History of the War in Afghanistan, Vol. 2 (of 3) / Third Edition

by Sir John William Kaye

The Wuzeer had long been accommodating his demands to every change in the political barometer. Unfortunately, those changes had indicated little but the depressed circumstances of our position in Afghanistan. The disaster of Major Clibborne; the fall of Khelat; and the progress of Dost Mahomed on the Hindoo-Koosh, were adverse circumstances which encouraged the Wuzeer to rise in his demands for more money, and even to meditate aggressive movements of a more palpable character than any which had yet been undertaken against the power of Shah Soojah and his supporters. At one time he contemplated an attack upon Candahar, and was anxious that his intentions should be known to the British Mission. The surrender of Dost Mahomed had, however, somewhat checked his presumption; and the descent upon Candahar was postponed.

The knowledge of the Zemindawer outbreak soon caused the project to be revived. Having despatched an emissary to the disaffected country to keep alive the spirit of revolt, Yar Mahomed at the same time sent, secretly and suddenly, a deputation to the Persian governor at Meshed, seeking pecuniary assistance from his government, promising to expel the British mission from Herat, and urging him to unite in an attack on Candahar, whilst the communications between that place and Caubul were cut off by the snow.

This last glaring act of perfidy excited Todd to retaliate. He believed that there was a point of forbearance beyond which it would be disgraceful to his country to descend; so he determined to suspend the payment of the allowance[65] which had been granted to the state; and, taking advantage of the presence of a large body of troops in Upper Sindh, announced, on the 1st of February, his intention to the Wuzeer. But Yar Mahomed, at this time, was intent on playing a “great game.” He believed that his deputation had been favourably received at Meshed; he believed that the Douranees were again working themselves into rebellion; and he had abundant faith in the continued forbearance of the British government. So he played, with his accustomed craft, for a large stake; and little heeded the consequences of failure. The one object of all his intrigues was to obtain money—money for the state—money for himself. On the 8th of February he came forward with a string of specific demands. He asked for two lakhs of rupees to pay his own debts; he asked for an increased monthly allowance to his Government, to be guaranteed for a year; he asked for further improvement of the fortifications of Herat at the expense of the British Government; he asked for loans of money to enable Herat to recover possession of its lost territories, the troops to be subsisted in the field at our expense; and he asked for a written agreement to relieve him “from all apprehension for the future.” He knew well what he merited at our hands, and years afterwards justified his conduct to the British Mission, on the ground that he dreaded the influence of our officers, and felt that his very existence was at stake.

To these extravagant demands Todd gave an answer regulated by his knowledge of the forbearing course, which his Government desired him to pursue. He told the Wuzeer that before he could comply, even in a modified form, with such requests, he should require some guarantee that such concessions would not be thrown away. Yar Mahomed had some time before declared his willingness to admit a British garrison into Herat. If this were now done, some of his demands might be granted. Yar Mahomed clutched at this; but turning the proposed garrison into a British force to be located in the valley of Herat, declared that, on the payment of two lakhs of rupees, he would give his assent to the measure. Never had he the shadow of an intention of fulfilling his part of the contract—but he wanted the money. His sincerity was soon tested. Todd demanded that the Wuzeer’s son should be sent to Ghiresk, there to await an answer from the Government of India, and to escort, if the measure were approved, the British troops to Herat; and it was added, that on the Sirdar’s arrival at that place the money demanded would be paid. But Yar Mahomed at once refused his assent to Todd’s proposal. He required the immediate payment of the money or the departure of the Mission. So the British agent chose the latter alternative, and turned his back upon Herat.

Never before, perhaps, had the British Government been so insulted and so outraged in the person of its representatives. Shah Kamran, at a private audience, told one of the officers of the Mission that, but for his protection, “not a Feringhee would have been left alive;” and asked if he did not deserve some credit for not acting towards Todd and his companions as the Ameer of Bokhara had acted towards Colonel Stoddart. Yar Mahomed had intercepted Todd’s letters to Candahar. He had been for some time in an habitual state of intoxication. The seizure of the persons of the British officers, and the plunder of their property, had been openly discussed by the Wuzeer and his profligate friends, and there is little doubt that, if the Mission had remained longer at Herat, the members of it would have been subjected to indignities of the worst kind.

The Mission left Herat, and halted for a time at Ghiresk. When the tidings of its abrupt departure reached Lord Auckland at Calcutta, he was roused into a state of very unwonted exacerbation. He was not a hasty man—he was not an unjust one. But on this occasion he committed an act both hasty and unjust. He at once repudiated the proceedings of Major Todd at Herat; and removed him from political employment.

“I am writhing in anger and in bitterness,” he wrote to the Lieutenant-Governor of Agra, “at Major Todd’s conduct at Herat, and have seen no course open to me, in regard to it, but that of discarding and disavowing him; and we have directed his dismissal to the provinces. What we have wanted in Afghanistan has been repose under an exhibition of strength, and he has wantonly, and against all orders, done that which is most likely to produce general disquiet, and which may make our strength inadequate to the calls upon it. I look upon a march to Herat as perfectly impracticable; and if it were not so, I should look upon it, under present circumstances, as most inexpedient. We have taught Yar Mahomed to be more afraid of us than of the Persians. It is possible that, when he has been left a little time to himself, he will be more afraid of the Persians than of us—but, in the mean time, the state to which things have been brought is a cause of much anxiety and more apprehension to me.”

That, in one sense, the Heratee Mission failed, is certain; but, there were some of Todd’s measures which did not fail, and it is not to be forgotten that on his own responsibility he despatched Abbott and Shakespear to Khiva, and the good that was done by these Missions was often in the retrospect a solace to him in after days, when smarting under the injustice of his masters.[66] Substantial benefits, too, were conferred on the people of Herat—benefits still remembered with gratitude, and seldom spoken of without some expression of respect and admiration for their benefactors. The unceasing charities and the blameless lives of the officers of the Mission raised the character of the British nation as it was raised in no other part of Afghanistan. But Lord Auckland never forgave the diplomatic failure. Todd’s departure from Herat was inopportune; for, although he had no reason to believe the settlement of our differences with Persia was any nearer to its consummation than it had been for some time, they were then on the eve of adjustment. Had he known this, he would have braved everything and remained at Herat, encouraged by the thought that the re-establishment of our amicable relations with Persia would effectually cripple the power and restrain the audacity of the Heratee minister. Remanded to his regiment, Todd proceeded to join it at the head-quarters of the Artillery at Dum-Dum. “Equal to either fortune,” he fell back upon the common routine of regimental service, and, in command of a company of Foot Artillery, devoted himself with as much earnest and assiduous zeal to the minutiæ of military duty, as he had done, a year before, to the affairs of the Herat Mission. It has often been said that political employ unfits a man for regimental duty; but Major Todd, from the time that he first rejoined his regiment to the hour of his death, never slackened in his attention to his military duties; and, perhaps, in the whole range of the service, there was not a more zealous, a more assiduous—in other words, a more conscientious regimental officer than the old antagonist of Yar Mahomed. The trait of character here illustrated is a rarer one than may be supposed. Nothing in his political life became him like the leaving of it. There are few who know how, gracefully, to descend.

It is not improbable that these years of regimental duty were the happiest period of his life. Shortly after his return to the Presidency, from which he had so long been absent, he married; and in the enjoyment of domestic happiness, such as has rarely been surpassed, he soon forgot the injustice that had been done to him. Cheerfully doing his duty in that state of life to which it had pleased God to call him, respected and beloved by all who had the means of appreciating the simplicity of his manners, the kindness of his heart, the soundness of his intelligence, and the integrity of his conduct, he found that, in exchanging the excitement of a semi-barbarous Court for the tranquillity of cantonment life and the companionship of a gentle and amiable wife, the barter, though not self-sought, had been greatly to his advantage.

Being appointed to the command of a horse-field battery, stationed at Delhi, he left Dum-Dum for the imperial city, where he continued to serve, until, shortly before the Sikh invasion, he attained that great object of regimental ambition, the command of a troop of horse-artillery. In the Upper Provinces, he had more than once been disquieted by the illness of his young and fondly-loved wife; but the heavy blow, which was to prostrate all his earthly happiness, did not descend upon him until within a few days of that memorable 18th of December, 1845, which saw the British army fling itself upon the Sikh batteries at Mudkhi. He was called away, as he touchingly said, “from the open grave,” to be plunged into the excitement of battle. It was at Ferozshuhur that D’Arcey Todd, broken-hearted, with a strong presentiment of his approaching end, declaring that he “only wished to live that the grace of God and the love of Christ might prepare him to leave a world in which there could be no more joy for him,” led his troop, a second time, into action, and perished in the unequal conflict: and among the many who fell on that mournful day, there was not a braver soldier or a better man.