The Dark Defile Read online

  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.

  Cotton’s indignant response was that “in Persia, in Egypt, in Muscat, the greatest sovereigns allow the officers to occupy palaces [but] Shah Shuja declares he will resign his throne if he be so insulted by the contamination of those men who bled for him, and placed him where he is!” Macnaghten, though, supported Shah Shuja, and somehow—accounts vary as to who made the final decision—cantonments were instead built on low swampy ground a mile north of the city, between the Kabul River and a broad canal on the one side and the road leading to the northern province of Kohistan on the other. While these were being built, a few troops were permitted to remain within the Balla Hissar, but the majority passed the winter in ramshackle, chilly quarters that were hastily improvised beneath its walls.

  The cantonments soon under construction could not have been farther from the “stronghold on the approved principles of modern warfare” that Eyre wanted. Indeed, he later attributed “almost all the calamities that befell our ill-starred force” to the arrangements which he called “a disgrace to our military skill and judgement.” The cantonments were to be contained within a rectangular area measuring some thousand yards by six hundred yards and surrounded by a low mud wall with bastions at each corner and a narrow ditch that, as a senior officer later sneered, could be leaped by any Afghan “with the facility of a cat.” At the north end of the cantonments was the “Mission Compound,” roughly half the size of the main area and again bounded by a low wall. Here in the envoy’s residence Macnaghten would hold court.

  Surrounding gardens and orchards, which could not be cleared for fear of giving offense to the Afghans, obstructed the line of fire from the cantonments and provided cover for any would-be attackers, while barely four hundred yards from the southern corner was a mud-brick village bounded by a low wall that also provided excellent cover. Even worse, the cantonments were close to several Afghan forts, so that in times of trouble, as Eyre noted, soldiers “could not move a dozen paces from either gate without being exposed to the fire of some neighbouring hostile fort garrisoned by marksmen who seldom missed their aim.” The cantonments were also overlooked by the Siah Sung Hills a mile to the east and by the even more commanding Bemaru Hills to the west. Strangely, though it was decided to post troops in the Siah Sung Hills, no plans were made to defend the cantonments from potential attack from the west.

  Shah Shuja’s unwillingness to house his allies also extended to their grain, which he ordered to be removed from the Balla Hissar. In an act of incredible stupidity, the British high command had the main commissariat stores placed in an indefensible old fort outside the main compound and opposite a walled garden, the Shah Bagh. When the chief commissariat officer complained and asked for storage within the cantonments, according to Lieutenant Eyre he was told that “no such place could be given him, as they were far too busy in erecting barracks for the men to think of commissariat stores.”

  Not everyone was to live in the ill-conceived cantonments. Alexander Burnes, no doubt anxious to be as free of Macnaghten as possible, had early found himself a spacious house in the Kizzilbashi area near the center of Kabul, with Mohan Lal only a few houses away. Opposite Burnes’s mansion was a small, fortified building selected as a suitable place for Captain Hugh Johnson, the paymaster and head commissariat officer of Shah Shuja’s army, to protect Shah Shuja’s treasury with the help of a few guards. Also close by was the headquarters of Brigadier Abraham Roberts, the commander of the shah’s army, while Captain Robert Trevor, commander of the king’s Life Guards, occupied a small tower between Roberts’s and Burnes’s residences.

  As these eccentric and insecure arrangements were made, with key command posts scattered willy-nilly about the city and the main force located in a ludicrously indefensible position, the British set ou
t to enjoy themselves that autumn and winter. The departure of the sixteenth Lancers and their small pack of foxhounds with Keane was a cause for regret, but they held gymkhanas and races and went shooting and boating. They played cricket while the Afghans watched, but the latter, according to the Reverend Gleig, were not “tempted to lay aside their flowing robes and huge turbans and enter the fields as competitors.” The officers staged plays to which Afghan nobles were invited, with Alexander Burnes and others translating the dialogue for their guests.

  Sometimes the British organized wrestling contests with the Afghans, and one officer constructed a boat complete with oars, masts and rudder, in which to go sailing on the lake. When the lake froze, young officers went sliding with the Afghans over the ice—something which the Reverend Gleig thought the Afghans did “far more skilfully, as well as gracefully, than their European visitors.” The Afghans had believed that “heat, and not cold, was the white man’s element” until the British officers made skates for themselves. “The Afghans stared in mute amazement while the officers were fastening on their skates, but when they rose, dashed across the ice’s surface, wheeled and turned, and cut out all manner of figures upon the ice, there was an end at once to disbelief in regard to the place of their nativity. ‘Now,’ cried they, ‘we see that you are not like the infidel Hindus that follow you: you are men, born and bred like ourselves, where the seasons vary, and in their changes give vigour both to body and mind. We wish you had come among us as friends, and not as enemies, for you are fine fellows one by one, though as a body we hate you.’ ”

  Some of the British also thought the Afghans “fine fellows.” In those first months, Henry Lawrence was impressed by their individual courage, hospitality and generosity, their fine appearance and horsemanship, their love of sport, frank demeanor and affability. However, as the army of occupation settled down, early bonhomie faded as aspects of British behavior began to cause huge offense. Although sepoys were allowed to have their wives with them, European private soldiers were not, and large numbers of prostitutes were soon observed streaming into the cantonments. To the Afghans this was “rending the veil of religious honour.” As for the officers, some formed liaisons with Afghan women, who, Surgeon Atkinson claimed, were “notoriously given to intrigue,” taking advantage of their all-covering burkas to slip about the city without being recognized “even, it is said, by their own husbands!”

  Atkinson certainly displayed a detailed knowledge of their habille beneath the burka: “They wear a loose yellow, blue, or red jacket, muslin or silk, which hangs down below the waist, and wide trousers of silk or other coloured material. They are particular in having their hair minutely arranged. It is plastered down stiff with gums in various forms on the head, and from the roots behind, plaited into numerous long tails which hang over the shoulders and back. The outer margin of the ears, all round, is pierced and decorated with rows of small silver rings. Larger rings hang from the lobes of the ear. The neck and chest are tattooed, and dotted over with shapes of flowers and stars. The lids of the eyes are loaded with soorma (black antimony), and they use rouge. The face is often adorned with little round moles of gold and silver tinsel and vermilion fixed on with gum. The jacket and trousers are all that is worn in the house.” According to rumurs, the women’s willingness to risk death by consorting with the British had something to do with an Afghan predilection for homosexuality. Proverbs and songs were quoted hinting at such proclivities, for example “A beautiful boy with a bottom like a peach stands across the river, and I can’t swim” and “A woman for mating, a boy for love.”

  Occasionally, the intentions of British officers were honorable. Captain Robert Warburton of the Bengal artillery fell in love with and married a beautiful niece of Dost Mohammed, with Burnes and Macnaghten acting as witnesses. However, most relationships were casually promiscuous. The Reverend Gleig, who found so much to commend in the interactions between the British and the Afghans, deplored the distrust and alienation resulting from British womanizing, while Sita Ram wrote that more than one officer “was stabbed or fired at” by outraged husbands. Alexander Burnes was, once again in his career, believed by contemporaries to be seducing local women, and yet again Mohan Lal defended him, asserting in his memoirs that Burnes and the several other officers living with him—his brother Lieutenant Charles Burnes, who had recently arrived in Kabul, his military secretary William Broadfoot and his political officer Lieutenant Robert Leech—had brought Kashmiri girls with them from India and therefore had no need to run after Kabul women.

  Whatever Burnes’s personal activities at the time, his attitude to the philanderings of his British comrades made him enemies. When angry Afghan men sought justice from him as the British resident in Kabul, he always supported his fellow countrymen and, Lal frankly acknowledged, “gave no justice” and “wounded the feelings of the chiefs.” Abdullah Khan, the powerful head of the Achakzai clan, was so enraged when Burnes refused to intervene over the seduction of one of his women that he declared a blood feud against him. Such insensitive and offhand behavior toward Afghans from a man once so well attuned to understanding local attitudes seems strange. Perhaps the good judgment that had served him previously had been diminished, distorted by his feeling that he was being marginalized, his advice was being ignored and that the overall situation was deteriorating. For all this he blamed Macnaghten. He was so disenchanted that he wrote to his friend Dr. Lord, “I have begun the year with a resolution of making no more suggestions, and of only speaking when spoken to.” Later he told Lord, “Be silent, pocket your pay, do nothing but what you are ordered, and you will give high satisfaction. They will sacrifice you and me, or any one, without caring a straw … I can go a good way, but my conscience has not so much stretch as to approve of this dynasty. But, mum—let that be between ourselves.”

  The arrival of the wives of British officers, perhaps surprisingly, did not ease the growing resentment at British behavior. Though their presence might have been expected to have a restraining influence on philandering, to the watching Afghans it suggested a worrying permanence about the occupation. British forces were supposed to have left after Shah Shuja’s restoration. Instead a sizable number had stayed on, and now their women had come. Among the first to arrive in late 1839 was Macnaghten’s wife, Fanny, by common repute as pushy and ostentatious as he was reserved and studious, who moved in with her husband in his house adjoining the perimeter of the cantonment. Early in the new year came the tall imposing figure of fifty-two-year-old India-born Florentia Sale, wife of Brigadier “Fighting Bob” Sale, now the second-in-command in Kabul. Her experiences in Afghanistan would make her a national heroine. With her, besides a household staff of forty servants, was one of her daughters, Alexandrina, shortly to marry Lieutenant John Sturt of the Royal Engineers. Florentia had grand ambitions to plant a flower and vegetable garden in her new home, and her gardeners were soon at work.

  Chapter Eight

  There is nothing more to be dreaded or guarded against I think in our endeavour to re-establish the Afghan monarchy than the overweening confidence with which Europeans are too often accustomed to regard the excellence of their own institutions and the anxiety that they display to introduce them in new and untried soils.

  —CLAUDE WADE, JANUARY 1839

  During the winter months of 1839, Macnaghten’s focus turned increasingly on events beyond Afghanistan’s borders. He was alarmed by news that the Russians, despite their promises and protestations to Palmerston, were continuing to press forward in Central Asia, mounting an expedition from their frontier base at Orenburg, in the southern Ural Mountains, against the khanate of Khiva. The Russians’ declared aim was to punish its tribes for their raids into Russian territory to abduct its citizens for sale in the slave markets of Khiva, but in considerable part the expedition was sparked by the British invasion of Afghanistan and consequent Russian fears about British intentions for further expansion. On hearing of the British capture of Kandahar, Czar Nicholas
I told the Austrian ambassador, “Much good may it do them; they said I wanted to occupy those countries. It’s their army that is there. They always describe me with my arms stretched out wishing to seize all … it is they who are everywhere.” Equally, the Russians had long regarded the Central Asian khanate of Khiva as pivotal to the control of trade in the region and a desirable imperial acquisition. A Russian envoy who had visited Khiva twenty years before had written that if Russia could take Khiva, “It would become the point of reunion for all the commerce of Asia, and would shake to the centre of India the enormous commercial superiority of the dominators of the sea [the British].”

  Macnaghten saw no reason why, if the Russians indeed took Khiva, they would halt there. His nightmare vision was of Cossack armies advancing to the northern slopes of the Hindu Kush and pushing down into Afghanistan toward India. The way to stop them, he believed, was for Britain to mount a major preemptive military expedition through the Hindu Kush to annex the petty states lying between the mountains and the Oxus River. He said as much to Auckland in secret dispatches written with a pen dipped in rice water that could only be read by the application of a solution of iodine. Without even waiting for Auckland’s sanction, he sent part of a brigade northward toward Bamiyan to watch the passes leading down from the Hindu Kush.

  Auckland, who had known of the Russian plans to advance on Khiva for some time, thought Macnaghten was exaggerating the danger. Neither, as Macnaghten wanted, was Auckland tempted to deploy troops westward to annex Herat, where, despite earlier promises to the British, the vizier Yar Mohammed was again putting out feelers to the Persians. While the Army of the Indus had been on its long journey to Kabul, Charles Stoddart and Eldred Pottinger had quarreled with Yar Mohammed, jeopardizing the British position in the territory instead of safeguarding it, which had been one of the key aims of their intervention. Liberal men of conscience, the two had tried to dissuade Yar Mohammed from continuing the slave trade that was so crucial to Herat’s economy. The administration in India had disowned Stoddart and Pottinger’s stance, claiming that they were acting in a purely personal capacity. Auckland’s private secretary, John Colvin, had written, “Why is it that Englishmen everywhere are rough, overbearing, without tact … and more disliked by foreigners than any other people? Pottinger endeavoured to make an Utopia of justice and forbearance among these rude … Afghans, fresh as they are from a prolonged and desperate contest and the result is that he with his schemes is sent out of the country and the check that he might by wiser means have maintained is totally lost.”