Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (66 page)

Night and day you wear out your pen

Writing letters to our enemies?. . .’
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On 3 April, the pressure on Shuja was increased still further when the head of the Kabul ‘ulema, Mir Haji, the elder brother of the recently killed Mir Masjidi, took up the call for holy war as well, and in his Friday sermons goaded Shuja to lead an Islamic army against the Kafirs. ‘The treacherous and hypocrite Mir Haji’, as Mohan Lal called him, ‘pitched his tent on the way to Jalalabad and sent the criers to proclaim in the city that he was going on a religious war and whoever being Mussalman will not march with him, shall be considered an infidel.’
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He then set off leading a long procession of ‘wild fakirs carrying alam battle standards and Holy Qur’ans and sacred relics from the shrines, chanting prayers in a vast procession, all heading to Jalalabad. It may have been the merest political manipulation,’ commented Herati, ‘but His Majesty realised that unless he went with them a new revolt would break out in Kabul.’
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The situation was now critical. That night Nawab Zaman Khan sent his wife to the palace with a sealed Qur’an to assure Shuja of his fidelity. ‘His wife begged the Shah to march fearlessly along with the Barakzais to Jalalabad and said that her husband will promote the cause and stand by His Majesty as a loyal servant. On considering the proclamations made by Mir Haji and having been insisted upon by all the Chiefs to march against Jalalabad, the Shah was obliged finally to send out his tent and consented to proceed with them.’
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The royal campaign tent was duly pitched at Siyah Sang on the Jalalabad road. ‘I scarcely believe he will ever march,’ wrote an anxious Mohan Lal to Jalalabad, ‘and if he does he will either be murdered or blinded by the Barakzais.’
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For one week more the Shah remained within the Bala Hisar, anxiously waiting to hear if General Pollock had yet managed to bring his army up the Khyber. ‘It is nearly one month that I have delayed sending troops to Jalalabad,’ he wrote in desperation to MacGregor. ‘But during this time no letters have been received from you. I know almost nothing of your intentions. If the British troops arrive within the next ten or fifteen days it is well, but the sooner the better. If not what ought to be done? This is not a matter to be trifled with. Whatever you think advisable, write to me plainly that it may be well understood and arrangements made.’

He added: ‘I have made myself unpopular with all Mahomedans on your account yet you have not comprehended this. Please understand. They say that I wish to destroy the true faith. This is an affair affecting life and death . . . God deliver me.’
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Major-General George Pollock was not a man who liked to be rushed. His reputation had been built on careful planning and meticulous logistics, and following the catastrophe of the slaughter of the Kabul army in January he was all the more determined not to be bullied into acting a single moment before he was ready. Sir Jasper Nicholls, the Commander-in-Chief in Calcutta, was entirely behind him in this, writing to London that ‘It was as well that a cool, cautious officer of the Company’s army’ should have the command. ‘Any precipitancy on the part of a general officer panting for fame might now have the worst effect.’
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Pollock had arrived in Peshawar on 5 February to find morale at rock bottom and many of the sepoys hospitalised: no fewer than 1,800 were on the sick list, and as the trickle of frostbitten survivors of the retreat limped and crawled into Peshawar with their stories of defeat and desertion by their officers, the atmosphere grew increasingly mutinous. Pollock knew he had to turn this around and immediately set about reassuring the sepoys. His first action was to issue worsted gloves and stockings to keep them from the cold. ‘I shall visit the hospitals frequently,’ he explained to Nicholls, ‘and by adding in any way to their comforts, show that I feel an interest in them.’ Soon the numbers of sick were decreasing by the day, and the atmosphere in the camp visibly improving.

Over the following two months, as more regiments and supply wagons arrived, he slowly assembled his forces and his provisions, riding out every day with his field glass to study the elaborate defences and stone sangars the Afridis were building across the Khyber to block his advance. He had calculated that he needed around 275,000 rounds of ammunition in order to bring his force up to 200 rounds per man, and these had all arrived by mid-March. Following desertions by his camel drivers he delayed another fortnight until he had the transport capacity he needed. He also wrote to Ferozepur requesting one more regiment of cavalry and several more traps of horse artillery. Meanwhile, to the increasingly desperate Sale in Jalalabad he wrote: ‘Your situation is never out of my mind . . . Necessity alone has kept me here. Pray therefore tell me, without the least reserve, the latest day you can hold out.’ Sale replied in a message written in rice water, visible only with the application of iodine, that his last supplies of salt meat would run out on 4 April.
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The camels, cavalry and artillery finally arrived on 29 March. That evening Pollock gave orders to break camp and move to the fort of Jamrud at the mouth of the Khyber. A week later, at 3.30 a.m. on 5 April, he ordered his troops to advance silently through the darkness, in three columns, up the defiles of the Khyber. By sunrise, the Afridis found that Pollock’s sepoys were crowning the heights on either side of their stone sangar. By mid-morning, the tribesmen had abandoned all their carefully erected defences and were in headlong retreat. By 2 p.m., Pollock’s central column had taken the fortress of Ali Masjid and were already regrouping, ready to head on to relieve Jalalabad.
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The same morning that Pollock’s sepoys were storming their way up the Khyber, Shah Shuja finally gave up on his British allies. Having heard nothing from MacGregor in reply to his last and most desperate note, the Shah decided he now had no option but to leave the shelter of his fortress and head off to Jalalabad.

He had spent a sleepless night ‘restlessly walking up and down, calling on God, and constantly asking the eunuch servants what time of the night it was’. He then performed his ablutions, said goodbye to his wives and packed a small travelling pouch with the pick of his remaining reserves of diamonds, rubies and emeralds. ‘At the first glimmer of true dawn, His Majesty prayed the two prostrations of the customary prayer in his private apartments in the fort, intending to pray the remaining obligatory two prostrations at the Siyah Sang camp. He mounted his palanquin and urged the porters to move quickly so as not to be late for the main prayer in camp. His Majesty was accompanied by only a minimal escort of personal servants.’
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The previous day, 4 April, Shuja had left the Bala Hisar for the first time since the outbreak of the rebellion on 2 November. He rode out to his tent at the Siyah Sang, and there he held a review of the troops and a public audience for the Kabul nobles. It was at this audience that he formally announced his departure for Jalalabad and appointed his favourite son, Prince Shahpur, as governor of Kabul during his absence. Nasrullah, the eldest son of Aminullah Khan Logari, was appointed Shahpur’s acting chief minister. According to Mirza ‘Ata, the Shah brought with him ‘200,000 Rupees in cash and several bolts of double shawl cloth with which to honour the Kabul chiefs, each according to his rank and merit. He especially favoured Naib Aminullah Khan Logari who had become his closest confidant. Shuja then mounted his palanquin with his son and returned to spend a last night with his harem in the Bala Hisar Fort.’
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Unbeknown to Shuja, however, this action of publicly honouring Aminullah Khan had been interpreted as a deliberate insult to his other principal ally, Nawab Zaman Khan Barakzai. He and Naib Aminullah Khan were now barely on speaking terms, and the public demonstration of the Shah’s closeness to Aminullah at the Siyah Sang durbar had caused huge offence in the camp of the Nawab, who was from by far the grander lineage. ‘Zaman Khan was a great lord with many fighters in his retinue,’ wrote Mirza ‘Ata,

while Aminullah Khan Logari had recently merely been one of his attendants. At the durbar Nawab Zaman Khan and others close to Amir Dost Mohammad Khan had received no cloaks of honour from the King and indeed were quite passed over in the gaze of royal favour. This change in fortune did not sit well with the Nawab. Had the King seen fit to bestow his favours more equitably, the hidden discord might have been healed rather than enflamed. But the Nawab and his followers were seething with rage and pique at the King’s taking no notice of them.

Most upset of all was Shuja’ al-Daula, Zaman Khan’s eldest son, ‘who . . . had received his name from his godfather [Shah Shuja’s] own lips’ and at whose birth the Shah had been present.

Shuja’ al-Daula, whose name means bravery or valour, a name which influenced his character, complained thus to his father: ‘That Aminullah Khan Logari was a mere servant of ours. He and those other minor chiefs with no solid base in society, they have now received all the King’s favours, all the honourable appointments. Meanwhile we have been passed over, all our services to the crown and sacrifices for the cause forgotten: we look on dry-lipped, receiving no sign of gratitude, while the others get all the praise. I’m going to kill him if ever I am able to do so!’ In spite of his father remonstrating that now was not the moment and that it was the time to concentrate on fighting the English, the boy took no notice and planned to ambush the King as he came from the fort to the army camping ground in the morning. Before dawn, he hid with 15 gunmen until the royal cavalry escort approached.

As Shah Shuja’s party headed down the corkscrewing road from the Bala Hisar, the Nawab’s son appeared and hailed his godfather’s palanquin. The carriers paused and put down the palanquin. The Shah peered out of the curtains, and at that moment the waiting gunmen opened fire. The bloodied figure of Shuja stumbled out and tried to limp away across the fields. The assassins were already making off from the scene of the crime when one of them spotted the Shah and shouted to his employer to finish the job properly. ‘So Shuja’ al-Daula gave chase and pounced on the prostrate monarch, stabbing him pitilessly with his sword, shouting “Give me that cloak of honour now!” He stripped the dead King of his jewels and golden arm-band, belt and sword – all worth some one million Rupees. The King’s gentle body, bred to rest on soft cushions of fine wool and velvet, was now dragged by the feet on rough stony ground and dumped in a ditch.’
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‘That blameless monarch’, commented Herati,

was martyred between two prayers, all the while repeating the holy names of God in his dawn litany, while the foul murderers earned only eternal damnation! Shahnawaz, one of His Majesty’s attendants, tried to resist and wounded two of the assassins, but then seeing that the place was empty and abandoned, and that the travelling case of jewels was unattended, grabbed it and rushed towards the fort. He hid it in a crack in an old wall, intending to retrieve it at a later stage and sell the contents. But his actions were observed and so it was that the jewels fell into the hands of the murderer Shah Shuja and his father Nawab Zaman Khan.

Alas for that monarch, who once walked the avenues of the royal gardens but never picked the flowers of his hopes and ambitions! Instead he remained lying in blood and dust, unburied in the open plain. He died on the 23rd of the month of Safar, fixing his permanent abode in the kingdom of heaven. ‘For we belong to God and to Him we return!’
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Prince Shahpur hastened at once to the Bala Hisar fort to protect the royal women and children. The body of his father was left to lie where it fell for twenty-four hours, while the Sadozais barred the gates of the fort and gathered together, with the old blind Zaman Shah taking charge, as they tried to work out a strategy to save their position and seek revenge on the murderers. ‘Meanwhile the Barakzais shouted out their gleeful congratulations, and Mir Haji promptly returned from his pretended jihad with his battle standards announcing, “We’ve sent the greater Lord [Shah Shuja] to join the lesser Lord [Macnaghten].” All were congratulating each other, saying “Now we’ve uprooted these infidel foreigners from our country!”’
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Only one man saw it as his duty to attend to the corpse of the murdered Shah. Shuja’s faithful water carrier, Mehtar Jan Khan Ishaqzai, who had followed Shuja into exile in Ludhiana, returned to the corpse late that night and remained next to it, guarding it from mutilation. The following morning he and another old retainer of the Shah’s, ‘Azim Gol Khan, the ‘Arz-begi, helped prepare the corpse for burial. Working alone, the two men dug a shallow grave inside a ruined mosque near the place of the murder. This they covered with earth, and placed the King’s palanquin on top. They also raised a small cairn of stones to mark the place of the murder.

Later that summer, the stones and the bloodstained palanquin were still lying where the two loyal retainers had left them.
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At the beginning of the twentieth century, the historian Fayz Mohammad was told that Shah Shuja Sadozai had eventually been laid to rest in the magnificent Mughal-style mausoleum of his father, Timur Shah. That may well be the case, and it seems probable that his sepulchre is one of three male graves in the basement of that building; but if so the grave remains unmarked, a measure of the Shah’s standing in Afghanistan today.