The plain has scarcely changed, and from the ridge to the east of the Bala Hissar, on one of those heavy hot mornings that contribute so powerfully to the flavour of Kabul, it is all too easy to imagine the isolation of the cantonment far below, and even to trace its outline in the dust. Kabulis well remember where it stood, for the war is a key event in Afghan national history.
1 From which, professing Islam, he was presently removed and beheaded, together with Captain Arthur Conolly, author of the phrase ‘the Great Game’, who had been sent to Bokhara to negotiate his release.
1 Admiration long felt in England, too. My copy of his biography, by Mohan Lal, was given in 1861 as a leaving present to one of his boys by Lionel Garnett, when a housemaster at Eton. It was dedicated to Queen Victoria.
2 Who was later to be a general himself, and went on to discover the marvellous sculptures of Amaravati—which, after lying for fifty years in the stables of East India House, are now among the treasures of the Victoria and Albert Museum.
1 A year to the day before, his brother James had been killed in a skirmish against the Afghans: four years later his brother George was killed in action against the Sikhs. They came from Kirkwall in Orkney.
1 The British returned to Kabul within the year, spoiling Sir John Kaye’s awful completeness, but blowing up the great bazaar as a reminder of their displeasure, and subduing the Afghans until the next Anglo-Afghan war, forty years later. Shah Shuja was soon murdered, of course, and Akhbar died in 1847, supposedly of poison: but Dost Mohammed was returned to his throne after all, and proved himself, as we shall later see, a true friend to the British Empire. The Great Game soon revived, and provided perennial alarums and arguments for the rest of the century. Lord Auckland, who wrote of the catastrophe that ‘the whole thing was unintelligible to me’, became First Lord of the Admiralty and died a bachelor in 1848. Poor Elphinstone died in the hands of Akhbar, who sent his body to Jalalabad, respectfully wrapped in aromatic blankets and attended by the general’s valet. Dr Brydon we shall meet again: his pony was last heard of by Mr Eric Linklater the novelist who, when he wished to replace a damaged iron fence upon his estate in Cromarty, was told that it had been bent during an unsuccessful jump by Dr Brydon’s famous pony, and had been left unrepaired in memorial ever since—a pleasant but unconvincing fantasy, Mr Linklater told me, for Brydon did not return from India until 1860, when the pony would have been about 20 years old.
As for the retreat from Kabul, though largely forgotten in Britain it is vividly remembered in Afghanistan: when in 1960 I followed the army’s route from Kabul to Jalalabad with an Afghan companion, we found many people ready to point out the sites of the tragedy, and recall family exploits. I asked one patriarch what would happen now, if a foreign army invaded the country. “The same’, he hissed between the last of his teeth.
CHAPTER SIX
Merchant Venturing
O N the other side of the world, on a summer day in those same 1840s, there sits around a polished oak table a group of men so far removed from the world of Akhbar and Elphinstone, so indifferent we may suppose to the aims of evangelical imperialism, that they might be living in another century, or another civilization. Yet they represent an imperial dynamic no less potent than strategy or philanthropy: profit.
There are ten men in the room, with a secretary in attendance, and they are sitting around the table as in a board room. They look a grave but weather-beaten lot, like businessmen hardened, and most of their faces are of a gaunt Scottish cast. The room is comfortably dignified. A log fire burns, and on a side-table are the minutes of previous meetings, in large leather-bound volumes, with quill pens, and bottles of ink, and sand-blotters. The hours pass in earnest deliberation, expert
1 From which, professing Islam, he was presently removed and beheaded, together with Captain Arthur Conolly, author of the phrase ‘the Great Game’, who had been sent to Bokhara to negotiate his release.
1 Admiration long felt in England, too. My copy of his biography, by Mohan Lal, was given in 1861 as a leaving present to one of his boys by Lionel Garnett, when a housemaster at Eton. It was dedicated to Queen Victoria.
2 Who was later to be a general himself, and went on to discover the marvellous sculptures of Amaravati—which, after lying for fifty years in the stables of East India House, are now among the treasures of the Victoria and Albert Museum.
1 A year to the day before, his brother James had been killed in a skirmish against the Afghans: four years later his brother George was killed in action against the Sikhs. They came from Kirkwall in Orkney.
1 The British returned to Kabul within the year, spoiling Sir John Kaye’s awful completeness, but blowing up the great bazaar as a reminder of their displeasure, and subduing the Afghans until the next Anglo-Afghan war, forty years later. Shah Shuja was soon murdered, of course, and Akhbar died in 1847, supposedly of poison: but Dost Mohammed was returned to his throne after all, and proved himself, as we shall later see, a true friend to the British Empire. The Great Game soon revived, and provided perennial alarums and arguments for the rest of the century. Lord Auckland, who wrote of the catastrophe that ‘the whole thing was unintelligible to me’, became First Lord of the Admiralty and died a bachelor in 1848. Poor Elphinstone died in the hands of Akhbar, who sent his body to Jalalabad, respectfully wrapped in aromatic blankets and attended by the general’s valet. Dr Brydon we shall meet again: his pony was last heard of by Mr Eric Linklater the novelist who, when he wished to replace a damaged iron fence upon his estate in Cromarty, was told that it had been bent during an unsuccessful jump by Dr Brydon’s famous pony, and had been left unrepaired in memorial ever since—a pleasant but unconvincing fantasy, Mr Linklater told me, for Brydon did not return from India until 1860, when the pony would have been about 20 years old.
As for the retreat from Kabul, though largely forgotten in Britain it is vividly remembered in Afghanistan: when in 1960 I followed the army’s route from Kabul to Jalalabad with an Afghan companion, we found many people ready to point out the sites of the tragedy, and recall family exploits. I asked one patriarch what would happen now, if a foreign army invaded the country. “The same’, he hissed between the last of his teeth.
CHAPTER SIX
Merchant Venturing
O N the other side of the world, on a summer day in those same 1840s, there sits around a polished oak table a group of men so far removed from the world of Akhbar and Elphinstone, so indifferent we may suppose to the aims of evangelical imperialism, that they might be living in another century, or another civilization. Yet they represent an imperial dynamic no less potent than strategy or philanthropy: profit.
There are ten men in the room, with a secretary in attendance, and they are sitting around the table as in a board room. They look a grave but weather-beaten lot, like businessmen hardened, and most of their faces are of a gaunt Scottish cast. The room is comfortably dignified. A log fire burns, and on a side-table are the minutes of previous meetings, in large leather-bound volumes, with quill pens, and bottles of ink, and sand-blotters. The hours pass in earnest deliberation, expert
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