Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (42 page)

Arrangements were swiftly made to convey the Amir to India. He would be given a generous pension and reunited with his harem, who were then being held in the fortress of Ghazni. It was soon agreed that he should be given Shah Shuja’s vacated quarters in Ludhiana, as Shuja’s harem were shortly due to leave for Kabul. Unexpectedly, in the nine days he stayed in Kabul, Macnaghten and the Amir became friends: ‘The candle of intercourse and conversation burned brightly between them,’ noted Mirza ‘Ata.
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Macnaghten even intervened on the Amir’s behalf with Auckland. ‘I trust the Dost will be treated with liberality,’ he wrote. ‘His case has been compared to that of Shah Shuja; and I have seen it argued that he should not be treated more handsomely than His Majesty was; but surely the cases are not parallel. The Shah has no claim upon us. We had no hand in depriving him of his Kingdom, whereas we ejected the Dost, who never offended us, in support of our policy, of which he was the victim.’
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It was the closest Macnaghten would ever come to admitting that ‘the gallant old Ameer’, who had always been friendly to the English, had been quite unnecessarily deprived of his throne and his kingdom.

The Amir was so pleased and relieved by his honourable surrender to the British, and the way in which he had been able to prove his valour on the field of Parwan Darra before he did so, that he was prepared to forgive even Burnes, whom everyone else in the Barakzai camp regarded as a devious and slippery
namak haram
[literally ‘impure salt’ – a serious insult, meaning one who had played traitor to his host]. As Burnes wrote to a friend,

My interview with Dost Mohammad was very interesting and very affectionate. He taunted me with nothing, said I was his best friend, and that he had come in on a letter I had written to him. This I disbelieve, for we followed him from house to house [through Kohistan] and he was obliged to surrender. On that letter, however, I hope I have got for him an annual stipend of two lakhs of rupees instead of one. On our parting I gave him an Arab horse; and what do you think he gave me? His own, and only sword, which is stained with blood. He left for India . . . and is to live at Ludhiana. In Kohistan I saw a failure of our artillery to breach, of our European soldiers to storm, and of our cavalry to charge; and yet God gave us the victory . . . If we could turn over a new leaf here, we might yet make Afghanistan a barrier.
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Only in one matter did the Amir refuse to co-operate with the British. Macnaghten repeatedly urged him to visit Shah Shuja, but Dost Mohammad flatly refused, and even sent back the trays of food that the Shah had sent to his surrendered rival – a mortal insult in the Afghan honour system. According to Mirza ‘Ata, ‘the Amir angrily replied to Macnaghten’s entreaties, “It is enough that I have come to see you with the result that I am to be taken abroad a prisoner. What would I gain from going to see one who has brought this storm of misfortune on his country? Without the King, you English could never independently have entered Afghanistan.”’
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Fayz Mohammad puts a similar speech into the Amir’s mouth: ‘I have no business with Shah Shuja,’ he is supposed to have said to Macnaghten. ‘I have not come to offer an oath of allegiance to him.’ Macnaghten insisted, ‘In view of the concern for the state that he has, it would be appropriate for you to see him.’ The Amir replied, ‘It is you who have put him on the throne, not the great mass of those who “loose and bind”. If this is true, then you should cease propping him up. When you do, it will be clear to you and to other intelligent people which man deserves to be sovereign and whom the leaders of the country and the subjects will obey. If he has anything to say to me let him come forward and state it in your presence.’
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The refusal of the British to hand Dost Mohammad over to the Sadozais for execution caused Shuja huge offence. For weeks he had been urging Macnaghten to send assassins to have the Amir killed, and now at the very least he expected his old enemy to be blinded. But Macnaghten refused even to discuss the matter. ‘His Majesty was surprised and could not understand why Dost Mohammad Khan rudely chose not even to pay his respects at court,’ wrote Mohammad Husain Herati. ‘All the Amir’s adherents and followers and Barakzai relatives who remained in Afghanistan went about their business as freely as if they had been infidels just converted to Islam and washed free of sin! The extreme attention and favour paid by the English to the faction and clan of Dost Mohammad Khan led very quickly to a total loss of prestige of His Majesty, as if he had fallen, hard, from heaven to earth.’ Meanwhile, continued Herati, ‘Macnaghten’s efforts to please his guest, and his neglect of the rights of His Majesty, led at length to his own death: again, as the poet said: “If you shower favours on bad men, you harm the good and virtuous.”’
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On 13 November, Dost Mohammad Khan left Kabul, accompanied by his son Afzal Khan to whom he had written, telling him ‘he had been received with much kindness and respect’ and urging his son to follow his example and surrender. In Jalalabad the two were reunited with the rest of their harem: Dost Mohammad’s nine wives, the twenty-one spouses of his sons, 102 female slaves and another 210 male slaves and attendants, who along with numerous grandchildren and other relations brought the party to a grand total of 381 people in all.
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As the news of the Amir’s honourable treatment spread, the number increased dramatically and, according to Mirza ‘Ata, by the time the party arrived at Ludhiana, ‘all the family and dependents of the Amir had arrived: 22 of his sons, 13 of his nephews, and another 29 relations as well as 400 male-servants and 300 female-servants, in total 1,115 persons joined the Amir in exile’.
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There was great relief in Kabul and Simla when the Barakzais finally reached Ludhiana at the end of December. Sir Willoughby Cotton, who had been given the job of escorting the Amir to his new residence at the end of his stint as British military commander in Afghanistan, even wrote to his successor to say, ‘You will have nothing to do here. All is peace.’
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But in reality the insurgency was by no means over. Akbar Khan, Dost Mohammad’s most warlike son, had just managed to escape from Bukhara. He would soon prove a potent new centre of resistance, and far more violent, ruthless and effective than his father had ever been.

6

We Fail From Our Ignorance

In early February 1840, as the Edens were heading down from Simla on their way back to Calcutta, they bumped into an old acquaintance from Scotland, Major-General William Elphinstone. The two families were friends, and the amiable, ineffective, bumbling old Major-General – an elderly cousin of Mountstuart Elphinstone – had last seen the Edens on his Carstairs estate in the Scottish Borders. Now, as he manoeuvred himself out of his palanquin, Elphinstone was rather put out to have to wait to see his young friend Auckland. ‘It seems odd that I have never seen [Lord] A since we were shooting grouse together,’ he told Emily, ‘and now I have to ask for an audience and for employment.’
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The feeling of disappointment was mutual. If Elphinstone was mildly ruffled by their relative change of status, the Edens were worried by the mere sight of Elphinstone. Since their days striding over the border heather, guns under their arms on the Glorious Twelfth, Elphinstone’s health had collapsed and he was now ‘in a shocking state of gout, poor man! One arm in a sling and very lame’, unable to walk unless supported, or aided by sticks. In fact it was so bad that at first Emily didn’t recognise him: ‘I remember him as “Elphy Bey”, and never made out it was the same man till a sudden recollection came over me a week ago.’
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It was, she wrote, ‘almost the worst [case of gout] I ever saw’.
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George was more worried still, though in his case the anxiety was professional, for this was the man he had just chosen to take over the command of the army in Afghanistan. His appointment was to be announced after the departure of Sir Willoughby Cotton; General Nott, whom Auckland regarded as chippy and difficult and far from a gentleman, was to be passed over yet again; but, wrote Auckland, he ‘had only himself to blame’. Nott, in turn, had all his fears about Lord Auckland’s judgement and class prejudices confirmed when he discovered he would be superseded by ‘the most incompetent soldier that was to be found among all the officers of requisite rank’.

As Nott was all too aware, Elphinstone’s failings were not merely medical. Like many Queen’s officers of his generation, he had not seen action since he commanded the 33rd Foot at Waterloo more than twenty-five years previously, and after years on half-pay had returned to active service only in 1837, at the age of fifty-five, in order to pay off his growing debts. His patron, and the man responsible for sending him to India, was Fitzroy Somerset, Lord Raglan, later famous for ordering the suicidal Charge of the Light Brigade.
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Elphinstone had no knowledge of or interest in the world into which Raglan had just pitched him. ‘He hates being here,’ noted Emily, ‘wretched because nobody understands his London topics, or knows his London people, and he revels in a long letter from Lord W[ellington] . . . He cannot, of course, speak a word of Hindoostanee, and neither can his aide-de-camp: “We can never make the bearers understand us[,” he complained.] “I have a negro who speaks English, but I could not bring him [up the country].” He can hardly have picked up a woolly black negro who speaks Hindoostanee. I suppose he means a Native.’
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Despite having seen that Elphinstone was more or less an invalid and had no sympathy for India or the Indian sepoys he would have to lead, it did not seem to have occurred to Lord Auckland to question or cancel his friend’s command. Instead, he wrote warmly to him throughout the year and when his appointment was finally confirmed in December 1840, shortly after Dost Mohammad’s surrender, confided to him his worries about the occupation. ‘Though I am impatient gradually to withdraw our regular troops from that country,’ he wrote, ‘I feel that, before we can do so, the new dynasty must be more strongly confirmed than it yet has been in power, and that there must be better security than is yet established.’
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Like Auckland, Elphinstone was not known for his decisiveness and, again like Auckland, had spent much of his career depending on the opinions of his assistants. But while it was Auckland’s fate to have fallen into the hands of the hawkish Colvin and the pedantic yet undeniably bright Macnaghten, Elphinstone was more unlucky still in that he was given for his deputy one of the most unhelpful, unpleasant and unpopular officers in the entire army.

Brigadier General John Shelton of the 44th Foot was a cantankerous, rude and boorish man who had lost his right arm in the Peninsular War, and the incessant pain he suffered seemed to have darkened and embittered his character. He was a rigid disciplinarian, known to be ‘a tyrant to his regiment’. When Captain Colin Mackenzie first saw him marching his troops into the country, he recorded in his diary that Shelton was ‘a wretched brigadier. The monstrous confusion which takes place in crossing the rivers from his want of common arrangement is disgraceful, and would be fatal in an avowed enemy’s country.’
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Later, Mackenzie crossed his path a second time and wrote, ‘As I expected, Shelton has marched the brigade off its legs . . . The artillery horses are quite done up, those of the cavalry nearly so, and the beasts of burden, camels etc . . . have died in great numbers, and will continue to die from overwork . . . The unnecessary hardship he has exposed the men to, especially during their passage through the Khyber, has caused much discontent. Part of the horse artillery on one occasion actually mutinied.’
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The entire cantonment took an instant dislike to Shelton. The surgeon John Magrath, who had come across him before in India, was soon describing him as ‘more detested than ever’.
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Nor did Shelton get on with the gentle and gentlemanly Elphinstone. ‘His manner was most contumacious from the day of his arrival,’ the Major-General wrote later. ‘He never gave me information or advice, but invariably found fault with all that was done and canvassed and condemned all orders before officers – frequently perverting and delaying carrying them into effect. He appeared to be actuated by an ill-feeling towards me.’
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Nor did Elphinstone much take to the political officers or the monarch he was going to have to work with. In April 1841, near the end of his journey from Meerut, he arrived at the winter capital of Jalalabad, to which Shuja had again retreated to escape the blizzards of the Kabul winter. ‘My Command I do not think enviable,’ he wrote to his cousin shortly after meeting Macnaghten.