Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (48 page)

Burnes is sitting pretty in all his conceit

When will there be a better moment than this?

Time is running out, there is no room for delay

We cannot choose to sit by, we must contrive

Lest the rabbit become aware

And the prey slip through our fingers

Let us make haste towards Burnes, the wicked soul

And take care of this business by daybreak
90

In the end, however, it was agreed that they would wait for an incident of bad conduct on the part of the occupiers to justify rising up in insurrection. On the evening of 1 November, in the first week of Ramazan, the leading sardars found the flashpoint they were waiting for. ‘It so happened, by God’s will, that that night a slave girl of Abdullah Khan Achakzai ran away from his house to the residence of Alexander Burnes,’ wrote Mirza ‘Ata. ‘When on enquiry it was found out that that was where she had gone, the Khan, beside himself with fury, sent his attendant to fetch the silly girl back; the Englishman, swollen with pride, cursing and swearing, had the Khan’s attendant severely beaten and thrown out of the house.’ This was a provocation too far. According to Mohan Lal, ‘Abdullah Khan Achakzai, with his relatives, went to Aminullah Khan Logari, and holding the Qu’ran in his hand, implored him to be his comrade in exciting sedition in the city. When he had agreed to this, some other disaffected chiefs were sent for into the house of the Achakzai chief.’
91
Once the jirga had assembled, the nobles were addressed by Abdullah Khan:

‘Now we are justified in throwing off this English yoke: they stretch the hand of tyranny to dishonour private citizens great and small: fucking a slave girl isn’t worth the ritual bath that follows it: but we have to put a stop right here and now, otherwise these English will ride the donkey of their desires into the field of stupidity, to the point of having all of us arrested shortly and deported into foreign imprisonment. I put my trust in God and raise the battle standard of our Prophet Muhammad, and thus go to fight: if success rewards us, then that is as we wished; and if we die in battle, that is still better than to live with degradation and dishonour!’ The other Sardars, his childhood friends, tightened their belts and girt their loins and prepared for Jihad – holy war.
92

When Mohan Lal came to hear about the meeting of the conspirators through his informers, he immediately went over to Burnes’s house to warn him of what was brewing. Burnes had spent the day fretting about his future: it was the twentieth anniversary of his first footfall in India and he felt that it must be a life-changing day. ‘What will this day bring forth?’ reads the last entry in his journal. ‘It will make or mar me, I suppose. Before the sun sets I shall know.’
93
But the Ghilzai uprising had blocked the passes, and no post arrived in Kabul that day.

‘On the evening of 1st November 1841,’ wrote Mohan Lal,

I visited Sir Alexander Burnes and told him [what was afoot] . . . He replied that he does not like to meddle in the arrangement made by the Envoy, as he goes in a few days to Bombay, and then he [Burnes] will conciliate the chiefs by fixing former allowances. I told him again that it was contrary to the rules of service to allow such unfortunate evils to grow in height and not contrive means to annihilate them before the serious injuries are done to us by the enemies. When he heard this, he stood up from his chair, sighed, then sat back, telling me that the time had already arrived that we should leave this country and lament for the loss of it.
94

As Mohan Lal was heading back to his house, further down the Pul-i-Khishti Bazaar, the conspirators were preparing for action. ‘That very night,’ wrote Mirza ‘Ata,

before dawn had broken, they went to the house of Burnes, and with their pitiless swords killed the soldiers that were on guard there. The news of the fight spread through the city and the men of Kabul, sturdy fighters, welcomed it as a gift from God long prayed for. They boarded up their shops, took up arms and ran to the scene shouting [the Durrani and Ghilzai battle cry] ‘Ya Chahar Yar! O Four Friends, the rightly-guided Caliphs of Islam!’ As dawn was breaking, locust-like, they poured into the streets, and assembled around the house of Alexander Burnes.
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7

All Order Is at an End

The morning of 2 November 1841 dawned clear and cold. The oblique winter light threw long, sharp shadows from the Afghan pines and cypresses in the gardens outside Kabul’s city walls. Beyond the gardens, in the newly completed cantonment, Captain Hugh Johnson, the paymaster of Shah Shuja’s troops, had woken early. He had attended a regimental dinner party the night before and, given the worsening security situation, had been persuaded by his brother officers to spend the night in the cantonment, even though his Afghan mistress was waiting for him in his bed in the Shor Bazaar in the centre of the city.

‘At about sun rise & before I was up,’ he wrote in his diary that night, ‘one of my servants came to inform me that the workmen who had for the last few days been employed on a house I had purchased in the Mission Compound refused to leave their houses today as they were afraid of their property being plundered, a rumour having been spread during the night that a disturbance was to take place in the city.’
1
This Johnson thought unlikely. There had been no signs of imminent trouble in the city before he left the previous evening, and as his house was opposite that of Alexander Burnes he felt sure his friend would have warned him if there had been any intelligence of a disturbance. Nevertheless, ‘about ½ an hour after my servant left me to return to the city, three chaprasses came to report that a mob had collected in front of my house and Treasury. They were endeavouring to effect an entrance, and Burnes was trying to pacify them.’ Johnson’s account continues:

Arose. Ordered my horse to be got ready, but before mounting went to report what I had heard to Captain Lawrence, Military Secretary to the Envoy. The latter had already received a note from Burnes on the subject and was on his way to the General’s. Another of my servants then arrived to say the street in which Burnes and I lived was completely taken possession of by the mob. Some of them were trying to break open my gate, and my Treasury guard was keeping up a heavy fire upon them. Seeing my horse was saddled, he told me it would be impossible to reach my house, as the insurgents were increasing every minute, and were murdering any Europeans or Hindoostanees that came in their way. In the supposition that the General would immediately order down a detachment to suppress the tumult, as well as to save my Treasury and the life of the Resident, Sir Alexander Burnes, from whom another letter had been received
imploring immediate assistance
, my horse was kept ready that I might accompany the party. Went on the ramparts to see if anything towards the city indicated a disturbance. Had not been there five minutes before a dense smoke was seen rising and from its direction I was immediately convinced the rebels had set fire to my house. I also heard heavy vollies of musquet firing.

‘Terrific reports . . . of murder and plunder’ began to reach him.

Yet to our astonishment no detachment was as yet ordered. Hours slipped away and no steps taken to quell the insurrection. A rumour was current, which afterwards proved but too true, that the insurgents had gained possession of my Treasury by mining the wall and of my house by setting fire to the gateway, that they had murdered the whole of the guard consisting of 1 Subadar and 28 Sepoys besides our [European] commissioned officers, all my servants – male, female, and children – had plundered the whole of my Treasury to the amount of about one lakh and seventy thousand rupees, burnt all my office records for the past 3 years, which comprise unadjusted accounts to nearly
one million
sterling, and had possessed themselves of all my private property amounting to upward of ten thousand rupees.
2

Johnson could not believe that so little was being done to save Burnes or the treasury, or his staff, and made repeated enquiries as to what the plans were. It emerged that the problem lay with General Elphinstone. When reports came in that a disturbance had begun in the old city, the ailing General had tried for the first time since his arrival to mount his horse, but had fallen heavily, and the horse on him, after which, according to Captain Vincent Eyre, ‘Elphinstone, who I fancy was never a strong or independent-minded man, was reduced to one remove from dotage.’
3

One man in the cantonment who was trying to stir the troops into action was Macnaghten’s energetic young Military Secretary George Lawrence. Like Johnson, Lawrence had been up early and had discovered that trouble was afoot. ‘A messenger who I had sent into the town to make some trifling purchases, returned breathless, in the greatest state of excitement, reporting that the shops were all closed, and crowds of armed men were filling the streets?. . .’ he recorded. ‘I instantly rose and sought the Envoy, whom I found at about eight am in earnest consultation with General Elphinstone?. . .’
4

Lawrence proposed that the 5,000 British troops in the cantonment should be marched immediately into the city to Burnes’s residence and that the two known ringleaders of the uprising, Aminullah Khan Logari and Abdullah Khan Achakzai, should both be arrested: ‘Not a moment should be lost!’ But, as he wrote later, ‘my proposal was at once put down as one of pure insanity and, under the circumstances, utterly unfeasible’. A second proposal was, however, accepted: that the recently married garrison engineer, Lieutenant Sturt, should gallop out to Brigadier Shelton, who was encamped on the far side of the city at Siyah Sang guarding the route into the city from the mouth of the disturbed Khord Kabul Pass. Sturt should tell him about the mob marauding around Pul-i-Khishti and encourage him to march to the Bala Hisar fort; from there he could command the walled city and take appropriate action. Lawrence was meanwhile to head on to the Bala Hisar and confirm the plan with Shah Shuja.

With a small escort of four troopers, Lawrence set off from the cantonment at around 9 a.m., directing his escort ‘to keep close up to me, to use their spurs if necessary, but on no account to pull up or stop’.

Near the fort of Mahomed Khan, an Affghan rushed from a ditch on to the road, brandishing a huge double-handed sword, and made a furious lunge at me, which I avoided by throwing my stick at him, drawing my sword and making my horse plunge towards him. One of my escort killed the fellow with a shot from his carbine . . . Just as we emerged from the road we were met by a shout and a rapid fire of musketry from a second party of men concealed in a ditch. Our rapid pace, and the firing being too high, alone saved us from destruction.

When he got to the Bala Hisar, Lawrence was conducted into the presence of the Shah, ‘who was walking with great agitation up and down the court’.

His Majesty exclaimed, ‘Is this not just what I always told the Envoy would happen, if he would not follow my advice?’ I then informed the King of the object of my visit, and requested His Majesty to authorise me to order up Brigadier Shelton’s brigade to occupy the Bala Hisar. ‘Wait a little,’ the King replied. ‘My son Fatteh Jang, and the Prime Minister, Usman Khan [Nizam al-Daula], have gone down into the city and with some of my troops. I have no doubt they will suppress the tumult.’
5

As Lawrence was aware, there was no small irony in this. For months, the British had been describing Shuja as lazy and ineffectual, yet when the crisis broke it was Shuja alone who took immediate action to suppress the uprising in the city before it got out of hand. He had sent into action against the mob the loyal and long-standing Anglo-Indian commander of his personal guard, William Campbell, at the head of a thousand troops and two cannon, with Fatteh Jang adding his authority. Indeed, Shuja was the only person to make any effort to try to save Alexander Burnes, despite the fact that he had been the Shah’s loudest critic for over a decade. As Lawrence waited with Shuja, reports began arriving of Fatteh Jang’s successful progress into the city and his pacification of successive wards.