Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (27 page)

If younger soldiers were hoping the war might bring them glory, plunder and promotion, Nott merely hoped it would help him forget. ‘Passed a miserable day in thinking of times gone by, and those I dearly love,’ he wrote to his daughters the night of his arrival in Karnal. He added: ‘strange to say, my mind was in some degree relieved’ by the distraction of a war to be fought; only for him to be horrified by this thought and scribble in the margin: ‘When will man cease to destroy his fellow man?’
11

It came as little comfort that he had finally been promoted to major-general, a distinction that might have come much earlier had he not been so quick to speak truth to power. For Nott was not a man to keep quiet in the face of a perceived slight, and he was already gearing up to take offence at the precedence that was being given to newly arrived commanders of the British army. These men, though usually richer and better connected than their counterparts in the army of the Company, did not speak Hindustani or have any experience of fighting in India or with sepoys. He had heard rumours that the Commander-in-Chief, Sir John Keane, was to take several sepoy regiments away from the control of the Company’s generals, and he was already squaring up for a fight about the issue. ‘The truth is he is a Queen’s officer, and I am a Company’s,’ he explained to his daughters. ‘I am decidedly of the opinion that a Queen’s officer, be he ever so talented, is totally unfit to command the Company’s Army.’

To everyone’s relief, the rains had stopped by the time the now grandly named Army of the Indus began to assemble on the plains of Ferozepur in early November. To try and cheer up the camp, Ranjit Singh sent 600 of his gardeners to arrange impromptu gardens of potted roses around the officer’s tents. But a more serious obstacle to the war now confronted the gathering armies. To Auckland’s embarrassment, in the midst of all the preparations for the invasion, news came that the Persians, alarmed by the British naval occupation of the island of Kharg, had unexpectedly abandoned the siege of Herat and withdrawn to Mashhad. Soon afterwards came confirmation that Count Nesselrode in St Petersburg had also given way, this time to diplomatic pressure from the Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, in London. Count Simonitch, the author of the entire Russian diplomatic campaign to outflank the British in Persia and Afghanistan, was to be sacrificed – removed from his job as ambassador to the Persian court on the grounds that he had exceeded his instructions.
p
Vitkevitch was also to be recalled to St Petersburg from Kandahar, where he had been busy reinforcing the Russian–Barakzai alliance by promising Dost Mohammad’s half-brothers Russian military support in the event of a British invasion.

Both of Auckland’s original
casus belli
were now removed: Russia and Persia were publicly backing down. If there had ever been any real threat to British India it was now over. This would have been an ideal moment to reopen negotiations with Dost Mohammad and achieve all the aims of the war without a shot being fired. There was, after all, still a major famine in north India which had left tens and quite possibly hundreds of thousands starving to death – there are no official statistics – and whose horrors had been greatly exacerbated by the British encouragement of poppy growing over food crops. There was also the increasing likelihood that Auckland would choose to fight a second illegal war of aggression on a different front – this time with China – in order to protect the Company’s profitable trade in the opium grown from those very poppy fields which had once produced such rich harvests of grain. Then there were all the uncertainties of Shuja’s reception in Afghanistan, and the unanswered question as to whether it would be possible to maintain him on his throne once re-established. But, astonishingly, no one at Ferozepur seemed to have given a moment’s thought to the option of reopening negotiations.

Instead, now that there was no danger of encountering the Cossacks or the Imperial Persian army in Afghanistan, an announcement was made that several regiments would be withdrawn from the Army of the Indus and a significantly smaller force would be sent into action. Auckland nonetheless made a strong public declaration that he intended to ‘prosecute with vigour’ the existing plan. ‘Of the justice of the course about to be pursued, there cannot exist a reasonable doubt,’ he asserted. ‘We owe it to our own safety to assist the lawful sovereign of Afghanistan in the recovery of his throne.’ The Tripartite Treaty would be honoured, and Shah Shuja would still be ‘replaced on the throne of his ancestors’.

On 27 November, the Sikh and Company armies finally converged on the plains of Ferozepur. Lord Auckland’s normally cynical ADC, William Osborne, was astonished at the sheer scale of the gathering. ‘In the
Champs de Drap d’Or
of Ferozepore, Lord Auckland appeared with the imposing magnificence of an Indian potentate,’ he recorded, ‘and though the uniforms of the vice-regal staff were eclipsed by the jewels and chain armour of the Sikh sardars, the Governor General with his immense retinue and escort of 15,000 men was quite a match for the monarch of the Punjab.’
12
Emily, unusually, was also completely won over by the spectacle. ‘Behind us there was a large amphitheatre of elephants belonging to our own camp,’ she wrote. Facing them were ‘thousands of Runjeet’s followers, all dressed in yellow or red satin, with quantities of their led horses trapped in gold and silver tissues, and all of them sparkling with jewels. I really never saw so dazzling a sight. Three or four Sikhs would look like Astley’s [Circus] broke loose, but this immense body of them saves their splendour from being melodramatic.’
13

Others, however, were less impressed. Sir John Kaye, the future historian of the Afghan War, was a young officer in the artillery at the time, and remembered the first meeting of Lord Auckland and Ranjit Singh as being ‘amidst a scene of indescribable uproar and confusion’. Indeed such was the chaos amid the collision of two lines of trumpeting elephants and the subsequent rush to follow the two leaders into the Durbar Tent that many of the Sikh troopers suspected there might be a British plot to do away with their beloved leader ‘and began to blow their matches [that is, prime their matchlocks] and grasp their weapons with an air of mingled distrust and ferocity’.
14
Lord Auckland, excited by the hubbub, then ‘made a most splashy answer’ to Ranjit’s speech of welcome ‘about their united armies conquering the world. You will be much taken aback, I guess,’ wrote Fanny to her sister in England, ‘when they march hand in hand and take Motcombe.’
15

That night Fanny sat next to Ranjit Singh at the banquet and was intrigued and charmed by her dining companion. He had turned up in a pair of plain white kurta pyjamas, with one single jewel, the Koh-i-Nur, glinting on his arm – not perhaps the most tactful ornament for the occasion, given how he had come to own it. The Sikh monarch spent much of the evening trying to get Fanny to drink his home brew. ‘The composition he calls wine is like burning fire, and much stronger than brandy,’ she noted afterwards.

At first he was content to let George and Sir W Cotton swallow it. Then he began plying me with gold cupfuls. I got on very well for some time, pretending to drink it and pass it to his cupbearer. But he grew suspicious, put it up to his one eye, looked well into the cup, shook his head and gave it back to me again. The next time he put his finger into the cup to see how much had gone. I made Major Wade explain that ladies do not drink so much in England, upon which he waited until George’s head was turned away and passed a cup to me under his arm, thinking George was a horrid tyrant who prevented me.
16

George meanwhile was fending off persistent questions from his new colleague about why he did not possess even one wife. ‘George said that only one was allowed in England,’ reported Emily, ‘and if she turned out a bad one, he could not easily get rid of her. Runjeet said that was a bad custom; that the Sikhs were allowed twenty-five wives, and they did not dare to be bad, because he could beat them if they were. G replied that was an excellent custom, and he would try to introduce it when he got home.’

The next morning the Sikhs showed off their drill and impressed their allies with their discipline and particularly with the accuracy of their artillery. Then it was the turn of the British. ‘The consummate skill with which the British chief attacked an imaginary enemy’, wrote Kaye, ‘was equalled by the gallantry with which he defeated it. He fought indeed a great battle on the plain, and only wanted another army in his front to render his victory a complete one.’
17

Two days later, after further displays of military and equestrian prowess, many more speeches and several more banquets, the troops finally set off to war. Led forward by lancers with scarlet cloaks and plumed shakos, the columns of cavalry and infantry regiments headed downstream towards Shikarpur, where they were supposed to liaise with the Bombay army and Shah Shuja’s Contingent. The Sikhs meanwhile headed north towards Lahore.

The Army of the Indus now consisted of around a thousand Europeans and 14,000 East India Company sepoys – excluding the 6,000 irregulars hired by Shuja – accompanied by no fewer than 38,000 Indian camp followers. The baggage for these men was to be carried to war on over 30,000 camels, which had been collected for the purpose from as far away as Bikaner, Jaisalmer and the Company’s camel stud at Hisar in Haryana.

No one was planning to travel light. One brigadier claimed that he needed fifty camels to carry his kit, while General Cotton took 260 for his. Three hundred camels were earmarked to carry the military wine cellar. Even junior officers travelled with as many as forty servants – ranging from cooks and sweepers to bearers and water carriers.
18
According to Major-General Nott, who had had to work his way up throughout his career without the benefit of connections, patronage or money and who looked with a jaundiced eye on the rich young officers of the Queen’s Regiments, it was already clear that the army was not enforcing proper military austerity. Many of the junior officers were treating the war as if it were as light-hearted as a hunting trip – indeed one regiment had actually brought its own foxhounds along with it to the front. ‘Many young officers would as soon have thought of leaving behind their swords and double-barrelled pistols as march without their dressing cases, their perfumes, Windsor soap and eau de Cologne,’ he wrote. ‘One regiment has two camels carrying the best Manila cigars, while other camels carry jams, pickles, cheroots, potted fish, hermetically sealed meats, plate, glass, crockery, wax-candles, table linen, &c.’
19

It did not bode well for the effectiveness of the fighting force. Nor did the lack of communication between the different wings of the Army of the Indus. By now Alexander Burnes was supposed to have completed the negotiations with the Amirs of Sindh and to have received the necessary permissions for the army to pass up the river and through their lands. But the attack on Karachi coupled with the looting of Larkana instead nearly sparked a second war between the British and the Sindhis even before the planned war against Dost Mohammad had got under way. The Sindhis, quite understandably, did not want a British army tramping across their territory, so dragged their feet over permissions and refused to find camels or transport animals for the Bombay troops who were still stranded where they had landed on the shores of the malarial Indus Delta.

Things got worse before they got better. The following week Macnaghten was hurrying to catch up with the army after accompanying the Sikh leader to Lahore, where Fanny and Emily had visited ‘a select number of Mrs Runjeets’. On his way he heard to his horror that General Sir Willoughby Cotton, without any orders, had left the agreed place of rendezvous and was fast heading south, away from Afghanistan, and about to launch an illegal attack on the Sindhi capital of Hyderabad. ‘Cotton is clearly going on a wild goose chase,’ wrote Macnaghten to Simla in desperation. ‘He seems to be travelling by a route which has no road. He will soon, I fear, be in the jungle. If this goes on as it is now doing, what is to become of our Afghan expedition?’ Mirza ‘Ata, who appears to have been attached to Shah Shuja’s Contingent, reported the rumour current in the Sadozai camp that Cotton had wandered so badly astray that it took the miraculous intervention of a saint to get him back on track. ‘The army lost its way in the scrub jungle,’ he wrote, ‘and wandered confused and alarmed for one whole watch, until a white-bearded old man like the prophet Khizr appeared and guided them to their camping grounds by the river.’
20

Macnaghten sent a series of increasingly desperate notes by camel express, urging Cotton to stop. The General reluctantly agreed to call off the attack, just hours before the assault was due to begin, but only after the amirs had fully submitted to him. As Mirza ‘Ata put it, ‘when these Mirs – an uncouth and subversive lot, always eager to pick a fight – saw waves and waves of British soldiers like a tidal wave, or black clouds of a gathering storm converging both through land and water towards their land, they were intimidated and gave in’.
21
Nevertheless the incident caused a loss of face for the General in front of his troops, who were much looking forward to looting the city that was supposed to contain great riches.

The reunion of Macnaghten and one of his principal commanders was far from a happy one: ‘Sir Willoughby is evidently disposed to look upon His Majesty and myself as mere ciphers,’ Macnaghten complained to Colvin. ‘Any hint from me, however quietly and modestly given, was received with hauteur; and I was distinctly told that I wanted to assume command of the army; that he, Sir Willoughby, knew no superior but Sir John Keane [the Commander-in-Chief], and that he would not be interfered with &c, &c. All this arose out of my requesting 1000 camels for the use of the Shah and his force.’
22
This request was an allusion to a growing crisis with the baggage animals, which had just got much more serious after half of the Shah’s camels had died from eating a poisonous Sindhi plant, a cousin of the foxglove, so leaving the Shah and his troops, like those still broiling in the humidity of the Indus Delta, ‘in the lurch without the means of moving’.