Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (31 page)

Before long orders had gone out that no sepoys or British troops could stray out of the camp ‘unless going in a body and well armed’.
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It was a ruling that would never be lifted for the rest of the occupation. For all their claims to be restoring peace to Afghanistan, and to be there at the invitation of the lawful sovereign of the country, the British were under no illusions as to how unpopular they were, and knew that the minute they stepped outside their heavily guarded cantonments they were likely to have their throats cut.

It was in response to this crescendo of attacks that Lord Auckland now took the fatal step of deciding to keep British troops in Afghanistan after Shah Shuja had been re-established on his throne, writing to London that ‘we must for a time be prepared to support the Shah where we have placed him’.
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While Shah Shuja was being installed in Kandahar, Wade and Prince Timur were making rather less progress in Peshawar. Despite Wade’s disbursement of over 50,000 rupees in bribes, there was no sign that the Khyber tribes were ready to let Shuja’s forces through. Still less were they willing to perform any of the acts of subterfuge suggested by Wade such as seizing the fort of Ali Masjid just below the top of the pass or ‘invading and taking possession of Jalalabad and destroying and plundering the property’ of the Barakzais there.
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One chief replied bluntly that now that the Shah had become the friend of the infidels, ‘he would fight for the sake of his religion even if all the Barakzais were exterminated’.
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Like Mehrab Khan of Qalat, the Afridis and the other frontier tribes had been loyal followers of Shuja and repeatedly protected him at the lowest ebb of his fortunes; at least one – Khan Bahadur Khan of the Malikdin Khel tribe – was closely related to Shuja by marriage. But all were suspicious of his new alliance with the infidel Sikhs and British. This was something Dost Mohammad successfully played on, sending messages to each that ‘if you want more money say so, but remember that you are an Afghan and a Muslim and that the Shah is now a servant of the Kafir infidels’.
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In case the call to blood and faith was not enough, Dost Mohammad had been careful to ensure the chiefs’ loyalty by taking hostages from all the leading maliks, and these he carefully kept at his side in Kabul.

It did not help that Prince Timur was far from a charismatic figure. The nervous and ineffectual Crown Prince was meant to act as a lure for the Khyber chiefs. But Timur was not a natural leader – his portrait shows him to be a slight and anxious-looking man – and his stumbling performance at the durbar Wade had laid on to introduce him to Peshawar did not bode well. ‘On entering the Durbar tent,’ wrote one observer, ‘we found the poor Shahzada, unaccustomed to the royal part he was henceforth to play, standing to do the honours . . . On a motion from the Colonel [Wade] he instantly rectified it by popping with much alacrity on his gadi or throne.’ But he soon lost interest, sitting ‘with a listless indifference to his situation and an unyielding apathy to everything around him . . . Only recently drawn from comparative obscurity, and unaccustomed to the gaze of strangers, he seemed ill at ease with this public exhibition of his greatness, and was clearly glad when the ceremony was concluded.’
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Nor was there any sign as yet of the Sikh forces Ranjit Singh had promised for the invasion. For the previous two months it had been clear that once Lord Auckland had disappeared back to Simla, the wily Maharajah was doing all he could to drag his feet rather than provide the troops or supplies he had pledged. On 19 March 1839, Wade wrote to the Maharajah regretting ‘that the appointment of the Muslim army and a Muslim Commander has not yet been made’, and asking him ‘to give immediate attention to the matter’.
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Two days later he wrote again to point out that it was now four months since the Army of the Indus had left Ferozepur and only the household troops of two of Ranjit Singh’s nobles had so far reported for duty.
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A stream of other complaints followed as spring turned to high summer: Sikh officials on the Indus at Attock were not co-operating in getting Prince Timur’s forces ferried across; other officials were failing to provide soldiers, shelter, fodder or food supplies; troops had still not arrived – ‘the services of Muslim soldiers are urgently required’, wrote Wade, again and again. A month later he complained that ‘the army appointed at Peshawar was in great trouble as the salaries of the soldiers have not been paid . . . the recruitment of the army, according to the agreement, has not been completed as yet’.
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Only at the end of April were orders finally despatched to General Avitabile, Ranjit’s Governor in Peshawar, to organise a regiment of local Muslims to assist with the invasion.
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By mid-May, when Shah Shuja and the main army were already gorging on the peaches, apricots and apples of Kandahar, only one battalion of irregular cavalry – around 650 sowars [cavalrymen] – had yet turned up in Peshawar.
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Throughout May, as the Khyber chiefs sent down further requests for advance presents and payments – ‘I have been successful winning over the people of my hills,’ wrote one chief, ‘and Rs 20,000 will now be required’ – Ranjit sent a message to the now frantic Wade, telling him that there was no hurry and could he come back to Lahore for further consultations about the planned attack?
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A month later, Wade received worse news still: Ranjit Singh had taken to his bed ‘after a fainting fit’; he died on 27 June, at the age of fifty-eight. His last act was to make a series of huge charitable disbursements. ‘Two hours before he died he sent for all his jewels,’ reported William Osborne, ‘and gave the famous diamond called the Mountain of Light to a temple, his celebrated string of pearls to another, and his favourite horses, with all their jewelled trappings, to a third. His four wives, all very handsome, burnt themselves with his body, as did five of his Cashmerian slave girls . . . Everything was done to prevent it, but in vain . . .’
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In Simla, Emily Eden, who had been celebrating the taking of Kandahar – ‘Our ball tomorrow will be very gay, and I have just arranged to stick up a large “Kandahar” opposite the other illuminations’ – was now horrified by the fate of the ‘Mrs Runjeets’ she had visited only a few months earlier. ‘We thought them so beautiful and so merry,’ she wrote. ‘The deaths of those poor women is so melancholy, they were such gay young creatures, and they died with the most obstinate courage.’ She added: ‘I begin to think that the “hundred wife system” is better than the mere one wife rule; they are more attached and faithful.’
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It was Wade who immediately realised the much more serious implication for the invasion of Afghanistan. If it had been difficult to gather the promised army when Ranjit Singh was alive, it was going to be next to impossible now he was gone: few of Ranjit’s noblemen had shared his enthusiasm for an alliance with the British, and with the succession disputed and a civil war potentially looming, it was likely to be some time before British diplomacy could be brought to bear on whoever finally succeeded the dead Maharajah.

More serious still were the implications for feeding and supplying the Army of the Indus: what chance would there be of sending food, arms, money and reinforcements into Afghanistan when disorders looked almost certain to engulf the Punjab plains separating the invading army from its supply base in British India? Already isolated, the Army of the Indus was now looking increasingly cut off, with the Punjab closing up behind it. Meanwhile, the army was marching ever deeper into the mountains of Central Asia, with ever longer and more vulnerable supply routes, and beyond any easy assistance should anything go wrong.

A difficult expedition, whose success was far from assured, had just become much more difficult.

The same day that Ranjit Singh was dying in Lahore – 27 June 1839 – the Army of the Indus resumed its march from Kandahar towards Kabul.

The force was now split into three units and moved steadily forward at around ten miles a day. This was a little faster than before due to Keane’s decision to leave the vast siege guns that had caused such trouble in the passes. He took this decision having been advised that the fortifications of Ghazni and Kabul were not especially formidable and having been assured by Shuja that his Popalzai clansmen would seize control and open the gates of Ghazni when the army arrived there. In Kandahar a garrison of 3,000 men was left behind under the nominal sovereignty of one of Shuja’s younger sons, Prince Fatteh Jang, and under the actual military control of Major-General Nott. Most of the Durrani nobles who had just sworn their allegiance to Shuja also chose to stay; only Haji Khan, ambitious for promotion, chose to accompany the army.

The two-month break in Kandahar had been brought to a close after worrying intelligence had arrived from both Herat in the west and Ghazni to the east. In Herat, the Wazir Yar Mohammad Alikozai was not showing the gratitude that the British had expected him to demonstrate for their part in ending the terrible Persian assault on his city. Instead, within weeks of the Persian retreat, he had quarrelled with the British envoy, Eldred Pottinger, who had just spent £30,000 in charitable disbursements in the city, cut the hand off one of Pottinger’s servants and attempted to have the envoy himself assassinated. The Wazir had then opened secret negotiations with Mohammad Shah of Persia whose armies had until recently been encamped before his city, declaring, ‘I swear to God that I prefer the fury of the King of Kings [the Shah] to the kindliness of a million of the English.’
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Macnaghten was uncertain if the fault for the breakdown in relations lay with Yar Mohammad or with the inexperienced Pottinger, so he decided to despatch an embassy to try to win back Herat. Macnaghten asked Burnes to lead this mission, but the latter shrewdly declined, wanting to be around in Kabul ready to step in and replace Macnaghten when the latter returned and suspecting – rightly as it turned out – that the mission to Herat was unlikely to succeed. So Macnaghten sent in his place the Persian-speaking D’Arcy Todd, a former colleague of Henry Rawlinson in the British military mission to Teheran. ‘Young Pottinger allowed himself to be apologised to for their threatening to murder him,’ wrote Burnes to a friend. ‘Major Todd starts tomorrow for Herat, and I predict can do nothing, for nothing is to be done with them.’
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Todd’s orders were simple: to befriend Yar Mohammad and turn Herat into a pro-British ally on the Persian border, and to settle the frontier with Shah Shuja’s dominions. But instead, before long, Todd was writing back in horror at the ‘arbitrary and oppressive exactions’ being committed by Yar Mohammad, Britain’s nominal ally, in his efforts to restore the Herat treasury:

The person selected was generally a Khan who had enjoyed favour and was therefore supposed to possess wealth, or an executioner convicted of amassing wealth in the non-performance of his duties. The culprit was then put to the torture, the commonest method being by boiling or roasting or baking over a slow fire. The horrible ingenuities practised on these occasions are too disgusting to be more than alluded to. The wretch, writhing in agony, gradually disgorged his wealth and learned before he died that his wives and daughters had been sold to the Turkomans, or divided amongst the sweepers and servants of his murderers. Of two recent victims one was half-roasted and then cut into very small pieces, the other parboiled and afterwards baked.
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Herat presented the British with a dilemma they would become increasingly familiar with during the occupation – and one that later colonisers of the region would also have to face: should you try to ‘promote the interests of humanity’, as Todd put it in one letter to Macnaghten, and champion social reform, banning traditions such as the stoning to death of adulterous women? Wade at the Intelligence Department was, for one, clear where he stood on the issue. The British were there for reasons of strategic self-interest. They were not there to nation-build or encourage gender reform. ‘There is nothing more to be dreaded or guarded against’, he wrote, ‘than the overweening confidence with which we are too often accustomed to regard the excellence of our own institutions, and the anxiety that we display to introduce them in new and untried soils. Such interference will always lead to acrimonious disputes, if not to a violent reaction.’
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Meanwhile, Wade’s spies in Kabul were reporting that Dost Mohammad was living up to his reputation for efficiency and had been energetically preparing for the British advance by building up his army and repairing the fortifications of Ghazni. He sent a mass of stores down the Kabul River to Jalalabad, and procured a fatwa of jihad against Shah Shuja from the ‘ulema of Kabul. He also wrote to Teheran to try to persuade Mohammad Shah to return to the field of battle, ‘urging his Majesty to assist him without delay’ and declaring that this was now the last opportunity he had before the British established themselves in Afghanistan. ‘The mouth of a fountain may in the beginning be stopped by a needle,’ he wrote, ‘but when it overflows even the elephant has not the power to arrest its course.’
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Intelligence of all this activity reached the British camp around 20 June and it was decided that the quicker Dost Mohammad was attacked the better.