Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (24 page)

Vitkevitch was on the verge of winning the contest for Kabul. On 23 March, Dost Mohammad went to see Burnes for the last time.
He had lost hope, he told his friend. ‘I wish no countenance but that of the English,’ said the Amir, ‘but you refuse all pledges and promises, and mean to do nothing for me.’
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Meanwhile, certainty was growing that the Persians and their Russian allies would soon take Herat and march on into Afghanistan; in response the ethnically Persian Qizilbash Shias of Kabul processed triumphantly through the Kabul streets with a new confidence. ‘An event’, wrote Burnes, ‘unknown to the eldest inhabitants, and which a short time since would have caused a religious tumult.’
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Finally, a month later, on 21 April, Dost Mohammad summoned Vitkevitch and had him escorted with a troop of his own cavalry through the streets of Kabul. He received him in the Bala Hisar with full honours. In formal durbar, while Burnes sat alone in his rooms on the other side of the palace complex, Vitkevitch told the Amir that Russia did not recognise the Sikh conquests in Afghan territory and that in the eyes of Russia Peshawar, Multan and Kashmir all still belonged de jure to Afghanistan. He said Russia wished to see a strong and united Afghanistan which Russia would protect diplomatically as an unbreakable barrier against British expansion into Central Asia. He admitted that Russia was too far away to despatch troops at short notice, but promised to give Dost Mohammad money to fight Ranjit Singh, and told him, according to Mohan Lal, much that was ‘anything but complimentary about the British’. He also promised that Russia would protect Afghan traders in Russia. In response, Dost Mohammad offered to send his son, Mohammad Azam Khan, to meet Count Simonitch at the Persian camp outside Herat and to confirm in person the Amir’s intentions of opening permanent friendly relations with Russia.

For Burnes it was all over: Vitkevitch had won. There was now no longer any point in the Scotsman prolonging his stay in Kabul. On 25 April he and Dost Mohammad exchanged sad notes of farewell to each other. The following morning Burnes, Mohan Lal and Masson rode out of Kabul. Masson wrote that the sudden departure of the British ‘partook a little of the nature of flight’, and Maulana Hamid Kashmiri in his
Akbarnama
actually has Burnes fleeing for his life
:

His cheeks became yellow like saffron

Inwardly he gave up his life

The Amir said: ‘Up and out with you! Fly from this place!

Set out on your journey with all haste

Lest in your greed for money and treasure

You get from me suffering and punishment

I fear that contrary to what one may think

Great affliction will fall upon you

I see it as very far from my principles

To kill someone after showing favour

I do not wish to lose my honour for gold

By handing a guest of mine over to another’

Sikandar [Burnes,] who had no hope of life

Could not have imagined such a deliverance

He set out from Kabul upon the road to Hind

Like a sheep running away from a roaring lion

Every step of the way he would look back

Lest the falcon should seize him again
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In reality, it was not quite as bad as Afghan hindsight remembered it. The British were escorted out of town by the Amir’s youngest son, Ghulam Haidar Khan, and as a last gesture of personal friendship Dost Mohammad sent Mirza Sami Khan with three stallions which reached the party at the village of Butkhak, twelve miles from Kabul. Burnes and Dost Mohammad would not meet again for another three years, and when they did so it would be under very different circumstances.

Before Jalalabad, Burnes boarded a raft which would take him down the Kabul River to Peshawar. By this stage Vitkevitch was already well on his way to Kandahar. This was the next stage in his mission where he was to negotiate a treaty with Dost Mohammad’s Barakzai half-brothers who, having been rejected by Auckland, had now also agreed to join Dost Mohammad, the Persians and the Russians in the siege of Herat.

Herat was Vitkevitch’s final Afghan destination. He was accompanied there by Barakzai princes from both Kabul and Kandahar, and was received in triumph in the Persian camp by Count Simonitch on 9 June. Vitkevitch had achieved more for Russia than any of his superiors had even dared hope. His triumph over Burnes and the British was total.
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Shortly afterwards the Shah of Persia invested him with Order of the Lion and the Sun.
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Burnes by then was back in Peshawar, awaiting further instructions. Meanwhile he vented his frustration to Major Holland. ‘The game is up,’ he wrote. ‘The Russians gave me the coup de grâce and I could hold no longer at Kabul so I have fallen back on Peshawar. Our government would do nothing and the Russian legation came down with the most direct offers of assistance and money, and as I had no power to counter act him by a similar offer I was obliged of course to give in.’
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His public letters to Simla were, however, more diplomatic. Burnes realised that ironically the failure of his mission meant that the need for an Afghan expert was now greater than ever. He knew that war with Kabul was now possible, perhaps even probable, and despite all his misgivings about the direction British policy was taking, he was sufficiently ambitious still to want to be at the helm of whatever it was that Lord Auckland now had planned.

Even before Burnes reached Peshawar, the wheels of the Company machine were cranking into action to demonise Dost Mohammad and punish him for what Auckland interpreted as his defiance. ‘Dost Mahomed Khan has shewn himself to be so disaffected and ambitious that with him we could form no satisfactory connection,’ Auckland reported, most inaccurately, to London.
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If the Amir would not co-operate with Auckland’s wishes, then he clearly needed to be replaced by Shah Shuja, who Auckland believed would be more reasonable and do as he was told. But exactly how this was to happen, and in what form, Auckland had yet to decide.

Auckland and his sisters had now arrived in Simla at the end of their Indian tour, and found it to be the first place in India that they really liked. ‘The climate is English and exhilarating,’ wrote Emily. ‘It really is worth all the trouble. Such a beautiful place . . . deep valleys on the drawing room side to the west, and the snowy range on the dining room side, where my room also is.’
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The existence of Simla was itself a comment on the astonishing complacency of the British in India at this period: for seven months of the year, the Company ruled one-fifth of mankind from a Himalayan village overlooking the borders of Tibet and connected to the outside world by a road little better than a goat path. Here, over the two decades since the area had been ‘discovered’ by Captain Charles Kennedy in 1822, the Company had begun building on a long, narrow, high-altitude Himalayan saddle a small fantasy England, a sort of early Victorian theme park of their own imagination, complete with Gothic churches, half-timbered cottages and Scots baronial mansions. Simla was all about homesickness and the nostalgia of the exile for home: it was an escape from the heat, but it was also, tacitly, an escape from India. As one disapproving official later put it, ‘Sedition, unrest and even murderous riots may have been going on elsewhere in India, but in Simla the burning questions are polo finals, racing and the all-absorbing cricket tournaments.’

Here, finally, Lord Auckland brought himself to focus on events in Afghanistan in a way he had not previously. For the past two months he had seriously underestimated the threat posed by Vitkevitch and the Russians; now, reading the latest intelligence from Peshawar and Herat, he was belatedly plunged into a state of high anxiety and began to swing instead towards a major overreaction. One reason for this was the arrival of a series of apocalyptic despatches from MacNeill outside Herat, who was just about to withdraw from the Persian camp in protest at the way the Shah was ignoring and humiliating him and his staff, much to the delight of Count Simonitch. Before breaking diplomatic relations with Persia, and retreating to Ottoman Turkey, he fired off a call to arms. ‘Lord Auckland should now take a decided course,’ he advised, ‘and declare that he who is not with us is against us, and shall be treated accordingly. If the Shah should take Herat we shall not have a moment to lose, and the stake will in my opinion be the highest we have yet played for . . . We must secure Afghanistan.’
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As a preliminary measure, Auckland ordered a naval flotilla to sail from Bombay to the Persian Gulf and occupy the island of Kharg off the coast southwest of Shiraz as a warning to the Shah. Then, while Emily organised amateur theatricals on one side of the drawing room – ‘six plays for the benefit of the starving people at Agra’ – on the other George turned his attentions to changing the ruler of Afghanistan.

His first hope was that Shah Shuja or Ranjit Singh would dispose of the troublesome Amir, so saving him the trouble of doing so. As Emily noted in a letter to her sister in England, ‘Whenever we want to frighten our neighbours into good conduct, we have one sure resource. We always have a large assortment of Pretenders in store. They have had their eyes put out, or their children are in hostage, or the usurper is their own brother, or they labour under sundry disadvantages of that sort. But still there they are, to the good. We have a Shah Shuja all ready to
lacher
himself at Dost Mohammed if he does not behave himself, and Ranjit is ready to join us in any enterprise of that sort . . .’
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In a letter to his masters in London Auckland put it more formally, writing that he was exploring the idea of ‘granting our aid, in concert with Ranjit Singh, to enable Shah Shuja ul-Mulk to re-establish his sovereignty in the Eastern division of Afghanistan, under engagements which shall conciliate the feelings of the Sikh ruler and bind the restored monarch to the support of our interests’.
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So it was, on 10 May, that Macnaghten was despatched down to Lahore along with Lord Auckland’s nephew and Military Secretary, Captain William Osborne, to sound out the Lion of the Punjab. Having learned the lesson not to economise on gifts, they carried a generous set of presents – ‘A sword, the workmanship of which is reported to have been of high merit, two horses agreeable to ride and of a much esteemed English breed and to these I have added two Pistols specially selected by the Commander-In-Chief and understood by him to be admired by Your Highness.’ For good measure, Auckland also sent several camel loads of alcohol for the bibulous Maharajah, who according to Emily ‘had requested George to send him samples of all the wines he had, which he did, but took the precaution of adding some whisky and cherry brandy, knowing what Ranjit Singh’s drinking habits are. The whisky he highly approved of, and he told Macnaghten that he could not understand why the Governor General gives himself the trouble of drinking seven or eight glasses of wine when one glass of whisky would do the same work.’
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Some of the crates were robbed en route by Punjabi footpads, along with an assortment of items from the bag of the assistant doctor accompanying the party: ‘The stomach pump was cut to pieces by the thieves – such a blessing for Ranjit’s courtiers,’ wrote Emily when she heard of the robbery. ‘He tries all medical experiments on the people about him. How they would have been pumped!’
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On 20 May, Macnaghten crossed into Sikh territory. Ranjit Singh, as was his custom, received the Embassy at his favourite summer palace at Adinagar. Osborne described how Ranjit received them:

cross-legged in a golden chair, dressed in simple white, wearing no ornaments but a single string of enormous pearls round the waist, and the celebrated Koh-i-Noor, on his arm – the jewel rivalled, if not surpassed, in brilliancy by the glance of fire which every now and then shot from his single eye as it wandered restlessly round the circle. On Ranjit sitting, his chiefs all squatted around his chair, with the exception of Dheean Singh [his eldest son] who remained standing behind his master. Though far removed from being handsome himself, Ranjit appears to take pride in being surrounded by good-looking people, and I believe few, if any other courts either in Europe or the East, could shew such a fine looking set of men as the principal Sikh sardars.

As was also Ranjit Singh’s custom, he then proceeded to interrogate his visitors: ‘Our time was principally occupied in answering Ranjit’s innumerable questions,’ wrote Osborne,

but without the slightest chance of satisfying his curiosity. It is hardly possible to give an idea of the ceaseless rapidity with which his questions flow, or the infinite variety they embrace: ‘Do you drink wine?’ ‘How much?’ ‘Did you taste the wine which I sent you yesterday?’ ‘How much of it did you drink?’ ‘What artillery have you brought with you?’ ‘Have they got any shells?’ ‘How many?’ ‘Do you like riding on horseback?’ ‘What country horses do you prefer?’ ‘Are you in the army?’ ‘What do you like best, cavalry or infantry?’ ‘Does Lord Auckland drink wine?’ ‘How many glasses?’ ‘Does he drink it in the morning?’ ‘What is the strength of the Company’s army?’ ‘Are they well disciplined?’ After passing upwards of an hour in conversation, Ranjit Singh rose, and, according to custom, having half smothered us with sandal-wood oil, embraced and allowed us to depart . . .
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