Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (28 page)

Relations between Shuja and Macnaghten did not get off to a much better start. ‘The Shah, I am sorry to say, talks foolishly every time I see him on the subject of how confined his territories are to be,’ wrote the Envoy, ‘and frequently says it would have been much better for him to have remained in Ludhiana. The next time he touches on the subject, I intend to remind him of the verse of Sa’adi, “If a King conquers seven regions he would still be hankering after another territory.”’ He then added, ominously for the future, ‘I hardly think the 50,000 rupees per mensem will suffice for the Shah’s expenses.’
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There were also, as ever, tensions between Macnaghten and Burnes, exacerbated by the fact that Macnaghten had been given the job Burnes wanted, while Burnes had been awarded the knighthood the profoundly snobbish Macnaghten would have loved. As a result Macnaghten routinely patronised Burnes, whom he tended to treat as an over-promoted teenager, while Burnes regarded Macnaghten as ‘a man of no experience and quite unskilled with natives. He is also very hasty in taking up and throwing off plans.’
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It was therefore a disgruntled and disunited army that finally began to converge in one place at Shikarpur at the end of February 1839, a full three months after the scheduled start of the invasion. The only people impressed by the Army of the Indus were the Afghans who, unaware of the lack of co-ordination, discipline and foreplanning, or the squabbles between the commanders, heard only exaggerated stories about the size of the enormous force heading towards them. Dost Mohammad’s Barakzai half-brothers in Kandahar felt particularly vulnerable: as in 1834, they would be the first target of any advance into Afghanistan through the Bolan, and now that Vitkevitch had been withdrawn and his promises of Russian military support disowned, they knew all too well how ill prepared they were to meet a modern, well-drilled and well-equipped colonial army. Years later, the epic poets of the country recalled the rumours that spread of the huge British invasion force marching towards their mountains and valleys:

On the appointed day, at the appointed hour

Replete and multitudinous, the army set out for Kabul

When the horde was set in motion from that land

The earth shook to its very foundations

Accompanying the Shah, by way of Sindh

Were one hundred and fifty thousand hand-picked soldiers

By another route, Timur, Wade and
Daktar
[Doctor] Lord

Were on their way with five thousand other soldiers

Two raging rivers from two different directions

Made their way to Kabul from Ludhiana

The ruler of every region and province

Was as obedient as wax to the Shah’s seal ring

The stamping horses reached the mountains of Sindh

And entered the deserts of Hind

Sweating and over-loaded camels

Flooded through the mountainous road

The cannon and the elephants marched together

Like a mountain moving from its place with the force of the River Nile.
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Once a British camp and bridgehead had been established at Shikarpur, in the absence of further camels to move the supplies of war, ammunition and food stores began to be sent down the Indus by fleets of hastily requisitioned barges – ‘flat bottomed, very shallow and broader at the stern than at the bow, which rise to a peak some fourteen feet out of the water’, remembered a young infantryman, Thomas Seaton, who was given charge of one supply convoy. ‘In this queer conveyance a straw hut of two rooms had been built, and as all the boats in the fleet – about fifty – were exactly like mine, they looked like a floating village.’
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By the end of February the entire arsenal had arrived at Shikarpur; and by the end of the month the last of the Bombay troops had marched in too.

All that was now needed was a bridge. The river was more than a thousand yards wide ‘with a torrent like a mill stream’, and initially the engineers had only eight boats ‘and nothing near us but a small village . . . First we seized, by great exertion, about 120 boats,’ reported the Orcadian James Broadfoot, who was put in charge of the operation,

then cut down lots of trees; these we made into strong beams. There was no rope, but we made 500 cables out of a peculiar kind of grass which grows 100 miles from here; the anchors were made of small trees joined and loaded with half a ton of stone. Our nails were all made on the spot. We then anchored the boats in the middle of the stream in a line across leaving twelve feet between each; strong beams were laid across the boats; and planks nailed on these for a roadway. This is the largest military bridge which has ever been made, and you may conceive what labour we had in finishing it in eleven days.
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On the very last day of February, the invasion force finally crossed the Indus. Mirza ‘Ata was profoundly impressed: ‘the astonishing technical skills of the British army would have humbled Plato and Aristotle themselves’, he wrote. ‘Indeed anyone who saw the structure was astonished.’
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But the limits of British skills were made very evident in the days that followed.

It was only at this point, after crossing the Indus and entering the 150 miles of sterile salt marshes separating Shikarpur from the Bolan Pass, that it seemed to have dawned on Macnaghten and his generals exactly what they had taken on: a campaign far from their own territory, through a hostile, parched and largely unmapped landscape, with only the most tenuous communications and guarded on all sides by unwilling and unreliable allies.

Because of the delays, summer was now approaching and the desert was rapidly beginning to warm up. So the marches through the empty wilderness now had to be conducted at night. Insufficient surveying of water and supplies ahead of the intended route meant that no one knew how much food and water would be needed. Nor was anyone prepared for the heat. Seaton found it almost unbearable from the very beginning. ‘We commenced our march at sunset,’ he wrote two days after leaving Shikarpur. ‘As soon as we entered into the Desert, a wind sprang up, gentle at first, then hot and fierce, bringing with it particles of dust, fine as the finest powder, which penetrated everything, and, with the heat still radiating from the soil, created an intolerable thirst.’ He went on:

The sepoys, each with his heavy musket, sixty rounds of ammunition, clothing, haversack with necessaries, accoutrements, and his brass pot filled with water, were heavily laden for such a march, the burden doubling the already unbearable oppression of their tight-fitting woollen uniforms. The condition of the men in such circumstances was pitiable, and every minute their sufferings increased. The water in the men’s pots was soon exhausted. At midnight they began to flag, then to murmur, and shortly there was a universal cry of ‘water – water!’ Many were half-raving . . . One sepoy was in such a state that, when I spoke to him, he could scarcely reply; his tongue rattled in his mouth, and his whole countenance was distorted in agony.

It was not just the sepoys who were suffering:

The poor, heavily laden camp-followers, some carrying infants, were in a more pitiable state still, and the children’s cries were heartrending. Strong men, exhausted from carrying loads, were scattered on the ground moaning and beating their breasts . . . One of the native officers in camp had with him a little girl, his only child, whose mother was dead. She was a pretty, lively, prattling thing of about six years of age, the delight of everybody. I used to see her every day chattering to her father, helping him light the fire, and cook their food; and her pretty little ways were a delight to witness. I saw her at ten o’clock all well, and at 3pm she was dead and laid out for burial . . . [When they reached the camp at dawn] out of thirty-two wells dug in the bottom of a ravine, only six contained water. One of them was poisoned by an animal which had fallen into it, and of the others the water was so bitter and brackish that the men said it turned their lotas [brass pots] black.
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Then there was the gathering crescendo of attacks by Baluchi brigands. Inadequate diplomacy, high-handedness and a lack of co-ordination with local chieftains meant that the tribes of the area looked on the vulnerable British columns as fair game. The troops were generally left well alone, but the unprotected camp followers began to be robbed and murdered on a daily basis.

Neville Chamberlain was a young cavalry officer on his first campaign, and it was a week after leaving Shikarpur, near a waterhole, that he saw his first casualty: ‘One woman lay – poor creature! – on the edge of the water, with her long black hair floating in the ripples of the clear stream.’ Her throat had been cut from ear to ear. Many other casualties followed. ‘The unburied dead were left rotting on the road. Not a tree or a shrub or a blade of grass could be seen through the light the moon afforded us. It was all sand, not a bird exists on this plane, not even a jackal – for we frequently passed camels in a putrid state and if there had been jackals they would be sure to have found them out. Our camels had nothing to eat for several days and forty-five died in one night from hunger and the length of the marches.’
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It was on these hot moonlit night marches that the troops caught what was for many of them their first glimpse of the man for whom they were risking their lives. ‘Shah Shuja is an old man, about sixty years of age,’ wrote Chamberlain. ‘His beard reaches down to his waist, and it is naturally white, but to make himself look younger he dyes it black. He goes about in a sort of tonjon [litter] carried by twelve men, and attended by horsemen, running footmen, elephants, horses and a hundred sepoys.’

Shuja put a good face on the privations of the march, but was as anxious as everyone else about the lack of planning and the growing problems with Baluchi marauders and dying baggage camels. He was also worried by the slow response from his future subjects to his letters entreating them to rally to his standard. Ever since Macnaghten had informed him of the plan to reinstate him, Shuja had been engaged in an energetic correspondence with the different tribal leaders of his old dominions, inviting them ‘in accordance with their family traditions to come forward and offer allegiance, and have their ancient rights and lands confirmed in perpetuity’. But the response had been a deafening silence, except from some of the Ghilzai and the Khyber chiefs, who had replied asking him to send money.
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There was also an ominous silence from the leader whose territory the army was now heading into – Mehrab Khan of Qalat. In the past the Khan of Qalat had been a fairly loyal follower of Shuja and had given him shelter after he fled from his defeat in Kandahar five years earlier. But he strongly disapproved of Shuja returning to power as the puppet of the British. When Burnes was sent to try and win him over – and to try and procure 10,000 sheep for the troops who had now been put on half-rations – Mehrab Khan was frank in declaring that he regarded the policy as tactless, ill planned and strategically wrong-headed. ‘The Khan, with a good deal of earnestness, enlarged upon the undertaking the British had embarked in, and declared it to be one of vast magnitude and difficult accomplishment,’ reported Burnes.

He said that instead of relying on the Afghan nation, our Government had cast them aside, and inundated the country with foreign troops; and that if it was our end to establish ourselves in Afghanistan, and give Shah Shuja the nominal sovereignty of Kabul and Kandahar, we were pursuing an erroneous course; that all the Afghans were discontented with the Shah, and all Mahometans alarmed and excited at what was passing; that we might find ourselves awkwardly situated if we did not point out to Shah Shuja his errors; and that the Chief of Kabul (Dost Mohammad) was a man of ability and resource, and though we could easily replace him by Shah Shuja even in our present mode of procedure, we could never win over the Afghan nation.
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It was wise advice. As Burnes prepared to return to his army, having failed to procure any of the supplies he needed, or even the most tenuous support of Mehrab Khan, his host was no less prescient in his final warning. ‘You have brought an army into the country,’ he said. ‘But how do you propose to take it out again?’
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From the blinding white salt marshes of Dadur, the shimmering heat haze of the desert flatlands slowly gave way to rolling foothills. These in turn scrolled up to the silvery outlines of dragons’-backs rising in the distance from a summer dust storm: the great mountains of southern Afghanistan. The country remained burned out and ash-coloured, and as arid as before, but the gradient became increasingly steep and tortuous until the gaping funnel of the Bolan Pass suddenly opened blackly in front of the troops.

For the first four of the pass’s seventy miles, the enfilade was so narrow that only a single camel could advance at a time. Now, as the feet of the cavalry clattered uneasily over the rockfalls blocking the dry riverbed, the errors of the commanders began to multiply the casualties: the stifling winter uniforms of the infantry were far too hot for a steep ascent in baking summer temperatures, and even if the vertical cliff walls initially shielded the sepoys from the direct rays of the sun, the rocks reflected the heat into their faces like an open tandoor. By day, the thermometers in the airless tents registered 119 degrees.