mount Ararat for the first time: its double peak covered in glittering snow rose in the south over the plain. On the 13th we went over the last mountain ridge and descended into the Araxes valley. It was a beautiful day, not a cloud in the sky. We settled in the shade of a small grove by a babbling stream and admired the magnificent Ararat towering before us. Our Armenian manservant made a delicious pilaf and we, being in high spirits, emptied a bottle of Madeira.
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It was once they had crossed the Persian border that Vitkevitch’s volatile temperament darkened. ‘During our journey through Persia, Vitkevitch was often in a melancholy mood,’ remembered Blaramberg, ‘and he would say that he had had enough of life.’ Only when the party reached Teheran did Vitkevitch’s spirits revive.

For here Simonitch informed Vitkevitch of two pieces of intelligence which greatly excited the Pole. The first – which later turned out to be false – was that Mirza Hussein Ali’s mission had already aroused the suspicion of British intelligence, which, said Simonitch, had tailed the two travellers all the way from Kabul. Simonitch further warned him that as a result he might now be a target for ‘intrigues and provocations by British agents’. None of this was true – the British were at this stage entirely ignorant of the Afghan mission to the Tsar – but in order to safeguard the mission Vitkevitch was provided by the Embassy with a Cossack escort to look after him as he headed on to Nishapur and hence to the Shah’s camp at Herat. It was this escort that did finally alert British intelligence – in the person of Rawlinson – to the existence of Vitkevitch’s mission.

The second piece of news was even more to Vitkevitch’s taste. For Simonitch’s spies in Afghanistan had just informed him that Vitkevitch would not be alone in Kabul. His British counterpart Alexander Burnes was heading in the same direction, on his second mission to Central Asia. Like Vitkevitch he had specific instructions to win over Dost Mohammad Khan. The man whom Vitkevitch had shadowed and to some extent modelled himself on was heading to the same destination, charged with exactly the same task.

The two men had in fact much in common. They were of nearly the same age; both came from the distant provinces of their respective empires, with few connections to the ruling elite, and having arrived in Asia within a few months of each other had both worked their way up through their own merit and daring, and especially their skill in languages. Now the two would come face to face, in the court of Kabul, and the outcome of the contest would do much to determine the immediate future not only of Afghanistan, but of Central Asia. The Great Game had begun.

On his arrival in Peshawar in October 1837, Alexander Burnes was not impressed with the changes in the city since his last visit.

In the three years since his conquest of Peshawar at the time of Shah Shuja’s attack on Kandahar in 1834, Ranjit Singh had moved half his army into the city, turning the former Durrani winter capital into a massive Punjabi barracks. In the process the Sikh Khalsa had destroyed many of Peshawar’s most beautiful sights. An enormous new brick fort had been built over the delicate pleasure gardens and pavilions of the Bala Hisar where Shah Shuja had in 1809 received the Elphinstone mission. Another new fort bristling with artillery had just been erected at Jamrud at the mouth of the Khyber. Burnes recorded that one of Ranjit Singh’s former Napoleonic officers, Paolo Avitabile, now governed Peshawar, ‘and the Sikhs had changed everything: many of the fine gardens around the town had been converted into cantonments; trees had been cut down; and the whole neighbourhood was one vast camp. Mahommedan usages have disappeared – the sounds of dancing and music were heard at all hours and all places.’
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Burnes also noted that, despite the massive army of occupation garrisoning the Peshawar valley, the Sikhs had found it very difficult to rule the rebellious Pashtuns who inhabited the area and that there had been so many tribal uprisings, assassinations and acts of insurrection in and around the city that the occupation of Peshawar had become a major drain on Sikh resources. This, he realised, was actually good news for his mission, as it could only make Ranjit Singh more willing to come to an accommodation with Dost Mohammad about the future of the city, and with luck allow Burnes to reconcile the two rivals, bringing both into alliance with the British.