Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (67 page)

Even in his own time, the victorious Barakzai view of the struggle between the two clans dominated the way the Afghans wrote about the war, not least because they were patronising the poets who did the writing. Maulana Hamid Kashmiri, for example, puts into the mouth of the Shah’s assassin a speech which he shouts at the dying Shuja and which represents the Barakzai position on Shuja’s legacy: ‘O cruel tyrant!’ he taunts. ‘When were you ever Shah that you call yourself so?’ And he adds:

‘The country that bestowed upon you this title of Shah

You have destroyed by casting a shadow of doom

Drunk like a maddened elephant

You aided and abetted the Firangi forces

Devastation came to Ghazni and Kabul

Into every home reached the hand of oppression

You turned the land of Islam into the land of infidels

You made the marketplace of infidelity brisk and vigorous

Your outer garb is like that of holy pilgrims in Mecca

But within, you thirsted for the blood of Muslims

You killed many brothers of mine

And now you say that I am murdering you?

I am extracting blood vengeance by law

With the blood of your throat I will wash you clean of blood.’
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It is certainly true that the Shah was a deeply flawed man and made many errors of judgement. He was rarely an impressive leader in war and his arrogance and hauteur alienated potential followers throughout his career; as William Fraser noted soon after he crossed the frontier into British India for the first time in 1816, he was indeed ‘very Ultra-Royal in his wishes and expectations’.
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This belief derived from Shuja’s essentially Timurid view of his own kingship: as he wrote to Lord Bentinck in 1834, he believed himself to be ‘under the special protection of God’.
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Yet, for all this, Shuja was a remarkable man: highly educated, intelligent, resolute and above all unbreakable. Throughout his life he was fated to suffer desperate and repeated reverses, often for reasons quite outside his own control, but he never gave up nor ever gave way to despair. ‘Lose no hope when faced with hardships,’ he wrote in his youth while on the run after the blinding and deposition of his brother. ‘Black clouds soon give way to clear rain.’
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This optimism remained a strength throughout his life. Observers constantly remarked on his ‘grace and dignity’, even in the most adverse circumstances.
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The British called him ineffectual, and Burnes in particular mocked him as the man who lost the kingdom of his ancestors; but when the moment of crisis came at the outbreak of rebellion in November 1841, Shuja was the only figure in Kabul to offer an effective military response, and the only person who made any attempt to save Burnes, even though Burnes had always done his best to humiliate him.

Shuja was always unusual for his honourable loyalty to his allies and his faithfulness to his agreements, in a region not known for either. This was one reason he never forgave the Barakzais for breaking the arrangement made between his grandfather, Ahmad Shah Abdali, and Dost Mohammad’s grandfather, Haji Jamal Khan, that the Sadozais would rule as King, with the Barakzais as their faithful servants. He saw himself as the true heir to a highly cultured Persian-speaking Safavid and Timurid civilisation, and as well as writing fine verse and prose himself was a generous patron to poets and scholars, as Mountstuart Elphinstone discovered to his surprise when he spent time in Shuja’s court in 1809. His vision of his kingdom was one which saw it not as an isolated and mountainous backwater but instead as tied by alliances to a wider world, and which through the common Persianate civilisation was diplomatically, culturally and economically integrated with the other countries of the region. It was sadly not a vision that shows much sign, even today, of being realised, though the idea has never completely died.

Shuja’s reign was brought down not by his own faults but by the catastrophic mishandling of the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan as managed by Auckland and Macnaghten, and as lost by General Elphinstone. This left him in the unenviable position of being distrusted and used by the British, while being seen across the country as the Kafir’s puppet. Yet the uprising of 1841 was a rebellion not against Shah Shuja but specifically against the British; indeed it is clear from the Afghan sources that many of the participants saw themselves as rescuing the Shah from the gilded cage into which it was believed the British had locked him for their own ends. The rebels even offered Shuja the leadership of their struggle, and only began opposing him when he refused to disown his British patrons. The rebellion only became a Sadozai–Barakzai power struggle much later on with the arrival of Akbar Khan. When Akbar Khan left Kabul for Jalalabad, the allegiance of many nobles reverted to the Shah. Throughout, Shuja remained surprisingly popular, and outlived almost all those who had been involved in the fiasco: not just Burnes and Macnaghten and the rest of the Kabul army, but even the man who took his most precious possession, Ranjit Singh.

Shuja’s greatest mistake was to allow himself to become too dependent on the troops of his incompetent British patrons. He should have insisted on the return of all British forces immediately after his installation in 1839, for as the most perceptive of the British observers of Afghanistan, Charles Masson, noted at the time, ‘the Afghans had no objection to the match, only the manner of the wooing’.
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As his renewed popularity after the exit of the British in 1842 showed, there were still great reserves of support for the Sadozai monarchy if he had only had the confidence to rely on it. Instead, he remained for ever hitched to his unpopular allies, and it was his unwillingness to sever his links with the British that was in the end his undoing.

As a result, Shuja’s turbulent life ended, as so much of it had been lived, in failure. His premature death left behind him no legacy for his successors: as Maulana Hamid Kashmiri put it, his sons and grandsons were now ‘like a flock out to pasture with no shepherd’. Although after the Kabul army was massacred it briefly seemed as if the revival of the Sadozais might be possible, on his death his sons and his blind brother Shah Zaman were left in a hopeless situation, with little chance of consolidating the power of his dynasty. As Herati noted, for the Sadozais ‘the day now turned to blackest night . . . His Majesty was 65 years of age when he was murdered: he had tasted the triumphs and misfortunes of a long life, and had learned to distrust his fickle subjects. Shah Shuja’ al-Mulk of noble lineage would never have disgraced himself by ingratitude for their years of hospitality, but the repeated wrong choices made by Macnaghten compromised him beyond hope of recovery.’
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Shuja’s death did not, however, bring the end of the killing, nor the end of the war. For even as Shuja’s corpse was lying in the Kabul dust, Pollock’s Army of Retribution was marching for Jalalabad and, as Lady Sale had already heard from her anxious jailers, it was taking no prisoners and giving no quarter.
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10

A War for No Wise Purpose

On the evening of 6 April 1842, Akbar Khan’s artillery around Jalalabad thundered into life and blazed out a series of rolling salutes. All night the guns continued, accompanied – so the garrison could hear from the walls – by the sounds of celebration, music and dancing from beyond the far side of the siege works.

The salutes had been ordered by Akbar Khan to celebrate the death of Shuja and the mortal blow which the Barakzais had just inflicted on their Sadozai rivals and blood-enemies. Within the walls of the besieged city, however, the gun-salutes were assumed to have a quite different meaning. The garrison knew that Pollock was about to attempt the difficult feat of taking the Khyber Pass by force, and supposed the victory salutes were to celebrate his defeat. A false report from a British informer confirmed the error, adding incorrectly that Akbar Khan had just sent reinforcements to the pass to help wipe out what was left of Pollock’s force.

Sale had made all his calculations for the defence of Jalalabad around the certainty that Pollock was imminently coming to his rescue. Now, with his ammunition nearly expended and only 500 sheep left to feed the defenders, Sale believed he had few options left. Plunged into deep gloom, he allowed himself to be persuaded by his younger officers to risk everything in a last desperate attempt to break out, even though the garrison was by then outnumbered at least three to one by Akbar’s huge army of Ghilzai and Shinwari tribal levies. A Council of War was summoned where ‘each gave his opinion that if they must perish, it would be better to die like men, with arms in their hands’, as the Rev. G. R. Gleig put it. ‘They were about to throw their last die and engage in their final battle; for, let it terminate how it might, there would not remain for them musket ammunition enough to try the fortune of another. It was necessary, therefore, that their victory should not only be sure, but complete; so complete as to open for them a free passage to the head of the Khyber – and perhaps beyond it.’
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That evening, a simple strategy was thrashed out. The wounded soldiers and the camp followers with their home-made pikes would man the defences, while every last able-bodied soldier would be divided into one of three columns. The columns would all ‘march direct upon Akbar’s camp, burn it, drive him into the river, and bring off his guns’.
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There was no alternative plan in case of failure.

The following day, in the chilly pre-dawn glimmer of 7 April, the city gates were thrown open, and for the first time since they arrived in late December the entire garrison marched out. Sale had expected to surprise the defenders, but word of the General’s gamble had somehow leaked out and, as the sun rose over the mountains to the east of Jalalabad, the troops saw that Akbar Khan, far from being taken by surprise, had formed his entire army into battle order ‘and they were turning out in their thousands’.
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Firing began immediately. The first casualties were inflicted on the westernmost column, which was commanded by the long-bearded Baptist teetotaller Henry Havelock. Akbar launched all his cavalry at Havelock. As ‘large masses of horse’ closed in, Havelock coolly ordered the column into a square and repulsed the attack, inflicting heavy losses on the circling horsemen. ‘I felt throughout that Lord Jesus was at my side,’ wrote Havelock later. Havelock’s men had become rather bored of his sermons during the siege; they were, however, deeply impressed by their commander’s almost mystical sangfroid in battle. ‘He was as calm under fire as if he stood in a drawing room full of ladies,’ one wrote afterwards.
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Throughout the battle, the column was skilfully supported by the artillery from the city walls. This was something the Kabul defenders had never properly achieved but here, as in earlier battles during the campaign, accurate and effective cannonfire made a crucial difference against armies of Afghan tribesmen unused to grapeshot and modern explosive shells. Moreover the flat plains of Jalalabad favoured the British style of disciplined infantry warfare and did not allow the Afghans to bring into play the mountain guerrilla tactics that had proved so devastating in the passes. It was clear almost immediately that, after six months, the tables were now turning in favour of the British.

There was a brief halt in the advance as Sale ordered his second-in-command, William Dennie, to assault one of the small mud forts that lay between the city and Akbar’s camp; in the confusion Dennie – the man who had led the assault on Kandahar in 1839 and defeated Dost Mohammad at Bamiyan a year later – was shot dead as he rushed through the fort gate at the head of his men. But the advance continued unchecked. As Akbar’s lines drew closer, and the Afghan guns opened up on the columns, the infantry broke into a run, then charged with fixed bayonets. Among those in the lead was Thomas Seaton. ‘The columns were soon well up to the camp,’ he wrote.

We made a rush at it, and carried it without a check, the enemy flying through the grove of trees beyond. We saw large numbers of them throw themselves into the river which, swollen and rapid, destroyed the greatest portion of them. The enemy’s horse hung about for some time, but our cavalry and guns making a demonstration against them they moved off, going along the banks of the stream. The whole of Akbar’s camp fell into our hands. His guns, ammunition, standards, plunder – everything he had with him. The bugle soon recalled our skirmishers, and I detached with a party to fire the tents, and the huts made of boughs and reeds. They were very numerous, and the smoke of the burning proclaimed our victory to the whole valley. Numbers of camels and mounds of grain fell into our hands . . . In spite of the woeful mistake made in attacking the enemy’s outpost [where Dennie had been killed] our loss was surprisingly small, amounting to only eleven men killed.
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