Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (44 page)

Burnes was also keen on marginalising Shuja and reforming his corrupt government. In August 1840, just before the surrender of Dost Mohammad, he had written Macnaghten a long memo expressing his view that the Shah’s government was inefficient, unpopular and expensive, and that greater British interference in the administration was the only way to save the regime. He was not personally in favour of full annexation, and he was clear ‘that we shall never settle Afghanistan at the point of a bayonet’, but he noted that many of his colleagues were now coming to believe the best solution was to annex both the Punjab and Afghanistan into the Company Raj.
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In his private correspondence Burnes was more scathing, and pointed the finger of blame at Auckland and Macnaghten. ‘There is nothing here but downright imbecility,’ he wrote to his brother-in-law Holland.
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‘We are in possession of the cities,’ he told his elder brother around the same time, ‘but have not got the country or the [support of the] people, and have as yet done nothing liberally to consolidate Afghanistan. Lord A has it in his power to take Peshawar and Herat now and restore the Monarchy, enable it to pay itself and relieve India from all expenses, but he will do nothing.
Après moi le déluge
is his motto. He wishes to get home, but is afraid of what he has already done.’
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Macnaghten, meanwhile, was pursuing a third approach: he was still toying with the idea of actually bolstering Shuja’s power, possibly just to irritate Burnes, but like his deputy wanted to expand the regime’s frontiers and to attack Herat, believing, correctly, that Yar Mohammad was encouraging the tribes to rise up against the British. He also wished to annex and ‘macadamise’ the Punjab, as well as to advance north beyond Bamiyan and annex the Uzbek territories of the Mir Wali, so as to fix Shuja’s frontier on the banks of the Oxus, ready to face any Russian advance out of Central Asia.
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But against all these ambitious schemes for bringing in more soldiers and hugely extending British control, there stood the unassailable fact of a now almost completely drained treasury in Calcutta. Occupying Afghanistan is always a very expensive business, and by 1841 the combined expenses of the occupation were amounting to a colossal £2 million a year, many times what had initially been expected, and far more than the profits of the East India Company’s opium and tea trade could support.

By February 1841, the head of the accounts department working on the figures in Calcutta was forced to write to Auckland and break the news that ‘ere six months elapse, the treasures of India will be completely exhausted’.
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By March, the full scale of the problem was dawning on Auckland. ‘Money, money, money is our first, our second and our last want,’ he wrote to Macnaghten. ‘How long we can continue to feed you at your present rate of expenditure I cannot tell. To add to the weight would break us utterly.’

Once the accounts had been passed to the Commander-in-Chief, Sir John Keane, he was equally depressed. ‘We are clearly in a great scrape,’ he noted in his diary on 26 March 1841. ‘That country drains us of a million a year or more – and we only, in truth, are certain of the allegiance of the people within range of our guns and cavalry . . . The whole thing will break down; we cannot afford the heavy yet increasing drain upon us in troops and money.’ A few days later he added, ‘it will never do to have India drained of a million and a quarter annually [the real figure was actually much higher] for a rocky frontier, requiring about 25,000 men and expensive establishments to hold it’.
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Yet while policy was in confusion, and money was running out, on the ground the occupation was becoming daily entrenched, with the first and toughest of the memsahibs making the now dangerous journey through the Punjab to the Kabul cantonment. These first arrivals included Macnaghten’s socially ambitious wife Frances, along with her cat and parakeet and five attendant ayahs. This at least provided some relief to the Eden sisters, who had been trying to avoid her company ever since her husband had left her with them in Simla. Then there was Florentia Sale, the indomitable Indian-born wife of ‘Fighting Bob’, who arrived in the summer of 1841 with a grand piano and her winsome youngest daughter, Alexandrina.

Not everyone was delighted by the arrival of the women. John Magrath, the grumpy cantonment surgeon, thought Ladies Sale and Macnaghten were ‘both equally vulgar and equally scandalous’ (without, sadly, giving more details), and was also dismissive of Lady Macnaghten’s abysmal household skills. ‘I dined at the Macnaghtens’ some days ago,’ he wrote in May 1841, ‘and got a wretched dinner for my trouble of riding six miles for it.’ Alexandrina Sale, he added, was ‘ignorant and illiterate’, though he conceded that she was at least said to be ‘good tempered’.

Despite her alleged illiteracy, Alexandrina was soon being courted by half the officers in the cantonment. This Magrath put down to her ‘being the only spinster here and . . . determined to get married . . . One thing in her favour is that she could not lose by comparison.’
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Lady Sale disapproved of most of her daughter’s suitors with their sweet nothings – ‘Fair words butter no parsnips,’ she was fond of observing – but she liked the handsome Lieutenant John Sturt, the engineer who had designed the indefensible barracks, and before long Sturt was widely judged to be well ahead of the pack, much to the envy of his single colleagues.

Lady Sale had had the foresight to bring enough seeds from her garden in Karnal to fill her Kabul borders with English blooms. ‘I have cultivated flowers that are the admiration of the Afghan gentlemen,’ she was writing before long. ‘My sweet peas and geraniums are much admired and they were all eager to obtain the seed of the edible pea, which flourished well. In the kitchen garden the potatoes especially thrive.’
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It was not just the memsahibs who arrived at this time. Seeing Macnaghten reunited with his wife, Shuja now decided to bring his blind brother Shah Zaman and both their harems up from Ludhiana. This was presumably partly because he was missing them, but also because he must have calculated that it was important to move them before the Punjab got any more dangerous, or even closed completely, so cutting him off from his family.

Two young Scottish officers were deputed to the job of escorting the harems from Ludhiana to Kabul, a journey which in calmer times could have been easily accomplished in two to three weeks but which now, with the Khalsa in disarray and with many of its regiments in a state of open mutiny, was a hazardous and uncertain undertaking. To make the commission more difficult still, Shuja decided to send along with his women much of his savings and his celebrated box of Mughal jewels, and word of this soon leaked out.

George Broadfoot, who was put in charge of the caravan, was a practical, red-haired Orcadian giant whose father was the minister of St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall. He was assisted by his friend, the dashingly moustachioed Colin Mackenzie, originally from Perthshire, who was renowned as the most handsome young officer in the Indian army. Soon after his arrival in Calcutta, Mackenzie had won the hand of the town’s most celebrated beauty, Adeline Pattle, one of six sisters of mixed English, Bengali and French extraction, who had inherited the dazzling dark eyes and skin of their Chandernagore grandmother. The sisters had been brought up between Bengal and Versailles, where their French grandfather, the Chevalier de L’Etang, had been a page to Marie Antoinette, and they spoke Hindustani, Bengali and French among themselves. One of Adeline’s younger sisters married Lord Auckland’s adviser Henry Thoby Prinsep, which – even though Emily Eden described Prinsep as ‘the greatest bore Providence ever created’ – meant that Mackenzie had a direct link over Elphinstone and Macnaghten’s head into Lord Auckland’s council, something that would later prove extremely useful.

From their barracks at Aligarh, the two men made their way to Shah Shuja’s harem via the Taj Mahal and a stop to hunt cheetah in the jungles near Mathura. On arrival in Ludhiana they found that the caravan now consisted of ‘the old blind Shah Zaman, a host of shahzadas [princes], and a huge number of ladies of all ranks and ages, [around] 600 from the [two] zenanas [women’s quarters], with numerous attendants, together with a large amount of treasure and baggage’. In all, it made up a party of nearly 6,000 people, which together with their baggage needed 15,000 camels to transport. Yet the two young officers expected to protect this temptingly valuable and vulnerable convoy with only 500 men. To make matters worse, at the Sikh border they were met by a further ‘escort of picked troops from the Sikh army; but these were affected by the spirit of mutiny then abroad, and were a source of danger rather than protection’, wrote Broadfoot. ‘The Punjab was verging towards anarchy when we started and daily got into greater confusion as we advanced. The Mutinous troops were moving in all directions towards Lahore, and occasionally crossed our path. They had already murdered or expelled their officers before starting . . .’
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The caravan made slow progress, but by careful scouting and intelligence work, they managed to pass safely through the first two-thirds of the Sikh dominions.

Matters however took a more serious turn when they got news, just before crossing the Indus at Attock, that there had been a large-scale mutiny in Peshawar. Worse still, the four disaffected battalions – around 5,000 men – who had heard of their coming, were now blocking the road just ahead of them with all their artillery waiting in position, ‘and were intending to plunder the kafila’. To avoid having to fight on two fronts, Mackenzie broke the bridge of boats after crossing the Indus, so protecting them from their own Sikh escort. For the several days which followed there was a stand-off, until Broadfoot managed to lure the leaders of the mutineers into an ambush, and by holding them prisoner successfully negotiated a safe-passage. He then crossed around Peshawar, faced down a second stand-off with more mutinous border guards at Jamrud ‘who seized a lot of property and made an attempt of a search of the Begum’s palkees [litters]’, and eventually mounted the Khyber Pass – all without firing a shot.
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As they moved on through Jalalabad towards Kabul, both men were appalled by the state of Afghanistan, which they immediately realised was on the verge of breaking out into a major uprising. Broadfoot quickly saw how unpopular the British had become and that the existing garrison was now wholly inadequate to hold the country. ‘The army of occupation was reduced in numbers,’ he wrote, ‘part of it having been sent back to India, while what remained, instead of being concentrated in one or two important places, was scattered in small bodies over a vast country.’
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Broadfoot was also horrified by the sheer lack of knowledge displayed by the British about the Afghanistan they were trying to rule. ‘Our apathy in this respect is disgraceful,’ he exclaimed,

and so is our ignorance of the institutions and manners of the country. When a country is invaded, its resources are always used by the conquering army, the leader of which assumes the government. Lord Wellington administered the civil government of the South of France, collecting the revenues and appointing every functionary. After four years of occupation we are as little prepared to do that effectually here as in 1838; less so, for the desire to learn is diminished, as all think we are soon to quit the country . . . To acquire accurate information of the real resources of the country, the modes of collection, and the rights of the various classes in relation to the State and to each other, never seems to have been thought necessary . . . Consequently, we fail from our ignorance.
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Soon after their arrival in Kabul, the two officers were invited to meet Macnaghten and Burnes, and they told them something of their impressions. But ‘the Envoy took no notice of any of these warnings’, wrote Mackenzie, ‘and Burnes did not like to interfere further: his views were, except in the details, those of Macnaghten, and he was nearly as blind as to what was passing around him’.
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Instead, Macnaghten, ever keen on ceremonial, organised for them to be accorded a grand Bala Hisar reception by Shuja, who he said wished to thank them for safely bringing in his women and treasure, and to present them both with ‘a horse, a sword and a dress of honour’.
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Mackenzie was appalled by the whole farce, and wrote to his in-laws in Calcutta telling Thoby Prinsep that he believed the occupation in its current form was now untenable and that the whole situation was most ‘alarming . . . our gallant fellows in Afghanistan must be immediately reinforced, or they will perish’.
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While waiting for his begums to arrive, Shah Shuja had decided to turn his charm on another young woman. ‘Most sacred Queen, whose banner is the Sun,’ wrote Shuja to Queen Victoria around this time. ‘My Kind and Illustrious Sister, may the Almighty God preserve her! I had the pleasure to receive the congratulatory letter which Your Majesty, out of the excess of your kindness and friendship, wrote me conveying the joyful accounts of your health and prosperity. This caused the garden of affection to bring forth an increase of excellent fruit.’

Never had the Shah felt such fondness for Britain, he wrote, than when he received the Queen’s letter: ‘At that moment the variegated and perfumed roses of concord, and the odoriferous flowers of love, were blossoming and smiling in the parterre of my affectionate heart.’ He went on to tell the Queen what an admirer she now had on the throne of Kabul, and how much he loved her ‘mind resplendent as the Sun, the Mighty Majesty exalted as the Heavens, high as the moon, wise as Mercury, joyful as Venus whose standard is the Sun, fortunate as Jupiter of whom Mars is the Hand, Glorious as Saturn, the ornament of the Hall of Justice and Victory, the splendour of the throne of equity and protection, the brilliant full moon of the Heaven of exaltation and fame, and the Shining Star of sovereignty and fortune’.
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