Sir John William Kaye

“ I have continually called for cavalry, for ammunition, treasure, stores, and medicines for the sick. I have called loudly, but I have called in vain. Had the least aid been sent—even a regiment of cavalry—I could have tranquillised or subdued the country. I have been tied to this important city, when a few additional troops for its garrison would have set me free; and I now would have moved on Ghuznee and Caubul. All I have now to do is to uphold the honour of my country in the best manner I can without the assistance above alluded to, and in ignorance of the intentions of government. ”

“ Presently the ramparts were lined with officers, looking out, with throbbing hearts, through unsteady telescopes, or with straining eyes tracing the road. Slowly and painfully, as though horse and rider both were in an extremity of mortal weakness, the solitary mounted man came reeling, tottering on. They saw that he was an Englishman. On a wretched, weary pony, clinging, as one sick or wounded, to its neck, he sate or rather leant forward; and there were those who, as they watched his progress, thought that he could never reach, unaided, the walls of Jellalabad. ”

“ It stirred the hearts of that eager multitude as the heart of one man. The Afghan cavalry, on issuing from the city, had spread themselves over the open country to the east, and the foot-men had taken possession of a neighbouring village and its surrounding gardens. The Persian videttes had fallen back; the trenches and batteries had been manned; and the reserves had stood to their arms, when, looking down from the ramparts, the excited Heratees saw the Persian Sirdar, Mahomed Khan, with a large body of troops, prepare himself for an offensive movement, and push onward to the attack. ”

“ It is a pity that I have no more money. If I had any more, and could raise 2000 or 3000 sowars, and 2000 foot-soldiers of my own, I would defy any one to stir. The foot-soldiers, too, who returned from the army, I collected—300 or 400—that they might be with my regiment. Oh! that God had never let me see this day! Although, if money reaches me, God will prosper everything. To give money to an enemy to collect troops, and to come and kill you, did ever any one so trust an enemy? ”

“ Burnes and his companions fell. There was a great plunder of property. The treasury of Captain Johnson, the Shah’s paymaster, was sacked. Thirsting for gold, and thirsting for blood, the insurgents undermined the walls and burnt the gateway of the house; then falling, like wild beasts, on all whom they met, and slaughtering guards and servants—men, women, and children, alike, in their indiscriminate fury—they glutted themselves with the treasure, [105] and to complete their work of mischief, burnt all the records of the office. The noise in the city was now growing louder and louder. ”

“ The royal body-guards rode among the foot passengers; lashed at them with their whips; tilted with their lances at grave spectators sitting quietly in their own balconies; and cleared the way as best they could. But fast as they dispersed the thronging multitude, it closed again around the novel cavalcade. Through this motley crowd of excited inhabitants, the British Mission was with difficulty conducted to a house prepared for them by royal mandate. Seated on rich carpets, fed with sweetmeats, and regaled with sherbet, every attention was paid to the European strangers. ”

“ But when we consider the amount of temptation and provocation—when we remember that the comrades of our soldiers and the brethren of our camp-followers had been foully butchered by thousands in the passes of Afghanistan; that everywhere tokens of our humiliation, and of the treachery and cruelty of the enemy, rose up before our people, stinging them past all endurance, and exasperating them beyond all control, we wonder less, that when the guilty city lay at their feet, they should not wholly have reined in their passions, than that, in such an hour, they should have given them so little head. ”

“ 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 no one who fairly estimates the character of Afghan history and Afghan morals, and the necessities, personal and political, of all who take part in such stirring scenes, can fail to perceive that his vices were rather the growth of circumstances than of any extraordinary badness of heart. Dost Mahomed was not by nature cruel; but once embarked in the strife of Afghan politics, a man must fight it out or die. Every man’s hand is against him, and he must turn his hand against every man. ”

“ Great was the joy which the recovery of the prisoners diffused throughout the camps of Pollock and Nott; and great was the joy which it diffused throughout the provinces of India. Rightly judged Pollock that, if he returned to Hindostan without the brave men and tender women who had endured for so many months the pains and perils of captivity in a barbarous country, his countrymen would regard the victory as incomplete. Let him fight what battles, destroy what forts, and carry off what trophies he might, he would, without the liberation of the prisoners, be only half-a-conqueror after all. ”

“ The Siege of Herat—Shah Kamran and Yar Mahomed—Return of the Shah—Eldred Pottinger—Preparations for the Defence—Advance of the Persian Army—Progress of the Siege—Negotiations for Peace—Failure of the Attack—The Siege raised.
Surrounded by a fair expanse of country, where alternating corn-fields, vineyards, and gardens varied the richness and beauty of the scene; where little fortified villages studded the plain, and the bright waters of small running streams lightened the pleasant landscape, lay the city of Herat. ”

“ On the morning of the 11th, through scenes of unexampled horror, the party of captives were conducted to the Tezeen fort. The road was strewn with the stark bodies of the mangled dead. Here and there little groups of wretched camp-followers, starving, frost-bitten, many of them in a state of gibbering idiocy, were to be seen cowering in the snow; or solitary men, perhaps wounded and naked, were creeping out of their hiding-places, in an extremity of mortal suffering and fear. ”

“ For a Calcutta Secretary to be at Caubul at all was necessarily to be out of place. If Macnaghten, suddenly transplanted from the bureau of an Anglo-Indian Governor to the stirrup of an Afghan monarch, is chargeable with some errors, it is, perhaps, more just, as it is more generous, to wonder not that those errors were so numerous, but that they were so few. To govern such a people as the Afghans through such a King as Shah Soojah, was an experiment in which an English officer might fail without the sacrifice of his reputation. ”

“ Like many a monarch, abler and better than himself, Zemaun Shah had chosen his minister unwisely, and was undone by the choice. When he entrusted the affairs of his empire to the administration of Wuffadar Khan, he made the great mistake of his life. A base and designing man, without any of those commanding qualities which impart something of dignity and heroism to crime, the Wuzeer bent his sovereign, but could not bend circumstances to his will. The loyalty of the Douranee sirdars he could extinguish, but their power he could not break by his oppressions. ”

“ Before the British army crossed the Indus, the English name had been honoured in Afghanistan. Some dim traditions of the splendour of Mr. Elphinstone’s mission had been all that the Afghans associated with their thoughts of the English nation; but, in their place, we left galling memories of the progress of a desolating army. The Afghans are an unforgiving race; and everywhere, from Candahar to Caubul, and from Caubul to Peshawur, were traces of the injuries we had inflicted upon the tribes. ”

“ 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 compelled the Wuzeer to appear before his men as one not utterly prostrate and helpless. The chief called upon the soldiery to fight; but they continued to fall back in dismay. Then seizing a large staff, Yar Mahomed rushed like a madman upon the hindmost of the party, and drove them forward under a shower of heavy blows. The nature of the works was such as to forbid their falling back in a body. Cooped up in a narrow passage, and seeing no other outlet of escape, many of them leapt wildly over the parapet, and rushed down the exterior slope full upon the Persian stormers. ”

“ Pottinger believed that the Sirdar was sincere in his expressions of a desire to establish friendly relations with the British. “But,” he added, “he has been brought up in the midst of treachery, and does not know how to trust; and I regret that our own conduct in this country has put our government’s faith on a par with themselves. Our defeat, though sufficiently galling to a soldier, really loses its sting when the taunts of our broken promises, which we know to be true, are thrown in our teeth by men who know the truth only by name.” ”

“ Whilst our wretched people were halting and perishing in the snow, the enemy were gathering in advance of them and lining the passes, intent on their destruction. The events of that miserable week in January afforded a fitting climax to the series of disasters which had darkened the two preceding months. There is nothing, indeed, more remarkable in the history of the world than the awful completeness—the sublime unity—of this Caubul tragedy. ”

“ To march a British army into Afghanistan was not, therefore, an obligation upon the Indian Government; it was their deliberate choice. The avowed object of the expedition, as set forth in the November declaration, was the establishment of a friendly power in Afghanistan. But the subversion of an existing dynasty could only be justified on the ground that its hostility threatened to disturb the peace and tranquillity of our own dominions. Whatever the hostility of the Barukzye Sirdahs may have been when Mahomed Shah was before the gates of Herat, it had now ceased to be formidable. ”