Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (49 page)

By mid-morning, however, events began to take a darker turn. First of all, Lieutenant Sturt arrived in the durbar ‘sword in hand, bleeding profusely, and crying out that he was being murdered. He explained that just as he was dismounting from his horse at the gate, he had been stabbed three times in the face and throat by a man who rushed out of the crowd.’ Reports then arrived that Campbell and Fatteh Jang’s levies had been ambushed by insurgents in the narrow streets of the city, and had taken over a hundred casualties from marksmen hidden within the houses of the Shor Bazaar. They had lost their two cannon and were now pinned down a short distance from Burnes’s house. Shuja became increasingly worried about his son and, despite Lawrence’s pleas, ‘influenced by paternal affection, after hesitating, eventually recalled his son and Prime Minister. The latter, a bold, honest, uncompromising man eventually came in panting from the fray, and greatly excited, said in an angry tone to the King, “By recalling us just at the moment of victory, your troops will be defeated, and evil will fall upon us all.”’
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After a sleep of only three hours, Mohan Lal was woken just before dawn by a maidservant who told him in alarm about the massing crowd outside Burnes’s gate, a few houses away at the end of the bazaar: ‘Agha,’ she said. ‘You are asleep and the city is upset.’

Mohan Lal came out into his garden, and saw the people moving their goods to a secure place away from the neighbourhood.

The merchants were taking off their commodities from the shops, and the whole city appeared in commotion. Mirza Khodad, secretary to Sultan Jan [one of the leading Barakzai rebels who had been with Dost Mohammad in Bukhara], came to my house and being my old acquaintance, warned me of the danger in which I was then standing, by remaining in my house and not sending away my property. Naib Sharif [one of the Qizilbash chiefs and an old carousing companion of Burnes] also sent his father-in-law, to fetch me to the Persian Quarters, with all my valuable things. But I refused to attend to their kind advice, fearing that my stirring from the house might increase the apprehension of the impending danger. So I sent my servant with a note to Sir Alexander Burnes, whose residence was separated by a few buildings from my house, conveying to him the messages I had received . . . His reply was that I must remain in my house, and that he has sent for troops, and that they will soon be in town. Half an hour after this, my servant informed me that the Nizam al-Daula was advising that officer to quit his house and to proceed with him to the Bala Hisar, as there was very great risk to his personal safety.
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Burnes had been so confident of his safety and popularity that he had only twelve guards. He had just decided to leave with the Wazir when at the last minute he was persuaded to stay by his old Jamadar (the head of his bodyguard), who reminded him that he had just sent a message to Macnaghten and that he should really wait for the Envoy’s reply. So Nizam al-Daula left alone, promising to return with a battalion of Shah Shuja’s troops. As he rode away he was fired upon from the rooftops, but managed to fight his way back to the Bala Hisar.

At this point the rebel leaders – a mixed crew of disaffected Royalists, Barakzai sardars, angry aristocrats furious about the military reforms, unemployed former bureaucrats and middle-ranking ‘ulema not in the Shah’s service – arrived in Ashiqan wa Arifan, at the corner of the Shor Bazaar. Directed by Abdullah Khan Achakzai who had quickly assumed military command of the uprising, they took up positions in the garden next to Burnes’s house. As Colin Mackenzie noted in his diary, the rebel leaders ‘hated Burnes as the man universally believed to have guided the British into Afghanistan. They alleged he did not behave to them with proper respect. Burnes thought himself popular with the lower classes; but it is doubtful if he was so, while the chiefs regarded him as the chief agent in introducing that system of order which was utterly repugnant to them.’
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So when Burnes sent two messengers to ask what the complaints of the rebel chiefs were, and inviting them to come to terms, the chiefs merely beheaded the first messenger, leaving the other to report this reply to Burnes. The chiefs’ men were then ordered up on to the rooftops, to try and work their way into the back of Burnes’s compound. He was to be offered no quarter. ‘Now about two hundred people assembled on all sides,’ wrote Mohan Lal, ‘and Sir Alexander Burnes, from the window of his upper room, demanded the insurgents to pacify themselves, and promised a handsome reward to all.’ With him on the balcony was Captain William Broadfoot, the younger brother of General Sale’s red-haired engineer, and Burnes’s own younger brother, Charles, who had just arrived in Kabul.

While he was haranguing the mob, Captain Broadfoot received a [musket] ball just below his breast, and was brought down by Sir Alexander and his brother Charles and placed in the room downstairs. The [sepoy] guard, being now under sharp fire from the rebels, opposed the advance. Some of the servants of Sir Alexander desired him to permit himself to be wrapped up in a tent, which they would carry off on their shoulders, in the way that many others were carrying off plunder, but he said he could neither leave his own brother, nor his wounded friend Captain Broadfoot.

At this point the mob managed to set fire to the gateway of Burnes’s house, ‘the flames extending to the room where Sir Alexander and his brother were standing, looking at the multitude and begging for quarter. Captain Broadfoot was consumed in it. Lt Charles Burnes then came out into the garden and killed about six persons before he was cut to pieces.’

Mohan Lal was standing on his rooftop, watching on with horror, as musket balls passing on from Burnes’s house pitted the walls and shattered the windows around him. Now he was spotted by the rooftop musketeers and had to make a rapid exit. This he made through a hole in the exterior wall of his compound that he had had specially prepared for his escape. His plan was to make a dash for the well-defended walled Qizilbash quarter of Murad Khani and fetch the pro-British Shia leader, Khan Shirin Khan, to the aid of Burnes. As he was rushing through the streets, however, he was seized by a group of insurgents coming from the opposite direction. They had surrounded him and were about to behead him as a Kafir spy when, by good fortune, the group ran into the elderly Barakzai chief and first cousin of Dost Mohammad, Mohammad Zaman Khan, whose surrender and integration in Shuja’s court Mohan Lal had facilitated a year earlier:

The Nawab came out of his house and upbraided those who had seized me. Snatching me away from their hands, he took me away and placed me among his ladies, who having received some assistance from me some time before, brought a sumptuous dish of ‘pulav’ for my breakfast. To enjoy this hospitality from the hands of the Afghan fair on other occasions would have been an unexpected and highly valued nourishment, but at the present disastrous moment, every grain of rice seemed to choak in my throat. I was now locked in a dark room and the good Nawab desired me to take my rings off from my fingers, and to conceal them somewhere, so that the avarice of his son might not tempt him to cut off my fingers with them. My house was in the meantime comprehensively plundered.
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Since Mohan Lal, the closest direct observer, was now secreted inside a zenana, there are no eyewitness accounts surviving of the final moments of Burnes, and the different versions that exist are all, to different extents, hearsay. The least likely version – though certainly the most imaginative – is that of Mirza ‘Ata. In his narration, when the ghazis burst into the compound,

it is said that Burnes at that moment was in the private quarters of the house, taking a bath with his mistress in the hot water of lust and pleasure . . . At this point, the guerrilla Ghazis burst in and dragged them all from the changing room of life, cut them down with their swords and threw their corpses into the ash-pit of death. Everything in the house was plundered, the fighters breaking open the treasure chests and filling the skirts of their clothes with Company coins which clinked with a loud noise: ‘shereng, shereng!’ The fighters then attacked the house of the Bakhshi [paymaster] Captain [Hugh] Johnson and plundered the godown of all its stores and treasure; any English who found themselves in the city of Kabul tried to escape as best they could and make their way to the cantonment.
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A variant on this story is given by Munshi Abdul Karim in the
Muharaba Kabul wa Kandahar
. Like Mirza ‘Ata, Munshi Abdul Karim takes the view that the crisis was largely precipitated by Burnes’s allegedly gargantuan sexual appetites. In the view of the munshi, the flashpoint was not a slave girl of Abdullah Khan Achakzai, but ‘Burnes’ falling in lust with an Afghan woman and imprisoning of her husband’.

It is said that, one day, he was walking to inspect the city and suddenly caught sight of a young Afghan woman, peerless in beauty, standing on the flat roof of her house. Burnes immediately became obsessed by the sight of her, and, forgetting his duties, or any sense of piety or shame, as soon as he returned to his office, summoned the Kotwal, the chief of police, to fetch the householder of that particular house in that particular quarter. The constable ran to carry out his orders and arrived back with a young Afghan soldier, upright and pious, the owner of that house and husband of that peerless beauty. Burnes said ‘I have work for you – if you do my bidding, I shall make you an officer, I shall make you rich, I shall make you one of my intimates!’

‘And what is that work? That I may strive to fulfil your wishes?’ asked the young soldier.

‘You have a wife, beautiful as the full moon, whom I saw standing on the roof of your house: I cannot get her out of my mind; give her to me, let me assuage my passion, and anything you ask shall be yours!’

The young soldier trembled with shame, fell into a fury of outraged honour and hissed: ‘You filthy animal! Have you no fear of God? Am I a pander, to sell my wife to you for gold? Beware! One more word and I’ll answer you with the blade of my sword!’ Burnes, to cover his confusion, had the man clapped into irons and thrown into a dungeon like a common murderer.

In Munshi Abdul Karim’s version, it is this soldier’s relatives who deliver the coup de grâce to Burnes:

Twelve relatives of the young soldier crowded into Burnes’s room. Two grabbed him, forced him down, sat on his chest, shouting: ‘You animal! You dare to defile girls of noble birth? If you’re supposed to be head of the courts of justice, just tell us, what punishment awaits such scum? What do the law books of the Jews, the Christians, the Zoroastrians have to say?’ Burnes pleaded for his life, begging forgiveness – but the Afghans were not to be moved. They killed him, hacked his body to pieces, shaved off his beard and exhibited his head through the streets of the city, after plundering and setting fire to his house, and killing any who came to his aid. The rioters ran to the jail, overpowered the guards and killed them, and set free the young soldier and other prisoners. Another group attacked the Bakshi’s treasury, mowing down with their swords all the guards and officials they found there, then plundered the contents of the treasury.
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A third version, preferred by the great Victorian chronicler of the Afghan War, Sir John Kaye, has a ‘mysterious Kashmiri Mussalman’ offer to save Burnes as the flames engulfed his house. This enigmatic figure – who appears in no other account – is alleged to have made his way to the balcony where the two Burnes brothers were defying the crowd and, swearing on the Qur’an, offered to lead them to safety through the back garden. Since it was clear by now that Macnaghten had no intention of saving his young assistant, both the Burnes brothers ‘threw on native dresses’ and followed their guide down into the garden, hoping that they might yet escape. But they had gone only a few paces before the ‘Kashmiri Judas shouted at the top of his voice: “See, friends! This is Sikunder Burnes!” It took the mob less than a minute to finish off the victims.’
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Mohan Lal gives a fourth version, probably the most credible, and certainly the most moving. He states that, after spending an hour locked in the zenana closet, he pleaded with Mohammad Zaman Khan, and his host finally consented to allow him up on to his roof. By this time it was all over: Burnes, his travelling companion and intimate friend for ten years, had been killed, and the remains of his house were being gutted by fire. But according to the Nawab’s guards, who had watched the final act from their parapet,

after Charles Burnes was killed, and fire had consumed the whole of the room, Sir Alexander Burnes was obliged to come to the door opening to his garden. Here he implored the multitude to save his life, but [instead] receiving a torrent of abuse . . . abandoned all hopes of safety. On this he opened up his black neckcloth and tied it on his eyes, that he should not see from what direction the blow of death strikes him. Having done this, he stepped out of the door, and in one minute he was cut to pieces by the furious mob.
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‘The sharp blades of two hundred brave Afghans worked his body into shreds of bone,’ wrote Maulana Kashmiri.

They strung them up for all to see

From every corner flowed a river of blood.