Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (105 page)

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Authors: William Dalrymple

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The British Garrison at Jalalabad, from the top turret of which an eagle-eyed staff officer was able to spot Dr Brydon’s approach and send out rescuers.

Lady Butler’s famous oil,
The Remnants of an Army
, which depicts Dr Brydon’s exhausted arrival at the walls of Jalalabad on his collapsing nag.

General William Nott, one of the most senior Company generals in India, was a brilliant strategist and ever-loyal to his sepoys – ‘the fine manly soldiers’ to whom he was fiercely attached. He was to prove much the most effective of the British military commanders. In August
1842
he marched across Afghanistan, defeating all the forces sent against him, and arrived in Kabul on
17
September, two days after Pollock had retaken the city.

The meticulous but merciless Major-General George Pollock, commander of the Army of Retribution which laid waste to south-eastern Afghanistan and burned Kabul to the ground.

The Army of Retribution arrived in Kabul in September
1842
. After releasing the British hostages, they destroyed the great Char Chatta covered bazaar. A new mosque built in celebration of the British defeat was also razed to the ground, and fires started across the city. ‘The cry arose that Cabul was given up to plunder...’

Dost Mohammad (
seated, to the left of the ring of dancers
) is received in Lahore, on his way back to Kabul. He was restored to the throne in
1842
following the final British withdrawal and the treacherous assassination of Shah Shuja by his own godson. He would reign until his death in
1863
.

A Note on the Author

William Dalrymple is the bestselling author of
In Xanadu
,
City of Djinns
,
From the Holy Mountain
,
The Age of Kali
,
White Mughals
,
The Last Mughals
and, most recently,
Nine Lives
. He has won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the
Sunday Times
Young British Writer of the Year Award, the French Prix d’Astrolabe, the Wolfson Prize for History, the Scottish Book of the Year Prize, the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, the Asia House Award for Asian Literature, the Vodafone Crossword Award and has three times been longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. In 2012 he was appointed Whitney J. Oates Visiting Fellow in Humanities at Princeton University. He lives with his wife and three children on a farm outside Delhi.