Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (12 page)

After the death of Ochterlony in 1825, the man who had to deal with such disputes was the new Ludhiana Agent, Captain Claude Martin Wade.

Wade was a Bengal-born Persian scholar, and godson of the French adventurer Claude Martin, who had lent money to Wade’s impecunious father and after whom he was named. It was Wade’s French connections that helped secure him the job of dealing with the Sikh court, as Ranjit Singh’s power rested on his remarkable army, the Sikh Khalsa, 85,000 strong, which in turn was trained and officered by a small group of French and Italian Napoleonic veterans. All of these had married locally and produced large half-Punjabi families. Thanks to Wade, these ex-Napoleonic officers became an important source of information about Central Asia for the British.
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Wade made a point of being friendly to them and was described by one appreciative French traveller as ‘the King of the Frontier and an excellent fellow . . . a clever, well-informed man whose society is equally profitable and agreeable’.
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His own despatches, however, paint a more complex picture: Wade was affable, certainly, but also shrewd, dry, penetrating and cynical. When crossed he could also be prickly and territorial, strongly resisting any attempts to break his monopoly on controlling British relations with both the Sikhs and Afghans.

From the day of his arrival in the town in 1823, Wade worked to revive the extensive news-writing and intelligence networks left in place by Elphinstone when he retreated from Peshawar and which had been neglected as unnecessary expenses since the passing of the Napoleonic threat. Wade also established a web of his own correspondents stretching through the Punjab and Afghanistan to Khiva, Bukhara and beyond, collecting information mainly through ‘intelligent natives specially despatched’.
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This information was collated, sifted and analysed, then sent on to his masters in Calcutta. Though the boundaries between news-writers, ‘intelligencers’ and outright spies were very porous at this period, Wade was effectively one of the first two spymasters of what later generations would call the Great Game, that grand contest of imperial competition, espionage and conquest that engaged Britain and Russia until the collapse of their respective Asian empires, and whose opening moves were being played at this period.
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Wade’s great rival in this work was an Anglo-Irish bulldog named Sir Henry Pottinger, who from the Gujarati town of Bhuj in Kutch ran a competing operation on behalf of the Bombay Presidency, with a particular focus on the Indus Delta, Sindh, Baluchistan and Sistan. As a young man, Pottinger had himself travelled through Persia and Sindh disguised as a Muslim merchant and, knowing the territory as well as any other Company servant, grew to be every bit as territorial as Wade.

In between dutifully playing his part at Shah Shuja’s phantom court, Wade spent his days piecing together a jigsaw of news and gossip through his growing list of informants: Indian clerks, traders, passing mercenaries and sympathetic noblemen were all recruited to provide news and bazaar
gup-shup
[gossip]. Perhaps his most useful correspondent was a remarkable British deserter, originally known as James Lewis, who had fled the Company’s service and set himself up in Kabul under the assumed name of Charles Masson.

Masson was a keenly inquisitive Londoner who, after deserting his regiment and faking his own death during the siege of Bharatpur in 1826, had walked through north India, crossed the Indus and explored Afghanistan on foot, living like a wandering dervish. Armed with a copy of Arrian’s
Life of Alexander the Great
,
he became the first westerner to explore Afghanistan’s archaeology. Following in Alexander’s footsteps, he located the remains of the great Bactrian Greek city of Bagram in the Shomali Plain, while elsewhere he methodically excavated Buddhist stupas and Kushan palaces, dutifully sending the pick of his finds down to the new Asiatic Society in Calcutta. Somehow Wade learned the secret of Masson’s real identity as a deserter, and before long had blackmailed him into becoming an ‘intelligencer’, dangling both the threat of capital punishment and the lure of a royal pardon in front of him, and so ensuring a stream of regular and accurate reports from Afghanistan for the first time.

This growing intelligence network was developed at a time of rapidly changing geopolitics. The Napoleonic threat was now over. Instead by the 1820s it was Russia that kept the Company’s hawks fretting over their glasses of madeira.

Since seeing off Napoleon in 1812, the Russians had moved their frontier south and eastwards almost as fast as Wellesley had moved that of the Company north and westwards, and it was becoming increasingly evident – at least to the armchair strategists in London – that the two empires would at some point come into collision in central Asia. Lord Ellenborough, the hawkish new President of the Company’s Board of Control, and minister with responsibility for India in the Duke of Wellington’s Cabinet, was the first to turn this growing anxiety into public policy. ‘Our policy in Asia must follow one course only,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘to limit the power of Russia.’ Later he added: ‘Four months from leaving Khiva the enemy might be at Kabul. The Directors are much afraid . . . [but] I feel confident we shall have to fight the Russians on the Indus and I have long had a presentiment that I should meet them there, and gain a great battle.’
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Ellenborough, the son of Warren Hastings’s defence lawyer, was a brilliant but difficult and unappealing man, whose physical appearance, dominated by what one observer called ‘his horrid grey locks’, was so distasteful that George IV was alleged to have claimed that the very sight of Ellenborough made him sick. He suffered a crushing humiliation when his first wife, the beautiful but wayward Jane Digby, left him and took a succession of lovers, first the Austrian Prince Schwarzenberg, with whom Ellenborough fought a duel, then in quick succession the kings of both Bavaria and Greece, and an Albanian general, before ending up happily married to a Bedouin sheikh in Palmyra. The ridicule Ellenborough suffered as a result permanently marked his character and led to him retreating into a cocoon of pride and ambition. But, for all his arrogance, he was energetic and clever, and became the first British politician to build a career on opposition to Russian imperialism.
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Though Ellenborough exaggerated the threat to the British dominions in India – St Petersburg had in reality no plans to attack the British there – it was certainly true that Russia had recently shown itself extremely aggressive in its dealings with Ottoman Turkey and Qajar Persia. Only a year after Napoleon’s 1812 retreat from Moscow, the Russian artillery had massacred Fatteh Ali Shah Qajar’s Persian army, and proclaimed the ‘liberation’ of the Eastern Christians of Armenia and Georgia. Russia then annexed great swathes of modern Armenia and Azerbaijan – what had been until then the Persian Empire in the Caucasus. ‘Persia was delivered, bound hand and foot, to the Court of St Petersburg,’ wrote the British Ambassador to Teheran.
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This turned out to be only the first of a long series of Ottoman and Persian defeats which marked the Russian army’s relentless advance southwards.
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To make matters worse, the British had failed to come to the aid of their Persian allies, so leaving the Persians to face the Russians alone. Following a further series of catastrophic Persian defeats in the Russo-Persian War of 1826–7, the Persians lost all that was left of their Caucasian empire, including all the passes controlling the road to Azerbaijan.
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If Russia had not also been fighting the Ottomans, the surrender terms might have been harsher still. But Russia was simultaneously inflicting defeats on the Turks so damaging that the Duke of Wellington believed they marked a ‘death blow to the independence of the Ottoman Porte and the forerunner of the extinction of its power’.
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By the end of the 1820s it seemed only a matter of time before the Russians seized both Teheran and Constantinople, turning Persia and Turkey into vast Tsarist protectorates. In Chechnya and Daghestan, the Russians were conducting a series of genocidal punitive expeditions during which they sacked villages, killed the women and children, cut down the forests and destroyed the crops.
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Further south still, in Jerusalem, the British Consul was reporting a build-up of ‘Russian agents’ preparing for a ‘Russian conquest of the Holy Lands’. Russia’s stated intention to recreate the old Byzantine Empire on the ruins of that of the Ottomans made such schemes appear perfectly plausible, at least to the foreign-policy hawks.
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This rapid succession of Russian victories, combined with reports of Russian brutality in the lands they controlled, came as a severe shock to the politicians in London, who since the demise of Napoleon had come to see the security of British India as vital to Britain’s status as a world power. When in 1823 the Himalayan explorer William Moorcroft managed to intercept a letter from the Russian Foreign Minister, Count Nesselrode, to Ranjit Singh, it seemed to confirm all the hawks’ worst fears. These fears, and the political paranoia they generated, triggered a wave of Russophobia in the British and British Indian press where Russia increasingly came to be depicted as a barbaric and despotic menace to liberty and civilisation.

This was given momentum by the publication of Colonel De Lacy Evans’s overwrought polemic
On the
Practicability of an Invasion of British India
.
The book sketched out a scenario whereby 60,000 Russian troops could march across the Hindu Kush, take Herat, then appear at the base of the Khyber Pass and sweep all before them. In reality, at this period this was almost as fantastical a scheme as Shah Shuja’s plan to invade Kabul via ‘Thibet’, and the Russian threat it presented was hugely overplayed: there were still only a handful of Russians in Central Asia and none within a thousand miles of Bukhara, let alone Kabul. Yet the book was widely read in political circles in London and, although the Colonel had never been to India or even to the region, this did not stop his alarmist text going on ‘to become the virtual Bible’ of a generation of Russophobes.
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It was particularly admired by Lord Ellenborough, who liked it as it confirmed all his existing prejudices.

The evening he finished reading the book, Ellenborough went to his study and wrote to the Duke of Wellington that ‘Russia will attempt, by conquest, or influence to secure Persia as the road to the Indus.’ The following day, 29 October 1828, having mailed off copies of De Lacy Evans’s book to colleagues in Teheran and Bombay, he took note of the book’s recommendation that ‘some sort of agent’ should be stationed at Bukhara to give advance warning of a Russian attack, and wrote in his diary that ‘We ought to have full information as to Kabul, Bokhara and Khiva.’
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In the weeks that followed, Ellenborough laid down his plans for how Britain should take measures to pre-empt further Russian advances. ‘We dread not so much an actual invasion of India’, he wrote to the Governor General of India, so much as:

the moral effect which would be produced amongst our own subjects and amongst the Princes with whom we are allied . . . [by] any approximation of the Russians to the north of India. It is in our interests to take measures for the prevention of any movement on their part beyond their present limits. But the efficiency of such measures must depend upon their being taken promptly, and you being kept constantly informed of everything which passes on the Russian frontier.
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Ellenborough’s despatch was to have far-reaching consequences. However much the threat it sought to counter was at this stage only a spectre of overheated British imaginations, by authorising a major new programme of intelligence gathering in Central Asia it gave a huge new momentum to the Great Game – what the Russians would later call ‘the Tournament of Shadows’ – and created an Anglo-Russian rivalry in the Himalayas where none had existed before. It also put immense resources at the disposal of Wade and Pottinger and those watching the Indian frontiers. From this point on a succession of young army officers and political agents began to be despatched to the Himalayas, the Hindu Kush and the Pamirs, sometimes in disguise, sometimes on ‘shooting leave’, to learn the languages and tribal customs, to map the rivers and passes, and to assess the difficulty of crossing the mountains and deserts.
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In years to come, this process of imperial competition would turn into something far more serious than any game and lead to deaths, wars, invasions and colonisation on a massive scale, profoundly changing the lives of hundreds of thousands of inhabitants of Afghanistan and Central Asia. More immediately, it radically changed the importance of Shah Shuja to the British: no longer was he an ex-monarch with over-grand ideas being maintained out of a sense of duty to a fallen ally; suddenly he was a major strategic asset against Russian encroachment and a key to British hopes of having an ally as ruler of Afghanistan. Ellenborough’s despatch also led to the immediate deployment of two covert intelligence operations.

One, led by Lieutenant Arthur Conolly, was designed to test out, on foot, the feasibility of reaching British India from Moscow. Conolly travelled to the Russian frontier at Orenburg, then changed into disguise and made his way through Bukhara and Afghanistan to Herat and the Indus. The journey turned out to be entirely feasible – at least for a determined individual – and much easier than Conolly had imagined, taking little over a year to complete at a leisurely pace.