The Dark Defile (8 page)

In late August, with the temperature touching one hundred degrees Fahrenheit and a haze low on the surrounding mountains, the party reached Lahore, where General Paolo Avitabile, an Italian mercenary employed by Ranjit Singh as governor, received them. Avitabile exercised his formidable authority through extortion. A shocked British officer described how “all fines being the perquisites of the governor, he is not chary of their infliction. Almost all crimes, even murder, may be atoned for by money, to extort which, torture is always applied.” The hands and noses of those too poor or obstinate to pay were lopped off. In one case, where he had given up hope of extracting money from the miscreants, Avitabile allowed a mother whose son had been killed to slit the murderers’ throats and drink their blood. However, Avitabile was exceedingly affable to his British guests, driving them in his own carriage on the next stage of their journey to Jamrud, three miles south of the mouth of the Khyber Pass, through which Burnes, having requested safe conduct from the local chiefs, proposed to travel.

Some weeks earlier, while still on the Indus, Burnes had learned of a battle between the Afghans and the Sikhs that had recently taken place at Jamrud, which, he noted, was in ruins. Dost Mohammed in a letter to Burnes claimed the Afghans had been provoked by the Sikhs’ fortress building. Victorious in their initial assault, the Afghans had not felt able to press their advantage because of fear of the arrival of Sikh reinforcements. They had therefore fallen back on Kabul, leaving the Sikhs still in possession of Jamrud, where Burnes observed them busily constructing one of their new forts. Even though several thousand men had died on each side, the confrontation was more significant in political than in military terms because it further reinforced the British government’s view that there was little chance of achieving a rapprochement between Ranjit Singh and Dost Mohammed and that any alliance with the latter would seriously endanger British-Sikh friendship.

Practical problems preoccupied Burnes at Jamrud. There was no sign of the Afghan escort he had optimistically asked
“the chiefs of the pass”
to provide. While they waited, his party had to endure “the effluvia from the dead bodies, both of men and horses” from the recent battle, which Burnes found “quite revolting.” They were also given ample evidence of how dangerous these lands were when tribesmen attacked some of their camel drivers, drove off the camels and beheaded two of the men, whose mangled torsos were later brought into camp.

Running out of patience, Burnes decided, against Avitabile’s earnest advice, to wait no longer, and on 2 September his party somewhat gingerly entered the Khyber Pass, an obstacle of legendary difficulty—in an officer’s words,
“a narrow defile of twenty-eight miles long, between lofty perpendicular hills, the road during its entire length passing over rocks and boulders, which render a speedy advance or retreat of any body of men impossible. The heights on either side entirely command the defile, and are scarped so that they cannot without great difficulty be scaled. They are also perforated with numbers of natural caves, the secure haunts of the savage robbers who have for ages held possession of the pass.”

On this occasion the tribes, in return for payment, treated them well. Over the next few days they were passed from one tribe to the next. Burnes later wrote, “Our march was not without a degree of anxious excitement. We were moving among a savage tribe, who set the Sikhs at defiance, and who paid but an unwilling allegiance to Kabul … By the road they showed us many small mounds, built to mark the spots where they had planted the heads of the Sikhs whom they had decapitated after the late victory: on some of these mounds locks of hair were yet to be seen.”

To Burnes’s relief, they cleared the Khyber Pass safely, and as they drew nearer to Kabul enjoyed the cool pine-scented air and groves of ripe pomegranates. One of those who came to greet them along the road was the elderly
cafila-bashee
who had helped Burnes through the Hindu Kush on his way to Bokhara and who now brought with him several mule-loads of fruit from another old friend, Nawab Jubbar Khan. Burnes gave the man a comfortable tent and a good
pulao
. He was soon also joined by Charles Masson, with whom he had been corresponding regularly and of whose low opinion of himself he was unaware. An embittered Masson later wrote that from the first he derived little confidence that Burnes would succeed, “either from his manner, or from his opinion ‘that the Afghans were to be treated as children.’ A remark that drew from me the reply that he must not then expect them to behave as men.”

Traveling on through steep-sided passes dotted with pines and holly trees, Burnes and his party at last saw “the distant hills over Kabul” emerge on the horizon. On 20 September 1837, a full ten months after departing from Bombay, they entered Kabul to be greeted
“with great pomp and splendour by a fine body of Afghan cavalry,”
led by the emir’s favorite son, Akbar Khan, who honored the envoy by placing Burnes beside him in the howdah of his own elephant. This was perhaps no more than Burnes expected. Dost Mohammed had written to him,
“My house is your house and if it pleases God, we shall soon know the secret wishes of each other.”

The delegation was accommodated within the Balla Hissar fortress, and the next day Burnes presented a letter from Lord Auckland eulogizing the benefits of commerce to Dost Mohammed, who greeted him warmly. When Burnes referred to “some of the rarities of Europe” that he had brought as gifts, he replied that Burnes and his companions “were the rarities the sight of which best pleased him.” Josiah Harlan was by then in Kabul and in Dost Mohammed’s service. He had been dismissed by Ranjit Singh for allegedly counterfeiting coins, pretending to have succeeded in the old alchemist’s trick of turning base metal into gold as well as demanding an extortionate fee from the maharaja to treat him after one of his many strokes. According to Harlan, Dost Mohammed actually thought Burnes’s gifts, which included a brass telescope, a pair of pistols and trinkets and knickknacks for his harem such as a toy accordion, were tawdry. “Behold! I have feasted and honoured this Feringee to the extent of six thousand rupees, and have now a lot of pins and needles and sundry petty toys to show for my folly!” he complained in private.

The Afghan leader must have also been both confused and suspicious about British intentions toward him. He had hard evidence that the British had actively connived at Shah Shuja’s attempt in 1833 to take his throne from him, and knew that they continued to be active supporters of his great enemy Ranjit Singh. However, he remained desperate for British help. To the southeast were the expansionist Sikhs, to the west Herat was ruled by a detested rival dynasty, while, to add a further complication, the oft-threatened Russian-backed Persian advance from the west on Herat seemed imminent. Dost Mohammed knew that if the Persians took the city, they were unlikely to halt there. Furthermore, his perennially disloyal half brothers at Kandahar were already making overtures to the Persians.

Over succeeding weeks, Dost Mohammed and Burnes met frequently. Just as before, the Afghan leader’s quiet authority and thoughtful demeanor impressed Burnes. “Power frequently spoils men, but with Dost Mohammed neither the increase of it, nor his new title of Emir seems to have done him any harm. He seemed even more alert and full of intelligence than when I last saw him,” he wrote of these encounters. The two men discussed a wide range of subjects, from the expansion of trade to the question of whether the Afghans were descended from the Jewish tribes as Dost Mohammed appeared to believe. The discussions of course turned frequently to Ranjit Singh and Peshawar. Dost Mohammed argued that Sikh aggression and expansionism were a barrier to the free flow of trade sought by the British.

What Dost Mohammed could not know was that, despite the impression he gave to contrary, the confident and articulate Burnes had no authority to make commitments such as those Dost Mohammed was seeking. While he had still been on the way to Kabul, Macnaghten, realizing somewhat late in the day that Burnes would be put on the spot, had dispatched further instructions:
“In any case in which specific political propositions shall be made to you, you will state that you have no authority to make replies, but that you will forward them, through Captain Wade, to the Government. If applied to, as you probably may be, for advice by Dost Mohammed Khan, in the difficulties by which he is surrounded, you will dissuade him from insisting in such a crisis [on] pretensions which he cannot maintain, and you will lead him as far as may be in your power, to seek and to form arrangements of reconciliation for himself with the Sikh sovereign.”

In late October Burnes received yet further instructions, by which he was to make clear that
“under any circumstances our first feeling must be that of regard for the honour and just wishes of our old and firm ally Ranjit Singh.”
However, if Dost Mohammed would seek peace with the Sikhs and abandon all contact with Persia, the British would use their good offices with the Sikhs perhaps to restore Peshawar to one of Dost Mohammed’s half brothers on payment of tribute to Ranjit Singh. As Burnes quickly discovered, the thought of Peshawar in the hands of one of his traitorous half brothers was as unacceptable to Dost Mohammed as “placing a snake in my bosom.”

Burnes was in a difficult situation. The means of transport then available and the long distances involved inevitably meant that letters overlapped and fresh instructions arrived while previous questions remained unanswered. Under the circumstances Burnes allowed himself greater latitude than his superiors ever envisaged. Soon after his arrival he wrote to Lord Auckland suggesting that Dost Mohammed be promised Peshawar on the death of Ranjit Singh. Rightly convinced that Peshawar was the key, he wrote further in late December: “In a settlement of the Peshawar affair we have, as it seems to me, an immediate remedy against further intrigue, and a means of showing to the Afghans that the British Government does sympathise with them, and at one and the same time satisfying the chiefs, and gaining both our political and commercial ends.” He therefore held out promises of British help to Dost Mohammed in the event of a foreign attack on his country, even suggesting that the British might mediate between the Afghans and the Sikhs.

Two months after Burnes’s arrival, his position became yet more difficult when the Persians finally made their long anticipated advance on Herat. In his published account of his mission, Burnes wrote simply that “these circumstances had a prejudicial effect at Kabul,” but he knew that if the Persians succeeded in taking Herat they would be only four hundred miles from Kabul. As a result, he took it upon himself to offer bribes to the rulers of Kandahar not to ally themselves with the advancing Persians and was jubilant over the cleverness of his strategy, boasting to a friend: “The chiefs of Kandahar had gone over to Persia. I have detached them and offered them British protection and
cash
if they would recede, and if Persia attacked them. I have no authority to do so but am I to stand by and see us ruined at Kandahar?” He sent Lieutenant Robert Leech to Kandahar to confirm its rulers’ agreement and in late December 1837 wrote to Macnaghten, justifying his intervention:
“In the critical position in which I was situated I saw no course left but that which I have followed … Herat may withstand the attack of the Persians, but if not, and the shah marches to Kandahar, our own position in the East becomes endangered and the tranquillity of all the countries that border on the Indus.”

The arrival in Kabul of a Russian envoy, Captain Ivan Vickovich, convinced Burnes even more strongly that he had been right to act.
“We are in a mess here,”
he wrote to a colleague. “Herat is besieged and may fall; and the Emperor of Russia has sent an envoy to Kabul, to offer Dost Mohammed Khan money to fight Ranjit Singh!!!!! I could not believe my eyes or ears; but Captain Vickovich—for that is the agent’s name—arrived here with a blazing letter, three feet long, and sent immediately to pay his respects to myself. I, of course, received him, and asked him to dinner.”

They dined together on Christmas Day. Burnes found the slight, thirty-year-old officer in his striking Cossack uniform both agreeable and intelligent. Of Lithuanian extraction, Vickovich had been exiled as a student for participating in Polish nationalist demonstrations but had later gained a commission in a Cossack regiment and, as able a linguist as Burnes, had undertaken successful missions in Central Asia. After receiving instructions from Count Simonich, the Russian envoy in Tehran, on his way to Kabul he stopped at Kandahar to encourage its rulers to cooperate with the Persians. Their Christmas dinner was to be the only meeting between the British and the Russian envoys. “I regret to say that I found it to be impossible to follow the dictates of my personal feeling of friendship towards him, as the public service required the strictest watch, lest the relative positions of our nations should be misunderstood in this part of Asia,” wrote Burnes. To Lord Auckland he wrote that he “knew not what might happen, and it was now a neck-and-neck race between Russia and us.”

Dost Mohammed, anxious to do nothing to offend the British, asked Burnes how he should treat the Russian emissary. He dutifully agreed to keep Vickovich at arm’s length, gave Burnes—for onward transmission to Calcutta and London—copies of the introductory letters Vickovich had brought and even offered to send him packing. Burnes meanwhile was sending dispatch after dispatch to Calcutta, arguing that Dost Mohammed was
“the one strong man”
in Afghanistan and that “now is the time to bind him to our side.” However, all Burnes’s official letters passed through Ludhiana and the hands of Claude Wade, whose suspicion of Dost Mohammed remained unshakable. He would not accept that the only reason Dost Mohammed had made overtures to the Russians and the Persians was because the British refused to help him against Ranjit Singh. He also could not appreciate that Dost Mohammed would hardly regard Russia and Persia—with their aggressive ambitions toward the western Afghan city of Herat—as desirable allies. Therefore, in letters he forwarded with those from Burnes, he criticized Burnes’s views to his superiors. Burnes found himself rebuked for his promises to the chiefs of Kandahar. A furious Macnaghten, writing on behalf of Lord Auckland, told him in future to
“conform punctually in all points to the orders issued for your guidance”
and to inform the Kandahar rulers that he had exceeded his instructions. Immediately Burnes did so, the Kandahar chiefs began negotiating with the Persians.