Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (74 page)

Also disenchanted with all the junketing was the Commander-in-Chief, Sir Jasper Nicholls. After watching the troops march in for a while he returned to his desk to begin drawing up his official report on how his army had suffered such an unparalleled disaster. ‘I would not have counselled that invasion
for any honour
which could have been conferred on me,’ he wrote.
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After all the waste and destruction of an expensive and unnecessary war of dubious legality, with the honour and reputation of British arms tarnished and British authority undermined; after spending £15 million [well over £50 billion in modern currency], exhausting the Indian treasury, pushing the Indian credit network to the brink of collapse and permanently wrecking the solvency of the East India Company; after losing maybe 40,000 lives, as well as those of around 50,000 camels; and after alienating much of the Bengal army, leaving it ripe for mutiny, the British had left Afghanistan much as they found it, he concluded: in tribal chaos, with Dost Mohammad about to return from exile and on the verge of retrieving his throne. Just ahead of the troops, the news had just come in by express that both Prince Safdarjang in Kandahar and Prince Shahpur in Kabul had been forced out by their Barakzai enemies.

In truth, no one except the bombastic Governor General himself was convinced by Ellenborough’s claims of victory, least of all the Afghans. As Mirza ‘Ata put it: ‘The remaining troops when they were safely out of Afghanistan were welcomed by speeches by the Governor General: for the proverb says Afghanistan is the land of hawks, but India is a land of carrion crows?. . .’ He continued:

It is said that the English entered Afghanistan a second time merely to free the English prisoners, spending lakhs and lakhs to bribe the Afghans into allowing them passage, leaving thousands more dead behind, and then revealing their true nature by demolishing the markets of Kabul and promptly returning to India. They had hoped to establish themselves in Afghanistan, to block any Russian advance – but for all the treasure they expended and for all the lives they sacrificed, the only result was ruin and disgrace. If the English had been able to conquer and keep Afghanistan, would they ever have left a land where 44 different types of grapes grow, and other fruits as well – apples, pomegranates, pears, rhubarb, mulberries, sweet watermelon and musk-melon, apricots and peaches? And ice-water, that cannot be found in all the plains of India?

‘The Anglo-Indian invasion of Afghanistan’, which had wasted money, military equipment and soldiers’ lives, ‘both black and white’, had been, he wrote,

an unequal fight between treacherous Indian crows and brave Afghan hawks: whenever they took one mountain, the next mountain was always still left in open rebellion. In truth the English would never ever, even after years and years, have managed to pacify Khorasan. The English with their crow-like Indian troops stayed with their bones scattered and unburied on the mountain-slopes of Afghanistan, while the brave Afghan fighters looked for martyrdom, and were victorious in this world and the next: blessed they are indeed who taste the cup of martyrdom!
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Whether or not Mirza ‘Ata’s ghazis received the blessings they were expecting either in post-war Afghanistan or in paradise, it was certainly true that very few of those who participated in the war, especially those on the Anglo-Sadozai side, saw their lives prosper in any way. Even before the war, many Afghans had warned the British that a curse was attached to the
kumbukht
[that unlucky rascal] Shah Shuja, who always saw his best-laid plans end in disaster.
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Now, long after Shuja’s death, this bad luck seemed to be passed on to any who were involved in his attempt to depose Dost Mohammad.

Ranjit Singh, Burnes, Vitkevitch and Macnaghten were already long dead, while Wade had been sacked from his jealously guarded position on the Frontier at the request of the Khalsa and had been bundled off to the less important Residency at Indore in central India. Burnes’s unfortunate Suffolk dray horses that he had escorted up the Indus with such trouble had also passed on: Ranjit Singh soon lost interest in them once it became clear that they were incapable of charging. They were penned up and soon died as no one in Lahore knew what to do with them.

Charles Masson, another survivor from pre-war Kabul, also came to a sad end. After the failure of the 1837–8 Burnes mission, he found himself sidelined by the Company as it prepared for war with Afghanistan, even though he knew the country much more intimately than any other Englishman. Later, while attempting to make his way back to Kabul in 1840, walking along the British line of march through country which he said had been devastated by the passage of the Army of the Indus, he had got as far as Qalat when the British stormed the city. On its capture Masson found himself arrested and imprisoned as a traitor and a spy. It took him over six months to prove his innocence and gain his release. When Henry Rawlinson later ran him to ground in Karachi, he was horrified by what had happened to the man he had long revered as the greatest archaeologist in the region: ‘Whilst at Kurrachee Camp I rode into the town to see Masson of whom I have heard and read so much,’ he wrote in his diary.

I found him in a wretched hovel talking with some Belochees nearly naked and half drunk. I remained with him several hours and was extremely pained with all I witnessed. His language was at first so insolent that I thought he had become quite foolish. But at last he told me, having sat up writing he had dined of a bottle of wine and had risen at daylight with the fumes still in his head. I almost think however that his mind is really giving way – he gave me several papers to read which were written in the same vague and dreary style as he spoke in and all his information appeared to me to be lost by his method in putting it together. He is most bitter against Burnes and Wade and Lord Auckland . . . He has already written two volumes relating to his travels and his work in Afghanistan and was busy with his third – many parts of this which he showed me are very curious, but they will not stand publication – there is a sort of stilting in his language and vague fanciful fleeting in his ideas that the taste of the age will never tolerate. If Pottinger allows the MSS to be printed as it now is Masson will pass for a presumptuous ignoramus instead of the conscientious, hard working fellow he really is. I trust something will be done to get him to Bombay.
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But nothing was done, and Masson was forced to sit and watch as Macnaghten blundered fatally around Afghanistan, unable to do more than write anonymous embittered letters to the press. ‘In your paper today,’ reads one of his submissions, ‘I observe that jackasses are to be employed in Afghanistan. What can be the reason for such a step? Are the camels of the country exhausted? Seeing that jackasses have been for a long time employed in the Political Department, is it the commencement of a system to introduce them to the military one, with a view to establishing uniformity in the services?’
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He eventually made his way back to England where his publications received the derisory reviews Rawlinson had predicted, and where his reputation as an antiquarian was belittled by his stay-at-home rivals. He died in poverty near Potter’s Bar in 1853 ‘of an uncertain disease of the brain’. He could have no idea that 160 years later he would be revered as the father of Afghan archaeology.

Eldred Pottinger, who received no reward for his work in Afghanistan, resigned from the Company. He went off to stay with his uncle, Sir Henry Pottinger, in Hong Kong, the island which Pottinger senior had just bullied the Chinese into handing over to him, and of which the former Great Game operative had just appointed himself the first governor. There Eldred died in 1843 from ‘the combined effects of his wounds, of hardship, and of depression of mind and body’.
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Brigadier Shelton was, somewhat surprisingly, exonerated by a court martial from responsibility for the catastrophic handling of the uprising, but remained as unpopular as ever: when he was thrown from his horse and died in Dublin in 1844, his men turned out on the parade ground and gave three cheers to celebrate his demise.

A version of Lady Sale and her husband’s Afghan adventures was turned into a popular act at Astley’s Circus, ‘The Captives at Cabool’, but the real ‘Fighting Bob’ Sale was killed along with George Broadfoot at the Battle of Moodki three years later during the Anglo-Sikh War of 1845, as the Company finally seized its chance to absorb the rich lands of the Punjab. Lady Sale emigrated as a widow to South Africa and died in Cape Town in 1853. Her grave is marked with the epitaph: ‘Underneath this stone reposes all that could die of Lady Sale.’
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Dr Brydon, the sole European in Company employ to make it through to Jalalabad during the retreat from Kabul, lived on to survive the next great Imperial catastrophe in the region: fifteen years later in 1857, during the Great Uprising, he helped defend the Lucknow Residency under George Lawrence’s younger brother Henry. In 1873 he eventually died in his bed, in peaceful retirement at Nigg opposite the Black Isle in the Scottish Highlands.

Auckland lived on in semi-disgrace in Kensington, and died aged only sixty-five in 1849, succeeded three months later by his sister Fanny.
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Empire-building did not prove to be a family talent: the next Eden to try his hand, Anthony Eden, presided over the debacle of Suez 114 years later.
oo

The heroic and ingenious Mohan Lal, who had taken out large loans in his own name for the benefit of Macnaghten during the siege, partly to raise a bounty for the assassination of the rebel Afghan leaders, and who again in 1842 borrowed more money to secure the release of hostages, was never repaid the 79,496 rupees he calculated he was owed; as a result he was dogged by debt for the rest of his life. In pursuit of justice, he eventually travelled to Britain in the company of his fellow munshi Shahamat Ali, where between attempts to lobby the Company directors he was entertained by the newly retired Colonel Wade and his young bride on the Isle of Wight; he also visited Scotland where he delivered Burnes’s surviving letters and journals to his family in Montrose. In Edinburgh, Mohan Lal was photographed by the pioneering Scottish photographers David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson in an exotic confection of Afghan-Kashmiri dress which
The
Times
called ‘magnificent Hindoo costume’.
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While in Britain he published in English a memoir of his Central Asian travels with Burnes and an enormous 900-page, two-volume biography of Dost Mohammad. He even had an audience with Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. But the Afghan War haunted his life and effectively ended his career.

On his return to Delhi from London he never received the appointments he applied for as Persian secretary to the prestigious residencies of Lucknow and Hyderabad. British officials distrusted him, frequently writing that he was ‘presumptuous’ and ‘had risen above his station’. Not only did he remain unemployed by the government, he also remained outcaste from his own Kashmiri pundit community. After narrowly escaping with his life during the 1857 uprising, when the mutinous sepoys tried to hunt him down as a prominent sympathiser with the British, he died in 1877 in poverty and obscurity, alienated from the society of both colonised and colonisers.
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A similar fate awaited the Sadozai princes. By March 1843 they were all stuck in Lahore, able neither to return to Afghanistan nor to enter British India, and living like their father thirty years earlier in daily fear of being plundered of their remaining wealth by their Sikh hosts.
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When permission was eventually granted for them to cross the border and return to their childhood home of Ludhiana, it was done with the explicit proviso that they should have lower pensions and smaller premises than those once given to Shah Shuja.
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All the Shahzadas ended up in debt and the National Archives of India contains long reams of correspondence between the government and their creditors who were attempting into the 1860s to sue the princes for unpaid loans. Without exception, they all died in poverty.

Colin Mackenzie, who was posted to Ludhiana to raise the Frontier Brigade, wrote movingly of the plight of the large Afghan refugee community in Ludhiana which he found struggling to survive when he arrived there, newly remarried, in 1847. ‘The miseries inflicted by our interference on those whom we professed to support ought not to be forgotten,’ he wrote in his memoirs. ‘It was sad to see men of rank and property reduced to absolute want. In one case a father and son, nearly connected with Shah Shuja, never paid a visit together because they had only one
choga
[cloak] between them. Another man of rank was obliged to sell even his sword for food. An old retainer of Shah Shuja said sadly: “I live upon fasting, and the day when a little dal is cooked in my house is a feast.”’
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A request by the old blind Shah Zaman that he should be allowed to retire as a poor dervish to the Sufi shrine of Sirhind was vetoed by the Maharajah of Patiala.
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The Maharajah did eventually relent on Shah Zaman’s death in 1844, and the old Shah was laid to rest there, beside the grave of his sister-in-law, Shuja’s chief wife and Dost Mohammad’s sister, Wa’fa Begum.
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