Far Pavilions (141 page)

The sun was still well below the horizon when Wally crossed the Indus and took the Peshawar road on the following morning, leaving his bearer Pir Baksh to follow in a tonga with the luggage, and an hour later he breakfasted at the Nowshera dâk-bungalow while his horse rested, before crossing the Kabul River and pressing on towards Risalpur. Mardan was an oasis of shade in a parched land. The fort and the parade-ground, the lines and the familiar back-drop of the Yusafzai hills quivered and swayed in the dancing heat, and far out on the plain towards Jamalgarhi an occasional dust-devil arose to whirl like a spinning-top and die again. But in the cantonment not a leaf stirred, and the dust of the hot weather lay like hoar frost on every stick and stone and blade of grass, reducing greens and browns to a single tint – the colour that Sir Henry Lawrence had chosen for the uniforms of his newly raised Corps of Guides in the days before the Great Mutiny, and that had come to be known as
khaki
.

Wally had gone straight to Wigram's quarters, but Wigram was not there; he had been attending some minor conference in Peshawar, and was not expected back until after sundown. He had, however, returned in time to dine in mess, and later walked back with Wally to the latter's rooms, where he had remained until long after midnight, listening to the saga of Ash and Anjuli-Bai.

The tale had obviously interested him deeply, though the marriage ceremony on board the
Morala
had drawn an angry exclamation and a black frown, and after that he had listened to the rest tight-lipped and with a furrowed brow. But he had made no comments, and at the end of it remarked thoughtfully that he remembered the Commandant saying, at the time when the question of a Court Martial was being discussed following the return of the carbines, that Ashton Pelham-Martyn was not only an insubordinate young hot-head, but an adult enfant-terrible whose penchant for acting on the spur of the moment made him capable of doing any damned silly thing without pausing to think what it could lead to in the long run; yet it had to be remembered that these were the very defects that often proved invaluable in time of war, particularly when accompanied, as in Ashton's case, with considerable courage.

‘I think he was right,’ said Wigram slowly. ‘And if there should be a war, which I pray God there will not be, we may need those defects – and the courage that goes with them.’

He lay back in his chair and was silent for a long time, chewing on the butt of a cheroot that had gone out long ago, and staring abstractedly at the ceiling; and when he spoke again it was to ask a question: ‘Do I understand that Ashton intends to spend the remainder of his leave at Attock?’

‘Yes,’ confirmed Wally. ‘He and his wife have been invited to stay with Risaldar Zarin Khan's aunt – she owns that big house in a walled garden that stands back from the 'Pindi road on the far side of the town.’

‘
Hmm.
I should like to go over one day and meet the bride. It would –’ his gaze fell on the clock and he came hurriedly to his feet: ‘Good gracious, is that the right time? I'd no idea it was so late. High time I got my beauty sleep. Good-night, Wally.’

He left to walk back to his own quarters, but not, as it happened, to sleep. Instead, having exchanged his mess dress for the loose cotton trousers that were the customary night-wear at that time of year, he came out onto the verandah, and subsiding into a long-sleeve chair, gave himself up to thought.

50

Captain Battye gazed out unseeingly at the hot moonlight and the black shadows, and thought of his youngest brother, Fred… of Fred and Wally and Ashton Pelham-Martyn, Hammond and Hughes and Campbell, Colonel Jenkins the Commandant, Risaldars Prem Singh and Mahmud Khan, Wordi-Major Duni Chand and Sowar Dowlat Ram and a hundred others… officers, non-commissioned officers and men of the Guides; their faces passing before him as though on review. If there should be another Afghan war, how many of them would be alive by the time it was over?

He knew that even now, after all these years, the bleached bones of General Elphinstone's demoralized army still littered the defiles where they had been trapped during the retreat from Kabul, and slaughtered like sheep by the vengeful tribesmen. This time it might be Fred's bones that were left there; or Wally's skull that would go trundling before the blast when the wind howled through those haunted passes. Fred and Wally, the forgotten debris of another useless, pointless Afghan war…

The first had been fought well before either of those two were born, and though the Afghans had not forgotten it, the British seldom mentioned it those who remembered it preferring to pretend they did not; which was hardly surprising, as it was an unedifying tale.

In the early years of the century, when ‘John Company’ ruled half India, a mediocre youth named Shah Shuja had fallen heir to the throne of Afghanistan. Having lost it after a reign that was brief even by the violent standards of that country, he fled to India where he was granted asylum by the Government and settled down to a peaceful existence as a private citizen, while following his departure, his erstwhile subjects indulged in a period of riot and anarchy that came to an abrupt end when a strong and able man, one Dost Mohammed of the Barakzi clan, brought order out of chaos and eventually made himself Amir.

Unfortunately, the Government of India distrusted men of ability. They suspected that the Dost would be difficult to manipulate and might even, if they were not careful, decide to ally himself with Russia; and discussing this possibility in the rarefied atmosphere of Simla, the Governor-General, Lord Auckland, and his favoured advisers came to the conclusion that it might be a good idea to get rid of the Dost (who had done them no harm and his country much good) and replace him with the now elderly ex-Amir Shah Shuja; their argument being that this aged nonentity, if bound to his British champions by ties of gratitude and self-interest, could not fail to become a biddable tool who would willingly sign any treaty they cared to dictate.

But though the war that Lord Auckland forced upon Afghanistan had ended in total disaster for the British, the majority of those who had helped to launch it did very well for themselves, since to mark the initial victory, medals, titles and honours had been showered upon them – none of which could be taken away. But the dead who rotted in the passes received no decorations: and within two years Dost Mohammed Khan was once again Amir of Afghanistan.

The
waste
, thought Wigram, the injustice and stupidity and the cruel, senseless waste. And all to no purpose, because now once again, after a lapse of almost forty years, it seemed that a handful of men in Simla were planning to force another Amir – the youngest son of that same Dost Mohammed – to accept a permanent British Mission in Kabul. Worse still, there had actually been a time when the Amir would have been only too willing to accommodate them. Five years ago, dismayed by threats of rebellion and the growing power of Russia, Shere Ali had made overtures to the then Viceroy, Lord Northbrook, and asked for an assurance of protection against any aggressor; but his request has been refused. Embittered by this rejection, he had decided to turn instead to Russia (who had shown a flattering eagerness to discuss treaties of friendship and alliance with him); yet now these same
Angrezis
, who had rebuffed him when he asked for help, were actually demanding, as a right, that he should welcome a British Envoy to his capital and cease ‘intriguing’ with the Tsar.

‘If I were in his shoes, I'd see 'em damned first,’ thought Wigram, and realized that there was no profit in thinking like that. This was how wars came about.

All those years ago Lord Auckland and his friends had sent thousands of people to their deaths on the mere supposition that Shere Ali's father might consider an alliance with Russia. Was Lord Lytton now about to do the same, and with no more proof than before, basing his decisions on suspicion, gossip and rumour, and the garbled accounts of paid spies?

In the course of the past few years Wigram had seen a good deal of Wally's kinsman the Deputy Commissioner of Peshawar, Major Louis Cavagnari; and until recently his opinion of the D.C. had been almost as high as Wally's. Pierre Louis Napoleon Cavagnari was a curious person to be found occupying such a position, for as Wally had related, his father had been a French count who had served under the great Napoleon, become Military Secretary to Jérôme Bonaparte, King of Westphalia, and married an Irish lady, Elizabeth, daughter of Dean Stewart Blacker of Carrickblacker (though despite his Gallic names the Deputy Commissioner, having been brought up in Ireland, had always regarded himself as British, and preferred his friends to call him ‘Louis’ because it seemed to him the least foreign of his three given names).

For twenty years he had served with distinction in India's Border lands, seeing service in no less than seven Frontier campaigns, and acquiring an enviable reputation for being able to manage the turbulent tribesmen, whose various dialects he spoke with idiomatic fluency. And though as far as appearance went, the tall, bearded figure might easily have been taken for a professor rather than a man of action, those who knew him declared him to be courageous to a fault. No one had ever accused him of lack of spirit, and he combined a dynamic personality with many excellent qualities; though in common with the majority of his fellow men, these last were offset by some that were less admirable: in his case egotism and personal ambition, a quick temper and a fatal tendency to see things as he wished them to be rather than as they actually were.

Wigram Battye had only recently become aware of these failings. But then he had also had the advantage of seeing Cavagnari in action. The success of the affair at Sipri with its swift night march and surprise attack had been entirely due to the D.C.'s imaginative planning and attention to detail, and that, with several other similar incidents, had given Wigram the greatest possible respect for the man's qualities. Nevertheless, of late he had come to feel less admiring and more critical; and, it must be owned, more than a little apprehensive, for the Deputy Commissioner was a professed supporter of the ‘Forward Policy’, whose advocates considered that the only way to protect the Indian Empire from the ‘Russian menace’ was to turn Afghanistan into a British protectorate and plant the Union Jack on the far side of the Hindu Kush.

As this was also the Viceroy's view (and Lord Lytton was known to have a great regard for Major Cavagnari and to take his advice on Frontier matters in preference to that of older and more cautious men), it was not surprising that Wigram Battye should feel uneasy at hearing the D.C. declare – as he had recently heard him do at a dinner party in Peshawar – ‘If Russia gets a foothold in Afghanistan she will take over that country as she has taken over almost all the old, proud kingdoms of Central Asia; and once she has done that the road through the Khyber will be open and there will be nothing to prevent her marching her armies down to attack and take Peshawar and the Punjab, as Barbur the Tiger did three hundred years ago. I have no quarrel with the Afghan people: my quarrel is solely with their Amir, who, by intriguing with the Tsar, is playing with a fire that unless we can prevent it will destroy his own country, and from there burn its way southward until it has consumed all India…’

Cavagnari's use of the first person singular was characteristic of the man and in a different context Wigram would probably have thought nothing of it: but used in this one it dismayed him. His own interest in the dispute between the Government of India and the Amir was entirely non-political, his concern being mainly with the military consequences of a possible war with Afghanistan and the part that his own Corps would be called upon to play in it. He was, after all, a professional soldier. But he also possessed a conscience, and his fear was that the Forward Policy clique intended to embroil the Raj in a second Afghan war without any real justification for doing so – and without fully realizing the enormous difficulties that would face an invading army.

Of the two, it was the former that worried him most, for having always held the view that the Afghan war of '39 had been morally indefensible as well as totally unnecessary, it horrified him to discover that once again History seemed about to repeat itself, and in his opinion it was the plain duty of all honourable men to try to prevent it doing so; the crying need, as Wigram saw it, being for accurate and unedited information as to the true intentions of the Amir Shere Ali and his people.

If it could be proved that Shere Ali was intriguing with the Tsar and about to sign a treaty that would grant Russia military posts and a firm footing in his country, then the Forward Policy men were right and the sooner Britain stepped in to prevent it the better – the prospect of a Russian-controlled Afghanistan with Russian armies stationed along the north-west frontiers of India being unthinkable. But then
was
it true? Wigram had an uneasy feeling that men like Cavagnari and Lord Lytton and other Forward Policy fire-eaters were being deluded by information supplied by Afghan spies who, knowing full well what these particular Sahibs hoped to hear, repeated only what would please, and suppressed anything else – a quirk probably due to a respect for good manners and a desire to please, rather than any deliberate intent to mislead.