The Dark Defile Read online

  The task was completed within eleven days and with considerable ingenuity. An officer of engineers described how they seized 120 boats, felled trees for beams and planks and in the absence of any rope made “500 cables out of a peculiar kind of grass which grows 100 miles from here,” by twisting the long fibrous stems together. They then made anchorage points in the river from “small trees joined and loaded with half a ton of stone. [Their] nails were all made on the spot. [They] then anchored the boats in the middle of the stream, in a line across, leaving twelve feet between each; strong beams were laid across the boats, and planks nailed on these for a roadway. This is the largest military bridge which has ever been made.” By 18 February 1839, the army, its equipment and supplies, as well as its thousands of camp followers, had passed over the Indus.

  Reaching Shikarpur—a small, hot and dirty town of mud-brick houses where Shah Shuja and his levies had already arrived safely—Cotton halted. He did so to wait for Keane and the Bombay force to rendezvous with him and to allow supplies of grain, water and animal forage to be organized at regular intervals along his route across the 150-mile stretch of bleak, salt-rimed desert that lay between Shikarpur and the formidable Bolan Pass. Macnaghten, who had caught up, was fretting at the delay caused by what he considered the needless diversion of Cotton’s forces to Hyderabad. He was also alarmed by reports that Baluchi tribesmen planned to block the pass, and pressed Cotton to go on while he remained with Shah Shuja and the king’s levies until Keane arrived, when they would advance together. The reason Shah Shuja was to stay behind was insufficient baggage animals. Macnaghten had sought an additional one thousand camels from Cotton, who had refused him, claiming he could not spare them.

  In fact, Macnaghten was soon barely on speaking terms with Cotton, who, he complained in a dispatch to Auckland a few weeks later, was a terrible defeatist: “Not content with telling me we must all inevitably be starved, he assures me that Shah Shuja is very unpopular in Afghanistan and that we shall be opposed at every step of our progress. I think I know a little better than this.” Cotton in turn accused the envoy of wishing to take over command of the army. The friction between the political and military leadership foreseen by the now departed Fane was only too evident.

  On 22 February Cotton led his forces onward again, taking with him provisions for only six weeks and leaving Macnaghten and Shah Shuja behind with one of his own brigades, under the recently widowed fifty-six-year-old Major General William Nott, to guard his rear. Burnes and Mohan Lal traveled ahead of the main force, their task to try to negotiate with the Baluchi tribes through whose lands the army had to pass.

  As the army plodded westward toward the Bolan Pass across the unforgiving scorpion-infested desert, temperatures touched one hundred degrees Fahrenheit, relieved only by occasional thundery showers when “the cool drops fizzed as they fell on the burning sand.” Two officers were found dead of heat stroke in their tents, their bodies blackened. Eleven men who lost their way and unwisely halted under a tree to drink brandy also collapsed and died. Such water as existed was muddy and brackish, and there was no food for the livestock. Lieutenant Henry Durand, an officer of engineers, later complained that they “marched into this tract of land as if possessed of miraculous powers of abstinence.” Pack animals died in their hundreds, while straggling beasts were seized by Baluchi tribesmen who were tracking the progress of the strange and cumbersome procession. Sita Ram wrote of the general despair, “Our sufferings were frightful and the livers of all the Hindustanis were turned to water.”

  Macnaghten had requested Cotton to do nothing to inflame the local population as his army approached Afghanistan, but when robbers attacked a hospital wagon, killing and wounding its occupants, Cotton ordered any raiders to be shot on sight. Sixteen days after leaving Shikarpur the army reached Dadur at the mouth of the Bolan Pass. According to an agreement just negotiated by Burnes and Mohan Lal with Mehrab Khan of Khelat—the powerful Baluchi ruler who controlled the pass—food supplies adequate for the ten-day transit of the Bolan should have been waiting, but there was barely enough to feed the army for a day. Though the khan was blamed for this, the lack of supplies was not entirely his fault. The advancing army had already consumed much of his people’s crops as well as using up precious water supplies at a time of drought, and though he could not supply much grain, the khan did provide thousands of sheep. He also told Burnes that the British venture was foolhardy, even hopeless, saying that Dost Mohammed was an able and resourceful ruler and that though the British might displace him and set up Shah Shuja, they “could never win over the Afghan nation.” Such gloomy predictions did not endear the khan to Macnaghten, who wrote to Auckland urging that Khelat’s most important provinces be annexed to Shah Shuja’s kingdom—when he again had one.

  Cotton, meanwhile, decided to push on into the Bolan Pass, knowing that there he would at least find water and hoping that when the army reached Quetta at the other end of the pass, supplies would be easier to come by. On 16 March the column began the arduous climb into the seventy-mile-long pass, which at its highest point reaches nearly six thousand feet. Heavy rains turned the stream running through the Bolan into a dangerous torrent, which the advancing force had to cross repeatedly. The ground behind them was soon littered with the carcasses of animals unable to stumble any farther, especially camels, which, Henry Havelock wrote, “never feel at home but on a plain and on soft ground” and which suffered horribly as they toiled uphill over bleak, stony terrain with “not a blade of grass, not a tree to be seen.” Another officer claimed that a tot of whiskey had a miraculously reviving effect on any beast that collapsed. The column also faced attack by tribesmen lying concealed with their long-barreled jezails behind the jagged outcrops above the pass, and whose behavior the khan of Khelat, whatever he might claim, was unable to control. The Reverend George Gleig, principal chaplain to the Army of the Indus, caught the menace of the wild desolate pass, “overlooked in all its narrower veins by clefts among which marksmen may stand, and high precipices, from the summits of which loosened rocks may be hurled.”

  Yet at last the army emerged from the Bolan Pass into meadows of aromatic herbs and nodding tulips and irises, but so few cultivated fields of barley and wheat that one officer in desperation purchased ghee (clarified butter) from some passing Afghan merchants to keep his camels alive. On the chill morning of 27 March the hungry and somewhat demoralized army reached the mud-walled town of Quetta, having lost in the pass two thousand camels and the valuable supplies the animals had been carrying. Learning that Quetta held no more than two days’ supply of corn and that little more was to be found in the hinterland, Cotton put his men on half rations while he waited for the Bombay force and Shah Shuja’s levies to arrive. Camp followers struggled to exist on fried sheep skins, congealed animal blood and whatever roots they could grub up. Some of Cotton’s officers, though, spent their time shooting woodcock, while the botanists among them examined the wild anemones, buttercups, poppies and dandelions growing around Quetta that were such a relief after what one officer called the “dismal sterility” of the Bolan Pass.

  On 4 April Sir John Keane finally arrived with the Bombay contingent and Shah Shuja’s levies and immediately assumed command of the entire Army of the Indus. Keane was a choleric man of nearly sixty who liked to be carried in a palanquin. He had fought in Wellington’s army during the Peninsula War and been wounded while leading an attack on New Orleans in the Anglo-American War of 1812. He had risen with the help of influential friends and was disliked by many for his coarse behavior and foul language. Henry Havelock wrote of Keane’s “open parade of private vices,” hinting that they were “only a cloak for darker features of his character.” The fact that Keane was not an East India Company officer was also held against him, given the rivalry between the officers of Queen’s regiments and those of the company.

  Keane had had to pick his way under sniper fire around piles of rotting animal carcasses and human corpses “in every degr
ee of putrefaction” as he advanced through the defiles of the Bolan Pass in Cotton’s wake. He had also experienced severe communications problems because the Baluchi tribesmen were attacking the cossids—native messengers employed by the British—and according to Lieutenant Holdsworth stealing official dispatches “to wrap their kebabs in.” Keane was therefore not in the best frame of mind when he reached Quetta and took command. He and Cotton quarreled immediately because Keane saw at once that the situation in Quetta was critical. Neither his own nor Cotton’s forces had any supplies. Keane decided his best option was to push on at once to Kandahar in the hope that their few remaining provisions would last until then.

  Despite his reservations, he appointed Cotton to command the Bengal infantry, which till then had been led by the able but irascible Major General Nott, who, having rejoined the main force, was—so Keane informed him—to be left to garrison Quetta with a brigade. Keane appointed Major General Thomas Willshire, like Cotton and himself a British army officer, to command the two brigades of the Bombay infantry. Nott, who was senior to both Cotton and Willshire, was predictably convinced that Keane was sidelining him because he was a company, not a Queen’s, officer. From a relatively humble tenant-farmer background, Nott was deeply critical of the posting of Queen’s officers to India. Some years earlier, in 1834, he had warned in one of the Bengal newspapers of the consequences “if the long-tried and experienced Company’s officer is to be superseded and commanded by the silly and weak scions of the aristocracy, or by the men of interest, whom the whim or caprice of the Horse Guards may send across the Ocean.” A furious scene between Nott and Keane ended with the latter roaring that he would never forget Nott’s conduct “as long as I live!”

  In the early morning of 7 April 1839, the Army of the Indus moved out, Shah Shuja’s levies in the lead once again for presentational reasons. The formidable Khojuk Pass lay between the army and the plains of Kandahar. Although shorter than the Bolan Pass, it was steeper, rising to almost 7,500 feet. In the thinning air a tangled mass of exhausted men and beasts struggled for breath as they ascended the narrow precipitous track. Moving the heavy artillery was a particular nightmare. Stripped to the waist and working in teams of one hundred alternating in thirty-minute shifts, sweating soldiers man-hauled the guns on long ropes. Once they had pulled one gun to the top of the pass, there was the even more difficult and dangerous task of getting it down the slope on the other side, which had a gradient of one in three, without it running away with itself. It took a week, but after a remarkable display of endurance and sheer grit, the guns were safely through the pass. Along the way, however, twenty-seven thousand musket balls and fourteen barrels of gunpowder had had to be abandoned—army engineers exploded them to keep them out of enemy hands—and three thousand long-suffering camels had either tumbled into precipices, collapsed through sheer exhaustion or been rustled by raiders.

  Shah Shuja was once more in his ancestral territory. His attendants pitched his brilliantly colored royal tents close to the British encampment but not near enough to discourage a group of Afghan horsemen from galloping through the tents one evening. The raiders shot down twelve men and carried off two women and a pair of elephants—one of them Shah Shuja’s own mount. It was hardly an auspicious start to his renewed reign. To mark his return as king, the British invited him to tour their camp. Henry Havelock watched as Shah Shuja was carried on men’s shoulders “in a gilded litter fenced from the sun by a kind of circular dome, guarded by about sixty attendants in scarlet armed with javelins or drawn sabres, some carrying silver sticks, others touting their master’s title and all running along at a fast pace.” He thought “the most singular part of the costume of the monarch’s retinue” was their caps “of red cloth ornamented with long horns of black felt, which give the wearers the air of representing in masquerade the great enemy of the human race [ i.e the devil].” He was unimpressed by the king himself—a “rather stout man of the middle size, his chin covered with a long, thick, and neatly trimmed beard, dyed black to conceal the encroachments of time.”

  Havelock also found fault with the king’s manner, which to his critical eye suggested “that mixture of timidity and duplicity so often observable in the character of the highest order of men in Southern Asia.” Though the king’s behavior toward the British was “gentle, calm and dignified,” his demeanor toward his own people was such that they “invariably complained of his reception of them as cold and repulsive even to rudeness.” Havelock also noted what Burnes had in vain pointed out to his superiors: that the Afghans regarded Shah Shuja as “a man of evil destiny, a kum nuseeb, or bud bukht.”

  On 20 April a large body of horsemen approached the camp. Ignoring sentries’ warning shots, their splendidly armed and clad leader, gold-fringed turban on his head, trotted forward and indicated that he had come in peace to wait upon Shah Shuja. The man was Haji Khan Kakur, an influential Afghan chief, who prostrated himself before a gratified Shah Shuja and received permission to pitch his tents nearby. Haji Khan claimed that the rulers of Kandahar—Dost Mohammed’s half brothers—had been planning to attack the British column but that he had convinced them they would be defeated and to flee. Haji Khan was a noted and notable liar who, according to one British officer, had “commenced life in the humble capacity of a melon vendor and raised himself to the highest rank by cunning and enterprise … invariably changing sides when his interest prompted him to do so.” It is unclear whether on this occasion his claims were true. Yet before long, more chiefs arrived to pledge allegiance to the returning king.

  With daytime temperatures still well above one hundred Fahrenheit, the Army of the Indus continued toward Kandahar, moving slowly across an arid and still mountainous landscape where the wells held only brackish and salty water. One officer noted in his diary, “no sweet water … great suffering among the soldiers, European and native, and the cattle.” Two days later, when the green ribbon of water that was the Dori River near Kandahar came in sight, parched men and animals rushed toward it. In their eagerness, horses tumbled down its steep banks, and many too weak to right themselves drowned. Keane ordered his army to make camp on the banks of the Dori, intending the following day to enter the walled city of Kandahar, whose rulers had indeed fled across the Helmand River toward Persia and which clearly would offer no resistance. However, next morning, 25 April, to Keane’s anger he awoke to discover that Macnaghten and Shah Shuja had, without any consultation with him, set off during the night with some of their men to Kandahar, into which Shah Shuja had made a ceremonial entrance at dawn.

  Two weeks later, on 8 May, seated on a canopied platform and, as the army surgeon Dr. Richard Kennedy described, with “the chief and general staff of the British army on his left, and some half-a-dozen shabby-looking, dirty, ill-dressed Afghan fellows on his right,” Shah Shuja was formally proclaimed king of Afghanistan to a 101-gun salute. The moment passed “without, however, any symptom of the interest or enthusiasm which we were led to expect,” another officer noted. Though the crowds dutifully attended the ceremony, a subsequent military review before the Afghan king attracted few spectators. Sita Ram captured what many had known in their hearts for months: “The truth began to dawn on us that despite all the assurances Shah Shuja had given us in Hindustan that the Afghans were longing for his return, in reality they did not want him as their ruler.” In particular they resented that “he had shown the English the way into their country and that they would shortly take possession of it. They would use it as they had done all Hindustan and introduce their detested rules and laws.” The hatred of the foreign invader became soon and bloodily obvious. A young officer wrote home of his sense of vulnerability, describing “horrible” murders of those unwise enough to stray too far and how he always carried loaded pistols when he rode out.

  MEANWHILE IN LONDON in the New Year of 1839, the British government faced an incessant clamor from Sir Robert Peel, the head of a critical Tory opposition, for the publication of all relevant documen
ts justifying the Afghan invasion, citing the precedent of government publication of previous important documents relating to Indian policy.

  Release would have been difficult enough since the government did not wish to expose the disagreements of Burnes, among others, with the proposed way forward, but there was also a further complication. Relations with Russia had thawed to such an extent that Britain was preparing to receive a state visit from the Czsarevitch, the future Alexander II and liberator of the serfs. Under the circumstances, publishing documents too openly critical of Russia seemed out of the question to the authorities. Hobhouse, the president of the East India Company’s Board of Control, summed up some of the objections to total disclosure in familiar terms: foreign relations difficulties, national security, impeding the progress of ongoing military operations and the impossibility of entrusting the public with sensitive information. “First—it would necessarily raise most embarrassing questions regarding the state of our relations with Russia. Secondly—it would put the Enemies of Great Britain in possession of most important information regarding the means of conquering the Indian Empire and of counteracting the measures in progress for defending it, and Thirdly—it might embarrass and weaken those measures by raising a premature discussion, and create unnecessary alarm in the Public Mind.”

  In Parliament the prime minister claimed the opposition was playing party politics in asking for such disclosure and in so doing entirely disregarding the national interest. Eventually, however, the government had to give way. Bolstering itself with the comforting thought that previous disclosures on other matters had been selective, over the next few months it released a selection of papers both partial and edited. Palmerston, newly married to his long-term mistress Lady Cowper, himself masterminded the dilution of the anti-Russian content of the published material. Similarly, Hobhouse omitted key dispatches from Burnes promoting Dost Mohammed’s merits and claims and edited others that were published without making clear where the editing had taken place. When Burnes came to hear of it, he was deeply upset, believing, as did the great historian of the period, Sir John Kaye, that officials had “dug the grave of truth … The character of Dost Mohammed has been lied away; the character of Burnes has been lied away. Both by the mutilation of the correspondence of the latter.” The official records—“the sheet-anchors of historians”—had been falsified. Burnes himself wrote, “All my implorations to Government to act with promptitude and decision had reference to doing something when Dost Mohammed was King, and all this they have made to appear in support of Shah Shuja being set up!”