Return of a king, p.40
Return of a King, page 40
After two hours, an agreement was reached. The British were to withdraw three days later, on 14 December, and their safety was to be guaranteed. Captain Trevor was to be handed over as a hostage. Jalalabad, Ghazni and Kandahar would also be evacuated. In return for a large down-payment, food, grain and transport cattle would be sent to the British to help them on their way. Shah Shuja would be given the choice of leaving with the British or remaining in Kabul as a private citizen. The Bala Hisar would first be evacuated by its few remaining British officers and handed over to Akbar Khan. Meanwhile Dost Mohammad would be released from his house arrest in Ludhiana and allowed to return to the throne. The Afghans would undertake not to ally with any foreign power without the consent of the British, and the British in return promised that ‘the English army will not cross into Afghan territory unless the Afghan leaders request it’.
Macnaghten thought the terms as good as he was likely to get and, naive and delusional as ever, wrote to Auckland, ‘We shall part with the Afghans as friends, and I feel satisfied that any government which may be established hereafter will always be disposed to cultivate a good understanding with us.’101
One person who of course was not consulted about any of this was Shah Shuja – the man in whose name the war had been waged and the occupation administered. His biographer Mohammad Husain Herati gives the only surviving account of the Shah’s reaction when he heard of the terms which had been offered by Macnaghten, his one-time champion:
When His Majesty got intelligence of this agreement, he wrote to Macnaghten as follows: ‘Did you bring us back to this country only to hand us over to our enemies? Have you still no idea of the faithlessness of the Barakzais and of the people of this country? By throwing money at these vengeful people, you are only hastening your own and our death and destruction! Is that sensible?’ Macnaghten merely countered: ‘It is too late to change the agreements that have been made.’ His Majesty was distraught, running hither and thither like liquid mercury, wringing his hands day and night, saying ‘Macnaghten has taken leave of his senses – it will be the death of both of us!’
Macnaghten ordered the remaining British troops to leave the Bala Hisar and despatched a message to inform Akbar Khan that the fort had been evacuated and that he should send his own troops to garrison it.
Mohammad Akbar Khan immediately sent 2,000 jezail-bearing Ghilzais. The decent citizens of Kabul were horrified, exclaiming ‘If Akbar Khan takes over the fort, what will happen to Shah Shuja’s womenfolk and children and dependants? God help them!’
At the thought of the imminent rape and pillage, His Majesty was sunk in a whirlpool of despondency. However the denizens of the Bala Hisar fort were mostly old retainers, born within the compound, loyal servants who had grown up under the protection and patronage of the royal family: these at least did not weakly give in to despair, and as soon as the last of the English forces had marched out of the fort, they boldly shut the gates behind them and killed any of the rebel soldiers who had already penetrated the fort, so that Akbar Khan’s troops were forced to retire disappointed.102
Akbar Khan’s troops tried twice more to assault the main gate of the Bala Hisar, but Shah Shuja’s household troops, whom the British had long disparaged as ‘a useless rabble’, successfully drove them back, inflicting serious casualties. ‘We could not but admire the promptitude and courage he [Shuja] had displayed on this very critical occasion,’ wrote Lawrence, ‘and heartily desired that a similar energy might be shown by our own leaders, who still appeared quite incapable of adopting any measures to secure our honour and our safety.’103
As the British buckled and surrendered, ignoring all Shuja’s warnings, the Shah remained strong and successfully held out in the Bala Hisar until he chose to march out from his well-provisioned fortress many months later, at the onset of the spring thaw.
While Macnaghten was quietly sacrificing Shah Shuja, Lord Auckland was, somewhat unexpectedly, entertaining Shuja’s old rival, Dost Mohammad, at a ball in Calcutta.
After the ‘bracing’ air of Simla, the Edens were appalled by the heat and humidity of a Calcutta summer. ‘We have subsided from the interests of Afghan politics’, wrote Emily to a friend, ‘into the daily difficulties of keeping ourselves from being baked alive. I may say we have risen to this higher pursuit, for it is much the more important of the two, and of much more difficult achievement?. . .’104 The heat confirmed her in her opinion that it was time for them all to get out of the horrors of Asia and head quickly back to the safety of Kensington: ‘Our George has done very well in India, has he not? You know we always thought very highly of him even in his comical dog days . . . Now I think he has done enough, and might as well go home, but none of the people at home will hear of it, and this month’s despatches have made me desperate.’105
But duty was duty, and on Queen Victoria’s birthday, amid the drenching humidity of a Bengali June, ‘the most desperate weather ever felt in India’, the sisters decided to throw a ball. ‘Our Queen’s ball was very magnificent,’ Emily wrote soon afterwards, ‘and as I fondly hope it is our last, I am glad it went off so well. I wore my diamonds!’ The star guest, on exhibit to all both as a curiosity and as an advertisement for the great successes of Lord Auckland’s foreign policy, was the Amir himself. ‘We had Dost Mohammad and his sons and suite at the ball,’ continued Emily,
the first time he had ever seen European ladies in their shameless dress; but he did not see the dancing – George took him to another room. He is a very kingly sort of person, and carries off his half-captive, half-lion position with great tact. By way of relieving George part of the evening, I asked him to play at chess, and we played game after game, which was rather a triumph considering native chess is not like ours, and he kept inventing new rules as we went on. If he were not a Dost it was not quite fair.106
Afterwards, Emily asked her chess partner if she could make a portrait of him and his followers. He agreed to sit for her pencil, but then, as appalled as she was by the Calcutta humidity, set off back up country to Ludhiana without telling her and before she had finished. ‘I have been making a sketch of Dost Mohammad and his family,’ Emily reported somewhat tetchily to her sister in England, ‘and he set off this morning for the upper provinces, leaving me with one of their nephews unsketched. So this morning, with great activity I got up early, and Colvin abstracted the nephew from the steamer and brought him to sit for his picture before breakfast. The nephew is very like the picture of Judas Iscariot, but he is a fine subject. Considering Colvin had no breakfast, he seemed to talk Persian with wonderful animation.’107
The situation in Afghanistan had begun to deteriorate rapidly soon after Dost Mohammad’s departure from Calcutta. News had arrived a fortnight later that a Tory government had been elected in London, and after mulling over his options, Lord Auckland resigned as Governor General. Lord Ellenborough, the man who had originally written the memo that sent Burnes up the Indus ten years earlier, was appointed to replace him.
A week later, the news of Burnes’s murder and the fast unravelling of Lord Auckland’s entire Afghan strategy arrived in Bengal by courier. The first despatch to make it to Government House was a short note from General Sale written three weeks earlier in Jalalabad telling Auckland of the first rumours of disaster in Kabul and of his own encirclement. ‘I need not tell you that these communications very greatly distress me,’ Auckland wrote to Sir Jasper Nicholls, the Commander-in-Chief, that night. ‘They leave room for very formidable and serious speculation. I would not however speak of my own feelings. The question is, what is to be done?’
He then laid out various options, but like his generals in Kabul the stream of depressing news seemed to paralyse him and from the beginning he opposed the idea of an immediate military response. ‘I propose to have a special Council tomorrow,’ he wrote, ‘but it seems to me that we are not to think of marching fresh armies for the reconquest of that which we are likely to lose . . . I fear that the Afghan national spirit has been generally roused.’108
The truth was that Auckland had already realised months earlier that his whole Afghan policy had been catastrophically mistaken and was in danger of bankrupting the entire Indian government. Now with disaster looming, and with his treasury empty, he had no hesitation in taking the decision that he should simply write off the entire project and not throw any further resources into what was clearly a losing battle.
Shah Shuja, Macnaghten, even his old grouse-shooting companion ‘Elphy Bey’, were to be left to sort out the mess on their own. No help would be coming from Calcutta.
Snow fell heavily in Kabul during the second week of December, billowing down from the Hindu Kush, instantly turning the dusty grey hills around the city a dazzling white, settling thickly on the parapets of the cantonment and freezing the Kabul River. ‘The snow did not trouble the Sardars and ghazis who were in their element,’ wrote Mirza ‘Ata, ‘but the army from India was unused to snow and many died. Many others became incapable of fighting because of the intense cold.’109
Yet for Macnaghten the snow was the least of his worries. He had, as agreed, handed over the two remaining fortresses overlooking the cantonment as well as the large down-payments demanded by the sardars, including 20,000 rupees to Akbar Khan, but still the promised food and fodder had only arrived in dribs and drabs and the army and their pack animals remained on the verge of starvation.110 Nor was there any sign of the promised carts and baggage animals the English would need to transport their goods back to India. As a result, the 14 December deadline for the departure of the army passed without the slightest movement. Meanwhile, any remaining defiance within the cantonment had ebbed into a cowed anxiety and fear. ‘So great was the want of common sense’, wrote Mackenzie,
that hundreds of the enemy, armed to the teeth, were allowed to insinuate themselves into the cantonments and to walk about spying everything. A Ghilzai drew his sword on Lt Sturt within a few yards of a loaded 6-pounder, because that officer endeavoured to keep back the man’s insolent comrades. So strictly were the sentries forbidden to fire, that our camp followers and friendly Afghans were often robbed and even killed a dozen yards from our walls, and the mess sheep of the 5th Cavalry were captured within 150 yards of the ramparts, under the eyes of the whole garrison.111
Realising the desperate state the British were in, Akbar Khan now increased his demands. More cannon were to be surrendered. Yet more hostages were demanded. Seeing the bottomless pit that they were falling into, Macnaghten again raised with his commanders the idea of retreating to the Bala Hisar or even reopening hostilities with the Afghans now that their guard was down, ‘to march out at once in order of battle [in Lawrence’s words], and enter Kabul or fight the enemy beneath its walls, expressing his own earnest hope that the General, now that he had been reinforced by the fresh troops from the Bala Hisar, would adopt this clear and obvious course’.112 Again Shelton and Elphinstone opposed all his plans, seeming more determined than ever to march out of Afghanistan as quickly as possible. ‘The forts were the same evening given up and immediately occupied by Afghans,’ added Lawrence. ‘The Envoy and I stood on a mound near the mosque whilst they were being evacuated by our men, and I am not ashamed to say that it was with eyes moistened with tears from grief and indignation, we witnessed these strongholds, the last prop of our tottering power in Kabul, which it had cost us so much blood to seize and defend, made over, one after another, to our treacherous and exulting enemies.’113
Then, without warning, a small chink of light and hope appeared. On 20 November, Nizam al-Daula, the Prime Minister Macnaghten had foisted on Shuja, sent news that his old patron, Nawab Zaman Khan, the Barakzai leader who had initially taken on the leadership of the revolt, ‘was offended because of the people rallying around Mohammad Akbar, and sent word that he wanted to become an ally of the English. The English, who sought safety from the sharp edge of Afghan swords, considered the Nizam al-Daula’s letter tidings from heaven.’114 At the same time, news came that many of the rebel troops were discontented with Akbar Khan due to the high price of food.115
Macnaghten immediately embarked on a renewed attempt to divide and rule. Desperate to avoid the potential catastrophe of a midwinter retreat through hostile mountains, he tried various schemes at once, ‘grasping at every new combination that seemed to promise more hope than the last’. Through Mohan Lal, both the Qizilbash and the Ghilzai chieftains were offered the large sum of 20,000 rupees to break with the rebels and rally to the support of the British. ‘If any portion of the Afghans wish our troops to remain in the country,’ he declared, ‘I shall think myself at liberty to break the engagement which I have made to go away, which engagement was made believing it to be in accordance with the wishes of the Afghan nation.’
But Macnaghten was hopelessly out of his depth. ‘It is very difficult to know what to do,’ he wrote in confusion to Mohan Lal at this time.116 He didn’t understand the strength of the marriage ties which linked the Ghilzais to Akbar Khan, nor did he even begin to comprehend the degree to which most Afghans hated their Kafir occupiers. Moreover, Mohan Lal was being watched and Akbar’s spies were passing on detailed information about all the Envoy’s amateurish attempts at intrigue. There were also damaging rumours circulating among the rebels that Macnaghten was offering money to anyone who would assassinate Akbar and the other hostile chiefs. According to Mirza ‘Ata, ‘Macnaghten wrote a secret letter to the chiefs, to the effect that whoever would bring Sardar Muhammad Akbar Khan’s severed head would be rewarded with a sum of 10,000 Rupees and would be appointed assistant to the Envoy. As soon as the Khans read this, they immediately passed the original on to Akbar Khan who kept it with him.’117 The story could well be true. Certainly there is evidence from the correspondence of Mohan Lal that a paid assassin called Abdul Aziz sent in an invoice to Mohan Lal for the killing of Abdullah Khan Achakzai, saying he shot him in the back with a poisoned bullet while he was fighting Shelton on 23 November, implying that Mohan Lal had indeed offered a bounty for the killing of rebel leaders.118 It is extremely unlikely he would have dared to do so without some sort of authorisation from the Envoy.
Hearing this, Akbar Khan decided to set a trap to expose Macnaghten’s duplicity. On the evening of 22 December, he sent out two of his cousins to the cantonment. They were escorted by Captain James Skinner, a young Anglo-Indian cavalry commander and the son of the founder of Skinner’s Horse, who had been captured and arrested on the first day of the uprising as he tried to flee from the city in a woman’s burkha.
Over dinner, the Barakzai envoys made Macnaghten a startling new offer. The British could stay in Afghanistan until the spring, they said, and Shuja remain as shah, if the British supported Akbar Khan’s bid to be wazir and to gain hold of the real reins of power. If Macnaghten would make a written undertaking to help him, make a colossal down-payment of £300,000 and an annuity of £40,000, then Akbar Khan would be happy to bring him the head of Aminullah Khan Logari. Macnaghten was apparently being offered a chance to tear up the recently agreed treaty and cut a secret deal with Akbar Khan. Given the extreme weakness of the British position, the terms were suspiciously generous, but, conceited to the last, Macnaghten seems to have convinced himself that his recent intrigues were so brilliant that Akbar had been forced to compromise in order to safeguard his position. Aminullah’s head Macnaghten rejected, saying the arrest of Aminullah Khan and handing him over as a prisoner to the British would be enough; but he swallowed the rest of the bait, and signed a Persian document putting his consent in writing. According to Mohan Lal, ‘The offer was not received by the Envoy altogether without suspicion; but as he has no hope of military aid, and considered the idea of a retreat disgraceful to the British name, he was like a drowning man catching at straws.’119
For Akbar Khan, this was the final evidence he needed of the duplicity of the Envoy. He showed the document to Aminullah Khan and warned the other chiefs of Macnaghten’s willingness to betray his agreements with them and do a secret deal behind their backs. Then he sent a message to Macnaghten to meet him again the following morning to finalise details of the plot. Macnaghten agreed.
George Lawrence, Mackenzie and Trevor were summoned by the Envoy at dawn and told about the offer. According to Lawrence, Macnaghten said:
