Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, 1839-42

by William Dalrymple

To make matters worse, the first Bombay troops arriving by sea at Karachi mistook an artillery salute from the lighthouse for an attack, and reduced to rubble the principal coastal fort of their supposed Sindhi allies.

Ominously, the revival of Shuja’s fortunes seemed already to have gone to his head. Before long the Shah—whose good nature had clearly been corroded and hardened by his long run of ill-fortune—had fallen out with all his British officers, alienating them with his haughtiness and his insistence on making them remain standing in his presence.

So it was that the ceremonial send-off for Lord Auckland’s war took place without the presence of the man in whose name the expedition was being sent, or indeed of any of his dynasty. In lieu of the Sadozais, the Edens set off from Simla in the middle of a monsoon downpour.

In the Bombay rain, regiments were streaming from their barracks down to the beaches to be loaded on board troop transports and ferried across the stormy sea to Karachi, Thatta and other landing points around the mouth of the Indus. In the cantonments below the Delhi Ridge, the riders of the new experimental camel batteries—mobile camel-borne mortar and Congreve rocket systems—were struggling to harness their obstinate camels.

It came as little comfort that he had finally been promoted to major-general, a distinction that might have come much earlier had he not been so quick to speak truth to power. For Nott was not a man to keep quiet in the face of a perceived slight, and he was already gearing up to take offence at the precedence that was being given to newly arrived commanders of the British army.

a more serious obstacle to the war now confronted the gathering armies. To Auckland’s embarrassment, in the midst of all the preparations for the invasion, news came that the Persians, alarmed by the British naval occupation of the island of Kharg, had unexpectedly abandoned the siege of Herat and withdrawn to Mashhad. Soon afterwards came confirmation that Count Nesselrode in St. Petersburg had also given way, this time to diplomatic pressure from the Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, in London. Count Simonitch, the author of the entire Russian diplomatic campaign to outflank the British in Persia and Afghanistan, was to be sacrificed—removed from his job as ambassador to the Persian court on the grounds that he had exceeded his instructions.

Both of Auckland’s original casus belli were now removed: Russia and Persia were publicly backing down. If there had ever been any real threat to British India it was now over. This would have been an ideal moment to reopen negotiations with Dost Mohammad and achieve all the aims of the war without a shot being fired. There was, after all, still a major famine in north India which had left tens and quite possibly hundreds of thousands starving to death—there are no official statistics—and whose horrors had been greatly exacerbated by the British encouragement of poppy growing over food crops.

There was also the increasing likelihood that Auckland would choose to fight a second illegal war of aggression on a different front—this time with China—in order to protect the Company’s profitable trade in the opium grown from those very poppy fields which had once produced such rich harvests of grain.

Batting a fuckin thousand England

astonishingly, no one at Ferozepur seemed to have given a moment’s thought to the option of reopening negotiations.

Instead, now that there was no danger of encountering the Cossacks or the Imperial Persian army in Afghanistan, an announcement was made that several regiments would be withdrawn from the Army of the Indus and a significantly smaller force would be sent into action. Auckland nonetheless made a strong public declaration that he intended to “prosecute with vigour” the existing plan.

Sir John Kaye, the future historian of the Afghan War, was a young officer in the artillery at the time, and remembered the first meeting of Lord Auckland and Ranjit Singh as being “amidst a scene of indescribable uproar and confusion.”

That night Fanny sat next to Ranjit Singh at the banquet and was intrigued and charmed by her dining companion. He had turned up in a pair of plain white kurta pyjamas, with one single jewel, the Koh-i-Nur, glinting on his arm—not perhaps the most tactful ornament for the occasion, given how he had come to own it.

Two days later, after further displays of military and equestrian prowess, many more speeches and several more banquets, the troops finally set off to war. Led forward by lancers with scarlet cloaks and plumed shakos, the columns of cavalry and infantry regiments headed downstream towards Shikarpur, where they were supposed to liaise with the Bombay army and Shah Shuja’s Contingent.

The Army of the Indus now consisted of around a thousand Europeans and 14,000 East India Company sepoys—excluding the 6,000 irregulars hired by Shuja—accompanied by no fewer than 38,000 Indian camp followers.

No one was planning to travel light. One brigadier claimed that he needed fifty camels to carry his kit, while General Cotton took 260 for his. Three hundred camels were earmarked to carry the military wine cellar.

Many of the junior officers were treating the war as if it were as light-hearted as a hunting trip—indeed one regiment had actually brought its own foxhounds along with it to the front.

Jfc

It did not bode well for the effectiveness of the fighting force. Nor did the lack of communication between the different wings of the Army of the Indus. By now Alexander Burnes was supposed to have completed the negotiations with the Amirs of Sindh and to have received the necessary permissions for the army to pass up the river and through their lands. But the attack on Karachi coupled with the looting of Larkana instead nearly sparked a second war between the British and the Sindhis even before the planned war against Dost Mohammad had got under way.

On his way he heard to his horror that General Sir Willoughby Cotton, without any orders, had left the agreed place of rendezvous and was fast heading south, away from Afghanistan, and about to launch an illegal attack on the Sindhi capital of Hyderabad.

This request was an allusion to a growing crisis with the baggage animals, which had just got much more serious after half of the Shah’s camels had died from eating a poisonous Sindhi plant, a cousin of the foxglove, so leaving the Shah and his troops, like those still broiling in the humidity of the Indus Delta, “in the lurch without the means of moving.”

There were also, as ever, tensions between Macnaghten and Burnes, exacerbated by the fact that Macnaghten had been given the job Burnes wanted, while Burnes had been awarded the knighthood the profoundly snobbish Macnaghten would have loved.

It was therefore a disgruntled and disunited army that finally began to converge in one place at Shikarpur at the end of February 1839, a full three months after the scheduled start of the invasion. The only people impressed by the Army of the Indus were the Afghans, who, unaware of the lack of co-ordination, discipline and foreplanning, or the squabbles between the commanders, heard only exaggerated stories about the size of the enormous force heading towards them.

Once a British camp and bridgehead had been established at Shikarpur, in the absence of further camels to move the supplies of war, ammunition and food stores began to be sent down the Indus by fleets of hastily requisitioned barges—“flat bottomed, very shallow and broader at the stern than at the bow, which rise to a peak some fourteen feet out of the water,” remembered a young infantryman, Thomas Seaton, who was given charge of one supply convoy.

By the end of February the entire arsenal had arrived at Shikarpur; and by the end of the month the last of the Bombay troops had marched in too. All that was now needed was a bridge.

What

On the very last day of February, the invasion force finally crossed the Indus. Mirza ‘Ata was profoundly impressed: “the astonishing technical skills of the British army would have humbled Plato and Aristotle themselves,” he wrote. “Indeed anyone who saw the structure was astonished.”

It was only at this point, after crossing the Indus and entering the 150 miles of sterile salt marshes separating Shikarpur from the Bolan Pass, that it seemed to have dawned on Macnaghten and his generals exactly what they had taken on: a campaign far from their own territory, through a hostile, parched and largely unmapped landscape, with only the most tenuous communications and guarded on all sides by unwilling and unreliable allies.

Because of the delays, summer was now approaching and the desert was rapidly beginning to warm up. So the marches through the empty wilderness now had to be conducted at night. Insufficient surveying of water and supplies ahead of the intended route meant that no one knew how much food and water would be needed. Nor was anyone prepared for the heat.

The sepoys, each with his heavy musket, sixty rounds of ammunition, clothing, haversack with necessaries, accoutrements, and his brass pot filled with water, were heavily laden for such a march, the burden doubling the already unbearable oppression of their tight-fitting woollen uniforms.

Then there was the gathering crescendo of attacks by Baluchi brigands. Inadequate diplomacy, high-handedness and a lack of co-ordination with local chieftains meant that the tribes of the area looked on the vulnerable British columns as fair game.

Neville Chamberlain was a young cavalry officer on his first campaign, and it was a week after leaving Shikarpur, near a waterhole, that he saw his first casualty: “One woman lay—poor creature!—on the edge of the water, with her long black hair floating in the ripples of the clear stream.”

He was also worried by the slow response from his future subjects to his letters entreating them to rally to his standard. Ever since Macnaghten had informed him of the plan to reinstate him, Shuja had been engaged in an energetic correspondence with the different tribal leaders of his old dominions, inviting them “in accordance with their family traditions to come forward and offer allegiance, and have their ancient rights and lands confirmed in perpetuity.” But the response had been a deafening silence, except from some of the Ghilzai and the Khyber chiefs, who had replied asking him to send money.

In the past the Khan of Qalat had been a fairly loyal follower of Shuja and had given him shelter after he fled from his defeat in Kandahar five years earlier. But he strongly disapproved of Shuja returning to power as the puppet of the British.

As Burnes prepared to return to his army, having failed to procure any of the supplies he needed, or even the most tenuous support of Mehrab Khan, his host was no less prescient in his final warning. “You have brought an army into the country,” he said. “But how do you propose to take it out again?”

For the first four of the pass’s seventy miles, the enfilade was so narrow that only a single camel could advance at a time.

the stifling winter uniforms of the infantry were far too hot for a steep ascent in baking summer temperatures, and even if the vertical cliff walls initially shielded the sepoys from the direct rays of the sun, the rocks reflected the heat into their faces like an open tandoor. By day, the thermometers in the airless tents registered 119 degrees.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.”

‘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?’

Nott may have been impressed with the Afghans, but he was less taken with his own colleagues.

Wise

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.