The Project Gutenberg eBook, History of the War in Afghanistan, Vol. II (of 3), by John William Kaye

HISTORY

OF

THE WAR IN AFGHANISTAN.

HISTORY
OF
THE WAR IN AFGHANISTAN.

By JOHN WILLIAM KAYE, F.R.S.

THIRD EDITION.

IN THREE VOLUMES.

VOL. II.

LONDON:
WM. H. ALLEN & CO., 13, WATERLOO PLACE,

Publishers to the India Office.
1874.

LONDON.
PRINTED BY W. CLOWES AND SONS, STAMFORD STREET
AND CHARING CROSS.

CONTENTS.

——◆——

BOOK IV.

————

BOOK V.

[1841-1842.]

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BOOK VI.

————

THE WAR IN AFGHANISTAN.

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BOOK IV.

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CHAPTER I.

[August-December: 1839.]

Dawn of the Restoration—Difficulties of our Position—Proposed Withdrawal of the Army—Arrival of Colonel Wade—His Operations—Lord on the Hindoo-Koosh—Evils of our Policy—Defective Agency—Moollah Shikore—Our Political Agents—Operations in the Khybur Pass—The Fall of Khelat.

Restored to the home of his fathers, Shah Soojah was not contented. Even during the excitement of the march to Caubul he had complained of the narrow kingdom to which he was about to return; and now, as he looked out from the windows of his palace over the fair expanse of country beneath him, he sighed to think that the empire of Ahmed Shah had been so grievously curtailed.

Very different, indeed, was the Douranee Empire, over which the sceptre of Shah Soojah was now waved, from that which his father had handed down to Zemaun Shah and his brothers, to be sacrificed by their weakness and disunion. The kingdom, which had once extended from Balkh to Shikarpoor, and from Herat to Cashmere, had now shrunk and collapsed. On every side its integrity had been invaded. Cashmere and Mooltan had fallen to the Sikhs; Peshawur had been wrested from the Afghans by the same unscrupulous neighbour; the independence of Herat had been guaranteed to a branch of the Royal family; the Beloochees had asserted pretensions unknown in the times of Ahmed Shah; the petty Princes on the northern hill-frontier no longer acknowledged their allegiance to Caubul. In whatsoever direction he turned his eyes, he beheld the mutilations to which the old Douranee Empire had been subjected; and yearned to recover some of the provinces which had been severed from the domain of his fathers.

But the kingdom to which he had been restored was more extensive than he could govern. There were many difficult questions to be solved, at this time; the first and the most important of which related to the continuance of his connexion with his Feringhee allies. The British Government had now done all that it had undertaken to do. It had escorted Shah Soojah to his palace gates, and seated him upon the throne of his fathers. In accordance with Lord Auckland’s manifesto, the time had now arrived for the withdrawal of the British army. But it was obvious that the British army could not yet be withdrawn. The Shah had no hold upon the affections of his people. He might sit in the Balla Hissar, but he could not govern the Afghans. Such, at least, was the conviction which by this time had forced itself upon Macnaghten’s mind. If the British Minister had ever contemplated the early abandonment of the restored King, the idea had now passed away. The Shah himself felt no confidence in his own strength. He did not believe that the power of Dost Mahomed was irretrievably broken, but still saw him, in imagination, flitting about the regions of the Hindoo-Koosh, raising the Oosbeg tribes, and pouring down for the recovery of Caubul.

There were objections, many, and weighty, to the continued occupation of Afghanistan by British troops—objections of one kind, which the Shah acknowledged and appreciated; and objections of another, which every statesman and soldier in India must have recognised with painful distinctness. But the experiment of leaving Shah Soojah to himself was too dangerous to be lightly tried. The Shah would fain have rid himself of British interference and control, if he could have maintained himself without British support; and the British Government would fain have withdrawn its troops from Afghanistan, if it could have relied upon the power of the Shah to maintain himself. But to leave the restored Suddozye to be dethroned and expelled, after the homeward march of the troops that had restored him, would have been to court an enormous failure, which would have overwhelmed our government with disgrace. Neither was the restoration sufficiently popular in itself, nor was there sufficient stability in the character of the King to warrant so hazardous an experiment. If the policy of the Afghan invasion had not been based upon error, the experiment would not have been a hazardous one. But the very acknowledgment of the Shah’s inability to maintain himself after the departure of the British army, was a crushing commentary on the assertions put forth in the great October manifesto. The truth was not to be disguised. The “adoration” which had greeted the Shah on his return to his long-lost dominions, was found to be a delusion and a sham. The palace of his fathers had received him again; but it was necessary still to hedge in the throne with a quickset of British bayonets.

So thought Lord Auckland. He had given his mind long and painfully to the subject, and had written an elaborate minute, reviewing all the circumstances of our position in Afghanistan after the entry of the Shah into the country. Macnaghten had been settled little more than a month in Caubul when a copy of this minute, dated Simlah, August 20, was put into his hands. There was nothing unintelligible in it. Ably written, clearly worded, it enunciated, in unmistakeable paragraphs, the views of the Governor-General, and left Macnaghten, even had he been disposed to follow an opposite course, which he was not, no alternative but to retain a portion of the troops, and himself to abide at Caubul as controller of the Shah. Lord Auckland saw plainly the advantages of withdrawing the Army of the Indus. India could ill afford the abstraction of so large a body of disciplined troops, and it was probable that their services might be required in less remote regions; but he could not purchase the advantages of their withdrawal at the price of the failure of the Afghan expedition.

It was the opinion of the Governor-General at this time, that although the British army could not with safety be wholly withdrawn, a force consisting of some five or six regiments of all arms would be sufficient to keep Shah Soojah upon his throne. The Bombay troops were to be withdrawn, en masse, by the Bolan Pass; and a portion of the Bengal army by the route of Jellalabad and the Khybur. The posts at which it was expedient to plant the remaining troops were, in the opinion of the Governor-General, the two chief cities of Caubul and Candahar; and the principal posts on the main roads to Hindostan—Ghuznee and Quettah, on the West, and Jellalabad and Ali-Musjid on the East. The orders which Sir John Keane had issued, before the Governor-General’s minute had reached Caubul, anticipated with much exactness the instructions of the Governor-General. A brigade under Colonel Sale was to remain in Afghanistan. Sir John Keane was to take the remainder of the Bengal troops back to India by the Khybur route; and General Willshire was to lead the Bombay column down by the western line of the Kojuck and the Bolan.

Such were the intentions both of the Supreme Government and the local authorities, when Prince Timour arrived at Caubul, accompanied by Captain Wade, and the little force that had made good his entry into Afghanistan by the eastern passes. It was on the 3rd of September that Cotton, Burnes, and other British officers, with a guard of honour, went out to receive the Prince. With befitting pomp, the procession made its way through the narrow streets of Caubul to the Balla Hissar; and there were those who said that the gaiety of the heir-apparent and his cortège fairly shone down the King’s.

Wade had done his duty well. The magnitude of the operations to the westward has somewhat overlaid the more modest pretensions of the march through the eastern passes; and it may be doubted whether the merit of the achievement has ever been fully acknowledged. Viewed as the contribution of the Sikh Government towards the conquest of Afghanistan, it is absolutely contemptible. Runjeet lay dying when the troops were assembling; and his death was announced before they commenced their march. He was the only man in the Sikh empire who was true at heart to his allies, and all genuine co-operation died out with the fires of his funeral pile. To Wade this was embarrassing in the extreme. But the greater the inefficiency of the Sikh demonstration, the greater the praise that is due to the English officer who triumphed over the difficulties thrown in his way by the infidelity of his allies.

Wade found himself at Peshawur with a motley assemblage of Hindoos, Sikhs, and Afghans, on the good faith of a considerable portion of whom it was impossible to rely. The Prince himself was soon found to be an absolute cypher. His most remarkable characteristic was, to speak paradoxically, that he had no character at all. He was a harmless, respectable personage, with an amount of apathy in his constitution which was sometimes advantageous to those in whose hands he placed himself; but which, at others, engendered an amount of impracticability that was very embarrassing and distressing. It was plain that, whatever was to be accomplished, must be accomplished by the energy of the British officers. Left to themselves, the Sikhs, aided by the Afghans who had joined the standard of the Prince, would never have forced the Khybur Pass. This formidable defile was supposed to be, if vigorously defended, impassable; and the long halt at Peshawur had given the Afreedis, if they were not inclined to sell the passage, abundant time to mature their defensive operations, and Akbar Khan, who was coming down from Caubul to oppose the march of Wade and the Sikh auxiliaries, every opportunity of perfecting his plans.

It was not until the 25th of July that Wade and Prince Timour found themselves before Ali-Musjid. The Afreedis, on that and the preceding day, had made some show of resistance; and our troops—the regulars under Captain Farmer, and the irregulars under Lieutenant Mackeson,[1]—had done good service; whilst Colonel Sheikh Bassawan, with the Sikh auxiliaries, had exhibited an amount of zeal which had won the confidence of the British officers. So closely now did Wade invest the place, so determined was the attitude he had assumed, and so successful was the play of his guns,[2] that on the night of the 26th the garrison evacuated the fortress; and on the following morning the allies took possession of Ali-Musjid in the name of the Shah. The Ameer’s son had not come down to its defence.

There was little more work for Wade and his auxiliaries. Akbar Khan, who had pitched his camp at Dakha—a place to the south of Jellalabad—had now broken it up and retired to join his father, who had by this time discovered that the greater danger was to be apprehended from the western line of attack, and had therefore recalled his son to the capital. The Shah-zadah and his party, therefore, advanced without further opposition. Opposite Dakha, on the other side of the Caubul river, was the fort of Lalpoorah, where dwelt Sadut Khan, chief of the Momund tribe. His conduct had evinced strong feelings of hostility to the Suddozye Princes. He was now, therefore, to be reduced, and his chiefship conferred on another. Throughout our entire connexion with Afghanistan, it was seldom our good fortune to select fitting objects whereon to lavish our bounty. It was generally, indeed, our lot to set up the wrong man. But the case of Tora-baz Khan, who was appointed to the chiefship of Lalpoorah, was one of the few fortunate exceptions to this calamitous rule. In this man we found a faithful ally; and when misfortunes overtook us, he was not unmindful of the benefits he had received at our hands.

On the 3rd of September, Wade and the Shah-zadah reached Caubul. The operations of the motley force which they had led through the difficult passes of Eastern Afghanistan have been dwarfed, as I have said, by the more ostentatious exploits of Sir John Keane’s bulkier army; but it is not to be forgotten, that it was in no small measure owing to the operations of Wade’s force that the resistance offered to Keane’s army was so slight and so ill-matured. It was long before Dost Mahomed ceased to regard the movement through the Khybur with greater anxiety than that of the main army along the western route. Akbar Khan and his fighting men never met Wade in the field; but they were drawn away from the capital at a time when they might have done good service in the West; and it is in no small measure owing to this division of the Ameer’s military strength, that he was unable to offer any effectual resistance to the march of the British army from Candahar. Nor, when we take account of the circumstances which facilitated our success at the outset of the war, ought it ever to be overlooked that Wade, from his forward position at Peshawur, was enabled to open a correspondence with parties at Caubul favourable to the restoration of the monarchy, and to win over many adherents to the Shah before he approached his capital. It was in no small measure owing to Wade’s diplomacy, carried on mainly through the agency of Gholam Khan, Populzye, that the Kohistanees were induced to rise against the Ameer.[3] These were important services. Wade carried on the work with much address; and there were able men associated with him.[4] But the whole affair was a melancholy illustration of the lukewarmness, if not of the positive infidelity, of our Sikh allies. It was plain that, thenceforth, we were to expect little from their alliance, but ill-concealed attempts to thwart and baffle the policy to which they were parties.

The month of September passed pleasantly over the heads of the officers of the Army of the Indus. The fine climate, the fair scenery, and the delicious fruits of Caubul, were all things to be enjoyed, after the sufferings and privations of the long and toilsome march from Hindostan. Then there were shows, and spectacles, and amusements. The troops were reviewed; and the officers rode races; and the Shah, ever delighting in pageantry and parade, established an order of knighthood, and held a grand Durbar, at which the ceremony of investure was performed with becoming dignity and grace. And the officers, happy in the belief that they were soon about to turn their backs on Afghanistan for ever, went about purchasing memorials of their visit to Caubul, or presents to carry back to their friends.

But the hopes of many were doomed to disappointment. On the 18th of September, the Bombay column commenced its march to India, by the route of the Kojuck and the Bolan; and it was believed that a large portion of the Bengal troops would soon be in motion towards the provinces, along the eastern country just traversed by Colonel Wade. A country in which wine was selling at the price of 300 rupees a dozen, and cigars at a rupee a piece,[5] was not one in which the officers of the army were likely to desire to pitch their tents for a sojourn of any long continuance. When, therefore, it began to be reported among them that the original intentions of withdrawing the troops, with the exception of a single brigade, had been abandoned, there was a general feeling of disappointment. The official order was looked for with anxiety; and on the 2nd of October it appeared.[6] The principal portion of the division was to be left in Afghanistan, under Sir Willoughby Cotton; and only a comparatively small detachment was to march to the provinces with Sir John Keane. A week afterwards, orders were issued for the disposition of the troops, and the military occupation of Afghanistan was complete.[7]

A change so great as this in the military arrangements, consequent on the restoration of Shah Soojah, could only have been brought about by a belief in the presence of some new and pressing danger. Dost Mahomed had been driven across the Hindoo-Koosh; but it was believed that he might there be hospitably received by some of the petty Oosbeg chiefs, between Bameean and Balkh; and that he might, united with them, gather sufficient strength to encourage him to turn his face again towards the South, and to sweep down upon the country which had been wrested from him. It had not, at first, been conceived that the prospect of the Ameer’s recovery from the heavy blow which had descended upon him, was sufficiently imminent to indicate the necessity of making any preparations upon a large scale to arrest his return to Afghanistan. But it was considered expedient to send a detachment of the Shah’s troops, with some field artillery, to Bameean, the extreme frontier station of the Shah’s dominions. Accordingly, on the 12th of September, a detachment had marched for the Hindoo-Koosh. A troop of Native Horse Artillery, which had just come in from Candahar, formed the most remarkable portion of this little force. The difficulties of the road to be traversed were such as no European artillery had ever before encountered.[8] But, in spite of this, the 4th troop, 3rd Brigade of Horse Artillery, under Lieutenant Murray Mackenzie (leaving its captain dead at Caubul), made good its way to Bameean; and the Shah’s Goorkha regiment, with other irregular details, accompanied it to its dreary winter-quarters in the mountainous recesses of the great Caucasian range.

Upon the policy of this movement I cannot pause to speculate. I believe that the system of planting small detachments in isolated positions was one of the great errors which marked our military occupation of Afghanistan. But something more was designed than this. It was in contemplation to send a larger force to explore the mountains of the Hindoo-Koosh. Dr. Percival Lord, who had been one of Burnes’s companions on the “Commercial Mission” to Caubul, had just returned to the Afghan capital with the force under Colonel Wade; and now that it was considered desirable to despatch a political officer to the Oosbeg frontier, it was but natural that Lord, who had visited the neighbourhood of Koondooz in 1837-1838, should have been selected for the duty. Lord went; but had not been long absent from Caubul when he returned, with exaggerated stories of the success of Dost Mahomed among the petty chiefs of the Hindoo-Koosh, and of a great movement which was about to be made for the re-establishment of the supremacy of the Ameer. Upon this, Macnaghten, who had begun to doubt the extreme popularity of Shah Soojah, and the safety of confiding his protection and support to the handful of British troops which it was originally intended to leave in Afghanistan, made a requisition to Sir John Keane for a stronger military force, and turned Dr. Lord’s story to account in the furtherance of his own views.

It was easy to issue orders for the maintenance of a large body of British troops in Afghanistan; but it was not so easy to house the regiments thus maintained. The winter was before them. They could not remain encamped on the plain around Caubul. It became, therefore, matter of anxious consideration how accommodation was to be provided for so large a body of regular troops. The subject, indeed, had pressed upon the attention of the political and military chiefs before the brigade, which was originally to have been left in the country, had swelled into a division; and the engineer officers had been called into council, and had given the only advice that was likely to emanate from competent military authority. Lieutenant Durand—a gallant soldier and an able scientific officer—saw at once the importance of posting the troops in the Balla Hissar.[9] And there, in the winter of that year, they were posted, to be removed in the following autumn to the fatal cantonments which by that time were springing up on the plain.

The city of Caubul is situated between two ranges of lofty hills, along the ridges of which run lines of loop-holed walls, with here and there small obtruding towers, or bastions, too weak and too extended to be serviceable for purposes of defence. It is said to be about three miles in circumference. The Balla Hissar stands on a hill, overlooking the city. There are, strictly speaking, two Balla Hissars; the lower of which, on our first entry into Caubul, was in a rickety and decayed state, and could not have stood for an hour against British artillery. Both were commanded by the walled hills above them. The upper Balla Hissar, or citadel, commands the whole of the city and the suburbs. The lower Balla Hissar, which is surrounded by a shallow but rather deep ditch, commands only part of one of the bazaars—the Shore bazaar—two large forts (Mahmoud Khan’s and the Beenee Hissar), and the road to Jellalabad. The houses of the town are mostly flat-roofed; the streets for the most part narrow and tortuous. The most important feature of it is the great bazaar, built, or commenced, by Ali Murdan Khan—a mart for the produce of all the nations of the East.[10]

The Bombay division of the Army of the Indus marched from Caubul on the 18th of September; and on the 15th of October, Sir John Keane, with the troops destined for Bengal, set out for the provinces by way of the eastern passes. The Shah had by this time begun to think of escaping from the severity of the Caubul winter, and reposing in the milder climate and more tranquil neighbourhood of Jellalabad. The sweets of restored dominion had not gratified him to the extent of his anticipations. He was, indeed, a disappointed man. He sighed as he declared that the Caubul he had revisited was not the Caubul of his youth; his kingdom seemed to have shrivelled and collapsed; and even of these shrunken dominions, fettered and controlled as he was, he was only half a king. It was plain that, in the eyes of his subjects, his connexion with the Feringhees had greatly humiliated him. But he wanted the English money and the English bayonets, and was compelled to bear the burden.

Macnaghten was to accompany the King to Jellalabad; and, in the meanwhile, Burnes was to be left in political charge of Caubul and the neighbourhood. The people seemed to be settling down into something like quiescence. If there were little enthusiasm among them, they seemed at first to be outwardly contented with the change. Cupidity is one of the strongest feelings that finds entrance into the Afghan breast. The boundless wealth of the English had been a tradition in Afghanistan ever since the golden days of Mountstuart Elphinstone’s mission. Money had been freely scattered about at Candahar; and it was believed that with an equally profuse hand it would now be disbursed at Caubul. It is true that the military chest and the political treasury had been so indented upon, that when the army reached the capital there was a painful scarcity of coin.[11] But there were large supplies of treasure on the way. The jingling of the money-bag was already ravishing their ears and stirring their hearts. They did not love the Feringhees; but they delighted in Feringhee gold.

This was a miserable state of things; and even the influence of the gold was limited and short-lived. After the outbreak at Caubul, when Mohun Lal was secreted in the Kuzzilbash quarters, he heard the men and women talking among themselves, and saying that the English had enriched the grain-sellers, the grass-sellers, and others who dealt in provisions for man and beast, whilst they reduced the chiefs to poverty, and killed the poor by starvation. The presence of the English soon raised the price of all the necessaries of life. This was no new thing. If a flight of Englishmen settle in a French or a Belgian town, it is not long before the price of provisions is raised. But here was a Commissariat department, with a mighty treasury at its command, buying up all the commodities of Caubul, and not only paying preposterous sums for everything they purchased, but holding out the strongest inducement to purveyors to keep back their supplies, in order to force a higher range of prices.

Even from this early date everything was working silently against us. The inherent vice of the course of policy which we had initiated was beginning to infect every branch of the administration. The double government which had been established was becoming a curse to the whole nation. The Shah and his officers ostensibly controlled all the departments of civil administration; but everywhere our English officers were at their elbow, to counsel and suggest; and when it was found necessary to coerce the disobedient or punish the rebellious, then it was British authority that drew the sword out of the scabbard, and hunted down offenders to the death. Bound by treaty not to interfere in the internal administration of the country, the British functionaries were compelled to permit the existence of much which they themselves would never have initiated or allowed in provinces subject to their rule; but they were often called upon to enforce measures, unpopular and perhaps unjust; and so brought down upon themselves the opprobrium which was not always their due. It could hardly be said that the King possessed a government of his own, when the control of the army and the exchequer was in the hands of others. England supplied the money and the bayonets; and claimed the right to employ them both according to her own pleasure. It would have been a miracle if such a system had not soon broken down with a desolating crash, and buried its authors in the ruins.

It was said prophetically by more than one statesman, that our difficulties would begin where our military successes ended. Englishmen and Afghans alike said that it was easy to restore Shah Soojah to the throne, but difficult to maintain him upon it. It was, from the first, only a question of time—only a question how long such a system could be propped up by the strong arm and the long purse of the king-makers. No amount of wisdom in the agents of such a policy could have saved it from ultimate ruin. Sooner or later it must have fallen. If there had been nothing else indeed to bring it to the ground, the utter exhaustion of the Indian treasury must have given it its death-blow.

To have placed Shah Soojah on the throne, and to have left him again to be driven back an outcast and a fugitive, to seek an asylum in the provinces of India, would have been a failure and a disgrace. It was the object of the British Government, therefore, to hedge him in a little longer with our authority, and to establish him more firmly on the throne. But so far from these being synonymous terms, and co-existent states of being, they were utterly antagonistic and irreconcileable. The more we surrounded the King with our authority, the less firmly he was fixed on the throne. It might have been sound policy to have continued the occupation of Afghanistan, if our continuance there had tended to secure the supremacy of the Shah, and to establish him in the affections of the people; but it was not in the nature of things that the effect of the experiment should not have been diametrically the reverse.

So prodigious an anomaly was the system itself, that, except so far as it affected the period of its dissolution, retarding or expediting it by a few months or a few years, the agency employed in the vain attempt to uphold it was a matter of little moment. But that agency was assuredly not of a character to enhance the chances even of its temporary success. Shah Soojah had brought from Loodhianah one Moollah Shikore[12]—a man who had shared his exile, and acted as his confidential agent. He was old, and enfeebled by age. His memory was gone; so were his ears. For some offence against his Majesty in former days, he had forfeited those useful appendages. A happy faculty of remembering the persons and personal histories of men, is one of the most useful ingredients in the character of a statesman, and it is one which, in rare exuberance, some of our greatest statesmen have possessed. But it was said of this Moollah Shikore, that men whom he had seen on one day he forgot on the next.[13] The King had abundant faith in his loyalty, and confidence in his personal attachment. The man had managed the stunted household of the royal exile with such address, that it was believed that he could now manage the affairs of his master’s restored dominions. So he was made minister of state. They called him Wuzeer. But his master did not acknowledge the title, and the British did not call him by it. “Bad ministers,” wrote Burnes, “are in every government solid grounds for unpopularity; and I doubt if ever a King had a worse set than Shah Soojah.” The system itself was rotten to the very core; and the agency employed was, perhaps, the corruptest in the world. Had there been much more vitality and strength in the system, Moollah Shikore and his deputies would soon have given it its death-blow.

But though feeble in other respects, this Moollah Shikore was not feeble in his hatred of the British. The minister oppressed the people. The people appealed to the British functionaries. The British functionaries remonstrated with the minister. And the minister punished the people for appealing.[14] The Shah and the Moollah chafed under the interference of the British. But they loved the British money; and they required the support of the British bayonets. And so bravely for a time worked the double government at Caubul.

Whilst such was the state of things at the supreme seat of government, there was little less to create dissatisfaction in the internal administration of Candahar. The principal revenue officers were two Sheeahs, the sons of that Hussein Khan, the obnoxious minister whom Shah Zemaun had put to death. Their names were Mahomed Takee Khan and Wulloo Mahomed Khan. Cradled in intense enmity to the Douranees, they had grown into unscrupulous persecutors of the tribes. Selected by the Barukzye Sirdars as willing agents of those humiliating and enfeebling measures by which they sought to extinguish the vitality of the Douranees, they entered upon their work in a ruthless and uncompromising spirit, and plied the instruments of their office with remarkable success for the persecution and degradation of their enemies. The hatred with which the Douranees regarded these men was too deep to suffer them to embrace with complacency any measures, however conciliatory in themselves, of which the old Barukzye tools were the executors. Such unpopular agents were enough to render distasteful the most popular measures. The Douranees were, indeed, greatly disappointed. Do what they would, they could not obtain a paramount influence in the state. The door was closed against them by the British janitors who kept watch around the palace; and the chiefs soon began to chafe under the foreign intrusion which deprived them of all ascendancy in the councils of the restored monarch, and prevented them from regaining the full extent of those financial privileges which they had enjoyed under his Suddozye predecessors.[15]

And so it happened that, from the very dawn of the Restoration, unpopular and unscrupulous Afghan agents were employed to carry out a monstrous system. Of a very different character were the British agents upon whom now devolved the duty of watching the proceedings of the native executive, and, without any palpable acknowledged interference, virtually controlling it. The political agents scattered about Afghanistan have drawn down upon themselves a larger measure of vituperation than perhaps has ever descended upon any body of British functionaries. They were mixed up with an unholy and a disastrous policy, and perhaps some little of the evil that subsequently developed itself may be attributed to their personal defects; but, on the whole, they were not unwisely chosen, and it is doubtful if other men would have done better. At all events, when Burnes, Conolly, Leech, Pottinger, Todd, Lord, and others, who had previously made themselves acquainted with the country and the people, were sent to overlook the progress of affairs in different parts of Afghanistan, it cannot be said that no care was taken to select our agents from among the officers who were most qualified by previous experience to perform the new duties devolving upon them. Macnaghten’s assistants were, for the most part, men of local experience and proved activity. The Governor-General had imparted to the Envoy his ideas of the manner in which it would be most expedient to employ them.[16] And it may be doubted whether, if the system itself had not been so radically defective, it would have ever broken down under the agency which was commissioned to carry it into effect.

Such, traced in dim outline, were some of the elements of decay planted deep in the constitution of the political system which we were attempting to carry out in Afghanistan. Always of a sanguine temperament, and one whose wish was ever father of his thoughts, Macnaghten did not see that already the seeds of a great and sweeping revolution were being sown broadcast across the whole length and breadth of the land. He was prepared, and it was right that he should have been, for local and accidental outbreaks. The Afghans are a turbulent and lawless people, little inclined to succumb to authority, and have a rough way of demonstrating their dislikes. Had he expected the authority of the Shah to be universally established in a few weeks, the British Envoy would have manifested a deplorable ignorance of the national character; but little less was the ignorance which he manifested, when he believed that the system of government he was countenancing could ever establish the country in tranquillity, and the King in the affections of the people. There were others who saw clearly that such a system was doomed to set in disaster and disgrace;[17] but Macnaghten, when he accompanied the Court to Jellalabad, carried with him no forebodings of evil. He believed that the country was settling down into quietude under the restored monarchy; and so little, indeed, did he think that any danger was to be apprehended, that he encouraged his wife to join him in Afghanistan, and sent a party of irregular horsemen under Edward Conolly to escort her from the provinces of India.

But already was he beginning to have some experience of the turbulent elements of Afghan society, and the difficulty of controlling the tribes. In the West, the Ghilzyes had been demonstrating the unruliness of their nature ever since Shah Soojah re-entered Afghanistan; and, shortly after his restoration to the Balla Hissar of Caubul, Captain Outram had been sent out against them, and had achieved one of those temporary successes which, in a country like Afghanistan, where blood is ever crying aloud for blood, can only perpetuate the disquietude of a disaffected people. And now in the East, the passes of the Khybur were bristling with the hostile tribes. The Khybur chiefs had always turned to good account the difficulties of the passage through their terrible defiles. They opened the highway in consideration of certain money-payments from the Caubul rulers. The sums paid under the Suddozye Kings had been reduced by the Barukzye Sirdars; but on his restoration, Shah Soojah, who, in a day of difficulty, had sought and found a refuge among the Khyburees, now promised to restore to the tribes the privileges which they had enjoyed under his fathers. But the Shah had acted in this matter without the authority or the knowledge of Macnaghten, and the chiefs were little likely to receive the amount which the King had agreed to pay to them. Incensed by what they considered a breach of faith, they rose up against the small detached parties which Wade had left at different posts between Peshawur and Jellalabad.[18] Ali-Musjid was attacked, but not taken. Ferris, who commanded the garrison, repulsed them with heavy loss. But a battalion of Nujeebs, entrenched in the vicinity of the fort, was cut up by an incursion of the mountaineers.[19] The appearance of Sir John Keane, with the residue of the Army of the Indus, quieted for a time the turbulent tribes. But when the column had cleared the pass, they harassed the detachments sent to the relief of Ali-Musjid,[20] and a force under Colonel Wheeler was therefore sent out from Jellalabad to overawe the refractory mountaineers, and support the negotiations in which Mackeson was engaged. The Khyburees attacked his baggage, hamstrung his camels, and thus contrived to sweep some booty into their hands. Wheeler’s operations were for a time successful; but it was not until Macnaghten himself appeared on the scene, and recognised, in view of their formidable defiles, the expediency of conciliating by sufficient money-payments these troublesome clans, that they sunk into temporary quiescence.

It was at Avitabile’s hospitable table in the Goorkhutra of Peshawur, that Macnaghten received intelligence of the fall of Khelat. The health of the victors was drunk with delighted enthusiasm, manifesting itself in the “three times three” of a good English cheer. All the circumstances of the capture of the stronghold were discussed with deep interest to a late hour. It was told how, on the morning of the 13th of November, General Wiltshire, with the 2nd and 17th Queen’s Regiments, the 31st Bengal Native Infantry, with two howitzers, four of the Shah’s six-pounder guns, and a detachment of local horse, found himself before Khelat. It was plain that Mehrab Khan was in no mood to submit to the terms dictated to him. He had at first doubted the intentions of the British to move against his stronghold, and had been slow to adopt measures of defence. But when he knew that our troops were advancing upon Khelat, he prepared himself, like a brave man, to meet his fate, and flung defiance at the infidel invaders. Khelat is a place of commanding strength. The citadel rises high above the buildings of the town, and frowns menacingly on its assailants. On the north-west of the fort were three heights, which the Khan had covered with his infantry, supported by five guns in position. The engineer officers reported that, until these heights were carried, it would be impossible to proceed against the fortress. Orders were then given for the attack. It was Willshire’s hope that the enemy might be driven down to the gates of the fortress, and that our stormers might rush in with them. Gallantly the hills were carried; gallantly the guns were captured. The infantry advanced under a heavy fire from the British artillery. The shrapnel shot from Stevenson’s batteries fell with too deadly an aim among the Beloochee footmen for them to hold their position on the hills. They fled towards the walls of the fortress, and our infantry pushed hotly after them. But not in time were they to secure an entrance; the gates were closed against their advance.

The artillery was now brought into play. The infantry, compelled to protect themselves against the heavy fire poured in from the rocks, sheltered themselves behind some ruined buildings, whilst our batteries, planted on the heights, opened upon the gate and the neighbouring defences. Two of Cooper’s guns were brought within a distance of 200 yards; and whilst the gunners fell under the matchlock fire of the enemy, played full upon the gate. At last it gave way. Pointing his hand towards the gate, Willshire rode down to show the infantry that an entrance was ready for them. Rising at once from their cover, they rushed in with a loud hurrah. Pennycuick and his men were the first to enter. The other companies soon followed, until the whole of the storming column were within the walls of Khelat. Onward they struggled manfully towards the citadel. Every inch of ground was obstinately disputed. But at last the citadel was won. There was a desperate resistance. Sword in hand, Mehrab Khan and some of his principal chiefs stood there to give us battle. The Khan himself fell dead with a musket-ball through his breast. Eight of his principal ministers and Sirdars fell beside him. From some inner apartments, of difficult approach, a fire was still poured in upon our people; and it was not until Lieutenant Loveday, an assistant of the British agent, went up to them alone, that they were induced to surrender.[21] Loveday received them as prisoners; and then proceeded to rescue from captivity the aged mother and other female dependents of an old rival, whose claims were to be no longer denied.

Nussur Khan, the chief’s son, had fled. A considerable amount of prize property was collected; an old pretender to the throne, known as Shah Newaz, who had for some time been hanging on to the skirts of Shah Soojah and his allies, was set up in his place; and the provinces of Shawl, Moostung, and Cutchee, which had long been sentenced to spoliation, were stripped from the old dominions of the Khan of Khelat, and annexed to the territories of Shah Soojah-ool-Moolk. The Shah had been hankering after an extension of empire; and it was determined that the much-coveted aggrandisement should be conceded to him in the direction of Upper Sindh.

It is possible that, whilst all these circumstances were being narrated and discussed at Avitabile’s dinner-table, there may have been present one or two officers much troubled with self-questionings regarding the justice of these proceedings. But the general opinion, all throughout Afghanistan and India, was that this Mehrab Khan had been rightly punished for his offences. Few knew distinctly what these offences were. There was a general impression that he had been guilty of acts of indescribable treachery; and that during the passage of the British army through Beloochistan, he was continually molesting our advancing columns. It was the fashion to attribute to the wickedness of Mehrab Khan all the sufferings which afflicted the Army of the Indus on its march to Candahar, the scarcity which pressed so heavily upon man and beast, and the depredations of the marauding Beloochees. The very barrenness of the country, indeed, was by some laid at his door. It was not very clearly seen, at this time, that the Army of the Indus was at least as much the cause, as it was the victim of the scarcity in Beloochistan. When our troops passed through the dominions of the Khan of Khelat, there was already, as has been shown by Burnes’s admissions, a scarcity in the land; and our vast moving camp increased it. The safe passage of the Bolan Pass was effected through the friendly agency of the Brahoo chief. And we have it emphatically, upon the authority of Macnaghten, that the progress of the Army of the Indus through the country of Mehrab Khan was attended by much devastation—that a great injury was inflicted upon the people—and that nothing would have been easier than for the Khan to have destroyed our entire force. Such was the language of our diplomatists up to the end of March; but in April, Burnes recommended the castigation of the Khan of Khelat; and Mehrab Khan was doomed to be stripped, on the first convenient opportunity, of his territory, and deprived either of his liberty or his life. The evidence of Mehrab Khan’s treachery is not sufficiently strong to satisfy me that the British righteously confiscated his principality and sacrificed his life. He was surrounded by traitors. When his stronghold was entered, it was seen that the servants he had trusted had the means of betraying their master; and it was clear, to all who investigated the charges against him with judicial impartiality, that he had been betrayed. It was clear that many of the offences imputed to him were to be ascribed rather to the machinations of his secret enemies than to his own enmity and bad faith. But he had been early doomed to destruction. The recommendations of the British diplomatists in Afghanistan had been adopted by the Governor-General; and the deposition of Mehrab Khan, and the annexation of Shawl, Moostung, and Cutchee, had been decreed in the Simlah Council Chamber.[22] It was true that Shah Soojah had, in the hour of need, been succoured by Mehrab Khan. A statesman in whom the kindly instincts of humanity were so strong as in Lord Auckland, was not likely to forget the obligations which so essential a service at such a time imposed upon the restored monarch.[23] But the graceful suggestion of the Governor-General was lost; and the Khan lived just long enough to curse himself for his folly in having opened his arms to receive the Suddozye pretender, when he fled, baffled and beaten, from the battle-field of Candahar. For that act of hospitality he paid, five years afterwards, with his life.

Whether any thoughts of this kind arose to dash the pleasure of those who toasted the victors of Khelat at Avitabile’s dinner-table, can only be conjectured; but all present acknowledged that the capture of Mehrab Khan’s stronghold was a great military exploit. The native soldiery are said to have esteemed it more highly than the capture of Ghuznee, for they had been wisely allowed to participate in the honour of the exploit. Sir John Keane had been much censured for composing his storming column entirely of European companies. The exclusiveness of the act seemed to imply mistrust in his Sepoy regiments, and did not raise the General in the estimation of their officers. It was a subject, therefore, of general congratulation throughout the Company’s army, that a Native regiment had shared with two of the Ghuznee storming corps the glory of the assault upon Khelat, and had proved themselves well worthy of the confidence that had been placed in them.

And so Sir John Keane and General Willshire returned to India. The “Army of the Indus” was broken up, and soon there came from England the welcome announcement that the successes of the campaign had been duly appreciated by the Sovereign, and the chief actors duly rewarded. Lord Auckland was created an Earl; Sir John Keane rose up as Baron Keane of Ghuznee; Mr. Macnaghten took his place in history as Sir William Macnaghten, Baronet; Colonel Wade became thenceforth Sir Claude Wade, Knight; and a shower of lesser distinctions, of brevets and Bath-honours, descended upon the working officers, whose gallantry had contributed so largely to the success of this memorable campaign.

CHAPTER II.

[January-September: 1840.]

The Great Game in Central Asia—The Russian Expedition to Khiva—Apprehensions of Burnes—Colonel Stoddart—Affairs on the Hindoo-Koosh—Failure of the Russian Expedition—Conduct of the Sikhs—Herat and Yar Mahomed—Mission of Abbott and Shakespear—Disturbances in the Ghilzye Country—Fall of Khelat—Arthur Conolly.

The King and the Envoy spent the winter at Jellalabad. There was something like a lull in Afghanistan. When the snow is on the ground the turbulence of the Afghans is wont to subside.[24] The time was favourable for the consideration of revenue matters, and Macnaghten began to inquire into the expenditure and the resources of the kingdom. The inquiry was not a satisfactory one. It was obvious that the government could be carried on only by the extraction of large sums from the treasury of India; and Macnaghten was continually urging the Supreme Government to authorise the expenditure of these large sums of money, and continually exhorting the authorities in the north-western provinces to send him all the treasure they could spare.

But there was much in the state of our foreign relations at this time to distract the thoughts of the minister from the affairs of the home department. The Russian question was now forcing itself again upon our Indian statesmen. Even before the Court turned its back upon Caubul, tidings had been received, in the first instance from Pottinger at Herat, which left little room to doubt that a Russian force was about to set out from Orenburgh on an expedition into Central Asia. The immediate object of this movement was to threaten the state of Khiva, which had long been throwing obstacles in the way of Russian commerce, and carrying off Russian subjects into hopeless captivity. Russia had been prosecuting an extensive trade with the countries of Central Asia; but the state of Khiva which borders on the country occupied by the Kerghiz Cossacks, was now declared by the Russian Government to be “daily harassing the wandering tribes that encamp on our frontiers, interrupting the intercourse the other states of Asia keep up with us, detaining the caravans of Bokhara on their way to and from Russia, obliging them to pay extravagant duties, and compelling them by main force to pass through its territory, and there seizing a considerable portion of their merchandise.” “These insults to foreigners, holding commercial intercourse with Russia, are, however,” continues the Russian state-paper—the manifesto of the Government of the Czar, declaring the grounds of their expedition into Central Asia—“of less importance than the attacks which have been made on Russian caravans. Not one of these can now cross the desert without danger. It was in this manner that a Russian caravan from Orenburgh, with goods belonging to our merchants, was pillaged by the armed bands of Khiva. No Russian merchant can now venture into that country without running the risk of losing his life or being made a prisoner. The inhabitants of Khiva are constantly making incursions into that part of the country of the Kerghiz which is at a distance from our lines, ... and to crown all these insults, they are detaining several thousand Russian subjects in slavery. The number of these unfortunate wretches increases daily, for the peaceful fishermen on the banks of the Caspian are continually attacked and carried off as slaves to Khiva.”

Here were plainly and intelligibly set forth the injuries committed by the state of Khiva against the subjects of the Russian Government, and the grounds on which the latter called for redress. Every attempt, it was stated, to obtain satisfaction for these wrongs, by reason and persuasion, had failed. It was necessary, therefore, to resort to more decisive measures. “Every means of persuasion,” continued the manifesto, “has now been exhausted. The rights of Russia, the security of her trade, the tranquillity of her subjects, and the dignity of the state, call for decisive measures; and the Emperor has judged it to be time to send a body of troops to Khiva, to put an end to robbery and exaction, to deliver those Russians who are detained in slavery, to make the inhabitants of Khiva esteem and respect the Russian name, and finally to strengthen in that part of Asia the lawful influence to which Russia has a right, and which alone can insure the maintenance of peace. This is the purpose of the present expedition; and as soon as it shall be attained, and an order of things conformable to the interests of Russia and the neighbouring Asiatic states shall be established on a permanent footing, the body of troops which has received orders to march on Khiva will return to the frontiers of the empire.”

The casus belli was here laid down with sufficient distinctness, and the facts stated in the manifesto were not to be denied. But it was believed that Russia had other objects in view than the liberation of her slaves and the safety of her commerce; and that if the British army had not occupied Afghanistan, this manifesto would not have been issued by the Czar. It was regarded, indeed, as a counter-movement called forth by our own advance; and candid men could allege nothing against it on the score of justice or expediency. There was something suspicious in the time and manner of its enunciation. But there was less of aggression and usurpation in it than in our own manifesto. The movement was justified by the law of nations. There was outwardly something, indeed, of positive righteousness in it, appealing to the best instincts of our nature. And, if there were behind all this outside show of humanity a politic desire to keep in check a rival power, that was now intruding in countries far beyond its own line of frontier, it can only be said that our own movement into Afghanistan was directed against a danger of the same kind, but of much less substantial proportions.

But the expedition of Russia into Central Asia excited the alarm of our statesmen in Afghanistan, though it did not rouse their indignation. There was, at all events, in it much food for anxious consideration. It was the one great subject of thought and topic of discussion in the winter of 1839-1840. Burnes, who was left in control at Caubul, whilst Macnaghten was with the Shah at Jellalabad, now, with the snow around him, found himself in the enjoyment of a season of comparative leisure, able both to think and to write. “What a year has been the past,” he wrote to a friend at Bombay, on the 19th of November—“not to me, I mean, but to our affairs in the East. Further submission to what was going on, and our days of supremacy in the East, were numbered. As it is, we have brought upon ourselves some additional half-million of annual expenditure, and, ere 1840 ends, I predict that our frontiers and those of Russia will touch—that is, the states dependent upon either of us will—and that is the same thing.... Every week brings fresh business; and all the world will now have it that Russia has advanced on Khiva. What of that? She has the right to relieve her enslaved countrymen; and if she have the power, why should she have so long hesitated? But the time she has chosen for this blow is an awkward one. I hold, however, that the man who recommends the cantonment of a British or an Indian soldier west of the Indus is an enemy to his country.”[25]

After the lapse of a month, Burnes wrote again to another correspondent, more emphatically, on the same subject:

But everything past and present has been cast into the shade by the expedition which the Russians have now pushed into Central Asia. I have known of it for eight weeks past, and had numerous and authentic reports concerning their waggons, their matériel, &c., &c., all of which are on a grand scale, giving rise to serious apprehensions that their plans are not confined to the chastisement of the petty Khan of Khiva; indeed, our policy at Herat is already out of joint, and we have reason to know that Russia from Khiva looks to that city. Her attack on Khiva is justified by all the laws of nations; and in a country like England, where slave-dealing is so odiously detested, ought to find favour in men’s eyes rather than blame. Yet the time chosen wears a bad appearance, if it at once does not lead to the inference that Russia has put forth her forces merely to counteract our policy. This latter is my opinion; and by our advance on Caubul we have thus hastened the great crisis. England and Russia will divide Asia between them, and the two empires will enlarge like the circles in the water till they are lost in nothing; and future generations will search for both of us in these regions, as we now seek for the remains of Alexander and his Greeks.

While external affairs stand thus, internal matters are not free from anxiety. Dost Mahomed’s power is nominally dissolved; but he has just been invited to Bokhara at the instigation of Russia, and he hopes to receive Balkh as a gift from the King there; but in May next we shall occupy Balkh, and if Russia advances beyond Khiva, be prepared to meet her. Troops are, indeed, warned; but as we cannot act till May, we shall have abundance of time. As for withdrawing our army, it is out of the question; for though I maintain that man to be an enemy to his country who recommends a soldier to be stationed west of the Indus, what is to be done? Shah Soojah’s contingent has been hitherto so mismanaged that it is fit for nothing; and till fit (supposing Russia not to have appeared), the Shah cannot rely on Afghans. So he says; but if he will but place British officers over them, pay them regularly and not interfere with their republican ideas, they would alone keep this country in order. Now, there is a dose of politics for you, as verbose as I used to give you when we dined at the house in Waterloo-place, or when, over a lobster, after some of those brilliant society meetings in London. My present position is as follows: I drive the coach in Caubul while Macnaghten is with the King. On our arrival here, the envoy made a bold push to get away, he being tired of his place; but the Governor-General beseeched him to stay a while longer, and appointed your humble servant resident at Candahar; but this I declined, and I now get 2500 rupees for staying here, though I hope to receive my resident’s salary. The atrocious crime of being a young man is what I imagine keeps me en second so long; but I get on well with Macnaghten, and only want responsibility to be a happy man.

In the Punjab, all is, I am glad to say, wrong. The son has usurped all real power, and Kuruk Singh is a cypher. I hope their strife will lead to the evacuation of Peshawur. Events bid fair for our taking Herat; and then, and not till then, shall we have restored the Afghan monarchy.[26]

Less heavily on Macnaghten’s mind sate the thought of this Russian invasion. Other and nearer sources of inquietude troubled him at this time. In whatsoever direction he turned his eyes, he was glared at by some great trouble. Everything was going wrong. At Herat, Yar Mahomed was playing a game of unexampled treachery. In the remote regions of Central Asia, a British envoy was groaning under the tyranny of the unscrupulous Ameer of Bokhara. Nearer home, the measures of the double government in Afghanistan were beginning to bear their own bitter fruits. At Candahar, the Douranees were chafing under the exactions of unpopular revenue-officers. In the Kohistan, already were those, who had revolted, in a critical hour, against Dost Mahomed, and contributed largely to his expulsion from Afghanistan, sighing for his return. And further down towards the South, the country which we had made the burial-place of Mehrab Khan, was breaking out into rebellion against the authority which we had attempted to establish; while the Sikhs, to whom we had conceded so much, our associates in the Tripartite Treaty, were unscrupulously intriguing against us.

All these things were against him. It was plain that he was among a people of a very different stamp from those with whom he had been connected throughout the earlier years of his administrative career. There was much to disquiet his mind, to engage his thoughts, and to occupy his time. One after another he passed in review before him all the difficulties which beset his path; but there was nothing that pressed more heavily on his mind, or which seemed to arouse him into intenser action, than the outrages to which Colonel Stoddart had been subjected at Bokhara.

Stoddart had been at Bokhara ever since the close of the year 1838. He had been despatched by Mr. M’Neill to that Court, with instructions to obtain the liberation of all the Russians pining there in captivity, and to conclude a friendly treaty with the Ameer. His reception, though marked by some caprice, was not altogether uncourteous. He was very ignorant of the customs of the country, and was inclined to resent as insults the exaction of formalities in accordance with the ordinary usages of Bokhara. He seems to have made no effort to win the favour of the barbarous monarch by the adoption of a conciliatory demeanour; but somehow or other he scrambled through the first ceremonials without giving the Commander of the Faithful any mortal offence.

But it would appear that he soon excited the bitter enmity of the Reiss, or minister. His letters had been addressed to the predecessor of this man. The old minister had been disgraced whilst Stoddart was on his way to Bokhara, and the new man was little inclined to regard with favour the Feringhee who had sought the protection of the old. In a very short time, Stoddart, having been invited to the residence of the Reiss, was suddenly seized, thrown to the ground, bound with cords, and threatened with death by the minister himself, who stood over him with a long knife. He was then carried out, on a dark rainy night, into the streets, hurried from place to place, by torchlight, and at last lowered down by ropes into a dark well, swarming with the most nauseous vermin, to be the companion of murderers and thieves. In this wretched dungeon, weakened both in body and in mind by long-continued suffering, he consented outwardly to conform to the ceremonials of the Mahomedan faith.

After two months of extreme suffering, Stoddart was released from this dreadful dungeon. The chief officer of police then received him into his house; and from this time, throughout the year 1839, though subject to the caprices of a tyrannous monarch and an unscrupulous minister, and the insults of barbarians of less note, his condition on the whole was bettered. The success of the British in Afghanistan seemed for a time to awaken the Ameer to a just sense of the power of the British nation, and Stoddart rose into importance at the Bokhara Court, as the agent of a powerful state, capable of exercising a mighty influence over the destinies of Central Asia. But the caprices of this barbarous potentate were great. The smiles of to-day were followed by the cruelties of the morrow. Stoddart continued a prisoner at Bokhara; and Macnaghten, sympathising with the sufferings of a brave officer, and eager to chastise the insolent barbarity of the petty Central-Asian tyrant, again contemplated the despatch of a brigade across the mountains of the Hindoo-Koosh.

It was necessary, however, to tread cautiously on this ground. There were more reasons than one why Macnaghten, at this time, turned his thoughts towards Bokhara. Dost Mahomed had sought an asylum at the Ameer’s Court.[27] The “Commander of the Faithful,” as this rude Mussulman potentate ostentatiously termed himself, received the fugitive with open arms. For a little while he lavished upon the fallen Prince all the benignities of oriental hospitality; and then laid his heavy hand upon him, and made him a prisoner.

“It seems certain that the Dost has got into bad odour at Bokhara,” wrote Macnaghten to Burnes, on the 20th of February, “and it is very improbable that the two Ameers-ool-Moomuneen will ever act cordially together.” It was the policy of our British diplomatists, at this time, to keep the two Ameers in a state of disunion and antagonism. But the very course which Macnaghten was disposed to pursue towards Bokhara, was that of all others which was most surely calculated to cement an alliance between them. A military expedition against Bokhara would, in all probability, have induced the Khan to release Dost Mahomed, and to supply him with the means of crossing the frontier at the head of an imposing body of fighting men, and, aided by the Wullee of Khooloom and other chiefs of the Oosbeg hill states, making an effort to regain his lost dominions. There was something, too, in the alleged cause of Dost Mahomed’s confinement at Bokhara, which made Macnaghten waver still more in his determination to send an army across the Hindoo-Koosh, and suggested to him the expediency of devoting himself to the furtherance of objects of another kind. It was said that the Ameer of Bokhara was greatly incensed by Dost Mahomed’s practical refusal to summon his family to that city. They had remained under the charge of Jubbar Khan, in the hospitable territory of the Wullee of Khooloom; and it was reported that the Khan of Bokhara had declared, that if they sought the protection of the British Government, he would destroy Dost Mahomed. But Jubbar Khan was well disposed at this time to seek from the British an honourable asylum for his brother’s family; and the question of their reception was earnestly pondered by Macnaghten, and discussed with the Shah. In the middle of February, he wrote to Burnes, from Jellalabad, that although common hospitality required that an asylum should not be refused to persons “in so distressed a plight as the Dost’s family;” but that, at the same time, common prudence required that in the exercise of this office of humanity, we should not expose ourselves to the machinations of perfidious enemies. He suggested therefore, that Dr. Lord, in reply to any request on the subject, should say that a safe and honourable asylum would be granted to the Ameer’s family on condition of their residing wherever our government might think proper to locate them.

But stolid, selfish, and remorseless towards his enemies, Shah Soojah was not easily to be persuaded that either humanity or policy demanded that he should grant an asylum or a maintenance to Dost Mahomed’s family, and declared that nothing short of absolute force would induce him to contribute a rupee towards their support. The vicissitudes of his past life had only hardened the King’s heart, and often as he had sought an “asylum” himself, he had now, in the day of prosperity, no bowels of compassion for the fugitive and the suppliant. On the English envoy, however, the obduracy of Shah Soojah had little effect, and he still declared that the family of Dost Mahomed were entitled to kind and honourable treatment at our hands. This justice and humanity required, whilst it seemed also to Macnaghten to be sound policy to hold out every inducement to the Ameer to commit his family to our charge. In that case, he wrote to Burnes, the Shah of Bokhara could make no use of Dost Mahomed, and the objection to the movement into Toorkistan would be obviated. “Let us examine,” he added, “what we are to gain by such a movement, and upon what principles it should be conducted. The first thing to be gained is the punishment of the Shah of Bokhara, for his frequent and outrageous violation of the law of nations, and the release of our agent, Colonel Stoddart, who, without some exertion on our part, will, it is likely, be doomed to incarceration for life. I suppose the expedition to be conveniently feasible, if entered upon at the proper season of the year. What Timour Shah effected, we can do; and with proper arrangement we may either enlist on our side, or keep neutral, the chiefs between us and Bokhara. If we compelled the Shah of Bokhara to release Stoddart, to evacuate all the countries on this side of the Oxus, and to pay the expenses of the expedition, we should have achieved all that is desirable.”[28]

The Court remained at Jellalabad up to the third week of April; and the excursive mind of the Envoy was still wandering out in the wild regions beyond the Hindoo-Koosh. It was certain that a Russian army was advancing upon Khiva. In the country about Khooloom the adherents of Dost Mahomed were exciting against us the hostility of the Oosbegs. Jubbar Khan, with the Ameer’s family and a large party of retainers, were there. The petty chiefs beyond the mountains were in a state of doubtful vassalage, scarcely knowing whether they were subject to Herat or to Caubul; whether they would recognise the Khan of Bokhara or the Khan of Khiva as their suzerain; or whether they would be, in effect, independent of all.[29] It was desirable to annex these Cis-Oxus principalities to the territory of the Shah, to strengthen our frontier, and keep them out of the hands of the Bokhara ruler. Already was there a weak detachment wintering amid the inhospitable snows of Bameean. The despatch of a strong brigade to the country beyond was still among the cherished projects of the Envoy. Writing from Jellalabad, he turned his back upon the southern passes, and looking out across the northern Caucasian mountains, declared that it was easier to march on Bokhara than to subjugate the tribes of the Khybur. To the Governor of Agra he thus addressed himself on the 1st of April, “A brigade of ours, with a due proportion of artillery, would, I think, from all I have heard, be fully competent to overcome any opposition that could be offered to us between this and Bokhara. I do not think that we should incur the risk of the movement solely for the purpose of reannexing the Cis-Oxus provinces to the dominions of his Majesty Shah Soojah; though if they are not so re-annexed, Bokhara, at the instigation of Russia, will certainly assert a real supremacy. At present she has only Balkh and its dependencies, and her sway over that even is but nominal. But we cannot allow Dost Mahomed’s family to occupy so commanding a position as Khooloom, close to the Afghan frontier. And may not the contingency upon which the home authorities direct an advance, be said to have arisen should the Russians establish themselves in force at Bokhara?”[30]

It was, indeed, a great game on which Macnaghten was then intent—a game so vast that the subjugation of the Punjab and Nepaul was regarded as a petty contribution to its success. These grand schemes dazzled him, and he could not see the dangers which grew at his feet.

“I intend,” he wrote in the letter above quoted, “sending Arthur Conolly, who has joined me here, and Rawlinson on a mission to Kokan, with a view, if possible, to frustrate the knavish tricks of the Russe log in that quarter. Though there are doubtless many of the elements of mischief in this country, yet I should not apprehend any internal explosion, even if the greater portion of our troops were withdrawn. Depend upon it we shall never be at our ease in India until we have subjugated the Punjab and Nepaul; and the sooner we can come to a reckoning with our faithful allies the Singhs, the better. They are doing all they can to injure us in this quarter, and are comforting all the rebels and parties disaffected to his Majesty Shah Soojah. We should here have no difficulty in dealing with them in this quarter, and I will venture to say there would not be a disciple of Nanuk on this side the Indus a week after the declaration of hostilities.”

As the month advanced, the intelligence from the North was more and more calculated to rivet the opinion entertained by Burnes and others of the success of the Russian expedition,[31] and Macnaghten began to think that the danger was greater than he had once believed. “Unless,” he wrote at the end of April, “Lord Auckland act with vigour and promptitude to secure and open our rear, we shall soon be between two fires—if not under them. France and Russia are advancing with only the remote contingency of profit to stimulate them. We are supine, whilst our inactivity will probably be the cause of our ruin. France gratuitously supplies Persia with 30,000 muskets, at a time when Persia may be said to be at war with us. I cannot, though I have repeatedly and earnestly pressed my request, obtain a single musket.”

A fortnight after this letter was written, the Envoy proposed to Burnes that he should proceed on a mission to the Russian camp. “He said, he would willingly go if ordered—but that,” added Macnaghten, “is not the spirit which should animate our Elchee;” and the design was abandoned. It must have been very soon after this[32] that the glad tidings of the break-down of the Russian expedition reached the Court of Shah Soojah. The Envoy had spoken despondingly of the contemptible enemy which the Russian army had to encounter. But there was an enemy of which no account was taken—an enemy that had destroyed one of Napoleon’s finest armies, and which was doomed to overthrow utterly our own policy in Central Asia—spreading its toils around Peroffski’s advancing columns. The Snow was doing its work.

On the 13th of March, the failure of the expedition was announced in the public journals of St. Petersburgh, and Lord Clanricarde, on the same day, sent the intelligence to Lord Palmerston. The journals announced that the intense cold, the deep snow, and the inaccessibility of the country, had destroyed the camels, and compelled the army to retrace its steps. But the actual truth was worse than the newspaper history; for Peroffski’s ill-fated army had been attacked by pestilence and famine.

As the year wore on, Macnaghten’s difficulties seemed to thicken around him. The failure of the Russian expedition removed one source of inquietude; but it was a remote one. And nearer home, many great dangers were bristling up in his path. Still immersed, however, in foreign politics, the Envoy gave little heed to the domestic troubles which were environing him. His thoughts were continually ranging beyond the limits of Shah Soojah’s dominions; and whilst the edifice he had reared was falling to pieces by the force of its own innate corruptness, he was devising measures of external defence.

During the spring and the early summer months two subjects pressed urgently on his attention, and became the burdens of his discourse. The one was the conduct of the Sikhs; the other, the state of affairs at Herat. Ever since the death of Runjeet Singh, the temper of the Lahore Durbar had been such as to impress the Envoy strongly with the conviction that nothing but decisive measures would ever bring our allies to regard the terms of the Tripartite Treaty. The real ruler of the Punjab was the young and impetuous Prince, Nao Nehal Singh, who had almost set aside the authority of his imbecile father, and was longing for the day when he might take more openly and undisguisedly the sceptre into his hands. In every possible way our allies had evaded the stipulations of the treaty. They had rendered no effectual aid to Prince Timour in the operations which, conjointly with Wade, he had undertaken for the recovery of his father’s throne. They were making light of the obligation to support a contingent force of Sikh troops on the frontier, in return for the subsidy granted by the treaty; and proof had been afforded that they were engaged in treasonable correspondence with our enemies in Afghanistan. It is certain, at least, that they were harbouring at their frontier stations the rebel Ghilzye chiefs, who had been driven out of Shah Soojah’s territory, and suffering, if not aiding, them to return again to foment new disturbances. Sultan Mahomed Khan and his brothers at Peshawur were servants of the Maharajah, but they were Barukzyes still; and it was not strange that they regarded with undisguised satisfaction the clouds which were gathering over the restored Suddozye monarchy.

But more important still than these considerations, was the question which had now arisen regarding the free passage of our troops and convoys through the dominions of Lahore. It was obvious that we could not maintain our position in Afghanistan so long as the Punjab stood impassable between that country and Hindostan. But Nao Nehal Singh and the Kalsa viewed with insurmountable jealousy the passage of our armaments through the Punjab. They declared, that when Mr. Clark negotiated for a passage for the troops returning from the expedition into Afghanistan, the accorded permission was limited to that especial case, and was by no means intended to convey a general license for the repeated crossings and recrossings which now seemed to be in contemplation. But Macnaghten declared that it was absolutely necessary to “macadamise” the road though the Punjab; and the authorities at Calcutta began to think that a war with the Sikhs was no improbable event.

Parallel with these inquietudes arising out of the conduct of the Lahore Durbar and its agents, ran the troubles which weighed upon Macnaghten’s mind in connexion with the ill-omened aspect of affairs at Herat. The insolent ingratitude of Yar Mahomed had reached a pitch of sublime daring. The British Government were lavishing their treasures upon Herat; and the chief minister of Herat, in return for this support, was insulting the British officers, and intriguing with the Persian Court. It has been stated that in the month of June, 1839, Major D’Arcy Todd had been despatched on a special mission to Herat. He was instructed to conclude a treaty of friendship with Shah Kamran; to ascertain the causes of the dissatisfaction of the Heratee Court with the British Government; to conciliate the good will of Yar Mahomed, and to wean him from his Persian intrigues, by assuring him of our friendly disposition towards him, and of our desire to support his administration; to determine, if possible, the boundaries between Shah Kamran’s and Shah Soojah’s dominions; to aid the Heratee Government with money, and to strengthen the fortifications of the place. This accomplished, he was to have joined the Court of Shah Soojah, leaving Pottinger, whose authority he was not to have superseded, to carry on the ordinary duties of the Agency. But the young Bombay Artilleryman had availed himself of the occasion of Todd’s presence at Herat to obtain leave of absence, and visit the British provinces; and the latter had consented to remain in his place.

The task which had been entrusted to Major Todd he had performed, as far as such a task was one of possible performance, with no common address; and being a man of enlarged humanity, with a high sense of his duty as a Christian officer, he had exerted himself to render the presence of the British Mission at Herat a blessing to the oppressed and suffering people. But it was not possible to change the nature of Yar Mahomed; to make him either grateful or true. In the history of human infamy there is nothing more infamous than the conduct of this man. The treaty between the British Government and the state of Herat, by which the latter bound itself not to enter into negotiations with other states without the knowledge and consent of the British Resident, had only been signed a few weeks, when Yar Mahomed was detected in carrying on a correspondence with the Persian Asoof-ood-Dowlah at Meshed, offering to place himself and his country under the protection of the Persian Government, and inviting him to enter into a league for the expulsion of the infidel English from Afghanistan.

Up to this time eight lakhs of rupees had been advanced to the Heratee Government. When the new year dawned upon Herat, twelve lakhs had been so advanced. The utmost benefits had been conferred upon the state. The measures of our British officers had rescued “King, chiefs, and people from starvation.”[33] But at this very time a letter was addressed to Mahomed Shah of Persia, in the name of Shah Kamran, declaring the Heratee ruler to be the faithful servant of the Shah-in-Shah; and setting forth that he only tolerated the presence of the English because they were useful to him—that, in truth, they were not niggardly with their money; but that the hopes of his Majesty were in the asylum of Islam.

In explanation of this black-hearted treachery it is said that the apprehensions of Yar Mahomed had been excited by the imposing attitude of Great Britain in Afghanistan—that he looked upon the danger to be apprehended from the contiguity of the British army as something less remote and more alarming than the return of Mahomed Shah; and that it was his policy at this time to play off one state against another, and to secure the good offices of Persia, whilst openly receiving the bounties of Great Britain. This is, doubtless, the view in which the matter is to be regarded with reference to the case of Yar Mahomed, the statesman. He was not incapable of taking a statesmanlike view of the position of his principality. He understood the interests of Herat. But better still did he understand the interests of Yar Mahomed. The presence of the English officers at Herat was a burden and a reproach to the Wuzeer. He hated their interference; he had no sympathy with their high-toned notions of humanity—with their horror of slavery—with their compassion for the weak and oppressed. He had thriven best in bad times; he had found the sufferings of the people serviceable to him. The surveillance of the British Mission impeded the exercise of his arbitrary desire to enrich himself at the expense of his poorer countrymen. So he hated Pottinger; he hated Todd; he hated every high-minded Englishman. But he bore with them for their money. Todd’s measures were especially distasteful to him. The effort which he was making to break down the accursed slave-trade of Central Asia, was more obnoxious than everything beside.

Associated with Todd—an Artillery officer—were two other subalterns of Artillery—James Abbott and Richmond Shakespear. They were men of ability, of enthusiasm, and of high courage. Abbott’s mind was of a more imaginative and romantic cast than that of his associate, who had qualities of a more serviceable kind, more practical, and more judicious. Both were men sure to carry out any duty, however hazardous, entrusted to them, in a conscientious and intrepid manner. They were well inclined for any kind of personal adventure; and, ardent in the pursuit of knowledge, were eager to explore new countries, to mix with an unfamiliar people, and to visit uncivilised courts. When, therefore, Todd, acquainted with the menacing attitude which Russia had assumed towards the Court of Khiva, and the declared grounds of her Central-Asian expedition, recognised the expediency of despatching a British officer to the capital of the Khan Huzzrut, to mediate for the liberation of the Russian slaves in captivity there, he was fortunate in having at his elbow two men, to either of whom he might securely entrust the charge of a mission at once hazardous and delicate. In December, 1840, Abbott, who was the senior of the two, was hastily despatched to the Court of Khiva.[34] The Khivan ruler, then awaiting in alarm the approach of the Muscovite battalions, yet not altogether unsuspicious of the forward movements of the British, was well-inclined to receive the Mission; but Yar Mahomed had set at work the same dark intrigues which had caused Colonel Stoddart to be cast into captivity at Bokhara, and was doing his best to thwart the humane efforts of the British artilleryman. He seems to have had an instinctive hatred of men who were exerting themselves to sweep away the foul slave-marts of Central Asia.

With deep and painful interest Macnaghten watched the progress of events at Herat. The perfidy of Yar Mahomed was so glaring—so unblushing—that the Envoy had not hesitated to recommend offensive proceedings against the state of Herat, to be followed by its re-annexation to the dominions of Shah Soojah. But Lord Auckland when the proposal first came before him, was disinclined to embrace it. He thought it better to forgive Yar Mahomed; and make a further experiment upon the gratitude of the Wuzeer. So, instead of an army, as Macnaghten eagerly recommended, a further supply of money was sent to Herat; and Yar Mahomed continued to intrigue with the Persian Government.[35]

It seemed to the Envoy, at this time, that there was no middle course to be pursued. All through our Central-Asian policy, indeed, there ran two substantive ideas. It was either the bayonet or the money-bag that was to settle everything for us. When Macnaghten found that the rulers of Herat were not to be dragooned into propriety, he declared that there was nothing left for us now but to bribe them. He proposed that a subsidy of two or three lakhs per annum should be granted to Herat; that guns, muskets, and ordnance stores in abundance should be furnished to the state; and in the meanwhile he continued to send up more treasure, with a profusion which startled the Calcutta Government, to be expended on the strengthening of its defences and the sustentation of the people.

But as the treachery of Yar Mahomed became more fully developed, the Governor-General began to mistrust the efficacy of the course of forbearance and conciliation which he had in the first instance recommended. He had authorised Major Todd to declare his forgiveness of all past offences, and was willing to enter upon a new covenant of friendship, rasâ tabulâ, with the offending state. But he was not then acquainted with the fact of the letter to Mahomed Shah, in which, with almost unexampled shamelessness, the writer boasted of the cajolery practised upon the English, who lavished their money freely upon Herat, whilst its rulers were flinging themselves into the arms of Persia; for although that letter had been written in January, and came, therefore, within the margin of those offences for which forgiveness had been declared, it was not until some time afterwards that this crowning act of perfidy was discovered and laid bare before the Governor-General. Then it would seem that Lord Auckland began to waver in his resolution to maintain the independence of Herat. But he was at this time resident at Calcutta. Sir Jasper Nicolls,[36] who had held the chief command at Madras, an old and distinguished officer, who had done good service in the Nepaul war, and was possessed of an amount of Indian experience almost unexampled in an Indian Commander-in-Chief, was at the Presidency. The war in Afghanistan had been extremely distasteful to him from the beginning, and he now viewed with suspicion and alarm all the projects which were passing before him for the despatch of more troops and the diversion of more treasure from their legitimate purposes in Hindostan. No warlike promptings, therefore, from the military side of the Council Chamber, ever stimulated Lord Auckland to bury his legions in the inhospitable defiles of Afghanistan, or to waste the finances of India in insane attempts to change the nature of the chiefs and people of Central Asia, and to bribe them into quiescence and peace.

But ever was it the burden of Macnaghten’s letters, that he could do nothing with Afghanistan until Yar Mahomed and the Sikhs had been chastised; and Herat on the one side, and Peshawur on the other, re-annexed to the Douranee Empire. How strongly he felt on these points may be gathered both from the public and private letters which, in the summer of 1840, he despatched from Caubul to his correspondents in different parts of India and Afghanistan. “This,” he wrote to the Governor-General on the 20th of July, “if the means are available, appears to me the time for accomplishing the great work which your Lordship has commenced, and of effectually frustrating the designs of Russia. Herat should now be taken possession of in the name of Shah Soojah. To leave it in the hands of its present possessors, after the fresh proofs of treachery and enmity towards us which they have displayed, would, in my humble opinion, be most dangerous. Herat may be said to be the pivot of all operations affecting the safety of our possessions and our interests in the East, and thence Balkh and Bokhara would be at all times accessible. The Sikhs should no longer be suffered to throw unreasonable obstacles in the way of our just and necessary objects, and if they really feel (as they are bound by treaty to do) an interest in the success of our operations, they should not object to the passage of our troops, or even to their location in the Punjab, should such a measure be deemed conducive to the welfare of us both. Your Lordship will, I feel assured, forgive the freedom of these remarks. I am convinced that one grand effort will place the safety of our interests on a firm and solid basis.... I shall only add, that should offensive operations against Herat be undertaken, I should not entertain the smallest doubt of their complete and speedy success, especially as we should have many friends in the country.”[37] “We have a beautiful game on our hands,” he wrote in another letter, “if we have the means and inclination to play it properly. Our advance upon Herat would go far to induce the Russian government to attend to any reasonable overtures on the part of the Khan of Khiva.”

And so still was Macnaghten’s cry ever for more money and more bayonets, that he might play the “beautiful game” of knocking down and setting up kingdoms and principalities, with which it became us not to interfere, to the waste of the resources, and the sacrifice of the interests of those whom Providence had especially committed to our care.

In the meanwhile, in the dominions of Shah Soojah everything was going wrong. Macnaghten still professed his belief in the popularity of the King, and was unwilling to acknowledge that the people were not in a state of repose. But every now and then, both in Afghanistan itself, and in the country that had been wrested from Mehrab Khan, awkward evidences of the unsettled state of the country rose up to proclaim far and wide the fact, that there was little loyalty in men’s minds towards the Shah, and little affection for his foreign supporters. The Ghilzyes, whom in the preceding autumn Captain Outram had attacked, and, it was said, reduced, were now again rebelling in Western Afghanistan. The chiefs had fled to Peshawur, had been harboured there during the winter, and now, on the return of the spring, had been slipped from their retreat, strengthened, it was believed, by Sikh gold. At all events, in the month of April they were actively employed raising the tribes and cutting off our communications between Candahar and Caubul. General Nott had by this time assumed the command of the troops at the former place—a place with which his name has since become imperishably associated. Under-rating the strength of the “rebels,” as all were then called who did not appreciate the new order of things which the British had established in Afghanistan, he sent out a party of 200 horsemen, under Captains Walker and Tayler, to clear the road. But the detachment was not strong enough for the purpose. It was necessary to reinforce them. Nott had some good officers about him, but he had not one better than Captain William Anderson, of the Bengal Artillery, commandant of the Shah’s Horse Artillery at Candahar. So, on the 6th of May, the General sent for Anderson, and asked him whether he could prepare himself to march on the following morning, with a regiment of foot, four guns, and 300 horsemen. Anderson answered promptly that the artillery were always ready, and that he would do his best. By seven o’clock on the following morning the detachment was under arms and ready for the march. On the 14th they came up with Tayler and Walker, in the neighbourhood of the Turnuk river. The Ghilzyes were about eight miles distant, variously reported at from 600 to 3000 men. Anderson’s cattle were exhausted; so he halted, and to gain time, opened negotiations with the enemy. The answer sent back by the chiefs was a gallant one. They said, that they had 12,000 men—a firm faith in God and in the justice of their cause—and that they would fight. So Anderson prepared to attack them. Detaching his cavalry to the right and left, he moved down, on the 16th, with his infantry and his guns, and, after a march of some five miles, found the enemy about 2000 strong, occupying some hills in his front. The action was a gallant one on both sides. Twice the enemy charged. The first charge was repulsed by a heavy fire from Turner’s guns—the second was met at the point of the bayonet by Spence’s infantry. Anderson, after the first march from Candahar, beguiled by some accounts of the retirement of the enemy, had sent back the greater part of the cavalry with which he had started; so that he was weak in that arm. But for this, he would have cut up the enemy with heavy slaughter. As it was, the victory was complete. The enemy fled and betook themselves to their mountain fastnesses, whilst Anderson re-formed column and marched on to take up a good position above Olan Robat. The country around was quieted for a time by this victory; but disaffection was not rooted out. Indeed, every action of this kind only increased the bitter animosity of the Ghilzyes, and established unappeasable blood-feuds between our people and the tribes.

But the money-bag was now brought in to complete what the bayonet had commenced. It was expedient to conciliate the Ghilzyes, who had at any time the power of cutting off our communications between Candahar and Caubul; and Macnaghten, therefore, recommended the payment of an annual stipend to the chiefs,[38] on condition that they would restrain their followers from infesting the highways. But neither the bayonet nor the money-bag could keep these turbulent tribes in a continued state of repose.[39]

At the same time, the state of the southern provinces was such as to excite painful disquietude in Macnaghten’s mind. The tract of country which, after the capture of Khelat, had been annexed, by the fiat of the Indian Government, to the territory of Shah Soojah, was perpetually breaking out into fierce spasms of unrest. It had been almost entirely denuded of British troops; and small detachments were sent here and there, or solitary political agents sate themselves down, with only a handful of fighting men at command, as though all their paths were pleasantness and peace, and all their homes bowers of repose. But the Beloochees neither liked their new chief nor his European supporters. The blood of Mehrab Khan was continually crying out against the usurpation. Ever and anon opportunity offered, and it was not neglected. One officer,[40] on his way from the fort of Kahun with a convoy of camels, was overwhelmed and destroyed by the Beloochees. Kahun was invested by the Murrees. Quettah was besieged by the Khaukurs.[41] It was soon apparent that the whole country was in revolt. The youthful son of Mehrab Khan was in the field. The tribes were flocking around him. The chief who had been set up in his place was at Khelat. Lieutenant Loveday was with him. The defences of the place were miserably out of repair. The garrison mainly consisted of the chief’s own people. There were scarcely any means of resistance at their command, when the wild tribes, headed by the family of Nussur Khan, came crowding around the walls of Khelat. The new chief was staunch and true. But there were traitors and evil counsellors in the fort, and Loveday listened to bad advice. No succours could be sent to his relief, for our other positions in Upper Sindh were threatened by the hostile tribes. And so it happened that, after some days of beleaguerment, Khelat fell to the Brahoo chiefs.[42] Newaz Khan abdicated in favour of the youthful son of the prince who had fallen in the defence of his stronghold; Loveday was made a prisoner; and when some months afterwards, a detachment of British troops advanced to the relief of Dadur, which had been attacked by the enemy, the unfortunate young officer was found in the deserted camp of the Brahoos, chained to a camel-pannier, half naked, emaciated, and dead. His throat had just been cut by the sabre of a Beloochee horseman.[43]

But in spite of all these indications of unrest——these signs of the desperate unpopularity of the restored monarchy——Macnaghten clung to the belief that the country was settling down under the rule of Shah Soojah, and never ceased to represent to Lord Auckland and his secretaries that there were no grounds for uneasiness or alarm. He was, indeed, most anxious to remove any impressions of an opposite character which may have forced themselves upon the minds of the Governor-General and his advisers. On the 8th of July he wrote to Mr. Colvin, saying; “You tell me that my letter has left a very painful impression upon you, as manifesting my sense of the weakness of the royal cause. I fear I must have written my mind to very little purpose regarding the state of this country. You rightly conjecture that the Barukzyes have most ‘inflammable material to work upon.’ Of all moral qualities, avarice, credulity, and bigotry, are the most inflammable, and the Afghans have all these three in perfection. They will take Sikh gold, they will believe that Shah Soojah is nobody, and they will esteem it a merit to fight against us. When, in addition to these inducements, there has been positively no government in the country for the last thirty years, it will cease to be wondered at that commotion can easily be raised by intriguers possessing a long contiguity of frontier, and having, besides, all the means and appliances to ensure success. Though our presence here, doubtless, strengthens Shah Soojah, it must be remembered that in some sense it weakens him. There is no denying that he has been supported by infidels; and were we not here, he would adopt Afghan means of suppressing disturbances such as we could not be a party to. To break faith with a rebel is not deemed a sin by the most moral Afghan; and assassination was an every day occurrence. By the encouragement of blood-feuds, it is notorious that Dost Mahomed propped up the little power he had beyond the gates of Caubul.”[44]

It vexed Macnaghten’s spirit to think that he could not infuse into other British officers in Afghanistan some of his own overflowing faith in the popularity of the Shah, or his own respect for the royal person. From the very outset of the campaign the popular feeling throughout the army had been strong against Shah Soojah, and the conduct of his Majesty himself had not tended to lessen it.[45] And the worst of it was, that all kinds of stories about the haughty exclusiveness of the Shah, and the low estimation in which he was held both by the British officers and by his own subjects, were perpetually making their way to Government House, and there finding ready acceptance. It irritated Macnaghten to receive letters from Colvin, commenting on failure, and hinting at mismanagement in Afghanistan. At last his patience gave way, and on the 4th of August he wrote to the Private Secretary, bitterly complaining of the attention paid by Government to the stories of persons afflicted with the “imposthume of too much leisure,” who, he said, were daily fabricating the grossest falsehoods against his Majesty and the authorities, as the supposed cause of their detention in a land “not overflowing with beer and cheroots.” “The Shah,” he added, “is conciliatory in the extreme to all his chiefs. He listens with the greatest patience to all their requests and representations, however unreasonable, and he cannot bear to give any of them a direct refusal on any occasion. You have been told that he is a ruler who seeks to get on ‘without trusting, rewarding, or punishing’ any of his own people. It is nonsense upon the face of it, and is contradicted by every hour’s experience. I have nothing more to say about his Majesty’s character than I have already said. I believe him to be the best and ablest man in his kingdom. The history of the revenues of this poor country may be given in a few words. The whole is consumed in the pay of the priesthood, the soldiery, and the support of his Majesty’s household. You shall have the particulars of these as soon as I can get half an hour’s leisure. You know we are solemnly bound to refrain from interference in the internal administration; and, in my advice, I have been cautious to urge no innovations which could, at this early stage of our connection with them, shock the prejudices of the people.”

“And now, my dear Colvin,” continued the vexed envoy, “you must allow me to disburden my mind to you. I have perceived, or fancied I perceived, on several occasions lately, a want of confidence in my proceedings, and a disposition to listen to every unfavourable report regarding affairs in this quarter; whilst I do not receive that support to which the overwhelming difficulties of my position entitle me.” He then adverted to a controversy which, he said, had been “thrust upon him” by Brigadier Roberts, who commanded the Shah’s force. There had been from the first a jealousy, almost amounting to a conflict of authority, between the envoy and the brigadier. It was often difficult to observe the just frontier-line between the military and the political, and each had chafed under the supposed interference of the other. The soldier, whose imagination did not colour affairs in Afghanistan with the roseate hues which flushed everywhere the future of the civilian, was regarded as an intrusive alarmist; whilst to Roberts it appeared, on the other hand, that the sanguine temperament of the envoy, was likely to be the parent of a host of evils which might culminate in some frightful disaster. The controversy had been brought to the notice of the Governor-General, rather in the shape of private or demi-official correspondence than in a formal appeal to the higher authority; and Lord Auckland, who still looked forward to the entire withdrawal of the regular troops from Afghanistan, and was, therefore, anxious to support the functionary on whom would then devolve the chief military command, ordered an official letter to be written containing some passages which stung the envoy to the quick.[46] Believing, then, that the Governor-General had withdrawn his confidence from him, he talked of resigning his appointment. “If no important operations,” he wrote to the Private Secretary, “should be contemplated for next year in this quarter, for the conduct of which it may be thought desirable that I should remain, some of the public money will be saved by the appointment of a less-paid though equally qualified agent. I never yet have served in an office where I had not the confidence of my superiors, and my inclination to do so is by no means strengthened after a laborious public life of thirty-one years.”

He was sore in spirit at this time because, as he said, his actions were watched and his measures criticised, and letters written to Calcutta, setting forth that things were not going on well in Afghanistan. He complained that the Governor-General was too willing to listen to all the stories which reached him from uncertain sources of information, and he looked upon Lord Auckland’s reasonable credulity as unreasonable want of confidence in him. “I am much obliged to you,” he wrote to a friend in August, “for the kind hint contained in your last. I should never for a moment think of resigning my post from any difference of opinion between myself and my superiors, as to the measures which should be adopted for the security of our interests in this quarter; but when a want of confidence is shown in myself personally, I would rather not wait till I get a less equivocal hint to move. Of late, I find that there has been kept up a system of espionage on my proceedings, and that the most ready credence has been afforded to the malevolent tales of every idle fellow about camp, to say nothing of newspaper fabrications, which are taken for gospel. I cannot well help myself as to my correspondents, for Colvin evidently writes to me with the sanction of the Governor-General.”

But above all these petty cares and distractions rose the one dominant thought in Macnaghten’s mind, of the great and beautiful game that was to be played by the annexation of Herat and the coercion of the Sikhs; and still he continued to write to Lord Auckland that there was nothing else to be done. One letter of many will suffice to show how this leading idea still overbore everything in his mind:—

“We are now arrived at a crisis which calls for the most serious consideration. If such a course should suit the convenience of government, I should say that a vigorous policy now is that which ought to be pursued. It is, indeed, in my opinion, by such a course alone that our interests can be secured, and your Lordship’s past policy justified. By annexing Herat to the crown of Caubul, and by insisting upon the concession of our rights from the ruler of the Punjab, your Lordship will at once provide for the consolidation of Shah Soojah’s power, and show to the world that the attainment of all the advantages contemplated from the movement across the Indus, has been hitherto opposed only by the perfidious intrigues of the two powers professing to be our friends and allies. In addition to the demands already made upon the Sikhs, they should be required, I think, to admit unequivocally our right of way across the Punjab, and in the event of their denying this right, they should be convinced that we can take it. I confess myself utterly ignorant of what political objections may exist to this course of proceeding, or of the military means that may be available; and I am much staggered at a paper which I have just seen from Captain Sanders, who talks of its being expedient to take 12,000 men against Herat. I believe, however, that military authorities seldom underrate the difficulties to be encountered. This paper will, I believe, be sent to your Lordship by Sir W. Cotton. I have a proposition from Captain Bean to recognise the right of Mehrab Khan’s son to the musnud of Khelat. This I think might be done, if he would come and pay homage in person to Shah Soojah, as Shah Narwaz can never be re-instated. But I shall tell Captain Bean to keep the question open if possible, until I know your Lordship’s views regarding Herat. If it be intended to send a large force into the country with a view of reducing Herat, the Khelat affair will afford an excellent screen to our intentions. I must beg your Lordship most earnestly, if possible, to relieve the two European and five Native regiments now in this neighbourhood. They are inefficient and worn out, and both officers and men are grumbling and discontented. In the present state of affairs it would be very hazardous to admit of their return, unless their places were filled by fresh troops, and a relief would enable us to settle with promptitude the Bajor affairs, and to place our relations with the Khyburees on a firmer basis. Then, should Dost Mahomed come in, he will have to be be sent to India, and in the present state of Sikh feeling, I doubt if it would be prudent to send him across the Punjab with only a regiment for his escort. We have a rumour very generally credited, that Colonel Stoddart has been poisoned by the Ameer of Bokhara, but I yet hope that it will prove incorrect. On the Ghilzye affairs alluded to in your Lordship’s letter of the 16th, I have this day written to Mr. Colvin. In a day or two it is my intention to send up officially, with my comments, a paper handed to me by Sir A. Burnes, on the present state and future prospects of this country. I hope to show that, all things considered, we are in as prosperous a condition as could have been expected. Sir A. of course wishes to prove the contrary, since by doing so, when he succeeds me, his failures would thus find excuse and his success additional credit. This is all natural enough. I have been exposed to a thousand interruptions whilst writing this, and beg pardon if I have used too much freedom.”[47]

In a letter despatched a few days afterwards to Lord Auckland, Macnaghten wrote: “I trust the Russians may not come to Khiva this year, for we have quite enough on our hands without them. Captain Conolly starts in a few days. I trust your Lordship will have the goodness to direct that both he and Captain Abbott be gazetted as lieutenant-colonels whilst serving in Toorkistan.” There had gone forth a mission—and an ill-omened one, to Bokhara—there had gone forth two missions to Khiva—and now one was to be despatched to the intervening state of Kokund.

Eagerly did Arthur Conolly grasp the idea of this Kokund mission. He was a man of an earnest, impulsive nature, running over with the purest feelings of benevolence, and glowing with the most intense longings after the civilisation and evangelisation of the human race. He believed that the great Central-Asian movement was designed by Providence to break down the huge walls of Mahomedanism which begirt the shining East, and to substitute civilisation, liberty, and peace, for barbarism, slavery, and strife. He was a visionary, but one of the noblest order; and when he looked out beyond the great barrier of the Hindoo-Koosh, traversed in imagination the deserts of Merve, and visited the barbarous Courts of the Khans of Khiva, Kokund, and Bokhara, he never doubted for a moment that the mission which he was about to undertake was one of the highest and holiest with which a Christian officer could be entrusted. “I feel very confident,” he wrote to a friend, “about all our policy in Central Asia; for I think that the designs of our government there are honest, and that they will work with a blessing from God, who seems now to be breaking up all the barriers of the long-closed East, for the introduction of Christian knowledge and peace. It is deeply interesting to watch the effects that are being produced by the exertions of the European powers, some selfish and contrary; others still selfish, but qualified with peace and generosity; all made instrumental to good. See the French in Africa; the English, Austrians, and Russians on the Bosphorus, forcing the Turks to be European under a shadow of Mahomedanism, and providing for the peaceful settlement of the fairest and most sacred countries in the world.”[48]

Ever delighting in adventure, and prone to romance, he was at this time in a frame of mind which rendered him peculiarly greedy of excitement. A great sorrow was weighing heavily upon his heart. He sought relief in stirring occupation—in active adventure upon new scenes of enterprise; and when, for a time, it seemed that the unwillingness of the Supreme Government to sanction the mission was not to be overcome, he gave vent to the liveliest feelings of disappointment: “I was greatly disappointed,” he wrote to a dear friend on the 30th of May, “when Lord Auckland’s prohibitory letter arrived; for I had set my heart upon this nobly stirring employment; and when the chance of it seemed removed, I felt the blank that a man must feel who has a heavy grief as the first thing to fall back upon.”

Conolly and Rawlinson were to have proceeded together to the camp of General Peroffski. But the Muscovite expedition to Khiva was brought by cold and want to a mournful end at Ak-boulak, and there was soon no Russian camp in Central Asia to which these enterprising officers could be despatched, if the permission of Government had been obtained. But Conolly, believing in his inmost heart that there was a much grander game to be played in those remote regions than one suggested by the mere accidental circumstance of the Russian advance, still clung to his conviction of the policy of the contemplated Mission, and earnestly enforced his opinions upon his political chief. Macnaghten listened—yielded—and indulging rather the wishes of his friend than conforming to the dictates of his own judgment, recommended the enterprise to the favourable consideration of the Supreme Government; and acting upon certain passages in a letter from the Chief Secretary, which might be construed into an implied permission, of a general rather than a specific character, ordered Conolly to proceed to Khiva and Kokund.

It was with feelings of irrepressible delight, that now, at the beginning of August, Arthur Conolly found himself “fairly going” on his enterprising journey to the Courts of the Trans-Oxian Khans. His heart was in the cause. He was full of impetuous enthusiasm. He was eager that the British Government should play “the grand game” in Central Asia, and declared that a mission so righteous in its objects must prosper in his hands. His spirits rose, as he looked into the future; and, full of generous enthusiasm, he began to make preparations for his journey. “We are just on the wing,” he wrote to Rawlinson on the 22nd of August, “and I shall make the best of my way to the two capitals for which I carry credentials. It is a work which must prosper; and I only wish again that you were to be of the party to accomplish it; but, as I said before, you occupy a high and useful station, and can’t be at two places at once. If the British Government would only play the grand game;—help Russia cordially to all that she has a right to expect—shake hands with Persia—get her all possible amends from the Oosbegs, and secure her such a frontier as would both keep these man-stealers and savages in wholesome check, and take away her pretext for pushing herself and letting herself be pushed on to the Oxus—force the Bokhara Ameer to be just to us, the Afghans, and the other Oosbegs states, and his own kingdom—but why go on; you know my, at any rate in one sense, enlarged views. Inshallah! The expepediency—nay, the necessity of them will be seen, and we shall play the noble part that the first Christian nation of the world ought to fill.”

There were still, however, causes of delay. An ambassador from Shah Soojah was to accompany the British officer. But it was long before the King could select from the people about his Court one to whom he could entrust so responsible a duty. At last, after much hesitation, his choice fell upon Allahdad Khan Populzye—a little, scrubby-looking, sallow-faced man, with a busy look and a restless eye, believed to be skilful in political intrigue, and as little likely to betray his trust as any man about the Court. He left his family and his money behind him, and these, as the Shah significantly said, were the best guarantees for his good conduct.

Everything now was ready. Conolly, early in September, turned his face towards the Hindoo-Koosh. There was a mission of another kind then setting towards those dreary regions. It was not a Mission of Peace. Colonel Dennie, who had distinguished himself at the head of the Ghuznee stormers, was about to march, with the 35th Sepoy Regiment, to reinforce the Bameean detachment, and to take the command of all the the troops on the northern frontier.

CHAPTER III.

[June-November: 1840.]

The last Struggles of Dost Mahomed——The British in the Hindoo-Koosh—— The Ameer’s Family—— Occupation of Bajgah—— Disaster of Kamurd—— Escape of Dost Mahomed——Feverish State of Caubul—— Dennie’s Brigade—— Defeat of the Ameer—— Sale in the Kohistan—— The Battle of Purwandurrah—— Surrender of Dost Mahomed.

It is time that to these regions of the Hindoo-Koosh attention should now again be directed. The little force which had been despatched thither in the autumn of 1839, and had wintered among the caves of Bameean, was by the coming in of spring released from its inactivity. It was not Lord’s policy to be quiet. There was Jubbar Khan with the family of Dost Mahomed at Khooloom. Already it has been seen that the reception of these people had been the subject of correspondence between Lord and Macnaghten. But Jubbar Khan halted between two opinions. The winter passed away. The spring passed away. And still he remained with his brother’s family at Khooloom. The Wullee, or chief, of that place was still true to the cause of the Ameer; and he permitted the Newab to maintain this numerous party by levying the transit duties of the place.

This was a state of things which, in the opinion of Lord and Macnaghten, had already lasted long enough. They were eager to bring the Newab to a decision. So, at the end of May, or the beginning of June, a party was sent out under Captain Garbett, ostensibly for the purpose of reconnoitring the passes to the north of our position at Bameean. But there was, doubtless, another object in view. It was believed that such a demonstration would have the effect of quickening the movements of Jubbar Khan, who had more than once been on the point of starting for the British post, but, overcome by irresolution, had struck his tents and returned. Already had some of the party of refugees left their asylum at Khooloom, and sought the hospitality of the British. Azim Khan, one of the Ameer’s sons, had “come in;” and some of the women and children, too, had passed on towards Caubul. But the Newab himself still vacillated; and it was believed that a forward movement of our troops would stimulate him to come to a decision.

The movement had the desired effect. At all events, Jubbar Khan set out for Bameean. Nor was this the only noticeable result of the reconnaissance. Beyond the valley or glen of Kamurd, which stretches northward from Syghan across the great mountain-range, lay the isolated fortress of Bajgah. When our reconnoitring party came upon this place, to their surprise they found it deserted. It belonged to one Syud Mahomed, who now appeared, and declared that he had vacated it for the express purpose of making a tender of the fort to the British, as an outpost that might be of great service to them. A small party of infantry were accordingly placed in the fort, and the circumstance was immediately reported to Dr. Lord. Lord grasped at the offer; and in the strongest terms recommended both to Cotton and Macnaghten the permanent occupation of the post. His arguments prevailed; and on the 29th of June the Shah’s 4th Regiment, under Captain Hay, was sent to garrison this isolated fort. On the 3rd of July, Jubbar Khan arrived at Bameean with the remaining members of the Ameer’s family, and a large party of retainers.

It soon became obvious that the occupation of Bajgah was a mistake. Sturt, the engineer, who had been sent up to survey the passes, pronounced upon its unfitness as a military post. It was plain, too, that the temper of the surrounding tribes was very different from that of the population about Bameean. At the latter place the soldiery and the peasantry were on the best possible terms. About Bajgah the people looked upon the new comers with a jealous eye. All the efforts of Captain Hay to establish a friendly intercourse between himself and the inhabitants failed. They would not bring in grain; they would not bring in forage. Soon their hostility began to evince itself in a more alarming manner. “On the extreme summits of the northern hills overlooking Bajgah, were frequently seen groups of horsemen, apparently watching the movements of the people in the deep glen below.”[49]

Unfortunately, at this time Hay, the only officer at Bajgah, was incapacitated by sickness. So he sent to Syghan for Lieutenant Golding; and on the 2nd of August sent out a party of two companies, under Sergeant Douglas, to escort that officer to Bajgah. They performed their march without interruption, and at night bivouacked under the walls of a fort held by one Sula Beg. The chief received them with an outside show of friendliness; and then despatched a message to another chief, Baba Beg, of Ajur, saying, “See! I have the Feringhees in a dieg (caldron). They are ready to your hand. If you are not here by noontide to-morrow, I will yield up my fort to them.”

Morning came. There was no appearance of the party whom they had been sent to meet; so Douglas was preparing to return to Bajgah, when a heavy matchlock fire was opened on his men, from the fort and the surrounding orchards; and presently a party of Oosbeg horsemen appeared in sight, and charged down upon the little band, who met and repulsed the attack. It was a fine thing then to see the bold front which Douglas and his men showed to the enemy, as they made their way, exposed to a heavy matchlock fire, through the dense orchards and wilderness of gardens. But many fell on the retreat; and many more would have fallen, for their ammunition was well-nigh gone, had not Sturt suddenly appeared with two more companies of the same sturdy Goorkha Regiment,[50] and rescued them from inevitable destruction. The enemy turned and fled; and Sturt and Douglas returned to Bajgah.

The evil tidings of this disaster soon reached Caubul. It was a time of deep anxiety. As this month of August advanced, the perplexities which distracted the mind of the envoy, gathered around him more closely and more tormentingly. A series of small but mortifying failures, of which this Bajgah affair was one, not without a significance of their own, kept him in a constant state of excitability, and left him neither rest of body nor serenity of mind. On the 12th of August he wrote to Major Rawlinson, saying, “There has been an awkward business near Bajgah, owing to the incapacity of the officer in command of the 4th or Ghoorka Regiment. He has allowed a company to lose thirty or forty men, killed and wounded, I think but little of this affair. Lord has gone off to put things to rights. Macgregor has failed also in his efforts to set matters to rights in Bajore. His invincibles have been vanquished, and he has lost a gun. All these little accidents happening at once are enough to disgust one; but, Inshallah! the Company’s Nusseeb will prove superior to them all.”

A week later, and it had become still more apparent that, even in the very neighbourhood of the capital, sedition was weaving plots for the subversion of the authority of the Shah; and that the Sikhs were intriguing from a distance for the restoration of Dost Mahomed. On the 19th of August, the envoy wrote to the same correspondent, that he had “intercepted a letter which, if genuine (as he had every reason to believe it to be), implicated many chiefs in meditated insurrection in favour of Dost Mahomed.” It distinctly stated too, that Nao Nahal Singh had promised pecuniary aid in furtherance of the design. “I am now just going to his Majesty,” he added, “to consult as to what should be done.” It was time, indeed, that the King and the envoy should take counsel together. Dost Mahomed had escaped from Bokhara.

For a while the fugitive Ameer had tasted the bitterness of close confinement in the city of Bokhara. His sons, Afzul Khan and Akbar Khan, shared his captivity. We know how the Khan of this inhospitable place is wont to treat his Christian guests. His Mahomedan visitors, whom he at first received with an outside show of kindness, were dealt with somewhat more leniently. But the natural ferocity of the man was not to be kept down. Dost Mahomed nearly became the victim of a treacherous murder. Baffled in this attempt on the life of his prisoners, and not daring openly to slay them, the Bokhara Ameer kept them for a time under strict surveillance, forbidding them even to repair to worship in the mosques. This inhospitable treatment seems to have called forth a remonstrance from the Shah of Persia, in consequence of which greater liberty was allowed to the unfortunate Princes. They made the most of the relaxation, and effected their escape. Many romantic incidents are told about this flight from Bokhara. The horse, on which the Ameer fled, fell exhausted by the way-side. So he transferred himself to a caravan, which he chanced to overtake, and escaped detection only by dyeing his beard with ink. The Wullee of Khooloom, with unshaken fidelity, opened his arms to receive his old ally, and placed all his resources at his command.

It was not long before the Ameer again found himself at the head of a considerable force. His family, with the exception of the two sons who had shared his captivity in Bokhara, were in the hands of the British. He knew the danger of his determined course, and when reminded that his wives and children were in our power, sorrowfully replied, “I have no family; I have buried my wives and children.” As the Oosbeg fighting men flocked to the standards of Dost Mahomed and the Wullee of Khooloom, the hopes of the former seemed to rise; and his determination to strike a vigorous blow for the recovery of his lost empire, gathered strength and consistency. To have cut up the Bameean detachment, and emerging from the Hindoo-Koosh, to have appeared on the plains below flushed with victory, raising the old war-cry in the name of the Prophet, and profiting by the unpopularity of Shah Soojah and his supporters, in that part of the country, would have been a noble achievement—one which would have rendered easy his triumphant progress to the very walls of the capital. He determined to make the effort; and early in September advanced upon Bameean, with a force of six or eight thousand men.

The month of September brought with it no mitigation of the anxieties of the envoy. From the country beyond the Hindoo-Koosh came exaggerated tidings of the successful progress of Dost Mahomed. “It is reported to-day,” wrote Macnaghten on the 3rd, “that all Toorkistan is in arms against the Feringhees and the Moofsids (rebels) here are very hard at work. It is certain that Hybuk has fallen to the Dost, and it is probable that Codrington will have to retire on Syghan. I put the best face on matters, and a slight success which our troops had at Bajgah over a party of the enemy, furnishes me with the foundation of a good story.”

But this good story soon became a bad one. On the 30th of August the Oosbegs had attacked Bajgah; and the Goorkhas under Codrington, aided by Rattray with some Afghan horse, had driven back the assailants. But it was plain that this isolated post, in the midst of a hostile population, was no longer tenable. It was expedient, therefore, to fall back upon Syghan. So Bajgah was evacuated. The Goorkhas commenced their retreat; and then it was pronounced that Syghan could not be held against a large body of hostile troops. It was determined, therefore, that they would fall back upon Bameean. They lost everything upon the retreat. We had pushed on our outposts to those remote points, only to abandon them disastrously on the first appearance of the enemy.

But there was something far worse than this. A regiment of Afghan infantry had been raised, and Captain Hopkins commanded it. It was the commencement of an attempt to establish a national army for the support of the throne. Its loyalty was now to be put to the proof, by placing it within the reach of all those sinister influences which were most likely to undermine it. The result may be readily anticipated. The atmosphere of the Hindoo-Koosh, and the contiguity of Dost Mahomed, were fatal to the fidelity of the corps. The Afghan soldiers, headed by their commandant, Saleh Mahomed,[51] deserted their colours; and a number of them joined the enemy.

Day after day, the tidings brought to Macnaghten were more and more distressing. All Afghanistan seemed ripe for revolt. “We are in a stew here,” he wrote to Rawlinson on the 6th of September, “perhaps greater than the occasion warrants; but our situation is far from comfortable. It is reported that the whole country on this side the Oxus, is up in favour of the Dost, who, with the Wullee, is certainly advancing in great strength; so much so that our troops have been obliged to fall back upon Bameean, whilst we have a formidable band of conspirators in the city, and the Kohistan is ripe for revolt. These matters of course engross my serious attention, and I have about fifty chits to answer every half-hour..... We are wretchedly weak, having only three infantry regiments, including one of the Shah’s. We have been compelled to send off the 35th to reinforce the garrison at Bameean, but still we are strong enough, I hope, in a fair field, to lick all the Moofsids that could be brought against us.”

Macnaghten’s worst fears were confirmed. Caubul now seemed to be on the eve of an insurrection. On the 9th, the Envoy, in preturbation of mind, wrote again to Rawlinson at Candahar: “The town is in a very feverish state. Some people are shutting up their shops; others, sending their families away; and some active measures must be taken for stopping the panic. We have taken possession of the gate of the Balla Hissar by a guard from Craigie’s regiment, and brought the mountain train inside the citadel. The apparently insignificant fact of Mesdames Trevor and Marsh having come up to the Balla Hissar from the town, has created a great sensation. We are sending out a party to watch the Charekar Pass, and Sanders goes with them; so that between force and conciliation and intrigue (in which art, I am sorry to tell you, I have now taken my degree), I hope we shall be more than a match for the Dost. But I have an anxious time of it, as you may imagine.”

But in the midst of all these perplexities he thought still of the “great game”—of the annexation of Herat and the subjugation of the Punjab—and chafed under the restraints which Lord Auckland had imposed upon him. “I had a letter,” he wrote, “from Lord Auckland yesterday, and from that I gather that his Lordship’s intentions are essentially pacific, both as regards Herat and the Punjab. Oh! for a Wellesley or a Hastings at this juncture. By a most ingenious process, he has substituted the cause for the effect, or rather the effect for the cause. He says, so long as we are continually agitating the question of taking possession of Peshawur and Herat, we cannot expect honest co-operation from the powers owning those places; thus overlooking, or affecting to overlook, the fact, that but for the dishonesty of those powers the question would never have been contemplated by us. This drivelling is beneath contempt. I shall now send up the proofs I have obtained (and they are tolerably strong) of the perfidy of the Sikhs without note or comment, and leave the rest to Providence. I shall adopt the same course with regard to the intrigues of Yar Mahomed.”

Day after day, the clouds gathering over Caubul grew denser and darker. An open enemy was in the field, and a false friend—our ally of the famous Tripartite treaty—was insidiously pushing his intrigues up to the very gates of the Balla Hissar. On the 12th of September, Macnaghten, weary and dispirited, wrote to the Governor-General, saying:—“I am much fatigued, having been severely worked the whole day; but I write these few lines just to apprise your Lordship that affairs in this quarter have the worst possible appearance. The whole Kohistan is reported to be ripe for revolt, though possibly in this there may be some exaggeration; and we hear of resolutions to rise in other parts of the country. But the worst news of all is that received from Dr. Lord this morning, to the effect that an entire company of Captain Hopkins’s corps has gone off with its arms and accoutrements to join Dost Mahomed Khan, and it is fully expected that their example will be followed by the whole regiment. Dost Mahomed Khan is said to be advancing with his entire force; but Dr. Lord’s intelligence seems very defective. I have just had a note from Sir W. Cotton, in which he observes: ‘I really think the time has now arrived for you and I to tell Lord Auckland, totidem verbis, that circumstances have proved incontestably that there is no Afghan army, and that unless the Bengal troops are instantly strengthened, we cannot hold the country.’ I have long since, and strongly and repeatedly, urged my opinion that another brigade should be sent to us. I have also pointed out that there is no such thing as an Afghan army, and I have incessantly urged my earnest opinion to the effect that our position here would be most perilous unless a stop were put to Sikh intrigues. They have now been allowed to go on till the country is thoroughly convulsed by them. Up to this moment Syud Mahomed Khan, one of the Barukzye triumvirate, is carrying into effect his iniquitous designs against his Majesty’s Government. Caubul is full of Sikh emissaries, and letters were yesterday intercepted from the Sikh agent to the address, amongst others, of Nao Nehal Singh, which clearly shows the animus by which the Sikhs are actuated towards their allies of the Tripartite treaty. The Sikh agent acknowledged the letters were his own. He did not know they had been opened.”

The 18th of September was a memorable day. It was the turning-point of our fortunes in Afghanistan. On that day the anxieties of the British minister were at their height. Never was the aspect of affairs more threatening—never was there so little to cheer and encourage the perplexed political chief. The pale cast of despondency was over all his thoughts. His physical and mental energies were alike beginning to fail. “At no period of my life,” he wrote on that 18th of September, “do I remember having been so much harassed in body and mind as during the past month. Nor is my uneasiness yet much lessened. The Afghans are gunpowder, and the Dost is a lighted match. Of his whereabouts we are wonderfully ignorant. I have no hope that he will attack Bameean, and I have great fear that he will throw himself into the Kohistan, where, it is said, the whole country will rise in his favour. But I am weary of conjecture; and we must make the best preparation we can against every possible contingency. Not the least of my vexations arises from our inability to depute Shah-zadah Timour at the present moment. But his presence in the Kohistan is indispensably necessary. He sets out this evening attended by all the chivalry of Caubul.”

But upon that very 18th of September—perhaps whilst the British minister, in perturbation and despondency of mind, was tracing these very lines, and looking, with painful forebodings of evil, for intelligence from the Hindoo-Koosh, the detachment of troops, long shut up in those dreary mountain fastnesses, now re-inforced from Caubul, were achieving a great and decisive victory over the forces of Dost Mahomed and the Wullee of Khooloom, and changing the entire aspect of affairs in those remote Caucasian regions.

On the 14th, the reinforcements under Brigadier Dennie had reached Bameean. It was currently reported that, on that day, Dost Mahomed would attack our position. Nothing, however, was seen of his army, and contradictory reports of his movements continued to pour into camp. From the stories which were circulated at Bameean, and the contents of the letters divulged by the neighbouring chiefs, it appeared that the Ameer had not yet fully determined whether to make a descent upon our detachment, or to avoid the contest. From Kamurd he wrote to one chief: “For God’s sake, tell me the news! Will the Feringhees run or fight?” To the Sirdars of the Afghan corps that has just before deserted, he wrote that all Toorkistan had joined him, and that he had 40,000 men at his call. In all his letters he declared that he had taken up arms for the honour of his religion, and called upon all true believers to flock to the holy standard of the Prophet.

Brigadier Dennie’s first measure, upon reaching Bameean, was to disarm the apostate Afghan corps. He then began to bethink himself of marching upon Syghan to meet the advancing troops of the Ameer. But the enemy were then nearer than he anticipated. On the evening of the 17th, he obtained intelligence to the effect that some advanced bodies of cavalry were “entering the valley from the great defile in our front,” six miles from Bameean; and on the following morning it was reported that they had attacked a friendly village which had claims to the protection of our troops. The Brigadier resolved, therefore, to expel them. It was believed that they constituted the advanced guard of the Ameer’s army under his son Afzul Khan. On the morning of the 18th, a detachment was ordered out to drive the enemy from the valley. Soon after eight o’clock, two horse-artillery guns under Lieutenant Murray Mackenzie, two companies of the 35th Native Infantry, two companies of the Goorkha corps, and about 400 Afghan horse, marched out to meet the enemy. About half an hour afterwards, Dennie, with two more companies of the Native Infantry regiment, and two also of the Goorkha corps, followed in support of the advanced detachment. Instead of coming merely upon the advance of the enemy, the Brigadier found an army in his front.

But in spite of the slender force at his command, and the overwhelming numbers of the enemy, Dennie did not hesitate for a moment. His men were eager to advance; and he himself was full of confidence and courage. The enemy had got possession of a chain of forts reaching to the mouth of the defile, and were collected in bodies round the several forts, and upon the hills on either side of the valley. Mackenzie’s guns began to play upon them. A little while the Oosbegs stood the fire; but the guns were nobly served, and the shrapnel practice told with terrific effect on dense bodies of men who had nothing to give back in return. The Oosbegs fell back, and, as they retreated, the guns were pushed forward; and first from one distance, then from another, opened a destructive fire upon the wavering disconcerted enemy. The Oosbeg force was soon broken to pieces; and our cavalry were then let slip in pursuit. Following the disordered masses for some miles along the defile, they cut down large numbers of the enemy, and dispersed them in all directions. Dost Mahomed and his son are said to have owed their lives to the fleetness of their horses.

Intelligence of this victory soon reached Caubul, and was received with the liveliest emotions of joy by the British Resident. His spirits rose at once. Again he began to look at the present without alarm, and into the future without despondency. Never was a victory so much wanted as in that month of September, and never did one promise so many good results.

“The Dost had only one weapon,” wrote Macnaghten on the 21st, to Major Rawlinson, “that was religion, and he certainly wielded it most skilfully. I think the Oosbegs will now abandon him. Lord has offered handsome terms to the Wullee, and should this fail, I am not without hope that Meer Mahomed Beg will seize the present opportunity of revenging himself on his old enemy.”

The attempt to detach the Wullee of Khooloom from his alliance with Dost Mahomed was crowned with complete success. Doubtless Mackenzie’s guns were the great suasive power. The battle of Bameean must have shown the Oosbeg chief the hopelessness of further resistance; and as Dennie was moving on to Syghan, it was prudent to come at once to terms. Lieutenant Rattray was sent forward to arrange a meeting between the Wullee and Dr. Lord; and on the 28th of September, on the summit of the Dundun-i-Shikun, the British political agent and the Oosbeg chief entered into engagements, by which the latter bound himself not to harbour or assist Dost Mahomed, or any member of his family. The country to the south of Syghan was ceded to Shah Soojah; that to the north of it to the Wullee; and a telescope, which he said had been promised, and which he was hurt at not having received before, was given to the latter in completion of the bargain.

But these favourable results were but local and incidental. “I am like a wooden spoon,” said Dost Mahomed; “you may throw me hither and thither, but I shall not be hurt.” Defeated on the Hindoo-Koosh, he reappeared in the Kohistan. Disaffection was rife throughout that part of the Douranee Empire. The chiefs had begun to feel the evils of the new revenue system, or rather the manner of its administration, which rendered the tax-gatherer something more than a name. Supported by British power, the executive officers of the Shah no longer stood in awe of the petty chieftains, who soon began to murmur against the change of government, and to lay all their grievances at the door of the Feringhees. Thus irritated and exasperated, they were in a temper to welcome back the Barukzye Sirdar. More than one fortress was in the hand of a recusant chief; and it was apprehended that the presence of Dost Mahomed would set the whole country in a blaze.[52]

In such a conjuncture it became necessary to do something in the Kohistan. But it was not easy to determine what. A blow was to be struck, and the chapter of accidents was to determine how and in what direction it should fall. Accordingly, in the last week of September, a force under Sir Robert Sale was ordered to take the field. Sir Alexander Burnes accompanied it, and directed its movements. At the entrance of the Ghorebund Pass was a fortified village, and a chain of detached forts, belonging to a hostile chief, who was known to be in league with the fugitive Ameer. The name of this place was Tootundurrah. On the 29th of September, Sale invested the enemy’s position. The resistance was very slight. The fire of our guns and the advance of the infantry column soon compelled its evacuation, and the place was speedily in possession of the British troops. The success was complete, and would have been cheaply purchased; but one fell there, who, mourned in anguish of spirit by the Envoy, was lamented by the whole force. Edward Conolly, a lieutenant of cavalry, one of three accomplished and enterprising brothers, who had followed the fortunes of their distinguished relative, Sir William Macnaghten, and obtained employment under the British Mission, had on that very morning joined Sale’s force as a volunteer. He was acting as aide-de-camp to the General; when, as the column advanced, he was struck down by a shot from the enemy’s position. The bullet entered his heart. “My mind was in too disturbed a state all day yesterday,” wrote the Envoy on the 1st of October, “to admit of my writing to you. Poor Edward Conolly (Arthur’s next brother) has been killed by a dubious hand at a petty fortress in Kohistan. Never did a nobler or a kinder spirit inhabit a human frame. Poor fellow! he was shot through the heart, and I believe he was the only individual on our side killed during the operations of the 29th, when three forts belonging to the chief rebel in the country were taken. The whole of the chiefs of the Kohistan have now taken to flight. This is a result I by no means anticipated; my wish was to punish some, and to conciliate others. As it is, I fear that Dost Mahomed Khan will now be received by them with open arms. There never was such a set of villains. They came in here, and bound themselves to serve the Shah under the most solemn oaths conceivable, and yet they had not returned to their homes half an hour before they reopened their correspondence with Dost Mahomed. Their punishment became indispensable, for they would shortly have had Dost Mahomed amongst them; and now there is a possibility of their having imbibed so wholesome a terror of our arms as to prevent their ever again assuming an offensive attitude.”[53]

Having destroyed the defences of Tootundurrah, Sale advanced on the 3rd of October to the attack of Joolgah—another fortified position held by the Kohistanee rebels. The walls of this place were too thick to be easily breached, and too high to be easily escaladed. The guns were light; the scaling ladders were short; and the enemy on the crest of the breach offered the most determined resistance. The storming party, led by Colonel Tronson, of the 13th Light Infantry, advanced to the attack with a desperate gallantry worthy of a more distinguished success. Many of the leading men were shot dead in the breach; the struggle to effect a lodgment was ineffectual; and the column was eventually withdrawn. Repulsed, but not disheartened by failure, the British troops were preparing to renew the attack, when the enemy, dreading the recommencement of hostilities, left the fort in the hands of the besiegers. The works were destroyed; and so far the movement was successful—but the failure of the assault deeply mortified the Envoy. “I have bad news to send you,” he wrote on the 4th of October; “our arms have met with a reverse at Joolgah in the Kohistan.[54] A storm and escalade was attempted, but it would not do. The enemy evacuated the place in the evening; but I fear that the whole of the Moofsids (rebels) have escaped...... Burnes represents the country as being in a very unsettled state; and I fear that it will be necessary for his Majesty to remain in Caubul this winter. I intend to write and tell Lord Auckland that he must send us reinforcements viâ the Punjab. The Dost was last heard of at Kanjau; but I have no doubt of his soon entering Nijrow. Would it be justifiable to set a price on this fellow’s head? We have intercepted several letters from him, from all of which it appears that he meditates fighting with us so long as the breath is in his body.”

During that month of October, to the annoyance and embarrassment of the political officers and the discomfort of the troops, Dost Mahomed was flitting about from place to place, with no intelligible plan of action to give it any shape and consistency to our counter-operations. Various were the reports which reached the British camp; various the accounts of the nature of his movements and the number of his adherents. Many of these were of the most conflicting character;—and the best-informed officers in the British camp were beset with doubt and perplexity. On the 11th of October it was known that the Ameer was in the valley of Ghorebund. “I believe that there can be little or no doubt,” wrote Macnaghten to Lord Auckland, on the following day, “of Dost Mahomed’s having entered Ghorebund, and of his being at this moment within forty or fifty miles distance from Caubul. It is impossible to say what may be the effect of his coming into this neighbourhood. But I apprehend very serious consequences, for both the town of Caubul and the country are ripe for revolt. Dr. Lord writes that, as soon as Dost Mahomed heard of Mr. Rattray’s approach, he said he would not remain to be sold to the Feringhees, and immediately took the road to Ghorebund. I cannot ascertain how many men he has with him—some accounts say ten thousand, others, three hundred. The last is, I dare say, nearer the mark—but what I dread is, the effect of his incessant intrigues (whilst he is so near us) upon the minds of the population.”

Such, indeed, at this time, were the gloomy forebodings which overshadowed the minds of the political chiefs, that they predicted the necessity of concentrating the troops in the Balla Hissar of Caubul, and actually began to talk of making preparations for a siege. Guns were mounted on the citadel to overawe the town. The guards were everywhere increased. The Bameean detachment was ordered to return to the capital with all possible despatch. And Macnaghten began to talk about “submitting to the disgrace of being shut up in Caubul for a time.” It was, indeed, a critical moment. It has been seen that the Envoy had begun to contemplate the expediency of setting a price on the Ameer’s head. It is a proof alike of the dangers that beset our position in Afghanistan, and the disturbing effects they had wrought upon the minds of our political ministers, that such was the exasperation produced by the apparent success of Dost Mahomed, even upon the kindly nature of the Envoy, that he talked about “showing no mercy to the man who was the author of all the evil now distracting the country.” Shah Soojah had long been eager to “hang the dog;” and now, in conversation with Macnaghten, he taunted him with his mistaken leniency. “I suppose you would, even now,” said the King, “if I were to catch the dog, prevent me from hanging him.” “It will be time enough,” said the Envoy, “to talk about that when your Majesty has caught him.” The British minister was about to take his leave, when the Shah arrested him, and said: “You know I have from the first expressed to you a mean opinion of my own countrymen. If you want further proofs, look at that from my own brother.” He then placed in the Envoy’s hands an intercepted letter to the address of the Barukzye chief, Sultan Mahomed, proposing that, with his aid, and that of the Sikhs, Shah Zemaun should be placed on the throne, as Shah Soojah had made over the country to the dominion of infidels. The letter bore the seal of the old blind king himself. It was on the following day that the Envoy wrote to the Governor-General that no mercy should be shown to the Ameer; but he added, “should he be so fortunate as to secure the person of Dost Mahomed, I shall request his Majesty not to execute him till I can ascertain your Lordship’s sentiments.”[55]

In the mean while, the force under Sir Robert Sale had moved, in pursuit of the Ameer, into the Nijrow country. On the 18th they were encamped near Kardurrah; and on the 20th were meditating an attack on the place. The Envoy, who watched their proceedings with extreme anxiety, was impatient of the seeming dilatoriness of their movements; and wrote to one of his colleagues: “Burnes and Sale, with nearly 2000 good infantry, are sitting down before a fortified position about twenty miles distant, and are afraid to attack it. The enemy made an attack upon them the night before last—killed and wounded some of our people, and got off unscathed. All this is very bad.” But it was not in reality so bad as it seemed to the perplexed and anxious minister at Caubul. Whilst he was writing, preparations were in progress for an attack, on the following day. On the morning of the 21st the force was ready and eager for action. But as the troops advanced, fresh and in good spirits, upon Kardurrah, a party of villagers met them with tidings to the effect that the enemy had abandoned their position, and that the place was without an inhabitant. If any feelings of mortification welled up on the discovery that the garrison had escaped our toils, they very quickly subsided. It was plain that the enemy had made a great mistake, and that the British force had providentially been delivered from a great danger. The position that the “rebels” had abandoned was one of uncommon strength, and, had it been defended with any spirit, could only have been carried, if at all, after a large expenditure of life.

Dost Mahomed was now in the Nijrow country. His cause seemed to gather strength. Even some of Shah Soojah’s soldiers deserted their British officers and flocked to the Ameer’s standard. On the 27th of October he broke ground, and moved down towards the capital. On the 29th, intelligence of his movements having reached the British camp at Bhag-alum, the force marched out to intercept the enemy. The two following days were employed by the engineer officers in reconnoitring and surveying the surrounding country; and on the 1st of November the force encamped before Meer-Musjedee’s fort. Here it was ascertained that they were in the neighbourhood of the enemy, and preparations were made to give battle to the Ameer and his adherents.

On the 2nd of November—a day which has obtained a melancholy celebrity in the annals of the English in Afghanistan—the British force came at last in sight of the enemy. The army of the Ameer was posted in the valley of Purwandurrah. The Nijrow hills were bristling with the armed population of a hostile country. Unprepared for the conflict, Dost Mahomed had no design, on that November morning, of giving battle to the Feringhees. An unexpected movement precipitated the collision. On the first appearance of the British troops the Ameer evacuated the village of Purwandurrah and the neighbouring forts; and was moving off to a position on some elevated ground commanded by a steep hill to the rearward, when, at the suggestion of Dr. Lord, the British cavalry were moved forward to outflank the Afghan horse.

It was a clear bright morning. The yellow foliage of autumn glittered like gold in the broad sunlight. The opposite hills were alive with the enemy. The crisp fresh air, so bracing and invigorating to the human frame, seemed to breathe confidence and courage. Dost Mahomed, who, since his defeat at Bameean, had been often heard of, but never seen, by the British troops, and who seemed to elude the grasp of the Army of Occupation like an ignis fatuus, was now actually within their reach. It ought to have been an hour of triumph. It was one of humiliation. The Afghans were on the hills skirting one side of the pass; the British troops were on the opposite declivity. Dost Mahomed saw our cavalry advancing, and from that moment cast behind him all thought of retreat. At the head of a small band of horsemen, strong, sturdy Afghans, but badly mounted, he prepared to meet his assailants. Beside him rode the bearer of the blue standard which marked his place in the battle. He pointed to it; reined in his horse; then snatching the white lunghi from his head, stood up in his stirrups uncovered before his followers, and called upon them, in the name of God and the Prophet, to drive the cursed Kaffirs from the country of the faithful. “Follow me,” he cried aloud, “or I am a lost man.” Slowly, but steadily, the Afghan horsemen advanced. The English officers, who led our cavalry to the attack, covered themselves with glory. The native troopers fled like sheep. Emboldened by the craven conduct of the British cavalry, the Afghan horsemen rode forward, driving their enemy before them, and charging right up to the position of the British, until almost within reach of our guns.[56] The Afghan sabres told, with cruel effect, upon our mounted men. Lieutenants Broadfoot and Crispin were cut to pieces. A treacherous shot from a neighbouring bastion brought Dr. Lord to the ground; and the dagger of the assassin completed the work of death. Captains Fraser and Ponsonby, whose gallantry has never been surpassed even in the annals of old Roman heroism, still live to show their honourable scars; and to tell, with mingled pride and humiliation, the story of that melancholy day.

In front of our columns, flaunting the national standard, the Afghans stood for some time masters of the field, and then quietly withdrew from the scene of battle. Sir Alexander Burnes, awed by this disaster, wrote to Sir William Macnaghten that there was nothing left for the force but to fall back upon Caubul, and implored the Envoy there to concentrate all our troops. Sir William received the letter on the 3rd of November, as he was taking his evening ride in the outskirts of the city. His worst forebodings seemed to be confirmed. Little did he know what thoughts were stirring in the breast of the Ameer. Dost Mahomed, in the very hour of victory, felt that it was hopeless to contend against the power of the British Government. He had too much sagacity not to know that his success at Purwandurrah must eventually tend, by moving the British to redouble their exertions, rather to hasten than to retard the inevitable day of his final destruction. He quitted the field in no mood of exultation; with no bright visions of the future before him. He had won the last throw, but the final issue had ceased to be a matter of speculation. The hour in which, with dignity and grace, he might throw himself upon the protection of his enemies, now seemed to have arrived. He had met the British troops in the field, and, at the head of a little band of horsemen, had driven back the cavalry of the Feringhees. His last charge had been a noble one; he might now retire from the contest without a blot upon his name.

So thought the Ameer; as was his wont, taking counsel of his saddle. None knew in the British camp the direction he had taken; none guessed the character of his thoughts. On the day after the victory of Purwandurrah he was under the walls of Caubul. He had been four-and-twenty hours in the saddle; but betrayed little symptoms of fatigue. A single horseman attended him. As they approached the residence of the British Envoy, they saw an English gentleman returning from his evening ride. The attendant galloped forward to satisfy himself of the identity of the rider, and being assured that the Envoy was before him, said that the Ameer was at hand. “What Ameer?” asked Macnaghten. “Dost Mahomed Khan,” was the answer; and presently the chief himself rode up to the British minister. Throwing himself from his horse, Dost Mahomed saluted the Envoy, said he was come to claim his protection, and placed his sword in Macnaghten’s hand. But the Envoy returning it to him, desired the Ameer to remount. They then rode together into the Mission compound—— Dost Mahomed asking many eager questions about his family as they went. A tent having been pitched for his accommodation, he wrote letters to his sons, exhorting them to follow his example and seek the protection of the British Government.

He seemed to have become reconciled to his fate. He had no wish, he said, to escape. Force, indeed, would not drive him to abandon the refuge he had voluntarily sought. With Macnaghten he conversed freely of his past history; and raised, by the recital alike of his doings and his sufferings, the strongest feelings of admiration and compassion in the Envoy’s breast. Every effort was made to soothe the Ameer’s feelings; and he soon became serene and cheerful. A report that it was the design of our government to banish him to London, disturbed his equanimity for a time; but he was soon reassured by the promises of the Envoy, and began to look forward with hopefulness to a life of repose and security in the Company’s dominions. A few days after his surrender, his eldest son, Afzul Khan, came into the British camp.

A prisoner, but an honoured one, Dost Mahomed remained some ten days at Caubul, during which time all the leading officers of the garrison paid him the most marked attention. Men, who kept aloof from Shah Soojah, as one to be religiously avoided, were eager to present themselves before the unfortunate Ameer, and to show that they respected him in his fallen fortunes. He received his visitors with courtesy, and conversed with them with freedom. Seated on the ground, he desired them to be seated; and seemed to take pleasure in the society of the brave men who did him honour. Captain Nicolson, an officer of distinguished gallantry and great intelligence, whose early death on the banks of the Sutlej is to be deeply deplored, having been selected by Sir W. Macnaghten to fill the difficult and delicate office of custodian to the fallen prince, acted, on these occasions, as interpreter. It may be doubted whether a single officer quitted his presence without drawing a comparison between the Ameer and the Shah, very much to the disadvantage of the latter. The King refused to see his prisoner, alleging that he would not be able to bring himself to show common civility to such a villain. “This is well,” said the Envoy, writing to the Private Secretary of the Governor-General, “as the Dost must have suffered much humiliation in being subjected to such an ordeal.” All the natural kindliness of the Envoy now set in towards the fallen prince, and all the courtesies of the English gentleman were freely bestowed upon him.

On the 12th of November, 1840, Dost Mahomed Khan, under a strong escort,[57] commenced his journey towards the provinces of India; and two months afterwards Macnaghten wrote:

“I trust that the Dost will be treated with liberality. His case has been compared to that of Shah Soojah; and I have seen it argued that he should not be treated more handsomely than his Majesty was; but surely the cases are not parallel. The Shah had no claim upon us. We had no hand in depriving him of his kingdom, whereas we ejected the Dost, who never offended us, in support of our policy, of which he was the victim.”[58]

And so Macnaghten, in a few lines of irrepressible truth and candour, denounced the injustice of the policy of which he himself had been one of the originators. It is possible, too, that Lord Auckland may have felt that Dost Mahomed “never offended us,” but that we had victimised him; for he received the Prince he had deposed with becoming hospitality and respect, and burdened the revenues of India with a pension in his favour of two lakhs of rupees.

CHAPTER IV.

[November: 1840-September: 1841.]

Yar Mahomed and the Douranees—Season of Peace—Position of the Douranees—The Zemrindawer Outbreak—Conduct of Yar Mahomed—Departure of Major Todd—Risings of the Douranees and Ghilzyes—Engagements with Aktur Khan and the Gooroo—Dispersion of the Insurgents.

The remainder of the month of November passed away in peace and tranquillity. The Envoy began now for the first time to taste the blessings of repose, and to enjoy the advantages of leisure. But his active mind was soon again busily at work. Dost Mahomed had surrendered; but the Sikhs had not been coerced. The time for the “macadamisation” of the Punjab seemed now to have arrived. To the Lieutenant-Governor of the North-Western Provinces of India, he wrote on the 24th of November, of the “piping times of peace, so unfavourable to the exercise of the epistolary art,” and of the “cards which played so beautifully into his hands.” “This is the time,” he added, “for a subsidiary force in the Punjab, and for the cession of the districts to the west of the Indus. We are clearly not bound any longer by the Tripartite treaty, and so I have told Lord Auckland; but I don’t think his Lordship’s ambition will aim at more than keeping matters on their present footing. We start for Jellalabad in three or four days; and it is high time we should do so, as the weather is becoming bitterly cold here. We shall now have a little time to devote to the affairs of the country, and I trust its condition will be soon as flourishing as its poor resources will admit.”[59]

Before the end of November, the Court were on their way to their winter quarters at Jellalabad. On the morning of the 13th they reached that place. The Envoy found Sir Willoughby Cotton still there, but “anxious to get away;” and Captain Macgregor, the political agent in charge of the district, surrounded by a motley crew of the chiefs of the country, who seemed to look up to him as their common father. In the enjoyment of a little rest from pressing anxieties, the Envoy began to turn his thoughts to the domestic administration of the country. “We have hitherto,” he wrote to the Private Secretary of the Governor-General, “been struggling for existence, without any leisure to turn to the improvement of the administration.”[60] And very little of this leisure was even now vouchsafed to him. Though Dost Mahomed was on his way to the provinces of India, and the winter snows had now set in, the struggle for existence was still going on, and more fiercely than ever. The Ghilzyes and Kohistanees had already risen up against the government of the Shah and his supporters; and now the Douranees were breaking out into revolt.

It has been shown, that on the reappearance of Shah Soojah at Candahar, the Douranees, enfeebled and prostrated by their Barukzye oppressors, clustered around the throne, and sought from the restored monarch the privileges and immunities which had been wrested from them by the Sirdars. Uncertain, at that time, of the ultimate success of the expedition, and eager to swell the number of his adherents, the Shah was willing to grant, and more willing still to promise. He made certain remissions of taxation in favour of the tribes; but he entrusted the execution of these new popular measures to the old unpopular agency; and the Parsewan revenue-collectors, who had oppressed the tribes during the reign of the Sirdars, were still left to exercise their hated calling under the King.

The experiment of giving is a dangerous one. In the ordinary concerns of human life, it is found that the shortcomings of those who give bring down upon them more hatred and more reproach than the withholdings of those who give not. It is perilous to raise hopes not to be fulfilled. The Douranees had looked for much from the restoration of the Shah; and they were disappointed. They had patiently submitted to the exactions and oppressions of the Barukzyes—but the imperfect liberality of the Suddoyze monarch irritated them past endurance. They looked upon the Barukzyes as their natural enemies, and they submitted when they knew that they had no power of resistance. But believing that it was the wish of the restored government of the Shah to conciliate and encourage them, they demonstrated their dissatisfaction in a violent and offensive manner, with the strongest assurance in their mind that their grievances would be redressed. Under the Barukzyes such a course would have been worse than useless, for their spasms of painful unrest were pleasing to the Sirdars. But as it seemed that the Shah desired to please them, they strove to evince, by most unmistakeable signs, that they were not pleased; and broke out into rebellion.[61]

In Zemindawer, a district which lies to the north-west of Candahar, symptoms of inquietude began to evince themselves at the end of 1840. At this time, the affairs of Candahar and its neighbourhood were, as regards all European superintendence, under the charge of Major Rawlinson. This officer, who had been employed for some years in Persia,[62] and on the rupture of our friendly relations with that state, necessarily remanded to India, had been so strongly recommended, for his intimate acquaintance with the languages, the people, and the politics of the East, as well as for his general aptitude and intelligence, by Sir John M‘Niell to Lord Auckland, that the Governor-General ordered him to proceed to Caubul, to be employed under Macnaghten. In the early part of 1840 it had been proposed to despatch Rawlinson and Arthur Conolly on a mission to the camp of the Russian General Peroffski, but the breaking up of the Khivan expedition caused this project to be abandoned; and another field of activity was opened out to Rawlinson in a region less inhospitable and remote. The supervision of affairs at Candahar had hitherto been entrusted to Major Leech; but Leech had given offence to the Envoy by the dilatoriness with which he had sent in his accounts, and it had seemed good to Macnaghten to remove him from his post.[63] He could not have appointed a better man than Rawlinson to fill it. So, on the 4th of July, he sent to that officer the Shah’s official notification of his appointment as political agent at Candahar.

The command of the troops at Candahar was in the hands of Major-General Nott. He was an old Sepoy officer of good repute; a man of some talents, but blunt address—an honest, plain-spoken soldier, not always right, but always believing himself to be right—hearty, genuine, and sincere. His faults were chiefly those of temper. He had not been well used. Sir Henry Fane had recognised his merits; but Sir John Keane, who was accused of fostering a narrow-minded prejudice against the Company’s service, had superseded him in a manner which had greatly incensed the General himself, and the army to which he belonged.[64] Labouring under a strong sense of the injustice that had been done him; feeling that his worth had not been duly appreciated, or his services duly rewarded; seeing much in the general management of the affairs of the distracted country in which his lot had been cast to excite his unqualified disapprobation; and being, moreover, constitutionally of an irritable temperament, he sometimes said and wrote what was calculated to offend others; and as the political officers were the especial objects of his dislike, he was in no favour at the Residency. Macnaghten declared that the general’s conduct frequently embarrassed him, and recommended, therefore, his recall. But it was felt that Nott was a fine soldier; and, though the Government eventually listened to the Envoy’s counsel in this matter, they were slow to remove him from a sphere in which his energy and decision were likely to be so serviceable to the state. And, perhaps, it was felt that, in his political colleague at Candahar, Nott had a man of excellent temper, of great tact and forbearance, and that the difficulty was much lessened by so fortunate an association.

Such were the men upon whom, at the beginning of 1841, devolved the duty of looking this Douranee outbreak fairly in the face. The task that fell to Nott’s share was the easier of the two. He had simply to beat the enemy in the field. The insurgents of Zemindawer had risen up against a party of the Shah’s horse, who had been sent out to support the revenue officers, and had defeated and dispersed them. A detachment, therefore, was ordered out against them, under Captain Farrington. On the morning of the 3rd of January they came up with the rebels. The Douranee horse, some 1200 or 1500 strong, showed a bold front; but the fire of Hawkins’s guns was too hot for them, and they began to waver. The infantry well completed what the cavalry had well begun; the insurgents were driven from their position, and were soon broken and dispersed. And so, for the time, the military officer had done his work, and with good success. The political officer had a more difficult duty to perform. Rawlinson was called upon to elucidate the causes of the dissatisfaction of the Douranees, and to recommend the best means of quenching the dangerous spirit of revolt. The causes, doubtless, were numerous, and there were some which lay far beneath the surface. Both in private letters to Macnaghten and in a masterly official report, to which allusion has been made, Rawlinson probed them to their very depths—but his views were not in accordance with those of the Envoy, and his warnings were disregarded.

Macnaghten had at first been willing to believe that this revolt of the Douranees had risen out of the tyrannical interference of unpopular revenue-administrators, which had left them in a mood of mind favourable in the extreme to the designs of any discontented or factious chief who had objects to gain, or resentments to gratify, by stirring the country into rebellion. “Aktur Khan,” he wrote to Mr. Colvin, “was disappointed in not getting the chiefship of Zemindawer; and he found the people in a temper to aid his rebellious projects, owing to the oppressions practised by the Wakeel.” But he was slow to believe that there was any general feeling of disaffection in the country; that the double government we had established was essentially and necessarily unpopular; or that such occasional outbreaks as he was condemned to witness were the results of anything more than personal and accidental circumstances, from which no general conclusions were to be drawn. He never believed that there was any nationality among the Afghans, or that the presence of the stranger and the Infidel in their land could be a sore continually to fester and to throb.

Still less did he believe it possible that our presence in Afghanistan could be hateful to the King himself, who owed everything to us. But it was reported, and believed by many in the neighbourhood of Candahar, that Shah Soojah had secretly fomented the rebellion of the Douranees. The Shah shook with rage, when this story was told him, and vowed that the man, to whom its authorship had been traced, should pay the penalty of his mendacity by having his tongue cut out at the root. “And I really think,” said Macnaghten, “there would be no harm in depriving the rascal of his ears.” But there were others who believed then and afterwards, that the old king was as eager as any one of his subjects, to see the white-faced intruders swept from the face of the land; and that he yearned to be in deed, as well as in name, supreme in the Douranee Empire.

To have acknowledged either the unpopularity of our occupation of Afghanistan, or the faithlessness of the King, would have been to have acknowledged the entire failure of our policy. So Macnaghten still continued to seek for accidental causes of the popular discontent, and to talk of superficial remedies. “My own impression is,” he wrote to Mr. Colvin, on the 5th of February, “that matters will revert to a wholesome state as soon as ever the incubus of apprehension is removed from the body of the people; and this will be effected by the simple recall of the obnoxious Parsewan managers.” But there was another source to which, at this time, he was fain to attribute the inquietude of Western Afghanistan. He suspected, and not without reason, that the disaffection of the Douranees had been fomented by the intrigues of Yar Mahomed. The suspicion soon rose into knowledge. There were undeniable proofs that the Heratee Wuzeer had been writing inflammatory letters to the Douranee chiefs. He had sent a delegate, named Nussur-ood-deen Khan, into the Zemindawer country, with letters to each of the principal Douranee chiefs, and one of them had forwarded to Lieutenant Elliot, Rawlinson’s assistant, a copy of the seditious missive, which ran to the following effect:

Let each of you assemble his followers, and go in to Aktur Khan in Zemindawer, and be ready and prepared, for I have moved out of Herat; and from Meshed, troops 10,000 strong, with twelve guns and two lakhs of rupees, are marching to our assistance. At latest, I shall arrive at Bukhwa by the end of the month Mohurram. Let not any Douranee chief of those now assembled disperse his followers, for I am most assured of coming to join you.

The fact was not to be doubted; but it was in no way the cause of the disorder. It merely aggravated the external symptoms of a deeply-seated disease. Vexatious and embarrassing as was this intelligence, there was worse behind to astound the Envoy, and make him cry out more and more bitterly against the authorities, who had thwarted his long cherished desire to play the “great game.” Suddenly there came upon him tidings that the outrages and the exactions—the treachery and the insolence—of Yar Mahomed had reached such a pitch, that Todd had broken up the British Mission, and set his face towards Candahar.

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.

On receiving intelligence of Todd’s departure from Herat, Macnaghten’s first impulse had been to muster all his available resources, and relying greatly on the “big guns,” to make an immediate demonstration in the direction of Herat, beating up the rebels on the Helmund, and “crushing Aktur Khan” on our way to the western frontier. He wrote to Rawlinson to prepare for the siege; he wrote to Ross Bell in Scinde to send up all the heavy guns in his part of the country, applying to the commissary at Forezpore for draft bullocks, if they were not to be obtained more readily; and he wrote to the Supreme Government to send “as large a force as might be available, and as speedily as possible, to Candahar, even if an attack on Herat should not be meditated.” He was eager for the opinions of every competent authority regarding the facilities of an immediate movement on Herat. “Is there any chance,” he wrote to Rawlinson, “of our mustering heavy guns and force sufficient to attack the place this year?” “What does Todd say of the best season for operations, and what aid does he hope we might obtain from people in and around Herat?” “What does Sanders think of the means at our command for subduing Herat?” “You may imagine,” he wrote, in another letter to the same correspondent, “how anxious I am to hear of Todd’s safety, and to learn the particulars of his departure from Herat, and the proximate cause of that important event, as well as his and your, and Sanders’ opinion, as to the practicability of operations against Herat this season. I suppose if the force were to move from Candahar by the middle of May, it would be time enough. But will the requisite battering train be then forthcoming? And shall we then have a quantum suff of grain and camels?” “The Governor-General,” added the Envoy, “will, I fear, if possible, do nothing.”

In this conjecture, at least, Macnaghten’s sagacity was not at fault. Against an armed interference with the affairs of Herat, Lord Auckland had always steadfastly set his face. It was his belief that it was necessary to establish ourselves firmly in Afghanistan before operating upon Herat; but Macnaghten always declared that there was no possibility of achieving the former object until the latter had been accomplished, and was always clamorous for the re-annexation of Herat to the dominions of Shah Soojah. His instructions, however, were imperative. Even after the departure of the Mission, the Governor-General counselled a mild and forbearing course. “I cannot,” he wrote to Macnaghten, “apprehend organised invasion from Herat, though there may be a foray on the frontier, which will not have the effect of making the advent of Yar Mahomed popular in Zemindawer. I think it, however, more likely that you will have to deal with letters and agents than with troops; and you ask me in what manner you are to receive overtures which may be made to you by Yar Mahomed. I would receive them calmly and coldly, but not repulsively. I would show no impatience to renew a Mission to Herat. I would have it to be understood that the stoppage of the allowances was unauthorised, and that the detachment of a brigade to the citadel of Herat was not desired, and would not have been acceded to by the British Government, but that the conduct of the Vizier has given great offence, and that we can regard Herat with no confidence or friendly feeling until there shall have been on the side of that state an entire change of policy. I can only repeat, therefore, what I have said very many times within the last two years: That you must be strong in Afghanistan before you can hope to exercise a wholesome influence upon Herat; and I am glad that you are giving your attention to the condition of the internal government of the country.”

But although the supreme authorities at Calcutta would not countenance a movement upon Herat, it was manifest at Candahar that the aggressive designs of Yar Mahomed, who contemplated the seizure of Ghiresk, and the hostile demonstrations of the Douranees in the western districts, rendered active operations on our part a matter of immediate necessity. So Rawlinson wrote officially to the General that it appeared to him “of first-rate importance that the insurrection in Zemindawer should be crushed before the acquisition of any further strength could render its co-operation of essential service to the Wuzeer of Herat in his projected advance.” “I also consider,” he added, “that the strengthening of our position on the Helmund, and the indication of readiness on our part to meet any such advance, would be the most effectual way of checking the movement, and of frustrating its object.”[67] An intercepted letter from Aktur Khan, announcing his intention to move from Zemindawer directly upon Candahar, if encouraged by the tribes occupying the intervening country, had been brought in to the Political Agent, and it was obvious, therefore, that no time was to be lost.

So a force was sent out to the Zemindawer country to beat up Aktur Khan’s quarters, or to intercept his advance. The political conduct of the expedition was entrusted to Lieutenant Elliot, Rawlinson’s assistant; and ably he did his duty. It was not our policy to beat the Douranees in battle. It never could be our policy in that country to shed the blood of the tribes. The submission, not the destruction, of Aktur Khan was now the object to be attained; and, as the chief was believed to muster not more than 1300 followers, it was deemed probable that the advance of our force would determine him, in the diplomatic language of the day, to “come in.” Intimations of his willingness to submit to terms met Elliot as he advanced. An interview was arranged between them. In the camp of the Douranee Sirdar, Atta Mahomed, the young English “Political” met Aktur Khan, and received his submission. A conditional pardon was granted to the disaffected chief, some concessions were made, and a dress of honour was conferred upon him. The most important condition on his part was, that he should disband his followers, and as it was believed that he would fulfil his promise in this respect, hope was entertained that the Zemindawer country would be tranquillised without further shedding of blood. But, Rawlinson saw plainly that the advantage which we had gained would be short-lived. “I do not anticipate,” he wrote to Macnaghten, “that by the conciliatory treatment recommended by Lieutenant Elliot, we gain any other advantage than that of temporary tranquillity; and however prudent therefore it may be at present to induce the rebel chief of Zemindawer to abstain from disorders by the hope of obtaining through his forbearance substantial personal benefits, I still think that when the danger of foreign aggression is removed, and efficient means are at our disposal, the rights of His Majesty’s government should be asserted in that strong and dignified manner which can alone ensure a due respect being paid to his authority.”[68]

And not the Douranees only, but the Ghilzyes also in Western Afghanistan were, in the spring and summer of 1841, revolting against the authorities of Shah Soojah and his Feringhee supporters. Lieutenant Lynch, an officer of the Bombay army, who had served in Persia with the rank of major, was in political charge of the country about Khelat-i-Ghilzye. The restlessness and disaffection of the tribes he attributed to the fact that the families of some of their chief people, who, after the operations against them in 1839, had fled for safety to the Sikh frontier, had at the instigation of the British Envoy, been seized and cast into captivity. But, whatever may have been the more remote cause, there was in this spring of 1841, a proximate source of irritation in the fact, that the English were rebuilding the fortress of Khelat-i-Ghilzye, which lies between Caubul and Candahar, with the design of posting there a strong garrison to overcome the circumjacent tribes. This movement had been regarded with great jealousy by the Ghilzyes; and the tribes in the immediate neighbourhood had assumed an insolent and defiant attitude. About two miles from Khelat-i-Ghilzye, was a small fort, bristling with armed men. As Lynch was riding past it, some of the people came out, and brandishing their swords defied him to attack them. It was thought that if this insolence were allowed to pass unnoticed, more serious acts of aggression might be anticipated. So the troops at Khelat-i-Ghilzye were summoned to attack the fort. Aided by Captain Sanders of the engineers, Captain Macan, who commanded one of the regiments of Shah Soojah’s force, led his Hindostanees against the rebellious stronghold, and captured it after a brave resistance. The chief and many of his followers were slain in the conflict, and the irritation of the Ghilzyes was greater than before.

It was a gallant military exploit, but a great misfortune; and Lynch, whether he had judged rightly or wrongly that the exigencies of the occasion demanded that he should chastise the people who had insulted him, was condemned both at Caubul and Calcutta. The Envoy wrote that he had “foreseen the likelihood of the Ghilzyes resenting the erection of a fort in the heart of their country;” but asked, “Why should we go and knock our heads against mud-forts? Why should we not have waited till the Ghilzyes chose to attack us?” Lord Auckland declared his opinion that Major Lynch’s proceedings had been “marked by a vapouring and needless parade, most likely to produce popular excitement.” And a little later, Burnes, in a letter full of wise humanity, wrote to Lynch; more in sorrow than in anger, saying, “I am one of those altogether opposed to any further fighting in this country, and I consider that we shall never settle Afghanistan at the point of the bayonet.... As regards the Ghilzyes, indeed, immense allowance ought to be made for them; they were till within three generations the Kings of Afghanistan, and carried their victorious arms to the capital of Persia. It is expecting too much, therefore, to hope for their being at once peaceful subjects; and as they exhibited so much indisposition to the King’s Government, it was, I think, right to build a fort at Khelat-i-Ghilzye, and thus bridle them, thereby enabling us, in the heart of the Ghilzye country, to protect those who were disposed to join us, and gradually undermine our enemies.... Had I been by, I would have said, ‘Build Khelat-i-Ghilzye, and pardon all kinds of insolence, for those who win may laugh.’”

Major Lynch was removed from office. When all the circumstances of the case came to be known, the Envoy took a more favourable view of his conduct. But, whether it were right or wrong in itself, its results were unfortunate. They could not be otherwise. It was the inevitable consequence of such proceedings that the bitterness and the turbulence of the Ghilzyes should wax greater than before, and that soon the aspect of affairs in the neighbourhood of Khelat-i-Ghilzye should render more dragooning necessary for the maintenance of the authority of the Shah. It was expected that the whole country would rise up against Macan’s detachment; so reinforcements were urgently called for from Candahar. The hot weather had by this time set in, and Nott was unwilling to expose his troops to the burning sun. But the political necessity was said to be great; Macan was in his danger; and no troops could be spared from Caubul.

So Colonel Wymer, a good and successful officer, with 400 men of his own regiment (the 38th Sepoys), four horse-artillery guns, and a party of Christie’s horse, took the field in the month of May. The Ghilzyes, eager for the conflict, moved down from Khelat-i-Ghilzye to meet our advancing troops; and, on the 19th, gave them battle. Night was beginning to fall when they came up with Wymer’s camp at Assiai-Ilmee. A Ghilzye chief of high estate, named Gool Mahomed, known as the “Gooroo,” who had threatened Keane’s army nearly two years before, was at the head of the tribes. They came on with unwavering gallantry, but were met with a heavy fire from Hawkins’s guns, which, served with equal rapidity and precision, committed mighty havoc in their ranks. Upon this, the Ghilzyes, resolutely intending to attack simultaneously both flanks and the centre of Wymer’s force, divided themselves into three columns; and, coolly and deliberately, they came down sword in hand to the charge. Wymer had an extensive convoy to protect. His movements, therefore, were crippled; and he was compelled to stand on his defence. But the destroying grape from the guns, and the steady musketry fire of the Sepoys, sent back the Ghilzye swordsmen again and again reeling under the iron shower. For five busy hours continued that mortal struggle; and then the Ghilzyes gave way. They had greatly outnumbered our party, and they left many dead on the field. All night long, too, the moving lights announced that many more, both of killed and wounded, were carried off to their camp.

Whilst in this manner efforts were being made to tranquillise the Ghilzyes, the proceedings of Aktur Khan and the Douranees were again exciting the apprehensions of the Envoy. In spite of all our conciliatory efforts, they had not been quieted. The chief, it has been seen, had outwardly tendered his allegiance to the King, and had received a dress of honour, with an assurance from our political officers that the past would be forgotten. The revenue officers, whom the Douranees detested, had been removed. The old earless minister, Moollah Shikore, had been replaced by Oosman Khan, a younger, an abler, and a more honest man; and Macnaghten was contemplating other fiscal reforms than those which he had already sanctioned, and hoping to restore the tribes to their allegiance. But their disaffection was too deeply rooted to be operated upon by such measures. The entire system of government was offensive to them. The presence of the British was a perennial source of irritation. What they regarded as their legitimate influence had been usurped by the Feringhees; and they were soon ready again to appear in the field, and cross their sabres with the foreign bayonets.

It was obvious, indeed, as the month of May wore to an end, that, unable to obtain all that he wanted for himself, Aktur Khan was still our bitter and implacable foe. Instead of disbanding his followers, he was collecting them for another struggle. Irritated by this, Macnaghten wrote to Rawlinson (May 31) as he had before written in the case of Dost Mahomed, that if he could seize Aktur Khan, he would recommend his execution. “I think,” he said, “you should strain every nerve to lay hold of that indomitable Moofsid, Aktur Khan, and that if you can seize him, the Prince should be recommended to execute him.... I further think that a reward of 10,000 rupees should be offered for the apprehension of Aktur Khan.” But it was still difficult to persuade the Envoy that the country was in an unsettled state. The Ghilzyes and the Douranees were both in arms against the authority of the Shah and his supporters. The whole country of Western Afghanistan was in a fearful state of unrest. Rawlinson, at Candahar, who saw clearly at this time the frail tenure by which we held our position in Afghanistan, was continually warning the Envoy of the dangers which loomed so largely before him. But Macnaghten only censured his correspondent for his “unwarrantably gloomy views,” and denounced everything that was said about the unsettled state of the country as an “idle statement.” How unwilling he was to believe that the clouds were gathering over his head, may be gleaned from his correspondence with Rawlinson at this time. On the 13th of June he wrote a long letter, in which he thus emphatically declared his opinions:

Your letter of the 7th arrived this morning. I don’t like reverting to unpleasant discussions, but you know well that I have been frank with you from the beginning, and that I have invariably told you of what I thought I had reason to complain. This may be confined to one topic—your taking an unwarrantably gloomy view of our position, and entertaining and disseminating rumours favourable to that view. We have enough of difficulties and enough of croakers without adding to the number needlessly. I have just seen a letter from Mr. Dallas to Captain Johnson, in which he says the state of the country is becoming worse and worse every day. These idle statements may cause much mischief, and, often repeated as they are, they neutralise my protestations to the contrary. I know them to be utterly false as regards this part of the country, and I have no reason to believe them to be true as regards your portion of the kingdom, merely because the Tokhees are indulging in their accustomed habits of rebellion, or because Aktur Khan has a pack of ragamuffins at his heels. As I have said before, there is nothing in these matters which might not have been foreseen, or which ought to cause us the slightest uneasiness. We will take such precautions as shall prevent the Ghilzyes from annoying us; and this is all that is requisite for the present. We may safely leave the rest to time. As to the documents protesting against the appointment of Sunmud, I look upon them as pure fudge. Send for the Janbaz. Let them make a forced march by night, and come in the rear of Aktur. Seize the villain, and hang him as high as Haman, and you will probably have no more disturbances. The Janbaz may remain out while the collections are going on, if necessary. I have already explained to you that I never intended offering a reward for Aktur’s head, nor should I approve of encouraging the man who has a blood-feud with him to put him out of the way. This, besides being objectionable, would be superfluous, because his enemy must know that we could not be otherwise than gratified at the removal of so atrocious a traitor. With regard to the Tymunees, all I meant was, that they should be encouraged to seize Aktur if he attempted to take refuge in their territory, and I thought that a large pecuniary reward would be necessary to overcome their natural scruples to such a proceeding.[69]

But these Douranee children were now again to be corrected. Though “all was content and tranquillity from Mookoor to the Khybur,” it was necessary that our troops should be continually in the field. And it was not always child’s play in which they were summoned to engage. Aktur Khan was, at the end of June, still in arms before Ghiresk, with a body of three thousand men, and it was necessary to strike a blow at the rebel chief. Macnaghten saw the necessity of “tolerating his audacity no longer,” and although he, at first thought that a “judicious use of the Janbaz would extirpate the villain,” he consented to send out a regular force against the rebel chief to “hunt him to the world’s end.”

So Woodburn, a fine dashing officer, who commanded one of the Shah’s regiments, was sent out against him, with his own corps (the 5th Infantry), two detachments of Janbaz, or Afghan Horse, under Hart and Golding, and some guns of the Shah’s Horse Artillery, under Cooper. On the 3rd of July he found the enemy posted on the other side of the Helmund river; mustering, it was said afterwards, six thousand men, in six divisions, with a Moollah, or priest at the head of each, and with each a standard, bearing the inscription, “we have been trusting in God; may he guide and guard us!”[70] Woodburn tried the fords, but they were impassable. Hart, however, had passed them at another point, but, finding himself unsupported, he returned. This was in early morning. Four hours after noon the enemy struck their camp, and soon afterwards commenced the passage of the river. Woodburn made his arrangements for their reception. The Douranees made a spirited attack, but Woodburn’s infantry, well supported by Cooper’s guns, met them with too prompt and sure a fire to encourage them to greater boldness. The Janbaz, already graduating in treachery and cowardice, covered themselves with that peculiar kind of glory which clung to them to the end of the war. It was a busy night. The enemy far outnumbered Woodburn; but the steady gallantry of his gunners and his footmen achieved the success they deserved. Before daybreak the enemy had withdrawn. It would have been a great thing to have followed up and dispersed the rebels, but with all the country against him, and a body of horse at his back on which no reliance could be placed, it would have been madness to make the attempt. So Woodburn, having written for reinforcements, pushed on to Ghiresk, whence he wrote that he believed the rebellion was far more extensive than was supposed, and that the population of Candahar were quite as disaffected as the rebels on the banks of the Helmund.

The month of August, however, found the Envoy still cheerful and sanguine. The convulsions of the Douranees and the spasms of the Ghilzyes were regarded by him as the accompaniments only of those infantine fevers which were inseparable from the existence of the tribes. In vain Rawlinson, with steady eye watching those symptoms, and probing with deep sagacity the causes of the mortal ailments out of which arose all those fierce throes of anguish, protested that throughout Western Afghanistan there was a strong national feeling against us; and that difficulties and dangers were coiling their serpent folds around us with irresistible force. Macnaghten still asked what we had to fear, and thus, on the 2nd of August, addressed his less sanguine colleague:

I am not going to read you a lecture, first, because when you indited your letter of the 28th ult. you pleaded guilty to the influence of bile; and secondly, because at the present writing I must own the same impeachment; but I must pen a few remarks, in the hope of inducing you to regard matters a little more “couleur de rose.” You say, “The state of the country causes me many an anxious thought—we may thresh the Douranees over and over again, but this rather aggravates than obviates the difficulty of overcoming the national feeling against us—in fact, our tenure is positively that of military possession, and the French in Algiers, and the Russians in Circassia, afford us an example on a small scale of the difficulty of our position.” Now upon what do you found your assertion that there is a national feeling against us, such as that against the French in Algiers or the Russians in Circassia? Solely, so far as I know, because the turbulent Douranees have risen in rebellion. From Mookoor to the Khybur Pass all is content and tranquillity, and wherever we Europeans go we are received with respect, and attention, and welcome. But the insurrection of the Douranees is no new occurrence. The history of the rule of the Barukzye Sirdars would show that they were engaged in one continuous struggle with their turbulent brethren. If they were able to reduce them to subjection with their contemptible means, what should we have to fear from them? We have given them something to lose which they had not before, and you may rely upon it that they will be quiet enough as soon as they are satisfied (which they ought to be pretty well by this time) of the futility of opposition, provided some means are adopted of preventing Yar Mahomed from carrying on his intrigues. Then, the Ghilzyes have been in arms. True. But it would have been unreasonable to suppose that they should surrender their independance without a struggle, and we have now put the bit in their mouths. I do not concur with you as to the difficulty of our position. On the contrary, I think our prospects are most cheering, and with the materials we have there ought to be little or no difficulty in the management of the country.

It is true the population is exclusively Mahomedan, but it is split into rival sects; and we all know that of all antipathies the sectarian is the most virulent. We have Hazaras, Ghilzyes, Douranees, and Kuzzilbashes, all at daggers drawn with each other, and in every family there are rivals and enemies. Some faults of management must necessarily be committed on the first assumption of the administration of a new country, and the Douranee outbreak may be partially attributed to such faults; but what, after all, do such outbreaks signify? The modern history of India teems with such instances. There is hardly a district in which some desperate adventurer has not appeared at some time or other, and drawn the entire population after him. The whole province of Bareilly, in 1817, rose against us on a religious war-cry. The whole province of Cuttack, shortly afterwards, followed the standard of the rebel Jugbeneda, and we had infinite trouble in quelling the insurrection. Instances of this kind might be infinitely multiplied, and yet we find the effects of such outbreaks are very evanescent. The people of this country are very credulous. They believe any story invented to our prejudice; but they will very soon learn that we are not the cannibals we are painted. Mr. Gorman’s fate was doubtless very melancholy; but are there no assassinations in other countries? I read in the Bombay Times only this morning an account of a cavalry officer being shot at in the open day in one of our villages. You say, “The infatuated towns-people are even beginning now to show their teeth; there have been three cases to-day of stones thrown from the tops of the houses on Sepoys’ heads walking along the streets.” Certainly our troops can be no great favourites in a town where they have turned out half the inhabitants for their own accommodation; but I will venture to say there is not a county town in England where soldiers are quartered in which similar excesses have not happened. European and Native soldiers have traversed the town of Candahar unarmed; and though it is to be apprehended that their conduct has been occasionally very aggravating, only two assaults have been committed upon them. When I went to Hyderabad in 1810, and for many years after, no European could venture to show himself in the city, such was the state of feeling against us. Look upon this picture and on that. Now I believe the lieges of Hyderabad look upon us as very innocent Kaffirs.

You are quite right, I think in directing Pattinson to accept the submission of all the rebels, save Aktur, who may be desirous of coming in. They should be required to furnish security for appearance sake. But these people are perfect children, and should be treated as such. If we put one naughty boy in the corner, the rest will be terrified. We have taken their plaything, power, out of the hands of the Douranee chiefs, and they are pouting a good deal in consequence. They did not know how to use it. In their hands it was useless and even hurtful to their master, and we were obliged to transfer it to scholars of our own. They instigate the Moollahs, and the Moollahs preach to the people; but this will be very temporary. The evil of it we must have borne with, or abandoned all hope of forming a national army.[71]

The Douranee children, however, required more chastisement. No man could have done more than Woodburn did with his means; but those means were insufficient. It was the custom then, both against the Ghilzyes and the Douranees, to send out detachments sufficiently large to accomplish, with the aid of their guns, small victories over the enemy, and so to increase the bitterness of their hostility, without breaking their strength. Aktur Khan was still in arms. Banded with him was Akrum Khan, another Douranee chief, inspired with like bitter hatred of the restored monarch and his Feringhee allies. A force under Captain Griffin, who had been sent to reinforce Woodburn at Ghiresk, now went out against them. It was strong in the mounted branch. Eight hundred sabres, three hundred and fifty bayonets, and four six-pounder guns, followed Griffin into the field of Zemindawer. On the 17th of August he came up with the insurgents. It was a moment of some anxiety. The Janbaz had not by their conduct under Woodburn won the confidence of the British officers. Nott always mistrusted them, and the feeling was, not unreasonably, shared by others.[72] But here they were associated with the men of the King’s regular cavalry, and they may have felt the danger of defection. Be the cause what it may, they did not shrink from the encounter. The enemy were strongly posted in a succession of walled gardens and small forts, from which they opened a heavy matchlock fire upon our advancing troops; but the fire of our guns and musketry drove them from their inclosures, and then the cavalry, headed by the young Prince Sufder Jung, who had something more than the common energy of the royal race, charged with terrific effect, and utterly broke the discomfited mass of Douranees. The victory was a great one. Aktur Khan fled. The Douranees were disheartened; and for a time they sunk into the repose of feebleness and exhaustion.

The Ghilzyes, too, had received another check. Colonel Chambers, early in August, had been sent out against them, with a party of his own regiment, (the 5th Light Cavalry), the 16th and 43rd Sepoy Regiments, and some details of Irregular Horse. He came up with the enemy on the morning of the 5th; but before he could bring the main body of his troops into action, a party of his cavalry had fallen upon them and scattered them in disastrous flight. There was nothing left for them after this but submission; and soon the chief instigator of the movement had “come in” to our camp.

Under the influence of these victories, Macnaghten’s confidence rose higher and higher. The Douranees were broken, and the Ghilzyes had submitted “almost without a blow.” Aktur Khan had fled, and the “Gooroo” had surrendered. Now, indeed, the Envoy thought that he might report “all quiet from Dan to Beersheba.” If anything caused him a moment’s inquietude, it was the thought that Akbar Khan, the favourite son of Dost Mahomed, was still abroad, hovering about Khooloom. With something that now seems like a strange presentiment, he wrote that “the fellow would be after some mischief, should the opportunity present itself.” It was on the 20th of August that, writing to Mr. Robertson, he thus expressed himself:

The victory of the Helmund was very complete. I believe the enemy on that occasion was as numerous a body as could ever be congregated in this country, consisting of some 4000 or 5000 men. The Douranees want one more threshing, and then they would be quite satisfied of the futility of opposing us; but my last letter from Rawlinson gave me no hope that they would collect again. The whole of the Ghilzye tribes have submitted almost without a blow; for the gallant little affair in which the 5th Cavalry redeemed the honour of that branch of the service, could hardly be dignified with the name of a fight. Those who knew this country when it was ruled by Barukzyes, are amazed at the metamorphosis it has undergone, and with so little bloodshed. The former rulers were eternally fighting with their subjects from one year’s end to another. Now we cannot move a naick and four without having all the newspapers setting up a yell about the unpopularity of the Shah. The Shah is unpopular with the Douranee Khans, and we have made him so by supplanting them, and taking the military power which they were incompetent to use from their hands into our own. With all other classes his Majesty is decidedly, but deservedly, popular, and the Khans are too contemptible to be cared about.

We have had very unpleasant intelligence from Bokhara, it being reported that Colonel Stoddart is again in disgrace and confinement; and I am the more alarmed about this, from thinking it probable that Arthur Conolly will return from Kokund viâ Bokhara. But the intelligence requires confirmation. Mahomed Akbar, the Dost’s favourite son, is still at Khooloom, and has rejected my overture to come in. The fellow will be after some mischief, should the opportunity present itself.... You will see that Shah Soojah has most handsomely given back Cutchee and Moostung to the young Khan of Khelat. His Majesty’s revenue is little more than fifteen lakhs per annum—hardly enough for the maintenance of his personal state—and yet the government below are perpetually writing to me that this charge and that charge is to be defrayed out of his “Majesty’s resources!” God help the poor man and his resources!! The country is perfectly quiet from Dan to Beersheba.[73]

But, although the Envoy thus on the 20th of August, wrote to his private friends in the provinces of India that all was quiet from Dan to Beersheba, he was at this very time making arrangements for the despatch from Candahar of a large force to the Tereen and Dehrawut country on the north-western frontier of Afghanistan. “The northern districts,” he wrote to General Elphinstone on the 21st of August, “have been in a state of rebellion, and the chiefs of those districts (of whom one Akrum Khan is the head) have refused to wait upon His Majesty’s representative; have been in constant correspondence with the rebel Aktur Khan, and have assembled a considerable number of armed followers, with a view to defy His Majesty’s authority. The arrival of the 16th and 43rd regiments of Native Infantry will admit of a force being detached from that garrison; and I am officially made acquainted with the opinion of the political agent at Candahar to the effect that it is necessary to send an expedition into the disturbed districts, with a view either to expel the offending chiefs or to enforce their submission.”

So, orders were sent to Candahar for the equipment of another force for field-service, with instructions to complete the necessary work in the least possible space of time, in order that three regiments of Native Infantry, which were under orders to leave the serene and prosperous country, might turn their faces towards India at the beginning of November. By the end of the first week of September the force was ready to commence its march—a difficult, toilsome and hazardous march into an unknown country. Two regiments of the Company’s Bengal Infantry (the 2nd and 38th), a regiment of the Shah’s cavalry, two Horse-Artillery guns of the same service, a company of European Artillery with two 18-pounder guns, and a detachment of Sappers, composed the force. It was in good condition; well equipped at all points; and it started with a month’s supplies.

The force was commanded by Colonel Wymer. Nott saw it depart with mortification and regret which he did not desire to conceal. Some time before he had received instructions from head-quarters not to leave Candahar, where his presence was conceived to be expedient; and he still believed that those instructions were in force. Eager, therefore, as he was, to place himself at the head of his men, he deemed it to be his duty, as a soldier, to remain in garrison while he delegated the command to another. But while to the officer he had selected to take the envied post he issued comprehensive instructions for his guidance in the field, he, at the same time, wrote to the officer commanding in Afghanistan, respectfully expressing his “deep regret that so large a portion of the force under his orders should be despatched on what might prove to be a difficult service, without his being permitted to assume the command.” The answer returned to this last letter entirely removed all restrictions on Nott’s movements; so the general at once prepared himself to take command of the force.

In the meanwhile the troops had marched. The political conduct of the expedition had been entrusted to Lieutenant Elliot, who had been summoned for this purpose from Khelat-i-Ghilzye, where he had been placed on the removal of Lynch. Every effort had been made to obtain reliable information relative to the country which they were about to traverse; but the want of local knowledge was severely felt, and the difficulties of the march, encumbered as was the force with heavy guns, was greater than had been anticipated. Nott joined the force on the 23rd of September; and they pushed on into the Dehrawut country. But it was soon apparent that so formidable a display of force would achieve without bloodshed the objects of the expedition. Early in the month of October many of the principal Douranee chiefs were in Nott’s camp. They had never before seen our regular troops, which now, paraded and exercised before them, made a strong impression on their minds. They gazed at and handled our heavy guns with wondering apprehension, and confessed that they had no desire to test their quality. It was said throughout the war, that our guns were the best “politicals,” but Elliot’s diplomacy was not unsuccessfully exerted, and the chiefs professed their willingness to proceed to Caubul and make submission to the Shah.

But there was one who refused to submit. The indomitable spirit of Akrum Khan was proof against all promises and all threats. He did not come into Nott’s camp; but held aloof, still eager, it was said, to give us battle. It was our policy to seize the rebel chief; and this was now to be done. One of his own countrymen undertook to betray him. It was suspected that the man had no real intention to lead us to the lair of the hostile Douranee; but, after the manner of his nation, to obtain money from us and then to lead our troops astray. But Elliot grasped the proposal, with a tenacity of purpose which baffled all fraud and defeated all evasion. He went to the general, and obtained his permission to send a regiment of Janbaz, under John Conolly, to beat up the quarters of Akrum Khan. There was little expectation in camp that the forces would be successful. But Conolly did his work well. It is said that the feet of the guide were tied under his horse’s belly to prevent his escape. A rapid march brought them to a small fort, where Akrum Khan was preparing to betake himself to the hills. A few hours’ delay would have been fatal to the success of the expedition. But now its great object was attained. The rebel Douranee was surprised, seized, and carried back, a prisoner, to Nott’s camp. The expedition had scarcely occupied thirty-six hours.

The rest is soon told. The unfortunate chief was carried a doomed captive to Candahar. Macnaghten, whose letters written at this time show how all his finer feelings had been blunted by the rude work in which he was engaged, had persuaded the King that it was necessary to make a terrible example of some of the disturbers of the public peace. Prince Timour was then the governor of Candahar. He had recently been sent to the western capital to take the place of his brother Futteh Jung, whose detestable character had rendered his removal necessary; and the change was one greatly for the better. Timour was a man of respectable reputation; mild, indolent, and compliant. He governed according to the behests of his English supporters, and had little will of his own. He now directed or authorised, under instructions from Caubul, the execution of the Douranee prisoner; and so Akrum Khan was blown from a gun.

Before the end of October, Nott had returned to Candahar with the greater part of the force; and Lieutenant Crawford had been despatched to Caubul with the Douranee chiefs who had tendered their submission. There was now really a prospect of tranquillity in Western Afghanistan; for both the Ghilzye and the Douranee confederacy had been crushed; and the facility with which we had moved our regular troops and our heavy guns into the most difficult parts of the country had demonstrated to the turbulent tribes the difficulty of escaping the vengeance of the Feringhees, and had produced a good moral effect among people who had before only known us from report.

CHAPTER V.

[September—October: 1841.]

Aspect of Affairs at Caubul—The King—The Envoy—Burnes—Elphinstone—The English at Caubul—Expenses of the War—Retrenchment of the Subsidies—Risings of the Ghilzyes—Sale’s Brigade—Gatherings in the Kohistan—Sale’s Arrival at Gundamuck—The 1st of November.

Taking advantage of the lull that followed the defeat of the Douranees and the Ghilzyes in Western Afghanistan, let us dwell for a little space on the general condition of affairs at the capital, in this month of September.

The King was in the Balla Hissar. Discontented and unhappy, he complained that he had no real authority; that the English gentlemen were managing the affairs of his kingdom; and that he himself was a mere pageant and a show. He had watched with satisfaction the growth of the difficulties which were besetting the path of his allies, and was not without a hope that their further development would be attended by our withdrawal from so troubled a sphere. It was plain to him that, although deference was outwardly shown to his opinions, and a pretence of consulting his wishes was made by his British advisers, they really held all the power in their hands; and he said, complainingly, to one of them,[74] for whom he entertained no little personal affection, that he “did not understand his position.” The appointment of the new minister, Oosman Khan, in the place of his old and tried servant, Moollah Shikore, had been extremely distasteful to him; and it chafed him to think that a functionary so appointed must necessarily be less eager to fulfil his wishes than those of his European allies. His health, too, was failing at this time; he was nervous and irritable, and Macnaghten thinking that he saw symptoms of approaching dissolution, contemplated the expediency of bringing Prince Timour from Candahar to the capital. “His Majesty,” he wrote to Rawlinson, on the 21st of September, “is ill of a fever, which has been hanging about him for some time, and at his time of life, the issue, to say the least of it, is very doubtful. It seems to be in the highest degree desirable that Shah-zadah Timour should be here in the event of a fatal termination of His Majesty’s illness. The Nizamoodowlah and I have had a serious conversation this morning on the subject. He thinks, and I am disposed to agree with him, that it might be well if the Shah-zadah were to address an areeza to His Majesty, stating how much grieved he is to hear of His Majesty’s illness, the intelligence of which has filled him with so much uneasiness as to incapacitate him for the proper performance of the duties of government, and expressing an earnest desire to kiss the feet of His Majesty, and thereby give relief to his mind.” But the old man rallied, and Macnaghten rejoiced. At such a time, a succession would have been embarrassing and inopportune, for the Envoy was preparing to shake the dust of Afghanistan from his feet for ever.

He was about to receive the reward of a life of successful and appreciated service, and to end his official days in comparative quiet and repose. He was about to escape out of the cares and inquietudes—the difficulties and dangers—the incessant harassing turmoil and excitement of a life of responsibility among a turbulent and discontented people, and to commence a new career of useful and honoured public service, upon a less stormy and tumultuous scene. He had been appointed Governor of Bombay. The same recognition of approved zeal and capacity which had been extended to Malcolm and Elphinstone, had now come to testify the estimation in which Macnaghten’s services were held by his employers. It was a high and flattering mark of confidence, and it was doubly welcome after all the doubts and misgivings engendered in his mind by the implied censures of his immediate superior. The value of the gift, too, was enhanced by the seasonableness of the time at which it was received. Macnaghten looked around him, and saw that “everything was quiet from Dan to Beersheba;” and he rejoiced in the thought that he was about to quit Afghanistan for ever, and to carry with him no burden of anxiety and fear.

Burnes was also at Caubul. He had been there ever since the restoration of the Shah, in a strange unrecognised position, of which it is difficult to give any intelligible account. He used to say, that he was in the “most nondescript of situations.” It appears to have been his mission in Afghanistan to draw a large salary every month, and to give advice that was never taken. This might have satisfied many men. It did not satisfy Burnes. He said that he wanted responsibility; and under Macnaghten he had none. He had no precise duties of any kind; but he watched all that was going on in Afghanistan with a penetrating eye and an understanding brain, and he wrote, in the shape of letters to Macnaghten, long and elaborate papers on the state and prospects of Afghanistan, which his official chief dismissed with a few pencil-notes for the most part of contemptuous dissent. Burnes saw clearly that everything was going wrong. He probed, deeply and searchingly, the great wound of national discontent—a mighty sore that was ever running—and he felt in his inmost soul that the death-throes of such a system could not be very remote. But better days were now beginning to dawn upon him. He had been waiting for Macnaghten’s office, and now, at last, it seemed to be within his reach. A few weeks, and he would be supreme at Caubul; and the great object of his ambition gained.

The command of the troops was in the hands of General Elphinstone—an old officer of the Queen’s service, of good repute, gentlemanly manners, and aristocratic connections. He had succeeded Sir Willoughby Cotton in the early part of the year. But it must have been a wonder to him, as it was to all who knew him, what business he had in such a place. He had no Indian experience of any kind, and he was pressed down by physical infirmities. When Sir Willoughby Cotton intimated his desire, on the plea of ill health, to be relieved from the command of the troops in Afghanistan, there was an officer already in the country to whom their charge might have been safely delegated. But he was not in favour either at the Mission or at the Calcutta Government House. Sir Jasper Nicolls would have placed Nott in command; but there were obstacles to his appointment, at which I have already hinted; and it was deemed expedient to send to Caubul a man of a more ductile nature, with as few opinions of his own as might be, to clash with those of the political chief. So Lord Auckland despatched General Elphinstone to Afghanistan—not in ignorance of his disqualifications, for they were pointed out to him by others—but in spite of a clear perception of them. Whether those who sent the brave old gentleman to India with all his infirmities thick upon him, recommended him for this especial field of service, or whether any notions of routine and the obligations of the roster pressed themselves upon Lord Auckland with irresistible force, I cannot confidently declare; but so inexplicable by any reference to intelligible human motives and actions is an appointment of this kind, that it is impossible not to recognise in such a dispensation a mightier agency than that of man, or to reject the belief that, when Elphinstone went to Caubul, the curse which sate upon our unholy policy was working onward for our overthrow.

Next in rank to General Elphinstone were Sir Robert Sale and Brigadier Shelton—both officers of the Queen’s service, but soldiers of long Indian experience. Each had served with his regiment in the Burmese war; and each had acquired a reputation for the highest personal courage. Sale’s regiment was the 13th Light Infantry. Shelton’s was the 44th.[75] Both of these regiments were now at Caubul. But the 13th was about to return to India, and soon afterwards to great Britain. It had seen many years of Indian service, and had been in Afghanistan since Keane’s army first entered the country. The 44th had come up early in the year, and had done some service in the Naziain valley, near Jellalabad, on the way.

The command of the Shah’s troops was vested in Brigadier Anquetil, a native of one of those lovely islands in the Channel which have sent forth so many brave men to fight our battles by sea and land. He was esteemed a good soldier; and I believe that Macnaghten found him a more pliant colleague than the “alarmist” whom he had supplanted. The controversies between Brigadier Roberts and the Envoy had ended in the departure of the former. His advice had been resented; his warnings had been scouted. His clear insight into the dangers which were beneath our feet had been regarded as idle and imbecile fear; and the unwelcome declarations of his honest convictions as little short of rank mutiny. He had done his duty; he had spoken the truth; and he had paid the inevitable penalty of his unwillingness to make an easy and a prosperous present at the cost of a tumultuous and disastrous future. He had returned in disgrace to the British provinces; but he had left his predictions behind him, and he knew that, sooner or later, History would do him justice.

The main body of the British troops were in the new cantonments. These works had been erected in the course of 1840. They were situated on a piece of low ground open to the Kohistan road. They were extensive and ill defended. They were nearly a mile in extent, and were surrounded by ramparts so little formidable that they might be ridden over.[76] Near the cantonments was the Mission compound, occupying an extensive space, and surrounded by a number of houses and buildings belonging to the officers and retainers of the Mission. There was here, also, a weak attempt at defence; but the walls were beyond measure contemptible; and the whole expanse of building, the entrenched camp and Mission compound together, were so planted, as to be swept on every side by hills, and forts, and villages, and whatever else in such a country could bristle with armed men. No such works were ever known—so wretched in themselves, and so doubly wretched by position. If the object of those who constructed them had been to place our troops at the mercy of an enemy, they could not have been devised more cunningly in furtherance of such an end. They were commanded on every side; and so surrounded with villages, forts, gardens, and other cover for an enemy, that our troops could neither enter nor leave the camp without exposing themselves to a raking fire from some one of these points of attack. And to crown the calamity of the whole, the Commissariat supplies, on which our army depended for its subsistence, were stored in a small fort, not within, but beyond, the cantonments. The communication between the two places was commanded by an empty fort, and by a walled garden, inviting the occupation of an enemy. Human folly seemed to have reached its height in the construction of these works. There stood those great, indefensible cantonments, overawed on every side, a monument of the madness which Providence, for its own ends, had permitted to cloud and bewilder the intelligence of the “greatest military nation of the world.” There it stood, a humiliating spectacle; but except by new-comers, who stood in amazement before the great folly, little account was taken of it. Men’s eyes had become accustomed to the blot.

And whose was this stupendous error? Are we to assign its origin to the professional incapacity of the engineer officers attached to the force; to the ignorance and carelessness of the officers commanding it; or to the wilfulness of the Envoy? Not to the engineers—Durand, who had first held the post, had urged upon the Envoy the necessity of constructing barracks and posting our troops in the Balla Hissar; and Macnaghten, yielding to these solicitations, had overcome the reluctance of the Shah—but the barracks had been afterwards given up to the accommodation of the old king’s harem; and from that time, though Sturt who succeeded Durand, insisted, with equal urgency on the expediency of locating the troops in the Balla Hissar, and strengthening its defences, all hope of securing a strong military position at Caubul was gone. The sheep-folds on the plain were built. When Brigadier Roberts, in the spring of 1840, saw that the work had commenced, and what it was proposed to do, he remonstrated against the plan; and was told that it had been approved by Sir Willoughby Cotton. The Brigadier had been connected with the Building Department in the upper provinces of India, and freighted his remonstrances, therefore, with much professional experience, bearing upon the sanatory as well as upon the defensive aspects of the question; but, although he believed at first that he had made some impression on the Envoy, his protests were disregarded. And so the cantonments had sprung up, such as we have described them; and there, in that late autumn of 1841, they stood, bare and defenceless, as sheep-pens, whilst the wolves were howling around them.[77]

The English had by this time begun to settle themselves down in Caubul. Indeed, from the very commencement, they had done their best, as they ever do, to accommodate themselves to new localities and new circumstances, and had transplanted their habits, and, I fear it must be added, their vices, with great address, to the capital of the Douranee Empire. It was plain that they were making themselves at home in the chief city of the Afghans. There was no sign of an intended departure. They were building and furnishing houses for themselves—laying out gardens—surrounding themselves with the comforts and luxuries of European life. Some had sent for their wives and children. Lady Macnaghten, Lady Sale, and other English women, were domesticated in comfortable houses within the limits of the great folly we had erected on the plain. The English, indeed, had begun to find the place not wholly unendurable. The fine climate braced and exhilarated them. There was no lack of amusement. They rode races; they played at cricket. They got up dramatic entertainments. They went out fishing; they went out shooting. When winter fell upon them, and the heavy frosts covered the lakes with ice, to the infinite astonishment of the Afghans they skimmed over the smooth surface on their skates. There is no want of manliness among the Afghans; but the manliness of the Feringhee strangers quite put them to shame. They did not like us the less for that. The athletic amusements of our people only raised their admiration. But there was something else which filled them with intensest hate.[78]

I am not writing an apology. There are truths which must be spoken. The temptations which are most difficult to withstand, were not withstood by our English officers. The attractions of the women of Caubul they did not know how to resist. The Afghans are very jealous of the honour of their women; and there were things done in Caubul which covered them with shame and roused them to revenge. The inmate of the Mahomedan Zenana was not unwilling to visit the quarters of the Christian stranger. For two long years, now, had this shame been burning itself into the hearts of the Caubulees; and there were some men of note and influence among them who knew themselves to be thus wronged. Complaints were made; but they were made in vain. The scandal was open, undisguised, notorious. Redress was not to be obtained. The evil was not in course of suppression. It went on till it became intolerable; and the injured then began to see that the only remedy was in their own hands. It is enough to state broadly this painful fact. There are many who can fill in with vivid personality all the melancholy details of this chapter of human weakness, and supply a catalogue of the wrongs which were soon to be so fearfully redressed.

Such, dimly traced in its social aspects, was the general condition of things at Caubul in this month of September, 1841. Politically—such was Macnaghten’s conviction—everything was quiet from Dan to Beersheba. The noses of the Douranee Khans had, he said, “been brought to the grindstone;” and the Gooroo and other Ghilzye chiefs were in his safe keeping at Caubul, seemingly contented with their lot. As the month advanced the Envoy continued to write that our prospects were “brightening in every direction,” that everything was “couleur de rose.” It is true that Eldred Pottinger, who after a brief visit to the British provinces had returned to Afghanistan, was not sending in very favourable reports from the Kohistan and the Nijrow country, which were now his new sphere of action; but of these troubles Macnaghten made light account. He believed that Pottinger was an alarmist. It is true, also, that an expedition was going out to Zao, to reduce some turbulent robber tribes; but this necessity he attributed to the indiscretion of one of our own officers, who had needlessly attacked the place with insufficient means, and been compelled to beat a retreat.[79] The expedition, too, as Macnaghten said, was only a “little go;” and immensely popular with our officers, who were zealously volunteering for the sport, as though it had been a battu or a steeple-chase.[80]

The popular expedition into the Zoormut country was completely successful. Macgregor, who accompanied the force in the character of political adviser, found the rebellious forts evacuated. He had only, therefore, to destroy them. The results, however, of the movement were not wholly pacificatory. Pottinger said that the feeling which it engendered in the Kohistan was extremely unfavourable to us. It confirmed, he said, in the minds of the malcontents, “the belief so industriously spread of our difficulties, whilst rumours from Herat and Candahar of invasion, renewed rebellion, and disturbances, were again spread abroad.”[81]

During the early part of October the Kohistanees remained perfectly quiet. But every hour, said Pottinger, “brought rumours of the formation of an extensive conspiracy.” These he at first doubted; but he reported them to the Envoy, and asked for information on the subject. The answer was, that neither Macnaghten nor Burnes could perceive any grounds for suspicion.

In the mean while, the Eastern Ghilzyes were breaking out into revolt.[82] They had the same cause of complaint as the Kohistanees. The money-bag, which had kept them in order, was beginning to fail. It is a moot point whether revenge or avarice is the stronger feeling in the Afghan breast. Both were now arrayed against us. The bayonet and the money-bag were failing to do their work.

The expenses of the occupation of Afghanistan had long been telling fearfully upon the revenues of India. Lord Auckland had been slow to look the intolerable evil of this exhausting drain fairly in the face. But the other members of the Supreme Council had been less slow to address themselves fully to the subject; and the home authorities had written out urgent letters regarding the miserable results of the continued occupation of a country that yielded nothing but strife. Looking at the matter in the most favourable point of view, it was found that the support of Shah Soojah cost the treasury of India at least a million and a quarter a year. The Board of Control, or that fusion of the two authorities of the crown and the company, known as the Secret Committee, had taken, at the close of 1840, a correct and statesmanlike view of the subject, and had written out, that they could see nothing in the continued support of Shah Soojah, who, it was plain, had no hold upon the affections of the people, to compensate for this alarming exhaustion of the financial resources of India, and the necessary injuries inflicted upon the people by such a fearful waste of the revenues of the country.

On the last day of the year they had clearly and emphatically propounded their views of this important question, saying;—“We pronounce our decided opinion that for many years to come, the restored monarchy will have need of a British force, in order to maintain peace in its own territory, and prevent aggression from without. We must add, that to attempt to accomplish this by a small force, or by the mere influence of British Residents, will, in our opinion, be most unwise and frivolous, and that we should prefer the entire abandonment of the country, and a frank confession of complete failure, to any such policy. Even financial considerations justify this view, inasmuch as a strong and adequate military establishment, costly as it must be, will hardly entail so much expense upon you as those repeated revolts and disorders which must arise in an ill-governed, half-subdued country; and which will compel you to make great and sudden efforts to maintain your character, and recover predominance. To whatever quarter we direct our attention, we behold the restored monarchy menaced by dangers, which cannot possibly be encountered by the military means at the disposal of the minister at the Court of Shah Soojah, and we again desire you seriously to consider which of the two alternatives (a speedy retreat from Afghanistan, or a considerable increase of the military force in that country), you may feel it your duty to adopt. We are convinced that you have no middle course to pursue with safety and with honour.” The letter enunciating these views had been scarcely signed when intelligence of the surrender of Dost Mahomed was received in England. But these tidings had caused no change in the opinions of the Secret Committee, and on the 2nd of January, 1841, they had written again to the Supreme Government, saying, “The surrender of Dost Mahomed does not alter the views contained in our late letters, and we hope that advantage will be taken of it to settle affairs in Afghanistan according to those views.”

When these letters reached Calcutta, in the spring of 1841, it had become a matter for the serious consideration of the Indian Government, whether the policy, which had proved so utterly disastrous, should not be openly and boldly abandoned. The question came before the Supreme Council at the end of March.[83] Either by some negligence, or by some juggle, the opinions of the military members of Council were not obtained. Lord Auckland and the civilians decided in favour of the continued occupation of the country, though it was certain that it could only be done at the cost of a million and a quarter a year. But money had already become painfully scarce. It was necessary to recruit the exhausted treasury. There was no other mode of accomplishing this than by opening a new loan. Such a public declaration of the embarrassed condition of the government was distressing to Lord Auckland; but nothing else was to be done. So at the end of March he drew up an advertisement for a five per cent. loan.[84] It is a remarkable instance of that kind of monomaniac blindness which besets some men, under peculiar conditions of existence, that when Macnaghten learned that a new loan had been opened, he asked, “What can this be for?” and spoke of the war—in China?[85]

But the call was responded to but slowly.[86] Money did not come in freely, though it was going out with a freedom perhaps unexampled in the history of Indian finance; and the home authorities still continued to write out, as Sir Jasper Nicolls and others in India were declaring, that it had become necessary either to withdraw altogether from Afghanistan, or to fall back upon the alternative of a large augmentation of the army. As the year advanced, too, other influences were at work to move the Indian Government to consider more and more intently the subject of the continued drain upon the resources of India. Great Britain was on the eve of a change of ministry, which would settle in Downing-street a party of Conservative statesmen, and send to Calcutta one of their number, known to be hostile to the whole policy of the expedition across the Indus; and Macnaghten was already beginning to tremble at the thought of what he called prospectively an “unparalleled atrocity”—but what many would have regarded as an act of wisdom and justice—the withdrawal of the British army from Afghanistan. How strongly the Envoy felt upon this subject, and in what manner he argued against it, may be gathered from a letter which, on the 25th of September, he addressed to the Governor of Agra. Still he continued to report that the whole country was quiet, and insisted that the Shah’s force, aided by one European regiment at Caubul, and another at Candahar, would be sufficient to keep the whole country in order:

......Rumours are rife as to the intentions of the Tories towards this country, when they get into power. If they deprive the Shah altogether of our support, I have no hesitation in saying (and that is saying a great deal) they will commit an unparalleled political atrocity. The consequences would be frightful. The act would not only involve a positive breach of treaty, but it would be a cheat of the first magnitude. Had we left Shah Soojah alone, after seating him on the throne, the case would have been different. He would have adopted the Afghan method of securing his sovereignty. But we insisted upon his acting according to European notions of policy, and we have left all his enemies intact—powerless, only because we are here. In short, we should leave him with all the odium of having called in the aid of foreign infidel auxiliaries, and with none of those safeguards which he himself would have provided for his security. How could we expect him, under such circumstances, to maintain his power? I know that he would not attempt it. He would pack up his all, and return to his asylum in India, the moment our resolution was imparted to him. We have effectually prevented his forming a party for himself. In a few years hence, when the present generation of turbulent intriguers shall have been swept away, the task will be comparatively easy. As it is, the progress we have made towards pacifying, or rather subjugating (for neither the Douranees nor the Ghilzyes were ever before subject to a monarchy), is perfectly wonderful. The Douranee Kings kept these unruly tribes in good humour by leading them to foreign conquest. The Barukzye rulers kept them down by sharing their power with some, and sowing dissensions amongst others, by the most paltry and unjustifiable shifts and expedients, to which the Shah could not, if it were in his nature even, have recourse. Now the whole country is as quiet as one of our Indian chiefships, and more so—but the reaction would be tremendous if the weight of our power was suddenly taken off. There are gangs of robbers here and there which it would be desirable to extirpate; and I had intended to postpone this job till a more favourable opportunity; but you will see, from my official letters, that it has been forced upon me, by Captain Hay’s proceedings, at an earlier period than I anticipated. We are well prepared, however, and the coercion of these brigands will have an excellent effect all over the country. Dost Mahomed not only tolerated them, but went snacks in their spoils. After their dispersion shall have been effected, there will be literally nothing to do except the subjugation of Nijrow. Pottinger has a project for effecting this, without trouble or expense, by marching through their country the troops returning to Hindostan and Jellalabad. I have submitted this to the General; and should it be carried into effect, I shall beg of government to send us no more troops, for they would only be an incumbrance. A million and a quarter per annum is certainly an awful outlay; but if the items were examined, you would find that a full moiety of this is to be laid to the account of Mr. Bell’s proceedings in Upper Sindh, where they have had an army, cui bono? larger than the Army of the Indus. All this profligate expenditure will now cease, and, barring Herat, I am quite certain that the Shah’s force would be ample, with the addition of one European regiment at Caubul and another at Candahar, to keep the entire country in order. I am, too, making great reduction in our political expenditure; and I feel certain that, in a very short time, an outlay of thirty lakhs per annum will cover, and more than cover, all our expenses. The process of macadamization (which, notwithstanding the present lull, I cannot but consider as near at hand) would reduce our outlay to nothing. I should not be surprised to see Colonel Stoddart and Arthur Conolly walking in any fine morning. I am glad you approved of the wig I conveyed to the latter. I am satisfied it adverted from him worse consequences. His enthusiasm, which I found it impossible to repress, is continually leading him into scrapes[87]....

Such, at the close of September, were Macnaghten’s views of our continued occupation of Afghanistan. But, before this, the letters of the Secret Committee, the orders of the Supreme Government, and the portentous shadow of the coming Tory ministry, had roused Macnaghten to a sense of the great fact, that it was necessary to do something to render less startlingly and offensively conspicuous the drain upon the resources of India, which was exhausting the country, and paralysing the energies of its rulers. So it was determined to carry into effect a system of economy, to be applied, wherever it could be applied, to the expenditure of Afghanistan; and, as ordinarily happens, both in the concerns of public and of private life, the retrenchments which were first instituted were those which ought to have been last. Acting in accordance with the known wishes of government, Macnaghten began to retrench the stipends, or subsidies, paid to the chiefs. He knew how distasteful the measure would be; he was apprehensive of its results. But money was wanted, and he was compelled to give it effect.[88]

The blow fell upon all the chiefs about the capital—upon the Ghilzyes, upon the Kohistanees, upon the Caubulees, upon the Momunds, even upon the Kuzzilbashes. Peaceful remonstrance was in vain. So they held secret meetings, and entered into a confederacy to overawe the existing government, binding themselves by oaths to support each other in their efforts to recover what they had lost; or, failing in this, to subvert the system out of which these injurious proceedings had arisen. Foremost in this movement were the Eastern Ghilzyes. Affected by the general retrenchments, they had also particular grievances of their own.[89] They were the first, therefore, to throw off the mask. So they quitted Caubul—occupied the passes on the road to Jellalabad—plundered a valuable cafila—and entirely cut off our communications with the provinces of Hindostan.

Upon this, Humza Khan, the governor of the Ghilzyes, was sent out to bring them back to their allegiance. “Humza Khan,” wrote Macnaghten to Macgregor, on the 2nd of October, “who is at the bottom of the whole conspiracy, has been sent out by his Majesty to bring back the Ghilzye chiefs who have fled; but I have little hope of the success of his mission.”[90] Humza Khan, whose own stipend was included in the general retrenchment, had been commissioned to carry the obnoxious measure into effect; and he had instigated the chiefs to resist it. He was now sent out to quell a disturbance of which he was himself the parent and the nurse.

These movements did not at first much alarm Macnaghten. He was intent upon his departure from Caubul; and he said that the outbreak had happened at a fortunate moment, as his own party and the troops proceeding to the provinces could quell it on their way to India. “You will have heard ere now,” he wrote on the 3rd of October, to Major Rawlinson, “of my appointment to Bombay. I could wish that this most honourable distinction had been withheld a little longer, until I could have pronounced our relations in this country as being entirely satisfactory; but, thanks in a great measure to your zealous co-operation, I may even now say, that every thing is rapidly verging to that happy consummation. No time is fixed for my departure. That will depend upon the instructions I receive from Lord Auckland. Should his Lordship direct me to deliver over my charge to Burnes, there is little or nothing, that I know of, to detain me, and I ought to be in Bombay by the middle of December. I am suffering a little anxiety just now, as the Eastern Ghilzye chiefs have turned Yaghee, in consequence, I believe, of the reduction of their allowances, and their being required to sign an ittezain against robberies. We have sent to bring them back to their allegiance, and I think there will be no difficulty about them, unless the root of the Fussad lies deeper, and they are, as some assert, in league with Mahomed Akbar. In that case, it will be necessary to undertake operations on a larger scale against Nijrow and Tugao, in the latter of which districts the Moofsids (rebels) have taken refuge. They are very kind in breaking out just at the moment most opportune for our purposes. The troops will take them en route to India. To-morrow I hope our expedition will reach the refractory forts of Zao, and teach them a most salutary lesson.”

But after a few days, he began to take a more serious view of the matter; and he urged Macgregor to return with all despatch to Caubul, that he might accompany the expedition he was about to send out against the rebels. But at the same time he wrote to Rawlinson, that he did not apprehend any open opposition; and he never seemed to doubt that the insurrectionary movement would promptly be put down.

Sale’s brigade, which was returning to the provinces, was, it has been seen, to stifle the insurrection en route to Jellalabad. Macnaghten, however, thought of strengthening the force, with a view to the operations against the Ghilzyes, and he wrote to Captain Trevor, who, pending the arrival of Macgregor, was holding the enemy in negotiation, that he believed the General would send out “two eight-inch mortars, two iron nine-pounder guns, Abbott’s battery, the 5th Cavalry, the Sappers and Miners, and the 13th Queen’s, with the 35th and 37th Native Infantry.”[91] But he continued to talk of the “impudence of the rascals,” and expressed his belief that, the insurrection put down, the country would be quieter than ever.[92] On the 9th of October, Colonel Monteith marched from Caubul, with the 35th Native Infantry, a squadron of the 5th Cavalry, two guns of Abbott’s battery under Dawes, and Broadfoot’s Sappers and Miners. That night his camp was attacked at Bootkhak—the first march on the Jellalabad road. On the 10th, therefore, Sale received orders to march at once with the 13th Light Infantry, and on the following day he started to clear the passes. On the 12th, he entered the defile of Khoord-Caubul. The enemy occupied the heights in considerable force, and, in their own peculiar style of warfare, opened a galling fire upon our advancing column. Sale was wounded at the first onset, and Dennie took command of the troops. He spoke with admiration of “the fearless manner in which the men of the 13th, chiefly young soldiers, ascended heights nearly perpendicular under the sharp fire of the insurgents;” and added, that the Sepoys of the 35th, who had fought under him at Bameean, “rivalled and equalled them in steadiness, activity, and intrepidity.”[93] The pass was cleared, and then the 13th retraced its steps to Bootkhak, whilst Monteith, with the 35th and the other details, was left encamped in the Khoord-Caubul valley.

In the mean while, Macgregor had returned from the Zoormut country. The Envoy had known him long, and had abundant confidence in the man. An officer of the Bengal Artillery, who had been a favourite member of Lord Auckland’s personal staff, he had accompanied Macnaghten to Lahore and Loodhianah, on the mission to negotiate the Tripartite treaty, and had subsequently been employed in political superintendence of the country between Caubul and Jellalabad, where, by an admirable union of the vigorous and the conciliatory in his treatment of the tribes, he had won both their respect and their affection. The Envoy now believed that Macgregor would soon restore the country to tranquillity, and was impatient until his return. Macgregor reached Caubul on the 11th of October, and soon started for Monteith’s camp. Macnaghten, who believed that the outbreak was local and accidental, looked with eagerness to the result. He took little heed of what was going on in the Kohistan. Nor did he think that the Douranee Khans, whose “noses he had brought to the grindstone,” were plotting their emancipation from the thraldom of the infidels.

But Pottinger, in the Kohistan, plainly saw the storm that was brewing—plainly saw the dangers and difficulties by which he was surrounded. As the month of October advanced, the attitude of the Kohistanees and the Nijrowees was more and more threatening. Meer Musjedee, the Nijrow chief, a man of a resentful and implacable temper, had been, some time before, described in the newspaper paragraphs of the day as stalking about the country, and sowing broadcast the seeds of rebellion. The measures of the King’s government had long before made these very people, who had risen up against the tyranny of Dost Mahomed, ripe for revolt against the more consummate tyranny of the Shah. And now, in the middle of October, Pottinger saw that the state of things was fast approaching a crisis; so he demanded hostages from the Kohistanee chiefs. To this the Envoy reluctantly consented. “And,” wrote Pottinger, in his official account of these transactions, “I only succeeded in procuring them by the end of the month, when everything betokened a speedy rupture with the Nijrowees.” By this time, indeed, Meer Musjedee had openly raised the standard of revolt, and the people were clustering around it.

Macnaghten thought very lightly of these movements in the Kohistan. Nothing disturbed his faith in the general tranquillity of the country, and the popularity of the double government. He greatly desired the settlement of the Ghilzye question, for there was something palpable and undeniable in such a movement; and he was anxious to set his face towards the provinces of Hindostan. Eagerly, therefore, he looked for intelligence from Macgregor. He had begun, however, to doubt whether so troublesome a business could be settled by peaceful negotiation. “We must thresh the rascals, I fear, after all,” he wrote to Macgregor, on the 17th; “but I don’t think that the troops will be under weigh until the 20th. Is not this provoking? Abbott has made some excuse about his guns being injured. Pray write a circumstantial plan of the best means of surrounding and preventing the escape of the villains.”[94] Abbott was not a man to make excuses of any kind, but the Envoy was becoming impatient. On the 18th, he wrote again: “It has been determined that the Sappers and Miners, the mountain train, and two companies of the 37th Native Infantry, march out to join you to-morrow morning. They will make one march to Khoord-Caubul. The next day I hope you will be joined by the 13th, the 37th, and Abbott’s battery. I hope you will arrange the plan of attack before Sale arrives.”[95] But although Macnaghten was eager to “thresh the rascals,” certain prudential considerations suggested to him that it would only be expedient to punish them as much as could “conveniently” be done. It would not be convenient, at such a time, to exasperate the insurgents too much, and drive them to block up the passes, and plunder everything that came in their way.

In the mean while, Monteith, in his isolated post in the Khoord-Caubul valley, was exposed, if not to some danger, to considerable inconvenience, for the enemy made a night-attack upon his camp, aided by the treachery of the Afghan horsemen, under the Shah’s Meer Akhor, (or Master of the Horse) who admitted the rebels within their lines. One of our officers, Lieutenant Jenkins, and several Sepoys, were killed; and a number of camels carried off by the enemy. Monteith reported the treachery of his Afghan friends, and the Envoy resented his just suspicions. But he was now to be relieved. Sale appeared with two more infantry regiments, with more guns, and more sabres; and after a brief halt, for want of carriage, which much tried the patience of the Envoy, the whole swept on to Tezeen. Here the force halted for some days, and Macgregor busied himself in negotiations with the enemy. Macnaghten had instructed him to accommodate matters, if it could be done without any loss of honour; and Macgregor was candid enough to acknowledge that the insurrection of the Ghilzyes had been brought about by “harsh and unjust” measures of our own. So he opened a communication with the rebel chiefs; and, being known to most of them, consented to a personal interview. So Macgregor met the chiefs. There was a long and animated discussion. They demanded that their salaries should be restored to their former footing, and that they should not be held responsible for robberies committed beyond their respective boundaries. To these demands Macgregor consented. But they demanded also that Shool Mahomed, who had been removed, as a rebel, from the chiefship of their tribe, should be re-instated; and this point Macgregor resolutely refused to concede, in the belief that such concession would compromise the honour of the Government. The chiefs yielded, and Macgregor returned to camp. It was supposed that the Ghilzye affair had been “patched up after a fashion;” not, perhaps, without some loss of dignity, but with as much vigour as was convenient at the time. The chiefs sent in their agents to remain with Macgregor, ostensibly to aid him in the re-establishment of the police, and post stations on the road; and Macnaghten was able to report that the affair was settled.

He thought, however, that the terms granted to the rebels were too favourable; and the King was dissatisfied with them; but the Envoy replied that it was the treachery of the Shah’s own people that had paralysed the efforts of our negotiators. Indeed, it was known that people about the Court had left Caubul for the purpose of joining in a night-attack upon our troops. Still Macnaghten could not believe that there was any wide-spread feeling of disaffection among the chiefs and the people of Caubul; nor when Pottinger sent in gloomy reports from the Kohistan, could he bring himself to think that they were anything but the creations of a too excitable brain. “Pottinger writes,” he said,[96] “as if he were about to be invaded by the Nijrowees, but I imagine that there is little ground for this alarm, and that at all events the fellows will sneak into their holes again when they hear that the Ghilzyes are quiet.” This was written on the 26th of October. On the 29th he wrote again, saying, “I trust I have at last got Pottinger into a pacific mood, though I tremble when I open any of his letters, lest I should find that he has got to loggerheads with some of his neighbours. In the present excited state of men’s minds, a row in any quarter would be widely infectious, and we are not in a condition to stand much baiting.”

Meanwhile, Macgregor had learnt the value of his treaty. From Tezeen to Gundamuck the agents of the Ghilzye chiefs were in our camp; but there was some hard fighting for the brigade. The enemy mustered in force, and attacked our column; and the old excuse was made, that it was owing to no faithlessness on the part of the chiefs, but to their inability to control the tribes. It was a terrible country for a baggage-encumbered force to toil through, in the face of an active enemy. Jugdulluck was gained with little opposition; but, on the next march, it was seen that the heights were bristling with armed men, and a heavy fire was poured in from all the salient points, on which, with the instincts of the mountaineer, they had posted themselves, with such terrible effect. Sale threw out his flanking parties, and the light troops, skirmishing well up the hill sides, dislodged the enemy, whilst a party under Captain Wilkinson, pushing through the defile, found that the main outlet had not been guarded, and that the passage was clear. The march was resumed; but the enemy were not yet weary of the contest. Reappearing in great numbers, they fell furiously upon our rear-guard, and, for a time, our people, thus suddenly assailed, were in a state of terrible disorder. The energetic efforts of our officers brought back our men to a sense of their duty, and restored the confidence, which, for a little space, had forsaken the young soldiers. Broadfoot, Backhouse, and Fenwick, are said to have rallied and re-animated them. But the loss that fell upon them was heavy—more than a hundred men were killed and wounded; and among them was Captain Wyndham, of the 35th, who fell like a brave soldier in the unequal fight.[97]

Sale halted at Gundamuck. Macnaghten heard of the loss sustained between Jugdulluck and Soorkhab, but wrote to Macgregor, on the 1st of November, that he “hoped the business last reported was the expiring effort of the rebels;” and that the party would have dispersed, and thannahs been re-established. To Major Rawlinson he wrote on the same day, and congratulated him on the tranquil appearance that affairs had assumed in the direction of Candahar. It was now the very day that he had fixed upon for his departure from Caubul; and still he did not doubt for a moment that his emancipation was close at hand.

BOOK V.

[1841-1842.]

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CHAPTER I.

[November-1841.]