Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (36 page)

As winter tightened its grip, the days grew colder and the low, heavy clouds filled with snow that would not fall, Shuja decided to award selected officers with a new medal of his own invention. This was the Order of the Durrani Empire, whose shape and physical form seems to have been modelled on that of the Freemason medal, the Guelphian Order, which Burnes had been awarded after his return from Bukhara.
22
These were given out as the first regiments began the long march back to India, before the first flurries of winter snow thickened into drifts and closed the higher passes. As George Lawrence, Macnaghten’s young Military Secretary, noticed: ‘The recipients were entirely composed of British officers of the force, as none of his own subjects were regarded as worthy of the honor.’
23

By late November the first returning regiments had reached Simla, ‘and very flourishing they look’, wrote Emily Eden. ‘They cannot now make out that their sufferings have been all that the papers described. Rather than having undergone privations, they are all looking uncommonly fat. Indeed Captain Dawkins, of Lord Auckland’s bodyguard, has come back looking fatter than most Falstaffs.’
24

While Shah Shuja was being installed in the Bala Hisar, its previous occupant, Dost Mohammad Khan, was fleeing north as fast as he could. Like Shah Shuja after the Battle of Nimla thirty years earlier, the loss of power immediately changed everything for him, and brought with it a series of humiliations which nearly resulted in his ruin and death.

The Barakzais struggled with difficulty over the icy passes, in headlong flight from the British trackers who had been sent out to hunt them down. Yet Dost Mohammad could not move with any real speed as he was ‘accompanied by a throng of wives, infants, brothers, sons, and servants’.
25
His heir Akbar Khan, moreover, was still recovering from the poison apparently administered to him at the Khyber, possibly on Wade’s orders. Unable to ride, he had to be carried on a litter. The Afghan epic poets remembered the flight of Dost Mohammad with as much sympathy as their Scottish counterparts romanticised that of Bonnie Prince Charlie after Culloden. ‘Then forward went the brave sovereign,’ wrote Ghulam Kohistani in his
Jangnama
,

And with him a thousand courageous cavalry.

And behind them passed the harem

Remembering the old custom

After him came the chattels and gold

And vigilant sentries, ever watchful

On their trail, with feet like lightning,

Travelled the vengeance-seekers

Both night and day they rode

Like clouds that rush across the sky
26

The tracking party was led by two tough and resourceful young officers, James Outram and George Lawrence, who were given Haji Khan Kakar and a thousand of Shah Shuja’s cavalry as their guides and escort. Travelling at speed, it should not have been difficult to ride down the slow-moving Barakzai caravan. Yet, for all their efforts, Outram’s party never succeeded in capturing the Amir, and it soon became clear that Haji Khan was as usual playing a double game, deliberately leading the British off the trail and doing all he could to slow the pursuit.

The search party picked up the scent of the Barakzais when, after two weeks on the hunt, they caught up with some deserters from Dost Mohammad’s bodyguard and learned that they were only one day behind the fugitives. ‘At five pm we resumed our march,’ wrote an exhausted Lawrence,

contrary to the protest of the Hadjee, who expressed himself most unwilling to proceed, alleging the dangerous and precipitous character of the road for a march at night.
s
It was quite apparent his heart was not in the cause. His objections were not listened to, and we proceeded by a very bad road, over high hills and along the dry channels of mountain streams, for ten miles, where we halted and lay down by our horses . . . Not fifty of our Affghans reached the ground with us; but they came in during the day. Here we received intelligence that the Dost was at a place called Youk, only one march ahead of us. Hadjee Khan again showed great reluctance to advance, begging Outram to halt there, as the Dost had 2,000 horsemen with him. Outram however ordered the party to march at four pm, and on mustering the Affghans found they numbered only 350, and they badly mounted.
27

These delaying tactics continued over the days that followed. The Haji insisted that they needed to wait for reinforcements, and when Outram tried nevertheless to set off on a night ride, ‘whether through accident or design, we had not advanced four miles, before the guides, who were under the charge of Haji Khan’s men, were reported to have deserted. It was then pitch-dark, and being left in the midst of interminable ravines, where no trace even of a footpath existed, we had no alternative but to halt until day break.’
28
The next evening as the British tried to press on, Haji Khan seized Outram by the arm ‘and loudly entreated me not to think of advancing, threatening rather to detain me by force, than to permit my rushing on certain destruction’. He also warned him, no doubt truthfully:

if you do encounter Dost Mohammad, not one of the Afghans will draw a sword against him, nor will I be responsible if they do not turn against yourself in the melee . . . Failing in his object of shaking our resolution, the Khan at last left and seating himself a few yards from the door of my tent, conversed in the dark in an undertone of voice, with three or four of his chiefs for more than an hour. The latter were heard to upbraid him for assisting the Firangis in their endeavours to arrest Dost Mohammad, enquiring whether the Amir had ever injured him . . . and Haji Khan was heard to admit the truth of all they had advanced.
29

The following day, as snow began to fall, the Afghans of the party turned increasingly mutinous. ‘We realized’, wrote Outram, ‘that our own Afghans were traitors upon whom no reliance could be placed.’ Outram and Lawrence then decided to go on a mission that seemed almost suicidal, heading on through a blizzard to apprehend Dost Mohammad with only thirteen British officers. That night, Outram slept in thick snow, aware he might well die the following morning, but determined to do what he could to arrest or else kill the Amir. Afterwards he remembered that he had never been ‘more happy than on this night, under the exciting expectation of so glorious a struggle in the morning’. But the struggle never took place. Outram and his men galloped down the pass into the wide Bamiyan valley to find that Dost Mohammad had just that morning fled north of the Hindu Kush, escaping out of their reach beyond Saighan to Tash Qurgan, and into the territory of the independent Uzbek leader, the Mir Wali, ‘who is at enmity with Shah Shuja’. Outram now had no option but to write back to Macnaghten that ‘there being, under such circumstances not the slightest hope of our now overtaking the fugitive within the Shah’s territories, to which we have been restricted, and the officers of our cavalry having represented that their horses are incapable, through want of food or rest, of making further forced marches immediately, we have here been compelled to relinquish the pursuit’.
30

That night, Dost Mohammad and his followers made it safely to the shelter of Khamard, the fortress of the slave-trading Mir Wali. ‘The Amir spent the next two months as honoured guest of the Uzbeks,’ wrote Mirza ‘Ata,

and from there he went on to Balkh where the governor received him in a guest-house in a beautiful garden. While he was in Balkh, letters arrived from Nasrullah Khan, the ruler of Bukhara, by camelpost, requesting the Amir to grace his court with his presence. The Amir left his family and dependents in Balkh and rode together with his heir Akbar Khan to Bukhara, the city of the Islamic sciences, where he was received with royal hospitality and he was given a private palace as his residence and a small allowance to meet his daily expenses.
31

It is not entirely clear what went wrong in Bukhara, but after a few weeks Dost Mohammad fell out with his hosts: Mirza ‘Ata suggests that this was due to some disrespectful remarks made by Akbar Khan, the Amir’s hot-tempered son. It may also have been because Nasrullah resented Dost Mohammad’s earlier attempts to seize the disputed border city of Balkh, claimed by both amirs, and now objected to his plan to have the ‘ulema of Bukhara declare a jihad on his behalf. Either way, harsh words were then exchanged between the two, and the Barakzais left the city having deeply offended Nasrullah Khan. The cunning and ruthless (and possibly even mildly psychotic) ruler of Bukhara then tried to have Dost Mohammad assassinated. ‘The Bukharan Amir secretly instructed the escort that when the party crossed the Oxus they were to scuttle the boat in which Dost Mohammad and the princes were riding and so cause them to drown,’ wrote Fayz Mohammad in the
Siraj ul-Tawarikh
.

The Afghans were thus taken under guard to the banks of the Oxus and put in boats. A hole was surreptitiously opened in the skiff in which the Amir chose to sit. When the boats moved off, one of the Bukharan Amir’s men who was unaware of his master’s plot sat as the Amir’s escort in the same boat. He planned to cross the river with him and then return. Another man who knew what was going on, spoke to him in Turkish and told him to get out of the boat so that he would not drown with the Amir. But the Amir, whose mother was the daughter of one of the leading Qizilbash of Kabul and was herself a Turk, understood Turkish. When he heard what the man said, he got out of the boat and refused to cross the river. No matter how hard the Bukharan Amir’s people tried to persuade him to get back in and cross he refused and said to his companions, ‘It is better to roll in my own blood than to die by drowning. For to die by the sword’s edge will remain as a reminder of the undeniable injustice of the Amir of Bukhara. But if I were to drown, no one would speak of the ill-treatment which he has shown me, his guest.’
t

The Amir headed back towards Bukhara with his party, now under guard. ‘But a very severe snowstorm blew up which brought everyone to the brink of death. Many of the younger princes were unable even to talk because of the extreme cold. The Amir ordered his personal servants to each take one of the princes and warm them by breathing heavily on them’ in order to save their lives.

In short, they limped back to Bukhara, and only reached it after the greatest difficulties. Now even the inadequate stipend which had been allotted the first time was withheld by the Amir of Bukhara. Eventually, some seventy of the group fled . . . Nasrullah Khan learned of their escape and ordered seven thousand cavalry to pursue with orders to cut off their escape and, if the sardars chose to fight, then to shed their blood; if not, then to bring them back in chains. At Chiraghchi, they overtook the sardars, surrounded them, and attacked. While bullets and powder lasted, the Afghans held the Bukharans off and spilled much of their blood. But in the end, when they had exhausted their ammunition, the Bukharans fell upon them and took them prisoner. Afzal Khan and Akbar Khan were both wounded in the fight, while several others were killed and many of the rest sustained serious wounds. The Bukharans carried Dost Mohammad and his men back to their city and at the Amir of Bukhara’s order, threw them all in a dark dungeon.
32

On 2 November 1839, with the puddles in Kabul bazaars now iced over and frost glinting on the willows beside the Kabul River, Shah Shuja left the Bala Hisar to winter in Jalalabad, which, in the absence of Peshawar, he now named as his winter capital. Macnaghten went with him. Arriving ahead of Shuja, while the Shah was delayed burying a junior prince amid the poplars of the Nimla Gardens, Macnaghten took for himself the best quarters in town, leaving the Shah to shelter in what one British observer called ‘a hovel’.
33

Mullah Shakur was left in charge in Kabul, with Burnes standing in for Macnaghten. On the last night of the year, as the winter cold grew more intense, Burnes threw a Hogmanay party, and presided over it all in kilt and sporran.
Neville Chamberlain, up for the week from Kandahar, was one of the guests. ‘We had a very merry party,’ he wrote the following morning.

Though we had nothing to drink but brandy and gin. At about 2 in the morning we took to the mess tables and commenced dancing reels, Captain Sinclair standing on the table, dressed in the Highland costume, playing the bagpipes. Burnes was extremely civil to us. He is liked by everyone, as there is no political humbug in him unlike most persons in that employ . . . [He is in fact] a general favourite, and very justly so as he is, I think, the most unaffected, gentlemanlike, pleasant and amusing man that I have had the good fortune to meet.
34

The celebrations that continued in Kabul throughout the winter were not to everyone’s taste. The American adventurer ‘General’ Josiah Harlan, who had fought successively for the East India Company, Shah Shuja, the Sikhs and finally Dost Mohammad, and who claimed he had briefly had himself crowned the Prince of Ghor, looked on with an increasingly jaundiced eye at the British at play, before finally quitting Afghanistan in disgust. ‘Kabul, the city of a thousand gardens, in those days was a paradise,’ he wrote later on the steamer back home after Burnes had had him deported from India as an unwanted alien. ‘I have seen this country, sacred to the harmony of hallowed solitude, desecrated by the rude intrusion of senseless stranger boors, vile in habits, infamous in vulgar tastes, callous leaders in the sanguinary march of heedless conquests, who crushed the feeble heart and hushed the merry voice of mirth, hilarity and joy . . .’ He added prophetically, ‘To subdue and crush the masses of a nation by military force, when all are unanimous in the determination to be free, is to attempt the imprisonment of a whole people: all such projects must be temporary and transient, and terminate in a catastrophe . . .’
35