Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (69 page)

On his last night, Elphinstone requested Moore to bring him a bowl of water and a clean shirt. Once washed and changed, he had Mackenzie read the prayers for the dying, and asked the weeping Moore to lift his head. ‘I lay down on the bare floor near the poor General,’ wrote Lawrence.

[He] never appeared to close his eyes all night, so great was the pain he suffered.

I spoke several times to him, but he only thanked me, saying I could do nothing for him, and that all must soon be over . . . His suffering had been intense, but he bore all with fortitude and resignation. He repeatedly expressed to me deep regret that he had not fallen in the retreat. His kind, mild disposition and courteous detachment had made him esteemed by us all, and we could not but regret his removal from amongst us, although his death was to him a most happy release.
27

When he learned of the General’s death, Akbar Khan chivalrously gave orders that the body should be conveyed down to Jalalabad, escorted by Moore. But it was Elphinstone’s fate to suffer bad luck even in death. On the way down, a passing party of ghazis discovered what was being carried, opened the casket, then stripped the General’s body naked and pelted it with stones. Akbar sent a second party of horsemen to rescue the corpse, and its guardian, and then had both rafted down the Kabul River to the gates of Jalalabad.

There, on 30 April, the ill-fated General was finally laid to rest by Pollock and Sale, with full military honours.
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When news arrived in Kabul of the complete defeat of Akbar Khan, and as his wounded and battered troops began limping in on the evening of 8 April, there was a widespread panic, and many supporters of the Barakzai began to flee for the hills.
28

Fatteh Jang and the Sadozai princes who had remained nervously holed up within the Bala Hisar since the death of Shah Shuja now found their hopes rising again. They began collecting food, arms and ammunition, and, encouraged by their key ally Aminullah Khan Logari, began negotiating with the Tajiks of Kohistan in a bid to recruit more troops to their cause. As so often in the past, Kabul fractured into rival quarters of Barakzai and Sadozai influence, with Nawab Zaman Khan’s Barakzai troops desperately defending their compounds against Aminullah and his Sadozai allies. ‘Ameenoollah’s power is daily increasing,’ reported Mohan Lal Kashmiri in a despatch to Jalalabad on 10 April. ‘He has command of the Treasury of the Shah and Futteh Jung, and is collecting the men of his own tribe, the Loghurrees.’
29

Lady Sale, characteristically, took a more forthright view of events. ‘Parties run high at Kabul,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘Nawab Zaman Khan says he will be king, Akbar ditto, Jubbar Khan the same, and Ameenoollah has a similar fancy, as also Mahommed Shah Khan, and Futteh Jung, the Shahzada.’ She added:

Troops go out daily to fight . . . Now is the time to strike the blow, but I much dread dilly-dallying just because a handful of us are in Akbar’s power. What are our lives when compared to the honour of our country? Not that I am at all inclined to have my throat cut: on the contrary, I hope that I shall live to see the British flag once more triumphant in Affghanistan; and then I shall have no objection to the Ameer Dost Mahomed Khan being reinstated: only let us first show them that we can conquer them, humble their treacherous chiefs to the dust and revenge the foul murder of our troops; but let us not dishonour the British name by sneaking out of the country like whipped pariah dogs . . .

Let our Governors-General and Commanders in Chief look to that; whilst I knit socks for my grandchildren: but I have been a soldier’s wife too long to sit down tamely whilst our honour is tarnished . . . Were I in power I would make the Chiefs remember it. A woman’s vengeance is said to be fearful but nothing can satisfy mine against Akbar, Sultan Jan and Mohammad Shah Khan.
30

The stalemate and uncertainty was broken on 9 May, when Akbar Khan arrived back in Kabul. With his usual vigour and decisiveness, he immediately laid siege to the Sadozais in their fortress, digging a series of massive mines under the most vulnerable towers. Using the same tactics that had served him so well while gathering supporters in Jalalabad, he again represented himself as the champion of Islam, and depicted the Sadozais as quisling friends of the Kafirs. He wrote to the chiefs that ‘it was an object of paramount importance that in the contest with the race of misguided infidels the whole of the members of the true faith should be united together, therefore did the whole of the devoted followers of the true faith consent to choose me as their head, and to place themselves under my counsel’.
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In just over a week, he managed to bribe Aminullah Khan to desert the Sadozai camp. A week after that he had won over Mir Haji, and with him the Kabul ‘ulema and the Kohistanis.
32
Akbar Khan also recruited and armed an infantry and artillery regiment made up of Indian sepoys who had deserted from the British during the retreat. By the end of May, 12,000 troops had rallied to his standard, outnumbering the Sadozai defenders three to one.
33
After a month of sustained bombardment and the mining, and having exhausted his stock of gunpowder and cannon balls, Fatteh Jang was finally compelled to surrender. Akbar Khan was admitted into the Bala Hisar on 7 June.

By the end of that month, Fatteh Jang had been forced to hand over all powers to Akbar, who formally appointed himself wazir, then promptly seized all the latter’s assets. Fatteh Jang was made to write to Pollock and explain, ‘I have given to Sirdar Mahomad Akbar Khan the full and entire management of all my property and affairs of every description and have resigned to him in perpetuity full power to judge and settle all questions on all points. Whatever arrangements he may make with the English government I agree to and confirm and no alteration shall be made.’
34

Initially, it seems, Akbar Khan still felt the need of a Sadozai figurehead to legitimise his rule: despite the taint the dynasty had suffered by allying themselves with the hated Kafirs, such was the charisma of the lineage of Ahmad Shah Durrani that even now Akbar felt it necessary to keep a Sadozai as head of state.
35
By July, however, he had tired of the fiction, and when in the middle of the month he intercepted a letter between Fatteh Jang and Pollock, he immediately had all the Sadozai shahzadas and the old blind Shah Zaman rounded up and imprisoned at the top of the Bala Hisar. ‘Akbar considered this letter to contravene all traditions of honour and to violate the Shah’s pact with him,’ wrote Fayz Mohammad. ‘He thereupon took the Shah into custody and expropriated all the jewels and fine things which Fatteh Jang had acquired. Still not satisfied, the Wazir wanted to punish the Shah with a whipping, and confiscate everything he owned.’
36

It was at the height of his power as wazir, with the Bala Hisar now his personal palace, that Akbar Khan decided to invite to dinner the British officers who had been captured at the fall of Ghazni, and who had recently been brought to Kabul on his orders to join the other hostages. Among their number was a taciturn young Ulsterman who would later go on to change the course of Indian history, Captain John Nicholson. Nicholson was not easily impressed, but wrote afterwards to his mother that he ‘never was in the company of more gentleman-like, well-bred men. They are strikingly handsome, as the Afghan sirdars always are, with a great deal of dignity . . . As I looked around the circle I saw both parricides and regicides – the murderer of our envoy was perhaps the least blood-stained of the party.’
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Nicholson’s colleague Lieutenant Crawford was also taken aback by Akbar Khan’s perfect manners. ‘We met with the kindest reception,’ he wrote later.

I could not bring myself to believe that the stout, good-humoured, open-hearted looking young man who was making such kind enquiries after our health, and how we had borne the fatigues of the journey, could be the murderer of Macnaghten and the leader of the massacre of our troops . . . He ordered dinner, and sent for Troup and Pottinger to see us; when they arrived the whole of us all sat down to the best dinner I had had for many a month. The Wuzeer chatted and joked away on different subjects during the meal . . . the following morning the arch-fiend sent us an excellent breakfast . . . and he desired a list of our wants, regarding clothes &c might be made out, and that they should be furnished.
38

One man who received less courteous treatment from the new Wazir was Burnes’s former munshi and intelligence chief Mohan Lal Kashmiri. Akbar Khan had intercepted some of Mohan Lal’s correspondence with the British and had discovered that the munshi had been actively gathering arms and ammunition for Fatteh Jang. In a stark contrast to the treatment extended to the British prisoners, Mohan Lal was immediately thrown into solitary confinement, beaten and later tortured. ‘I was forced to lie down and a couch placed over me on which the people are jumping and are beating me with sticks and tormenting me in a very rude and unmerciful manner,’ Mohan Lal reported in a hastily scribbled and ungrammatical letter that he managed to get smuggled out to Jalalabad. ‘Akbar wants Rs 30,000 from me, says otherwise he will pull out my eyes; all my body has been severely beaten. I cannot promise anything without governments order, but see myself destroyed. All my feet is wounded from bastinadoing.’
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A week later, he got word out that his condition had deteriorated: ‘Sometimes I am pinioned and a heavy stone is placed over my back, while red pepper is burnt before my nose and eyes. Sometimes I am bastinadoed. I suffer every imaginable agony. He wants Rs 30,000 out of which he has hitherto to get Rs 12,000 after using me very rudely. The remainder if not paid in the course of ten days, he says he will pull out my eyes and burn my body with hot iron.’ He went on to ask that if he was killed the government should look after his wife, his two children and his old father in Delhi.

After a few days more of torture, Mohan Lal had sunk into despair and began writing about himself in the third person, as if already beyond help: ‘Mohun Lall is severely beaten three times and most disgracefully and cruelly treated. He has been hitherto forced to pay Rs 18,000 and God knows what may befall him more than this. Kindly do something for his release from such pains.’
40
But, without Burnes to protect him, Mohan Lal had no friends in Pollock’s camp and received no letters or reassurances from his employers in Jalalabad. The only man to attempt to raise money to ransom him was his old Delhi College schoolfriend and fellow ‘intelligencer’, Wade’s munshi Shahamat Ali, who from Indore attempted to organise an immediate loan from the Hindu bankers of Kabul to effect his release.
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He eventually achieved this, aided by a belated letter of protest from Pollock addressed to Akbar Khan; but apparently not before Mohan Lal had been forced to convert to Islam.
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In the meantime, Akbar Khan had the defences of the Bala Hisar rebuilt and the ditches redug, laying in stores of food and ammunition, ready to defend himself against the British, should they attempt to retake Kabul.
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He also sent men to fortify with sangars
and breastworks the narrowest points of the Tezin and Khord Kabul passes. He was only just in time.

On 22 July, after three months of waiting, Pollock and Nott finally received the orders they had been waiting for. Using a form of words that put all responsibility on the shoulders of the generals, Lord Ellenborough authorised the two men ‘to withdraw via Kabul’, if they so chose. He also ordered them ‘to leave decisive proofs of the power of the British army’.
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A race now began between the two generals to be the first to Kabul, though Nott had by far the furthest to go – some 300 miles against Pollock’s 100.

‘They have untied my hands and mark me, the grass shall not grow under my feet,’ wrote an excited Nott to his daughters that evening. ‘I sit writing here in full confidence that my beautiful, my noble regiments will give them a good licking.’
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Only one man was more delighted. ‘I am so excited,’ noted General Sale in a letter as soon as news of the advance had been announced, ‘I can scarce write.’

Amid ‘bustle and confusion’ General Nott finally marched out of Kandahar for the last time, with his 6,000 troops, on 8 August.
46

Behind him he left the city under the charge of Shah Shuja’s youngest son, Prince Safdarjang. The handsome young prince, said to be the son of a Ludhiana dancing girl, had sworn to hold the city for the Sadozais, though Nott doubted whether the Prince would last long after his departure and privately believed ‘great confusion and bloodshed will follow our retirement’.
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The young Prince was nonetheless determined to try to hold out if he could. ‘We should know no other feeling than a bold determination to avenge the King’s blood,’ Safdarjang wrote to Nott, soon after he had left. ‘At present my own blood is in such ferment that I can think of nothing else but the best means to obtain this vengeance. I swear to God that while life is in my body I will attend to no other matter than this: I will either share my father’s fate, or I will avenge his death.’