Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (33 page)

Some were shot while letting themselves down in this way while many that made good their escape were sabred in the field by the cavalry. After all the works were in our possession, bands of the Garrison who had shut themselves up in houses continued to fire upon the troops. Those who surrendered were given quarter but the standard bearer and others who killed many of our men long after the place was ours were shot on their being taken. After all had become quiet, a body breaking from a house endeavoured to cut their way out and wounded many men in the attempt . . .

The slaughter, Gaisford added, was ‘dreadful’.

In a porch leading by a wide staircase to the rampart I found between 30 and 40 bodies lying together, many of them on fire and partially burnt . . . Some affecting scenes took place in removing the bodies. The party who had taken a corpse from a house found it dragged back immediately their backs were turned and a woman and child crying over it. Every house and shop was ransacked and scarce a household remained unstained by blood. Between 500 and 600 bodies were counted into pits and the probability is that not less than 1000 were killed altogether. The wounded were in a sad plight and were to be seen for the remainder of our stay in the town . . . some burnt, some with gunshot and bayonet wounds, others with shattered limbs and thirteen even blown up in one explosion at a Gun. The Governor of the Fort, Dost Mahomed’s son Hyder Khan, was discovered in a tower over a gateway and gave up his sword on being promised his life.
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By nine in the morning, resistance was at an end. It was now time for the prize agents to begin systematically collecting the loot which would be shared among the troops. It took five days to cart everything out, according to Mirza ‘Ata. They removed ‘to their own godown 3,000 horses of Turkish, Arabian and Iranian breed; 2,000 camels from Kabul, Balkh, Bukhara and Baghdad; sword hilts from Isfahan and Tehran in Iran; hundreds of pashmina shawls from Kashmir; thousands of maunds of raisins, almonds, salted pistachios, clarified butter, rice, flour; thousands of pistols’. The scholarly Mirza ‘Ata was especially interested in a part of the booty which no British source seems to have noted: the Kandahar palace library – ‘Several thousand precious and unique books in Persian and Arabic, covering all the sciences, logic, literary criticism, principles of jurisprudence, syntax and grammar’.
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It was a spectacular victory: the impregnable fortress of Ghazni had been captured within seventy-two hours of the army first sighting it. As well as a thousand fatalities, around 300 Afghans were wounded and 1,500 taken prisoner. In contrast, the British suffered only seventeen killed with around sixty-five wounded.
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But, as Durand later pointed out, the success of the assault was largely due to luck, as by leaving behind the siege guns and marching without sufficient supplies Keane had ‘committed a grievous military error; but as if in mockery of human prudence and foresight, war occasionally affords instances in which a mistake becomes, under the inscrutable will of Providence, the immediate cause of brilliant and startling success: and such this error ultimately proved’.
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If the British had won a remarkable victory against the odds, the Afghans had hardly disgraced themselves. They had shown their fighting skills, and the bravery of the defenders, even when all was lost, created legends that began to grow almost immediately. Mirza ‘Ata, who like many Afghans began to feel his own loyalties turning at this point, recorded that many believed that miracles attended the bodies of the fallen. ‘The dead ghazis, like the martyrs of Kerbela, were left on the battlefield without grave or shroud,’ he wrote,

and in spite of entreaties by pious Muslims to give them proper burial the English refused permission. But during the night, thanks to the Almighty, all the corpses of the martyrs disappeared and not a trace of their blood remained on the ground. Another curious story was of a ghazi who remained in a tower of the Fort for 3 days, sniping and killing all who came near – he accounted for 70 Company soldiers, then suddenly disappeared – and no one knew where he went. Inside the Ghazni Fort there are many large underground tunnels of which the English for some months were quite unaware, until, it is said, some 800 virgin girls and infants, 300 horses, 500 Afghan men suddenly appeared and walked away, and not one of the occupying troops making any attempt to stop or challenge them. So it was that English rule descended on Ghazni.
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News of the fall of Ghazni reached Dost Mohammad in Kabul in less than forty-eight hours. He had spent three months renovating and strengthening the greatest fortress in the land, and it had fallen to the Kafir [infidel] invaders within three hours. In the next few days there was further bad news that both eroded his own confidence and undermined the resolve of his supporters.

First, and most damagingly for the Amir, his favourite and most effective son Akbar Khan, whom he had deputed to guard the Khyber and block the advance of Wade and Prince Timur, had fallen suddenly sick. There were rumours of poison, and for two days Akbar Khan’s life hung in the balance. According to the Afghan sources, this more than anything else affected the spirits of Dost Mohammad: ‘When the Amir saw his son, as dear to him as his own liver, the pain of grief tore his heart to shreds and he beat his head with the hands of desperation.’
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The illness of Akbar Khan finally provided Wade with the opportunity he had been waiting for. In the confusion he decided to risk an assault on the Khyber although he had managed to gather fewer than 5,000 troops, and these of indifferent quality. The assault was fiercely opposed both by the local Afridis and by the tribesmen of Mohammad Shah Khan of the Babrak Khel Ghilzai, who was the father of Akbar Khan’s famously beautiful bride. But on 26 July Wade captured Ali Masjid below the summit of the pass, and before long was marching on towards Jalalabad, from which the prostrate Akbar Khan had to be hurriedly removed on a litter.

The capture of Ali Masjid and Ghazni within forty-eight hours of each other encouraged other disaffected tribesmen. In Istalif, thirty-five miles beyond Kabul, the Tajik Kohistanis rose up against the Barakzais under their religious leader, the Naqsbandi Pir and hereditary Imam of the Pul-i-Khishti mosque, Mir Haji, and expelled their Barakzai Governor, Dost Mohammad’s eldest son, Sardar Sher ‘Ali Khan. They pursued him into his mud-walled compound in Charikar which they then besieged, ‘tightening the noose around his neck’.
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As a young man, Dost Mohammad had had many of the Kohistani maliks killed when he ruled the area for his elder half-brother Fatteh Khan, and having been offered financial inducements by Wade, Mir Haji now encouraged his people to rise up and claim the revenge for which they had been waiting twenty years.
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With one army advancing on him from Ghazni, and another from Jalalabad, and with the Kohistanis rising in revolt to his rear, Dost Mohammad’s options were now rapidly diminishing. His first reaction was the traditional Pashtun response to a defeat – negotiations. Nawab Jabar Khan was the most pro-British of all the Kabul nobles: he had hosted Burnes and sponsored Charles Masson’s excavations as well as sending his son to be educated in the English fashion at Wade’s school in Ludhiana. Morever, during the face-off with Vitkevitch the previous year, the Nawab had worked hard to win over his brother to the British cause.

So Jabar Khan was sent to Ghazni with an offer – Shah Shuja could return to the throne, on the condition that under the Sadozai crown Dost Mohammad could continue as wazir, ‘which situation, by hereditary claim, he had a right to secure’. After all, his half-brother Fatteh Khan had been wazir to Shah Zaman, and his father Payindah Khan was wazir to Shuja’s father Timur Shah. To Pashtun eyes it was both the customary and the obvious solution to the problem, and Jabar Khan was amazed when the offer was peremptorily turned down by the British. He was also appalled at the rejection of his second request: ‘the deliverance of his niece, the wife of Haidar Khan’. As one young British officer, Henry Havelock, noticed, Jabar ‘felt or affected, the utmost indignation at the rejection’.
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Only Mohan Lal, with his long experience of Afghan notions of honour, understood how insulting this rejection was: ‘it was quite unnecessary to offend such a valuable friend as the Nawab at this critical time’, he wrote. As a result,

[Jabar] really lost confidence and hope in us. In the conversation which he had with us, the topic turned to Shah Shuja ul-Mulk whose name we mentioned with great deference; on which the Nawab smiled, and said to the Envoy, ‘If Shah Shuja is really a king, and come to the kingdom of his ancestors, what is the use of your army? You have brought him by your money and arms into Afghanistan, and you have behaved towards him in a friendly and liberal manner in every way. Leave him now with us Afghans, and let him rule us if he can.’ Such plain language was not palatable to us . . . and the good Nawab, sunk in disappointment and distress of mind by our unfriendly manner towards him, left our camp about noon on the 29th July. I was told to escort the Nawab beyond our piquets; and on the road we heard the shrieks of some woman captured from the fortress of Ghazni. The Nawab turned his face towards me, and nodded his head . . . The tone of the language of the Nawab, on his return to Kabul, was not friendly towards us.
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As negotiations had now failed, Dost Mohammad had only one remaining option: he gathered his supporters in Kabul and summoned a public meeting in the gardens surrounding the unfinished tomb of Timur Shah. There he made an emotional speech, several accounts of which have survived. ‘You have eaten my salt these last thirteen years,’ he told his last followers. ‘Grant me but one favour in return for that long period of maintenance and kindness – enable me to die with honour. Stand by the brother of Fatteh Khan while he executes one last charge against the cavalry of the Firangi dogs; if in that onset he will fall, then go and make your own terms with Shah Shuja.’
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The plea was met with silence. The fullest account of what happened next is that given by Maulana Hamid Kashmiri in the
Akbarnama
,
who has Dost Mohammad debate his own legitimacy with his followers. The Amir claims to represent the rule of Islamic law and justice, but his followers, seeing which way the wind is blowing, reply that a crowned and legitimate king should always have the first call on their loyalty, not an amir. For this reason they dismiss Dost Mohammad’s argument that Shuja has lost the protection of law as he has chosen to ally himself with the Firangi infidels.
‘
What has the world become in these times?’ asked the Amir.

‘When of a hundred friends not one remains a friend?

When men become more faithless than women

Why then should the faith of women be given a bad name?

I fear that the state will fall into the hand of the Firangis

Then laws, a creed and religion of their own they would place here

No one’s honour would remain intact

No one’s suffering would be spared.’

They said to him in reply: ‘O leader of this assembly

In this war, aid from us you will not find . . .

For rebelling against Kings is forbidden by God

To be an Amir and a Shah is quite different

We do not dare to draw swords upon him

Let whatever comes to us come.’

The Amir responded: ‘Obedience to a King is right

If he is on the rightly guided path of
Shari’a

Not a king who has become faithless

The world from his oppression would be rendered terrible

Now with the aid of infidels

He has come prepared with a great army

The helpers of infidels, by the law of the
hadith

Become
kafirs
, wicked and impure

The killing of such an impure Shah is right

Helping him is unrighteous and wrong’

He was answered by the Qizilbash leader, Khan Shirin Khan. Dost Mohammad had a Qizilbash mother and hoped the Qizilbash would stand and fight with him, but they, like everyone else, could see which way the wind was blowing.

‘Silence! [replied Khan Shirin Khan.] Do not speak words so                wicked and infelicitous

For after all we have eaten the salt of the Shah

Stop your idle boasting! The time of your pretensions has gone

The time of your arrogance and vanity has passed.’

When night fell, with a hundred furies and much presumption

The Qizilbash and others worthy of the gibbet and cross . . .

Like fearless thieves plundered the treasury