History of the War in Afghanistan, Vol. 1 (of 3) / Third Edition

by Sir John William Kaye

On the 11th of August, Colonel Stoddart arrived in the Persian camp. Repairing at once to the quarters of the minister, he found the son of the Candahar chief and a party of Afghans waiting in the tent. The Hadjee, on his return, received him with courtesy and friendliness, and fixed the following day for an interview with the Shah. Stoddart went at the appointed hour. The King was sitting in a raised room, up six or seven steps. Beckoning to the English officer to come up more closely to him, he welcomed him with much cordiality, and listened to the message from the British Government. Taking advantage of a pause in the recital, the King said: “The fact is, if I don’t leave Herat, there will be war, is not that it?” “It is war,” returned Stoddart; “all depends upon your Majesty’s answer—God preserve your Majesty!” The message, written in the original English, was then given to the King. “It is all I wished for,” he said. “I asked the minister plenipotentiary for it; but he would not give it to me. He said he was not authorized.” “He was not authorized then,” returned Stoddart; “but now he has been ordered to do it. No one could give such a message without especial authority from his Sovereign.” The Shah complained that the paper was in English, which he could not understand; but said that his Meerzas should translate it for him, and then that he would give a positive answer to its demands. Two days afterwards Stoddart was again summoned to the royal presence. “We consent to the whole of the demands of the British Government,” said the Shah. “We will not go to war. Were it not for the sake of their friendship, we should not return from before Herat. Had we known that our coming here might risk the loss of their friendship, we certainly would not have come at all.”[197] The English officer thanked God that his Majesty had taken so wise a view of the real interests of Persia; but hinted to the Foreign Minister as he went out, that although the Shah’s answer was very satisfactory, it would be more satisfactory still to see it at once reduced to practice.

Whilst, in the Persian camp, Mahomed Shah was promising the English diplomatists to withdraw his army from Herat, an officer of the Russian Mission—M. Goutte, who had approved himself an adept in intrigue—was busying himself in Herat to bring about an arrangement that would give a colour of victory to the achievements of the investing force. If Kamran could have been persuaded to come out and wait upon Mahomed Shah in token of submission, the army might have been withdrawn with some show of credit, and the Russian Mission might have claimed a diplomatic victory. The Afghans were not, in their present reduced state, disinclined to acknowledge the supremacy of Mahomed Shah, and to consent that Kamran should visit the Persian monarch at Ghorian: but the Russian envoy demanded that he should come out of Herat, and make his obeisance to the King of Kings, as a preliminary to the withdrawal of the Persian army.[198]

This was on the 17th of August. On the morning of the 18th, Yar Mahomed sent a messenger to Pottinger, requesting his attendance at the Wuzeer’s quarters. The English officer was received with coldness almost amounting to discourtesy. Scarcely a word was spoken to him whilst the levee lasted; but when the assembly broke up, Pottinger, in a tone of voice that showed he was not to be trifled with, asked him why he had sent for him if he had nothing to communicate and nothing to ask. The Wuzeer took him by the hand and was about to leave the room; when Pottinger, arresting his progress, demanded a private interview. The room was cleared. The young English officer and the Afghan Sirdar sate down together, and were soon in friendly discourse. Yar Mahomed, the most plausible and persuasive of men,[199] soon stilled the tempest that was rising in Pottinger’s breast. All patience and gentleness now, he was ready to submit to any rebuke, and to utter any apology. They were soon in earnest conversation, as friends and brothers, regarding the general condition of the garrison and its available resources. The Wuzeer declared that “he regretted much the step he was obliged to take, but that indeed no alternative was left him—that every resource which even tyranny commanded was exhausted—that he dared not lay hands on the property of the combatants, though many of them had large funds.” The chiefs, he declared, were misers. The eunuch, Hadjee Ferooz, he said, could easily contribute two lakhs of rupees towards the expenses of the war, and the Shah might contribute ten; but neither would advance a farthing. “They are all,” he said, “equally niggardly. They have money, but they will not advance it. When their wives are being ravished before their faces, they will repent of their avarice; but now it is impossible to convince them of the folly and the danger of the course they are pursuing. With such people to deal with, and the soldiery crying out for pay and subsistence, how can I hold out longer by force?” He consented, however, to protract the negotiations to the utmost—to amuse the Persians—and to gain time. And in the mean while, he extracted from the weak and unresisting all that he could wring from them by torture. On the night after this conference with Pottinger, the Moonshee-Bashee died under the hands of the torturers.

The struggle, however, was now nearly at an end. The movements in the Persian camp appear, at this time, to have been but imperfectly known within the walls of Herat. Whilst Mahomed Shah was making preparations for the withdrawal of his army, Yar Mahomed and the Afghan Sirdars were busy with their financial operations for the continuance of the defence. A Finance Committee was appointed. Kamran was told that he must either provide money for the payment of the soldiery, or authorise the Committee to set about their work after their own manner. Eager to save his money, he sacrificed his people, and armed the Committee with full powers to search the houses of the inhabitants, to order the expulsion of all who had less than three months’ provisions, and to take from those who had more all that they could find in excess. The Topshee-Bashee, or chief artilleryman, to whom the executive duties of the Committee were entrusted, contrived to extort from the inhabitants several days’ food, and a large supply of jewels, with which he enriched the Wuzeer and himself. It was always believed that the former had amassed large sums of money during the siege; that he had turned the scarcity to good account, by retaining in his own coffers no small portion of the coin which he had wrung by torture from the wretched inhabitants. Now when the soldiery, lacking the means of subsistence, entered upon a course of plundering that threw the whole city into confusion, the Wuzeer, whilst issuing a proclamation forbidding such irregularities, and declaring severe penalties for the offence, allowed a continuation of the license to his own people, that he might avoid the necessity of paying them at his own cost. It is not strange, therefore, that when reports were circulated throughout the city that the Persian army was about to move, the Soonee Parsewans, scarcely less than the Sheeahs, should have received the intelligence, some with sorrow, and some with a forced incredulity, “preferring the miseries of the siege with the ultimate prospect of the city being taken and sacked, to the raising of the siege and the prospect of Kamran’s and Yar Mahomed’s paternal government.” “All I wonder,” said Pottinger, recording this fact, “is, that not a man is to be found among them bold enough to terminate their miseries by the death of their oppressors.”[200]

But it was now becoming every day more obvious that Mahomed Shah was about to break up his camp. Some countrymen came into Herat and reported that the Persians were collecting their guns and mortars, and parking them as though in preparation for an immediate march. Parties of horsemen also had been seen moving out of camp. Others brought in word that the enemy had destroyed their 68-pounders, were assembling their carriage-cattle, and were about to raise the siege. The English, it was said, had taken Shiraz; but the Persians in the trenches, declaring that they were ready for another assault, cried out, that though the English army had advanced upon that city, the Prince-Governor had defeated it. All kinds of preposterous rumours were rife. Some asserted that the Russians had attacked and captured Tabreez; others that the Russians and English had formed an alliance for the overthrow of Mahomedanism, and the partition of the countries of the East between the two great European powers. But amidst all these rumours indicating the intended retrogression of the Persian army, the garrison was kept continually on the alert by alarming reports of another attack; and it was hard to say whether all these seeming preparations in Mahomed Shah’s camp were nor designed to lull the Heratees into a sleep of delusive security, and render them an easier prey.

But the month of September brought with it intelligence of a more decided character. There was no longer any doubt in Herat, that Mahomed Shah was breaking up his camp. Letters came in from the Persian authorities intimating the probability of the “King-of-Kings” forgiving the rebellion of Prince Kamran on certain conditions which would give a better grace to the withdrawal of the Persian monarch. To some of these, mainly at Pottinger’s suggestion, the Heratees demurred; but on the 4th of September, the Persian prisoners were sent into camp; and the Shah-in-Shah promised Colonel Stoddart that the march of the army should commence in a few days. There was, indeed, a pressing necessity for the immediate departure of the force. “The forage in camp,” wrote Colonel Stoddart to Mr. M’Neill, “will only last for five or six days more, and as messengers have been sent to turn back all cafilas, no more flour or grain will arrive. The advanced guard under Humza Meerza leaves camp on Friday evening.”

Everything was now ready for the retreat. The guns had been withdrawn from their advanced positions, and were now limbered up for the march. The baggage-cattle had been collected. The tents were being struck. The garrison of Herat looked out upon the stir in the Persian camp, and could no longer be doubtful of its import. The siege was now raised. The danger was at an end. Before the 9th of September, the Persian army had commenced its retrograde march to Teheran; and on the morning of that day the Shah mounted his horse “Ameerj,” and set his face towards his capital.

To Mahomed Shah this failure was mortifying indeed; but the interests at stake were too large for him to sacrifice them at the shrine of his ambition. He had spent ten months before the walls of Herat, exhausting his soldiery in a vain endeavour to carry by assault a place of no real or reputed strength. He had succeeded only in reducing the garrison to very painful straits; and had retired at last, not as one well-disposed to peaceful negotiation and reasonable concession, submitting to the friendly intervention of a neutral power, and willing to wave the chances of success; but as one who saw before him no chance of success, and was moved by no feeling of moderation and forbearance, but by a cogent fear of the consequences resulting from the longer prosecution of the siege. On the whole, it had been little better than a lamentable demonstration of weakness. The Persian army under the eye of the sovereign himself, aided by the skill of Russian engineers and the wisdom of Russian statesmen, had failed, in ten months, to reduce a place which I believe, in no spirit of national self-love, a well-equipped English force, under a competent commander, would have reduced in as many days.

The real cause of the failure is not generally understood. The fact is, that there was no unity in the conduct of the siege. Instead of devising and adhering to some combined plan of operations, the Sirdars, or Generals, under Mahomed Shah, to whom the prosecution of the siege was entrusted, acted as so many independent commanders, and each followed his own plan of attack. The jealousy of the chiefs prevented them from acting in concert with each other. Each had his own independent point of attack, and they would not even move to the assistance of each other when attacked by the Heratees in the trenches. Except when Mahomed Shah insisted on a combined assault, as on the 24th of June, and the Russian minister directed it, there was no union among them. Each had his own game to follow up; his own laurels to win; and was rather pleased than disappointed by the failures of his brethren. It was not possible that operations so conducted should have resulted in anything but failure. But it was the deliberate opinion of Eldred Pottinger, expressed nearly two years after the withdrawal of the Persian army, that Mahomed Shah might have taken Herat by assault, within four-and-twenty hours after his appearance before its walls, if his troops had been efficiently commanded.[201]