The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia (38 page)

The first signs of the coming explosion occurred on the evening of November 1, 1841, when Burnes was warned by his Kashmiri assistant and friend, the well-informed Mohan Lai, that an attempt was to be made on his life that night. It was Burnes whom many Afghans held responsible for bringing the British to Afghanistan, after first spying out the land under the pretence of friendship with Dost Mohammed. His blatant fraternisation with their womenfolk only served to deepen their hostility towards him. Burnes and several other officers were then living in a large and somewhat isolated house surrounded by a wall and courtyard in the heart of the old city. Because of its vulnerability to attack, he was urged by Mohan Lai to move to the safety of the cantonments, to the north of the city, where the British and Indian troops were quartered. Originally they had occupied the Bala Hissar fortress, but at the request of Shah Shujah, who wanted it to house his own troops and large household staff, Macnaghten had agreed to move the entire British force out of its walled security into hurriedly constructed cantonments. Confident that he could quell any trouble, Burnes eschewed his friend’s advice. He knew, moreover, that the British and Indian troops were less than two miles away. Nonetheless, he did ask for the sepoy guard on the house to be reinforced that night.

Meanwhile, not far away in the darkness, a mob was gathering. It was led by men of whom Burnes had made personal enemies. At first it consisted of only a handful of demonstrators, but the conspirators let it be known that the house next door to Burnes’s was the garrison treasury, in which was kept the soldiers’ pay and the gold used by Macnaghten for buying allies. In no time the numbers had swelled, and the crowd needed little urging to march on the infidels’ residence and surround it. At this point Burnes was still confident that he could talk the Afghans into dispersing, and he ordered his sepoy guards not to fire. As a precaution, however, he sent a runner to the cantonments to ask for immediate assistance. Then he went out on to the balcony and began trying to reason with the angry crowd in the street below.

When word of the danger facing Burnes and his companions reached Macnaghten, he immediately summoned his military advisers, and urgent discussions began as to how they should react. This soon developed into an argument between Macnaghten and the officer in command of his troops, General William Elphinstone. Macnaghten’s secretary, Captain George Lawrence, suggested dispatching a regiment of troops at the double to the old city to rescue Burnes, disperse the mob and seize the ringleaders while there was still time. But this was rejected out of hand. ‘My proposal was at once set down as one of pure insanity,’ wrote Lawrence afterwards. Macnaghten and Elphinstone continued to argue, while reports started to come in that the situation at Burnes’s house was rapidly deteriorating. The general, a sick and ageing man who should never have been in command of the troops, lacked the will or energy to take action, and could only come up with objections to the suggestions of others. Macnaghten was equally indecisive, being less concerned about rescuing Burnes than about the political consequences of using troops against the mob. Finally, however, it was agreed to send troops under a brigadier up to the Bala Hissar, and to decide there, in consultation with Shah Shujah, how best to deal with the demonstrators. There they learned that Shujah had already sent some of his own men into the city to try to disperse the rioters and rescue Burnes. Insisting that they were sufficient for the purpose, he refused to allow the British force to follow.

Meanwhile the plight of Burnes had become critical as he tried in vain to make himself heard by the screaming mob below. With him were two other officers – his young brother Charles, an Indian Army subaltern who had come up to stay with him in Kabul, and Major William Broadfoot, his political assistant. Sir John Kaye was to write afterwards: ‘It was obvious now that nothing was to be done by expostulation – nothing by forbearance. The violence of the mob was increasing. That which at first had been an insignificant crowd had now become a great multitude. The treasury of the Shah’s paymasters was before them, and hundreds who had no wrongs, and no political animosity to vent, rushed to the spot hungering after the spoil which lay so temptingly at hand.’ Yet despite the increasing fury of the mob, Burnes continued to order his sepoys to hold their fire, in the belief that help must very soon arrive.

By now some of the bolder demonstrators had entered the compound and succeeded in setting fire to the stables. They next turned their attention to the house. Then came a single shot from the crowd. Major Broadfoot, standing beside Burnes and his brother on the balcony, clutched at his chest and fell. Hastily his two companions dragged him inside, only to find that he was dead. Burnes returned to the balcony in a last attempt to save the situation, shouting down to the mob that he would give them large sums of money if they would disperse. The demonstrators knew, however, that they had no need to bargain. The British gold would very soon be theirs anyway. Realising that no relief was coming, Burnes at last ordered the sepoys to fire on the mob. But, like everything else that had happened so far, it was too late. By now the house itself was ablaze, and the crowd was rampaging across the compound, ignoring the bullets and making for the entrance. It was clear to Burnes and his brother that their last moment had come. Charles decided to fight his way out through the mob.

Watching in horror from a nearby rooftop, but powerless to do anything, was Mohan Lai, whose warning Burnes had ignored. ‘Lieutenant Charles Burnes’, he wrote afterwards, ‘then came out into the garden and killed about six persons before he was cut to pieces.’ Sir Alexander Burnes’s own death he did not witness, for some of the mob then turned towards the house on whose roof he was hiding, forcing him to flee. But he was told later by the servants that when Burnes finally emerged to face the mob he had tied a black cloth over his eyes so as not to see from where the blows came. Seconds later he was dead, wrote Burnes’s friend, ‘cut to pieces by the furious mob’. Inevitably, without reliable eye-witnesses, there are several versions of Burnes’s death. According to one of these, a traitor managed to gain access to the house and, under Koranic oath, persuade Burnes that if he disguised himself in native dress he personally would lead him to safety through the crowd. Realising that he had nothing to lose, Burnes agreed. But the moment he stepped out of the house, the man denounced him to the mob. ‘This’, he screamed in triumph, ‘is Alexander Burnes.’ A frenzied mullah then struck the first blow, and moments later Burnes was on the ground, being hacked to death by the long murderous knives of the Afghans.

Another version maintains that Burnes’s servants offered to carry him through the crowd wrapped up in a tent, as though they were bearing plunder, like so many others that night, but that he had refused. Whatever the truth about his last moments in this city he had once so loved, it appears that one of his old Afghan friends remained loyal to him to the last. According to Kaye, after the mob had moved on to plunder the treasury, a man named Naib Sheriff retrieved his badly mutilated body, together with that of his brother, and buried them both in the garden of the smoke-blackened residence. Major Broadfoot, Kaye records, was less fortunate, for ‘the dogs of the city devoured his remains’.

All this had been allowed to happen just half an hour’s march from where 4,500 British and Indian troops were quartered, and rather less from the Bala Hissar, where the British-led rescue party was standing by, awaiting orders. For reasons which are unclear, although the clamour and the firing could be heard quite distinctly from the cantonments, those orders were never given. Indeed, in the end the rescue party was employed, not to save Burnes and his companions, but to cover the inglorious retreat of Shujah’s irregulars, of whom the angry mob had made short work. Yet seldom could a tragedy have been so easily averted. As one young officer noted in his journal: ‘When 300 men would have been sufficient in the morning to have quelled the disturbance, 3,000 would not have been adequate in the afternoon.’

But it was far from over yet. Worse – much worse – was to follow.

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Catastrophe

News of the appalling fate which had befallen Sir Alexander Burnes and his two companions, not to mention some thirty sepoy guards and servants, sent a wave of horror through the British garrison. At first it was rumoured that Burnes had managed to escape, and was lying low somewhere, but any such hopes were soon dashed. The mob, meanwhile, emboldened by the failure of the British to act, continued on its rampage, burning homes, looting shops and slaughtering anyone suspected of collaboration with the British. Now and again, above the tumult and the roaring flames, could be heard warning cries of ‘They are coming . . . they are coming’, for the rioters were expecting swift and violent retribution. Indeed, so that they could make a quick get-away, the ringleaders, it was learned later, had their horses already saddled up. But in the cantonments Macnaghten and Elphinstone continued to vacillate and agonise, wasting even more precious time. And this despite reports that several other officers, as well as Mohan Lai, were still hiding out in the old city, hoping to escape the mob’s vengeance.

By now it had become clear to everyone, even to Macnaghten, that this was something far more serious than a rabble out of control. Word was coming in that thousands of Afghans were joining the cause by the hour, and that similar disturbances were taking place in the surrounding countryside. Rumours also reached British ears claiming that Shah Shujah himself had called for a holy war against the British. Letters to this effect, bearing his personal seal, were discovered in circulation. For a while it was feared that these might be genuine, and that Shujah had been playing a double game with those who had restored him to his throne. But, on examination, the letters proved to be forgeries and the rumours to be false, deliberately spread by the conspirators. Indeed, it was clear that Shujah’s own position was no less precarious than that of his sponsors. He, to be fair, was the only one who had tried to save Burnes and his companions on learning of their peril, but his troops had been ill-led. Instead of swiftly skirting the city to reach the quarter where Burnes’s house stood, they had tried to advance through the crowded centre, with its narrow, winding streets, dragging their guns behind them. They soon found themselves trapped, and at the mercy of the rioters, many of whom were armed and who greatly outnumbered them. Two hundred of them were killed. The rest, having abandoned their guns, fled in disorder to the shelter of the Bala Hissar, their unseemly retreat covered by the British relief party.

The humiliating rout of Shujah’s troops, supposedly there to protect him, reduced the Afghan ruler to ‘a pitiable state of dejection and alarm’, Kaye tells us, over his own personal safety. The British, too, were badly shaken by this violent and unexpected turn of events. ‘The unwelcome truth was forced upon us’, observed one officer in his diary, ‘that in the whole Afghan nation we could not reckon on a single friend.’ The champagne life, which the garrison had enjoyed for so long, was now clearly at an end. In a half-finished memorandum, which was found after his death, Macnaghten tried to justify his failure to anticipate the uprising. ‘I may be considered culpable’, he wrote, ‘for not having foreseen the coming storm. To this I can only reply that others, who had much better opportunities of watching the feelings of the people, had no suspicion of what was coming.’ He made no mention of Rawlinson or Pottinger, whose warnings he had ignored, and tried to blame Burnes, now conveniently dead, for failing to alert him to the danger. On the evening before his assassination, Macnaghten claimed, Burnes had congratulated him on leaving to take up his new post at a time of ‘such profound tranquillity’. It was no secret, however, that Burnes could hardly wait to see his chief go, and was unlikely to have said anything which might delay his departure, and therefore his own assumption of Macnaghten’s mantle.