Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (29 page)

The roads, which had not been properly surveyed or improved by the military engineers, were almost impossible to move artillery along. At first eight horses had to be attached to each gun, as well as lines of sepoys with drag ropes. Then as it grew steeper and stonier, the guns had to be dismantled and carried through by hand: ‘each gun, each tumbril, wagon &c was to be separately
handed
down by manual labour,’ recorded Major William Hough. ‘The ascent was so steep that some did not like to ride up it. A few camels fell and stopped the rest behind . . . The baggage was attacked with considerable spirit [by the Baluchis] at the head of the Pass; 49 camel loads of grain were carried off . . . [The rearguard] found on the road the mutilated bodies of many camp followers.’
34

At night, the air was filled with the bedlam moans of dying camels and camp followers. Many sepoys also collapsed, sucking at the thin, dry, hot air, calling for water, only to be told that there was none. In addition to everything else, ‘the stench of the dead camels rendered our lives intolerable’, wrote Seaton. ‘I cannot describe our sufferings from the heat, the dust, the desert wind, the myriad of flies. The whole camp smelled like a charnel house. No person could take three steps in camp, anywhere, without seeing a dead or dying man or animal.’
35

Lack of provisions meant that the soldiers’ food had now to be cut from half- to quarter-rations. The camp followers were reduced to eating ‘the fried skins of sheep, the congealed blood of animals, and such roots as they could pick up in the neighbourhood’.
36
Random incidents of savage violence continued to unnerve everyone. On 3 April William Hough recorded in his diary: ‘Two Serjts. Of Arty. trepanned while out shooting, and mutilated while in the act of giving a pinch of snuff.’
37
Horses too weak to continue had to be shot in large numbers, while much baggage had to be abandoned and burned to prevent it falling into the hands of the Baluch.
38

‘It was the mouth of hell,’ remembered the sepoy Sita Ram.

The water in the few wells was bitter and everything, even the firewood, had to be transported by camels. The Baluchis now began to harass us by night attacks and drove off long strings of our camels. The heat was such that many died from the effects – one day thirty-five fell victim to it. At this stage the sepoys of the Company army had almost determined to return to India and there were signs of mutiny in several of the regiments. However, partly on account of the lavish promises of Shah Shuja, and partly for fear of the Baluchis who grew in number every day, the armies marched on. Many people were killed by the tribesmen. They murdered everyone whenever they had the opportunity and rolled large boulders down the mountain sides.
39

Mirza ‘Ata wrote that the entourage of Shah Shuja also felt lucky to make it through alive, as they dodged the bullets raining down on the column from Baluch snipers sheltering in the faults and crevices of the rocks above. ‘The army entered the defiles of the Bolan Pass,’ he wrote.

The pass was rugged and stony, ringed with mountain peaks scraping the sky: the army gazed in dismay, and the Baluch mountain tribesmen did not delay to snipe and plunder. Thousands of pack-animals, camels, horses, elephants and their loads were lost.

Crossing the pass was extremely difficult: already two months earlier the English had sent two cannons and thousands of donkey-loads of gun-powder to the pass in order to clear the route, and had had to drag them up one by one with ropes; other supplies were transported with similar difficulty, at the cost of losing a great number of camels, horses, bullocks, as well as soldiers who died from lack of water and food – not to mention the military equipment that was plundered. In that waterless hellish defile they spent three days and nights, and supplies were so scarce that half a seer of flour could not be had even for a gold rupee.
40

For his part, Shuja wrote to Wade from the pass that he intended to punish the tribesmen of the area ‘for their criminal attitude, at a proper time’. He also wrote that he was anxious that ‘the usurpers’ were using scholars and the ‘ulema to turn the people against him ‘and raise disturbances’.
41
He was right to be worried: his association with the hated Firangi infidels would remain his most vulnerable point. Religious xenophobia was always the most powerful weapon in the armoury of his Barakzai rivals.

Beyond the Bolan lay Quetta, then ‘only a miserable village of some 500 houses’. After that lay a second difficult pass, the Khojak, which was shorter and less steep than the Bolan, but even more arid. ‘They passed the night without water,’ remembered Mirza ‘Ata. ‘What water they could find was filthy and putrid with the bodies of dead animals that had fallen in, and any who drank of it immediately had stomach cramps and diarrhoea. They were suffering so much from lack of water that for two days humans and animals all were shaking like willows.’
42
Food had by this stage almost completely run out among the camp followers: some ‘were to be seen gouging carrion and picking grains of corn from the excrements of animals’, reported one officer. ‘I saw one day the body of a man who had died by the way side in the act of gnawing gristle from the carcass of a dead bullock.’
43
Before the army had fought a single Afghan it was already a wreck.

But there was relief ahead. On the far side of the Khojak, the invading army found itself in rolling pastureland where the scrub grass was dotted with clumps of dwarf oak and ilex. Occasional herds of fat-tailed sheep and shaggy brown goats belonging to Kuchi nomads were watched over by tall men in white turbans and purple robes, huge mastiffs at their heels. It was still arid and there was still a hot wind blowing, but wherever there was water a cool shade could be found behind the screens of poplar, some of which had vines entwined up their trunks.
r

The army had now crossed an invisible border out of Baluch territory and into the lands of the Pashtuns. After the furtive Baluch brigands, Nott was impressed by the fearlessness of the Achakzai tribesmen, who strode proudly and proprietorially into the British camp and began interrogating their would-be colonisers. ‘They are very fine looking fellows indeed,’ wrote Nott to his daughters. ‘Quite the gentlemen.’ When one Afghan asked him why the British had come, Nott replied that Shah Shuja had returned to claim his rightful inheritance and that Dost Mohammad had no right to the throne. The Afghan retorted: ‘What right have you to Benares and Delhi? Why, the same right that our Dost Mahomed has to Kabul, and he will keep it.’ After this encounter, Nott grew increasingly sceptical about the reception Shah Shuja would receive. ‘I differ from the government and the others, and I really believe that the people of Afghanistan will not give up their country without fighting for it,’ he observed. ‘I know I would not, were I in their situation.’
44

Other officers had similar conversations. Lieutenant Thomas Gaisford’s Indian orderly was asked by one Pashtun visitor to the camp, ‘“Do they really call these Feringhees, ‘Sahibs’ [Sir]?” The inquirer asked in such a way as if he thought “Dog of an Infidel” might have been a more appropriate appellation.’
45
‘We fell in with a well-dressed Afghan horseman,’ wrote George Lawrence, a bright young Ulsterman whom Macnaghten had just promoted to be his military secretary. ‘He told me he had visited our camp, and seen our troopers, saying with much contempt, “You are an army of tents and camels: our army is one of horses and men.” “What can induce you”, he added, “to squander crores of rupees in coming to a poor rocky country like ours, without wood or water, and all in order to force upon us a
kumbukht
[an unlucky rascal] as a king, who the moment you turn your backs, will be upset by Dost Mohammad, our
own
king?”’
46
In time the horseman’s predictions would prove quite correct and when the rebellion did break out, it would be Achakzais from this region who would be in the vanguard.

Nott may have been impressed with the Afghans, but he was less taken with his own colleagues. It was around this time that the Commander-in-Chief Sir John Keane arrived in the camp and decided to promote General Willshire, a Queen’s officer, over the much more senior and experienced Nott, so giving Willshire command of the whole of the Company’s Bombay sepoy infantry. Though he had long suspected something of the sort would happen, and was inured by now to being passed over on account of his humble origins and the lack of prestige of the Company regiments relative to those of the regular army, Nott was still furious. He immediately confronted the Commander-in-Chief in his tent. The interview was very short, and went very badly:

‘I see I am to be sacrificed because I happen to be senior to the Queen’s officers,’ said Nott.

‘Ill impression Sir!’ replied Keane. ‘You insult my authority. I will never forgive your conduct as long as I live!’

‘Your Excellency, since that is the case, I have only to wish you a very good evening.’
47

The fight would cost Nott dear. Although he was by far the most popular, able and experienced general in the Army of the Indus, from this point on he came to have a reputation for being cantankerous with his superiors, and Auckland as well as Keane now believed him to be too difficult and undiplomatic ever to take full command. It was an impression that would lead to a further series of disastrous appointments, with Nott being passed over time and time again in favour of much less able men – something which would before long have fatal consequences for the occupation.

The Army of the Indus was now closing in on its first serious challenge: Kandahar. There were rumours that Barakzai cavalry units were in the vicinity, circling the army, ready to strike, and one night there was a false report of an imminent attack which caused the sleeping soldiers to rise in alarm from their tents and form up into defensive squares. They stayed there, muskets to the ready, until the break of dawn. Only the night-time diversion of a stream that was watering the camp, and the mysterious disappearance of Macnaghten’s two elephants, indicated that there were still unseen hostile forces round about, waiting for their opportunity.

It was just as well for the invaders that the Afghans did not attack with full force for the army was more or less broken by the journey they had just undergone through the passes. ‘We were at this time utterly unfit for active warfare,’ noted Thomas Gaisford in his journal. ‘Every man was greatly in need of repose and the horses could scarcely have crawled another march. As for the followers they were nearly starved. Our Commissariat supplies were quite exhausted. Indeed we were in a sorry plight for an advancing army.’
48

Then around 10 a.m. on 20 April, the Army of the Indus had its first real break. A messenger arrived at the tent of Burnes’s intelligence chief, Mohan Lal Kashmiri, announcing that one of Dost Mohammad’s most prominent nobles was waiting beyond the camp with 200 followers, ready to offer his allegiance to Shah Shuja.
49
At last one of the letters sent by the Shah had borne fruit.
50
Mohan Lal was sent out to escort the nobleman in and to conduct him to the tent of the Shah.

Haji Khan Kakar was a slippery, ambitious and unscrupulous figure even by the standards of nineteenth-century Afghan power politics. His ancestors had long played the role of regional power-brokers and king-makers. Having risen in the service of Dost Mohammad, who had appointed him first governor of Bamiyan and then commander of his elite cavalry, he had already twice deserted the Amir, most recently at the Battle of Jamrud in 1837. But he always played his hand with skill. He managed to choose his moment of side-changing with perfect timing, rising in power and importance with each successive act of treachery. Maulana Hamid Kashmiri, in the
Akbarnama
, describes him as ‘the outsider, the traitor, the master of betrayal’ who would use charm and flattery to achieve his duplicitous ends, ‘mixing poison in sugar’. Now, at this crucial juncture, on the excuse of leading a raid on the British camp, he took the opportunity to cross sides with all his followers, hoping to make his fortune from the rich and naive foreigners, and to take up Shuja’s written offer of a senior place in his government. In the process, he began a haemorrhage of defections and broke the already wavering morale of Kandahar’s defenders.

Unaware of the wrecked and starved state of the invading army, in the four days that followed an ever-growing number of Kandahari noblemen crossed the lines into Shuja’s camp and offered their fealty to the returning King. For Shuja it was the miracle he had almost despaired of ever seeing take place. For Dost Mohammad’s two Barakzai half-brothers in Kandahar, there was nothing to be done but watch the defections with growing despair:

In disarray, like maddened elephants

They were tormented by boundless rage

Those two fierce lions, all they wanted

Was to unsheathe the sword of revenge and enmity

But they lacked friends and their army was too small

After the treachery of Haji Kakar