The Dark Defile (16 page)

However, Atkinson deplored the “most disgusting” public baths, dismissing the Afghans as “generally an exceedingly dirty people” with “a sort of hydrophobia, a horror of water in its capacity of cleansing the person.” He was also unimpressed by the people’s houses of timber and sun-dried brick: “The middle part of the city is a collection of dwellings, two and three stories high, with almost inaccessible zigzag streets and blind alleys, a black offensive gutter creeping down the centre of the greater part of them. Walls across, with gateways, are common in all the streets, so that, by closing the doors, the city is divided into numerous distinct quarters of defence. The roofs of the houses have commonly a parapet-wall round them, to allow the women of the family to take an airing unveiled, and they are generally also applied to the nastiest of purposes.” These warrenlike residential areas were known as
mahallas
, where a maze of narrow, winding, dead-end alleys, or
kuchas
, led to the individual houses, built like fortified dwellings with bare external walls, only one point of entry or exit and, at the heart, a secluded inner courtyard.

While his troops explored Kabul, Auckland was already planning their withdrawal. He had meant it when, in the Simla Manifesto, he had promised that as soon as Shah Shuja was back on his throne and “the independence and integrity of Afghanistan” established, the Army of the Indus would return to India. Two weeks after Shah Shuja’s delighted return to his palace within the Balla Hissar, Auckland—although still awaiting confirmation that the Army of the Indus had safely arrived in Kabul—was already writing to Macnaghten of his hopes for the speedy return of the regiments to India. In fact, Auckland intended to withdraw the entire Bombay contingent and some of the Bengal forces almost immediately, leaving only a single brigade as a token of British support for Shah Shuja.

Before Auckland’s letter reached Kabul in September, Sir John Keane had independently reached similar conclusions, that most of the British forces could return swiftly. However, as the weeks passed, those in Kabul came to see that this would be impossible. Among the reasons was the failure to capture Dost Mohammed as he fled toward the Hindu Kush. The force led by Captain James Outram that had set out in pursuit had been led on a wild goose chase by the Afghan chief Haji Khan Kakur, who had accompanied him in command of two thousand of the shah’s cavalry and was a supposedly knowledgeable guide. Haji Khan Kakur had, it seems, decided to keep his future options open by allowing Dost Mohammed sufficient time to disappear into the lands of the independent Uzbek tribes beyond the mountains. Outram wrote to Macnaghten that Haji Khan Kakur was guilty of “
either the grossest cowardice or the deepest treachery
” and clearly believed the latter. On 18 August Outram and his men returned crestfallen to Kabul, where Keane told the officers that “
he had not supposed there were thirteen such asses in his whole force!
” Haji Khan Kakur was accused of deliberate deceit and banished to India.

Initially Macnaghten and Keane were not especially concerned that Dost Mohammed was still at large. However, by September Dr. Percival Lord—Burnes’s erstwhile traveling companion, who had been dispatched north toward the Hindu Kush as a political officer to gather intelligence—was sending alarming reports that the emir was attempting to raise the tribes beyond the Hindu Kush to fight on his behalf. As a precaution Keane, to whom Auckland had given authority to vary troop dispositions, decided after discussion with Macnaghten to retain the principal portion of the Bengal division in Afghanistan under Sir Willoughby Cotton. The decision disappointed many of the officers who were eager to leave a place where, as shown by the exorbitant prices realized at an auction of the possessions of a deceased brigadier, seeming necessities such as wine and cigars were scarce.

Before any troops departed, a bizarre ceremony was enacted. Macnaghten had persuaded Shah Shuja to inaugurate the Order of the Douranee Empire, after the name by which the Afghan Empire had been known in its heyday under Shah Shuja’s forebears. An earlier idea had been to call it the Order of the Douree Douranee so that, as the army surgeon Kennedy wrote, “the knights were to have written themselves ‘D. D.’; but some wicked wag announced it to mean ‘the dog and duck!’ so it was changed.” Shah Shuja sat on an old camp chair wearing a yellow tunic, billowing crimson gown and a purple velvet crown and flanked by two stout eunuchs, each bearing a dish. The ceremony commenced with Sir John Keane kneeling before the king. Then, as Kennedy described, “one of the fat eunuchs waddled to the front and uncovered his dish, in which was the decoration and ribbon of the ‘Order of the Douranee Empire.’ The Emperor with great difficulty stuck it on; and Sir John’s coat being rather too tight, it cost him some effort to wriggle into the ribbon: but the acorn in time becomes an oak, and Sir John was at last adorned … a Knight Grand Cross of the Douranee Empire!” Macnaghten and Cotton were invested next, but Burnes was told he would have to wait for his decoration because the goldsmiths had not been able to work fast enough. Neither were decorations ready for the fifty or so officers created Knights Commander and Companions, but a cavalry officer of the Bengal army read out their names, at which each man stepped forward and bowed to the king.

In Calcutta, Lord Auckland had issued his own, less flamboyant congratulations in the form of a General Order lauding Keane and the Army of the Indus and exulting that “
the plans
of aggression by which the British empire in India was dangerously threatened, have, under Providence, been arrested. The Chiefs of Kabul and Kandahar, who had joined in hostile designs against us, have been deprived of power, and the territories which they ruled have been restored to the government of a friendly monarch.” Later in London, the British government would make its own awards to those deemed to have engineered the first victorious campaign of young Queen Victoria’s reign. Auckland was to become an earl. Keane’s reward was a barony, Macnaghten’s a baronetcy and Wade’s a knighthood.

On 18 September Major General Willshire left for India at the head of the Bombay Division. His orders were to divert en route to punish the khan of Khelat, who was judged, not entirely fairly, to have reneged on his promises to supply and assist the Army of the Indus as it had advanced through the Bolan Pass. In mid-November Willshire’s forces arrived before the walls of Khelat—a citadel nearly as strong as Ghazni—and stormed it, losing one in seven of his men in the process. The khan was discovered with a musket ball through his heart, a fate that Mohan Lal thought exceeded his crime. A young British sublieutenant, William Loveday, moved by a request from one of the khan’s retainers for a shroud to cover his dead master, donated a brocade bedcover that he had purchased in “
days of folly and extravagance at Delhi.
” A rival claimant to Khelat was installed, who, as the price for his throne, agreed to the annexation of Khelat’s richest provinces to the kingdom of Afghanistan, just as Macnaghten had recommended to Lord Auckland. To “assist” Khelat’s new ruler, Loveday was appointed his adviser. However, the dead khan’s young son Nussar Khan had escaped and would soon return in force to challenge these cosy new arrangements.

Claude Wade was the next to depart homeward, taking with him those of Prince Timur’s levies who were no longer considered necessary and the six thousand Sikhs who were returning to an increasingly unstable homeland, now that Ranjit Singh was dead. The unrequired contingents of the Bengal Division left on 15 October with Keane. He was glad to be going, but something deeper than mere satisfaction at departing a wild and alien place seems to have been going through his mind. He famously remarked to Lieutenant Durand, hero of the storming of Ghazni, who was returning to India with him, “
I wished you to remain in Afghanistan for the good of the public service, but since circumstances have rendered that impossible, I cannot but congratulate you on quitting the country; for mark my words, it will not be long before there is here some signal catastrophe!
” Perhaps in making his gloomy prophesy he had in mind the recent murder of Lieutenant Colonel Herring and some of his men, ambushed by Ghilzai tribesmen while escorting a treasury convoy to Kabul from Kandahar.

On the very eve of departure another of Keane’s officers, Lieutenant Colonel Macdonald, wrote to a friend, “
Shah Shuja, I am sorry to say, is not popular and to maintain him on the throne it was absolutely necessary to have left some of our troops in support of him. It is to be hoped that it will be otherwise by and by and that we will be able to leave him to ‘the holy keeping’ of his own subjects.
”

AS THE DUST clouds raised by the last of the departing troops finally settled, those left behind took stock of their situation and responsibilities. The total number of regiments left in Afghanistan was one Queen’s regiment—the Thirteenth Light Infantry—seven regiments of the Bengal Native Infantry and one of Native Cavalry with between seventy to eighty artillery pieces. Their task, which they were to share with Shah Shuja’s soldiers, was to garrison the principal cities of his kingdom—Kabul, Jalalabad, Kandahar, Quetta, Ghazni—and guard other strategic positions such as the approaches to the passes. The Reverend Gleig estimated the total strength “of armed men, natives, and foreigners” at some twenty thousand.

It was a modest force for the task it faced, especially when dispersed around the country. Twenty-eight-year-old Lieutenant Vincent Eyre—a capable and handsome officer who was among those remaining in Kabul—called the forces left behind “a miserable moiety” and complained that troops had been precipitately withdrawn “before any steps had been taken to guard against surprise by the erection of a stronghold on the approved principles of modern warfare” or to secure the lines of communication with India hundreds of miles away. Sir John Keane had, he wrote bitterly, “left behind him, in fact, an army whose isolated position and reduced strength offered the strongest possible temptation to a proud and restless race to rally their scattered tribes in one grand effort to regain their lost independence.”

Eyre was right that the British in Kabul were isolated. Everything—supplies, reinforcements, orders from Calcutta—depended on keeping open the lines of communications through the narrow Afghan passes. Furthermore, messages took some five weeks to travel between Kabul and Calcutta. Should a crisis arise, those in command in Kabul would have to act on their own initiative—a situation conferring both considerable power and responsibility. The two senior men were Cotton, to whom the departing Keane had handed command of the remaining forces in Afghanistan, and Macnaghten. The relationship between them remained as uneasy as it had been during the advance on Kabul. As envoy to the court of Afghanistan, Macnaghten claimed the right to impose his will on the military where political necessity required, something the Reverend Gleig deplored: “One of the great principles of the English constitution, the subserviency of the military to the civil power, was applied to a case for which it was altogether unsuited … all authority over the troops, both in regard to the choice of their positions and the manner of using them, was vested in civilians … in Afghanistan it was wholly out of place.” He also pointed out such an arrangement was bound to cause tension since many of the political officers were military officers of a subordinate rank. He thought Alexander Burnes the ablest of the diplomatic corps and noted that he had early protested the absurdity of the arrangement and “foretold the results to which it would lead.”

The Reverend Gleig additionally disapproved of the appointment of what he called “a whole army of British political agents.” The chaplain believed that in Afghan eyes, “not only was the King of Kabul supported on his throne by British bayonets” as if the British government doubted his military strength, but it also appeared as if the British “reposed no confidence whatever in his sagacity or political firmness.” The problem was that the British did doubt Shah Shuja’s sagacity. As Mohan Lal later wrote, “We neither took the reins of government into our own hands, nor did we give them in full powers into the hands of Shah Shuja. Inwardly or secretly we interfered in all transactions,” though “outwardly we wore the mask of neutrality. In this manner we gave annoyance to the king upon the one hand, and disappointment to the people on the other.”

Shah Shuja’s subjects were not the only ones alienated by events. In October Major General Nott, who had been appointed to command in Kandahar, had been ordered to cooperate with Willshire, a Queen’s officer, in the attack on Khelat. He had agreed to provide troops but had protested to the deputy adjutant general at Kabul, “I conceive myself to be senior to local Major-General Willshire, and therefore can obey no orders originating with that officer, nor can I serve under him.”

Unknown to Nott, he was at that very time being considered as successor to Sir Willoughby Cotton. However, when his complaint was brought to Auckland’s attention, the governor-general decided that Cotton had to stay on until another successor was found. He gave Nott the option to resign his command if he was so discontented, but he was not in a financial position to do so. However, from his headquarters in Kandahar, he would observe events with growing disapproval and alarm.

As the weather turned cooler, Shah Shuja and Macnaghten departed for Jalalabad to winter there, as had been the tradition of the kings of Kabul. However, before the snows began to fall, ten thousand soldiers, still living in their lightweight campaign tents, needed to be properly accommodated. The most sensible place to billet troops, given its strong, high walls and preeminent position above the city, was the Balla Hissar. Henry Havelock certainly thought so, writing that the fortress was “the key of Kabul” and that whoever held it could hold the city. This too was the recommendation of the army engineers. Indeed, so obvious did this seem that Brigadier Sale had already ordered the erection of mud barracks within the Balla Hissar to accommodate the Thirteenth Light Infantry. Yet when Shah Shuja learned of this, he objected. His enormous harem of royal wives and concubines, children, elderly female relations and the mass of attendants and eunuchs required to run this department of the royal household was on its way to Kabul from the Punjab, and he insisted that he needed the space in the Balla Hissar for them. He also claimed that to have foreign troops in close proximity to the ladies of his household would be an affront to his dignity.