Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (34 page)

They carried away much wealth and loot

Then within one night like the wind they flew

To join the Firangi army

The Amir, betrayed by his own forces, was heartbroken.

All his friends he saw become strangers to him

He became sunk in anxiety for his own cause

As the poet Sa’adi said,
‘
When you see that your friends are no                longer friendly

Look upon flight from the field as your gain’

So he plucked out of his heart all thoughts of war

From weapons, arms and those things dear to him

He took such that he could carry by himself, the rest he let be

Then he beat the kettledrums of departure and raised the flag

He set out with one thousand and five hundred

Of his own tribe, and went towards Khulm by way of Bamiyan
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News of Dost Mohammad’s flight arrived in the British camp on 3 August 1839. It took only three more days for the army to march the final few miles to Kabul. On 7 August, eight months after they had left Ferozepur, the Army of the Indus finally marched into the Afghan capital with Shah Shuja at its head, ‘dazzling in a coronet, jewelled girdle and bracelet’, and Macnaghten not to be outdone in ‘a cocked hat fringed with ostrich feathers, a blue frock coat with raised buttons, richly embroidered on the collar and cuffs, epaulettes not yielding in splendour to those of a field marshal, and trousers edged in very broad gold lace’. It was thirty years since the Shah had last seen his magnificent Timurid palace on the great rock of the Bala Hisar, which occupied nearly a quarter of the area of Kabul. Silent crowds filled the street, standing up as the Shah passed, and reseating themselves as the British officials followed; but there were no cheers and no rejoicing. According to George Lawrence, the Kabulis showed ‘the most complete indifference [at the return of the Shah], expressing no sign of welcome or satisfaction at his accession to the throne. Evidently their hearts and affections were with their previous sovereign, now a wanderer beyond the Hindu Kush.’
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Another young officer went further. ‘It was more like a funeral procession’, he wrote, ‘than the entry of a king into the capital of his restored dominions.’
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Only the Shah himself showed any pleasure or emotion. ‘His Majesty led the way into the palace and gardens,’ wrote Major Hough. ‘The former were so much dilapidated after the lapse of thirty years that the old man wept, while he explained to his grandsons and family the state of its former splendour.’ As he mounted the familiar staircase to the upper wards of the palace and could see Kabul spread out below him, his spirits rose as he realised that his dream, thwarted for three decades, had finally been fulfilled: ‘Ascending the great staircase, the Shah ran with childish eagerness from one small chamber to another of the well-remembered abode of royalty, deploring aloud the neglect and damage which was everywhere visible, and particularly lamented the removal of the panels of mirror from the sheesh mahal.’
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But, for all the complaints, Shah Shuja was happy. Finally, he was home.

5

The Flag of Holy War

On the morning of 8 May 1839, just as Shah Shuja was riding in triumph through the gates of Kandahar, the dead body of a man in his early thirties was discovered by a cleaning lady. The discovery took place in a top-floor room of the Paris Boarding House in the shuttered backstreets of St Petersburg. The man had apparently locked his door from within. He had then blown his brains out.

A short and matter-of-fact note lay on the desk beside the body. It read as follows:

Not knowing anyone who would care about my destiny in any way, I find it sufficient to explain that I am taking my own life voluntarily. As I am currently employed by the Asian Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I humbly beseech the said Department to dispose of the 2 years’ wages due to me from the 1st Orenburg Regiment in the following way: 1. Settle the bill for officer’s uniform articles, for the total sum of about 300 roubles; 2. Give 500 roubles to the tailor Markevitch for the dress I ordered from him but haven’t collected; 3. Allow my man Dmitry the use of all my belongings that I have with me at the moment. I have burnt all the papers relating to my last journey and, therefore, all search for them would be entirely useless. I have settled the bill with the landlord of the Paris Inn up until May 7, but should he have any other requests I humbly beseech the Department to satisfy him from the above-mentioned sum. May 8, 1839, 3 a.m. Vitkevitch
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Nothing about Ivan Viktorovitch Vitkevitch’s notably Dostoyevskian death made much sense, and almost from the moment the body was discovered the mysterious end of Russia’s first agent of the Great Game became the subject of speculation. The British believed the suicide was evidence of all that they most disliked and feared about the autocratic callousness of the Tsar’s regime. Vitkevitch had, after all, been barbarously exiled from his native Poland to a punishment posting on the distant steppe at the age of only fourteen. Then, having worked his way up against all the odds and excelled as an intelligence agent, at the moment of his triumph, when he had outmanoeuvred his rival Burnes and won over the Barakzais, he had been callously disowned and cast out by his Russian masters.

The British Ambassador in St Petersburg wrote to Palmerston that ‘the cause is said to have been the disapprobation & disavowal of his conduct in Afghanistan by the Russ. Govt. instead of the reward & promotion he expected’.
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According to Russian ‘refugees and émigrés’ contacted by Sir John Kaye when he was enquiring into the matter in the late 1840s, Vitkevitch had arrived in the capital ‘full of hope, for he had discharged the duty entrusted to him with admirable address’. But Count Nesselrode had refused to receive him, and when he presented himself at the Ministry he had been turned away. The Count had sent word that he ‘knew no Captain Vitkevitch, except an adventurer of that name, who it is reported, has lately been engaged in some unauthorised intrigues in Kabul and Kandahar’. Vitkevitch ‘understood at once the dire portent of the message. He knew the character of his government.’ Aware that in the apparently successful British invasion of Afghanistan he had already been checkmated by Burnes, he now ‘saw clearly’ that in addition ‘he was sacrificed’ by the politicians he had served so faithfully and effectively.
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The British agent and news-writer in Bukhara, Nazir Khan Ullah, independently confirmed this version of events in a secret despatch sent from Central Asia. Vitkevitch had felt himself compromised when his superiors failed to honour his promises of military support to the Barakzais, leaving them to face the British alone. ‘The Russian agent here is my acquaintance,’ wrote Nazir Khan to his handler, Burnes. ‘He said that when Vitkevitch returned from Kabul to Russia, he told the Russian authorities that he had sent them many letters soliciting Military and Pecuniary assistance and that they never sent him any reply, and delayed the business, and that this neglect had made him out a liar in the country of Kabul and Kandahar. He therefore felt disgraced, and on hearing of the answer of the Cabinet of St. Petersburg, he shot himself.’
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For many Russian observers, however, the mysterious death coupled with the suspicious disappearance of Vitkevitch’s Afghan papers bore all the hallmarks of British foul play. After all, Vitkevitch’s papers contained details of the British intelligence and news-writing networks in Central Asia that he had successfully penetrated. As L. G. Sinyavin, the new director of the Asiatic Department, noted in a letter shortly afterwards:

He burned our papers without handing them over. Those papers constituted various observations to assist him in drawing up a report on the affairs of Afghanistan and copies of the despatches of British agents to various individuals in Afghanistan. In a word, with him perished all the valuable information about Afghanistan which would now be particularly precious and useful to us and which, from his remarkable talents and gifts of observation, we have every reason to suppose his papers contained. Only what he personally managed to relate to me is known.
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All this led to speculation that Vitkevitch’s shooting was in fact a covert assassination by British intelligence agents. There was, after all, no reason why Vitkevitch should commit suicide, given that – according to the official Russian version of events – he had been received with honour, promoted, told he was in line for a medal, and was about to be received by Tsar Nicholas I for a personal interview on the very morning of his death. Why would such a man kill himself on the eve of his great moment of glory? Sinyavin for one was baffled. ‘Vitkevitch had only arrived in St Petersburg eight days previously,’ he wrote to Perovsky, Vitkevitch’s patron in Orenburg. ‘He was extremely well received by the Ministry and on the very day of his death the report came through authorising his transfer to the guards, and on top of that, rewards of promotion, honours and money.’ Sinyavin continued:

During my meeting with him, I recounted what a favourable interest you took in him, of your anxiety on hearing [falsely that] he had gone to Khiva and been killed, and how before his departure you had especially recommended that I organise a decent reward for him for such a difficult expedition. He seemed very satisfied and merry, and a day before his death I saw him at the theatre, where he sat the whole evening and chatted with Prince Saltykov. On the eve of his suicide they saw him again in the middle of the day, and again he was merry; in the evening he visited Count Simonitch . . . It is all very strange . . .
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According to this Russian version, Vitkevitch was in the highest spirits throughout his trip to St Petersburg. Vitkevitch’s Orenburg friend K. Bukh described how they got together that morning and ‘went for a ride in the islands’, then saw a play in the Kamennoostrovsky Theatre. ‘He did not show any signs of melancholy,’ Bukh wrote later. ‘I went to see him on the eve of his tragic death; he was excited about some article in a German newspaper referring to him. He showed me the rifles and pistols, his life-long passion, he had bought in the East. On his return to the hotel he was in good spirits, and had asked to be woken at nine.’

The oddly terse tone of the suicide note also fuelled speculation: why was there no mention of his mother, his brother or any of his colleagues and friends? The first to express his suspicions in print was the Tsarist military historian M. A. Terntyev. ‘The investigation did not lead to anything,’ he wrote, ‘but it is difficult to believe that someone who had worked hard for so many years to further his career would give it up the night before his most ardent dreams were to come true . . . Many suspected the British to be involved in this mysterious incident . . . Who but the British were interested in Vitkevich’s papers? Who but the British were exasperated by Burnes’s failure and angry with Vitkevich? . . .Vitkevich’s death deprived us of important intelligence on Afghanistan; the treaty he had signed with Amir Dost Mohammad also vanished.’ This was certainly a version of events that appealed to N. A. Khalfin, the Cold War-era Soviet historian of the Great Game: ‘What was it then?’ he asked. ‘Murder, committed in the centre of St Petersburg, upon the order of a certain foreign power?’
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But there is a third version of the events in the Paris Boarding House, which is the one that is generally believed in Vitkevitch’s native Poland, and which perhaps rings most true. For, according to one of his Orenburg colleagues, at the theatre the night before he died Vitkevitch – or rather Jan Prosper Witkiewicz as he was still known to his fellow Poles – ran into an old friend from Vilnius. This friend, Tyshkevitch, berated him, angrily asserting that he had at one time been willing to sacrifice himself in the name of his motherland but had now lost all his ideals, abandoning his dearest principles for the sake of naked ambition.

The earliest source for this are some notes of Colonel P. I. Sungurov, who served in Orenburg for thirty years and knew Vitkevitch well. According to Sungurov, after the play Vitkevitch had returned to his hotel to pull together his plans and notes in preparation for the audience with the Tsar the following morning. Late that night, Tyshkevitch came to see Vitkevitch in his rooms, knocking on his door as the traveller sat surrounded by his papers and journals. Vitkevitch’s tale of his travels, of the ‘great service’ he had done to Russia and of his exciting future career provoked Tyshkevitch’s indignant response: ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Pan Vitkevitch . . . You talk of your mission as if it were some sacred feat . . . You, who did not hesitate to sacrifice your life, wealth, and position for the sake of freeing your dear motherland from slavery . . . you now assist with enslaving independent nations. You, who used to despise spies and traitors, have become one yourself . . .’ Tyshkevitch lectured his friend for some time. When he had finished, Vitkevitch collapsed, deflated and depressed: ‘A traitor, he whispered, yes, a traitor. God damn it all!’ As soon as Tyshkevitch left, seized with remorse, Vitkevitch had lit his fire, burned his papers and taken a pistol from the trunk on his hotel-room floor. This he put in his mouth, then pulled the trigger.
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