Lady Sale and the siege of Kabul - November 1841

Continuing extracts from the Journal of Lady Florentia Sale, published by John Murray in 1843:

There is another (unflattering) mention of Burnes in Lady Sale's journal entry for the next day, which is full of recrimination against Afghan aliies (the King the Brits supported seems to be a perfect bounder!) , stuffed shirts in Calcutta, and sickly, feeble General Elphinstone in particular...

"It is further worthy of remark that Taj Mohammed Khan says he went to Sir Alexander Burnes the very day before the insurrection broke out, and told him what was going on. Burnes, incredulous, heaped abuse on the gentleman's head; and the only reply he gave him was "Shuma beseeah shytan ust" on which Taj Mohammed left him. This anecdote was told us by himself.

There's no translation of this choice phrase offered...but Shytan is Satan to you and me..."Go to the Devil", then...at the politest...

By the fourth day, the injured Sturt is strong enough to take part in consultations, but grainstores as well as ammunition dumps and the treasury have been seized by the insurgents.

"The servants are to get half rations from the commisarriat tomorrow" is Lady Sale's comment, running the household staff being her demesne.

By the 8th, Sturt is back on active duty, as the only engineering officer in the cantonment, and is effectively in charge or organizing the defences

Lady Sale goes on:

"Sturt went to Gen Elphinstone...who gave him carte blanche, and desired that all his instructions should be obeyed. He has accordingly placed fifteen guns in position. We have only two artillery officers...available...now Waller is wounded...we have no labratory men - no ther engineer officer than Sturt, who, weak as he is, has to do everything."

There is perhaps a little motherly pride creeping in here. This chap was her son in law...By contrast, almost in an aside. in the same day's entry we find this:

"It is said that Mohun Lull has named the man who killed poor Sir Alexander Burnes..."

Her Ladyship does not recall when she was first told of his death. But we must remember that John Murray rushed her journal into print in 1843, to capitalise on the publicity she attracted as a captive (later in our story) of the beastly Afghans...

Lull, an intelligence agent who worked with Burnes, tells us he knows who killed him. She does not mention him again as far as I can tell...I haven't read the whole thing yet...but her thoughts are now pervaded with frustration and helplessness...as Macnaghten begins negotiations with the chiefs for surrender and retreat...and pride in her beloved Sturt, whose "revovery and energy appear little short of miraculous"

On the 17th of Novemebr comes news that her husband General Sale's column has reached Jalallabad...and from now on, reaching there themselves becomes the focus of all hope for the besieged garrison in Kabul.


'Interior of the City of Kandahar, from the house of Sirdar Meer' taken from plate 23 of 'Afghaunistan' by Lieutenant James Rattray.

Long dark night in Kabul - November 2nd, 1841

The long, dreadful night continues. Insurrection has broken out...confusion is everywhere...and her son in law is dreadfully wounded. Lady Sale writes in place of her sleep...filling page after page.

"There were of course various reports. We first heard that, on the affair breaking out, Sir A Burnes went over to the Wuzeer's...and that he was safe there, excepting having been shot in the leg...The King, from the Bala Hissar, sent intelligence to the Envoy "that Burnes was all right;" but a few hours later acknowledged that he did not know anything of him, neither did the envoy at seven in the evening, when Capt Lawrence and Capt John Conolly came to enquire after Sturt's health."

We know, as I've written in previous posts, that Burnes and his brother were already dead.

She gets reflective towards the end of the night.

"It appears a very strange circumstance that troops were not immediately sent into the city to quell the affair in the commencement; but we seem to sit quietly with our hands folded and look on"

I think the truth is probably that the Brits realized without saying it, that they had bitten off a lot more in Afghanistan than they could chew. The cost cutting that provoked rebellion in the first place indicates that the powers that be did not want to throw good money after bad. The policy of regime change (as outlined in earlier posts) had been an unpopular failure in the country, where they now seen not only as Feringhee-(Franks..Crusaders) - occupiers...but worse, as being weak and anxious to leave. The expedition had been undertaken in haste, with poor intelligence, and insufficient resources. (Against the advice of experts, like the hero of my early posts, Alexander Burnes).

And now, a decision had already been tacitly taken to cut and run...Sale's regiment had left before Nott's had come to relieve them...the weakness had been seen and exploited by an enemy far stronger than anticipated...and the mission was doomed. The only question now was whether all the troops and their families were now doomed too.

All that was possible now, and far from certain, was getting out of there alive.

As I've said elsewhere, does not all this ring bells of conemporary resonance almost too obvious to be rung? Or, as Lady Sale puts it, still writing that same terrible night.

"Most dutifully do we appear to shut our eyes on our probable fate."

The Indestructible Lady Sale

This is the frontispiece from "Disaster in Afghanistan" by Lady Sale, rushed into print by John Murray in early 1843...Her Ladyship was still in England recovering from three months of siege and seven more of being held hostage by Akbar Khan...just one episode in the broader catastrophe, but the only written account of the siege to survive...Indeed, of the 16000 odd British subjects, Indians included, who were left in Kabul after Her Ladyship's husband, General "Fighting Bob" Sale had marched out with his regiment, (which included our other witness, Reverend George Gleig), Lady Sale, one of a handful of hostages, was one of the few to survive.

Left unedited by Murray, Lady Sale's book is a transcribed daily journal...written in moments of leisure, or of minute by minute reportage, its not a narrative, let alone a considered account. The writing lacks the polish and poise of the Reverend Gleig...but makes up for it by being told in real time, as it were...

(I'm not sure if there's any publishing precedent for such a thing. Maybe my more learned colleagues at the NLS can help me out with that?)

As she says in her introduction...written from Calcutta, "I have not only daily noted down events as they occurred, but often have done so hourly"

So, right or wrong, whatever she thought was happening at the time, accurate or not, is what Murray rushed into print not long after her rescue from captivity in Afghanistan in September of 1842.

So, for example, she says contradictory things about the fate of Alexander Burnes (my first hero of this series) ...for whom she seems to have had little affection or personal concern...Burnes disappearance (and, as it happened, murder) was the first serious violence of the Cabool uprising inNovember of 1841. But Lady Sale doesn't know he's dead for quite a while, and doesn't tell us how she felt when she found out.

In fact, she says very little about how she "felt" about anything. None of your Lady Diana "Queen of Hearts" cobblers here...this is how the aristocracy used to behave. Good thing too, unless you were on the recieving end.

For example : (my interpolations in italics from now on) :

"29th October

We hear that since the force (Sale's Regiment) left Khoord Cabul they have never pitched a tent. The rear guard has been attacked daily, and the bivouak fired on every night. The camels are dying forty a night from cold and starvation. Lieut. Jennings (13th) has been wounded severely in the arm, the bone broken, and the ball went through into his side. Lieut. Rattray (13th) wounded, and a sergeant killed and 3 men wounded; 4 or 5 Sipahees (Sepoys) of the 35th wounded.

And so on. Dry. Factual. Stiff upper lipped.

31st October

The potatoes thrive well, and will be a very valuable addition to the cuisine. The cauliflowers, artichokes and turnip radishes are very fine...the Cabul lettuces are hairy and inferior....

1st November

No letters from camp (Sale's), which has caused both surprise and anxiety.

2nd November

Last night a party of Kohistannes entered the city...this morning, early, all was commotion in Cabul; the shops were plundered and the peoplke were all fighting...Capt Johnson's (paymaster to the Shah's forces) house and treasury in the city were attacked, as also Sir Alexander Burnes's...

This is the first time she mentions Burnes in her journal. She could not know that he was already dead. Besides, her attention that fateful day was elsewhere.

Capt Sturt...went to General Elphinstone, who sent him with an important message...to the King to concert with him measures for the defence of that fortress. Just as he entered the precincts of that palace, he was stabbed in three places by a young man well dressed, who escaped into a building close by, where he was protected by the gates being shut.

Captain Sturt was her son in law.

I cannot describe how shocked I was when I saw poor Sturt; for Lawrence, fearing to alarm us, had said he was only slightly wounded. He had been stabbed deeply in the shoulder and side, and on the face (the latter wound striking on the bone just missed the temple): he was covered with blood issuing from his mouth and was unable to articulate...the mouth would not open, the tongue was swollen and paralysed and he was ghastly and faint from loss of blood. He could not lie down from the blood choking him...he was better towards evening; and by his wife's (her daughter's) unremitting attention in assisting him to get rid of the clotted blood from his mouth...he was by eleven o'clock able to utter a tolerably articulate sound. With what joy did we hear him faintly utter "bet-ter"; and he really seemed to enjoy a tea-spoonful of water, which we got into his mouth by a drop or two at a time, painful as it was to him to swallow it.

I must admit, that as I approach the end of this residency, the idea of a dual theatrical Portrait of Mr Burnes and Lady Sale becomes and icreasingly tempting thought of one of the things I might do next.

Death in the Hills

I'm drafting this blog entry on the day when the death of the 344th British soldier in Afghanistan since 2001 was announced.

We've been here before. Worse, even...much worse. But much is the same. We are the same, alike devising strategy on the basis of cultural myopia and wishful thinking in general. And the Afghans are the same too. They are just waiting for us to leave. They don't know how long that will take. But they know it will come.

In 1841, matters, it must be said, accelerated.

The immediate spur to the revolt against the British Army occupying Kabul that year was, in fact, the withdrawl of a bribe.

(In a tribal society, the withdrawl of a financial inducement is an insult, as well as an inconvenience. Tribal politics, as we know in contemporary Afghanistan, ARE politics - the balance of financial tribute with military capability is the mechanism of civic stability - the central state, in the European model, scarcely exists except as a power broker and funding channel, whether the money comes from heroin, guilty oil shieks, or the UN).

The Reverend George Gleig, Chaplain to the Regiment of General "Fighting Bob" Sale, who we've been hearing from previously, assessed the Afghan situation in 1841 as follows:

'Candahar with the whole of the territory to the Helmand, if not pacified, was quiet; while the tribes in possession of the passes...were at once mollified and rendered happy by the receipt of a sort of blackmail, which, to the amount of 8000 pounds a year, the British Government paid to them as the price of protection to its communications. Nobody therefore dreamed of danger...yet the spirit of discontent was very busy through the whole compass of the Doorannee empire...

...as the whole of the troops, whether following the British standard or serving under that of the Shah, were fed and paid for at the expense of the Indian Treasury...the supreme government at Calcutta began to complain...instructions were given to the envoy that he should practice a rigid economy...Sir William Macnaghten seems to have met these instances with...every desire to fall in with the views of his superiors. He could recommend that the forces...be diminished...but he promised to reduce its expenses to the lowest practicable figure...Up to the autumn of 1841, [the Ghilzie chiefs] fulfilled their part of the treaty...but now it was decided to higgle with them about terms, and instead of 8000 poinds, 4000 pounds were offered. They indignantly rejected the proposal...and entered eagerly into the conspiracies which were everywhere maturing'.

He then gives us a flavour of what it was like to be stationed there...much as it is now, it seems.

'...to stray to any distance beyond the perimeters of the camp was never safe, and in more than one instance proved fatal, two British officers who had gone to fish the stream...were attacked...and one, Lt Inverarity of the 16th lancers, was murdered....while a body of not fewer than two hundred camp followers, when endeavouring to make their way back to Hindostan, were betrayed, disarmed and butchered to a man...the health of the troops began to give way...'

Then, in November, the storm broke in its full, hellish fury.

This is from a letter from James Burnes, Alexander's brother, (Alexander Burnes is the central figure in the early posts in this sequence) to James Carnac, 1 Feb 1842 (Wellesley 37313/135), and it's a translation of an intercepted message sent to Afridi tribesmen in the Khyber Pass.

'The fact is this, that on the third Tuesday of the blessed month of Ramadan in the morningtime it occured, that with other heroic champions stirring like lions, we carried by storm the house of Sickender Burnes. By the grace of the most holy and omnipotent God the brave warriors, having rushed right and left from their ambush, slew Sikander Burnes with various other feringees of consideration'.

Though they didn't know it yet, the British Army in Kabul, somewhere between twelve and sixteen thousand of them, including camp followers, was doomed.

Almost every single one of them...


Top image: 'Ko-i-staun foot soldiery in summer costume' taken from plate 12 of 'Afghaunistan' by Lieutenant James Rattray. Used by permission of The British Library.

Sex

I must not pass so lightly over so important a part of the population of Cabool as the ladies. Their ghost like figures when they walk abroad make one melancholy; but if all be true of them that is reported, they make ample amends when within doors for all such sombre exhibitions in public.
Alexander Burnes, 'Travels Into Bokhara', John Murray 1835



I couldn't resist fleshing out, as it were, the portrait in these blog posts of my first hero here...Alexander Burnes...a racy individual and spy...and friend of the Murrays, as well as a successful author. The boy from Montrose knew how to have a good time.

The following continues my extracts from the Reverend George Gleig's first hand account of this most pungent of Victorian military disasters. Here he is describing the social scene of the occupying British forces in Kabul in 1841, and Burnes own special role on that scene:

'Not only the houses of such men as the envoy, the commander in chief and Sir Alexander Burnes were thrown open to [the Afghan Chiefs] but the mess of ther 13th recieved its frequent guests, most of whom ate and drank as if there had been no prohibitory clauses in the Koran or elsewhere. Among other means adopted to entertain the aristocracy of central Asia, the British Officers got up a play: a theatre was constructed, scenery painted, dresses prepared; and as the pieces which they chose were chiefly broad comedies, such as 'The Irish Ambassador' and others of the same sort, great amusemewnt was afforded to the audience...while Burnes and others skilled in the dialect of the country, translated the speeches as they were uttered. The Afghans are a merry people, and have a keen relish of the ludicrous and the satirical; and as the interpreter never failed to bring the jokes of the actors home to them, they marked their delight by bursting into frequent peals of laughter.'


So far so cosy, and only slightly naughty. The Reverend Gleig, however, goes on to make some observations on sexual license, which, as we'll see, may not be unrelated to the particularly sticky end that overcame Alexander Burnes...as well as being a properly Churchly thing to say in the light of what happened next.

'Though they do not, like other Mohammedan races, universally shut up their women,the Afghans are as open to jealousy as orientals in general...their women...could not but be pleased with the attentions the Feringhees showed them. It is much to be feared that our young countrymen did not always bear in mind that the domestic habits of any people ought to be sacred in the eyes of strangers...whatever errors they may have committed, the great mass of the garrison of Cabul atoned for them terribly; and the survivors...will doubtless more and more become conviced that the gratification of the moment is purchased at too high a price.'

So far so general, but to get ahead of myself for a moment, Lady Sale, the other Murray author who was a first hand witness of the subsequent and horrible events says something curious, perhaps unguarded, certainly disapproving and revealing about Burnes' reputation as a bon viveur, this an entry in her journal from November 1841, when the insurrection has started, and Burnes has gone missing:

'Our only hope of Burnes' saftey rest on the possibility of him having obtained refuge in some harem.'

Now, what immediately occurs to me the image of her ladyship talking to a couple of subalterns, and asking them, "What do you think has become of Mr Burnes?"

And then one of these two chaps saying to Lady Sale..."Don't worry about old Sandy. Knowing him he's probably shacked up in some knocking shop"















I think it is something like this that she has sanitised for her personal journal.
As my colleague David McClay said when I told him this story over a latte from the nice new cafe here at the Library, "it's like 'Carry on Up the Khyber'...but with slaughtering".

Top image: 'Ladies Of Caubul' from plate 24 of 'Afghaunistan' by Lieutenant James Rattray.

Bottom image: 'Kandahar Lady of Rank, Engaged in Smoking' from plate 29 of 'Afghaunistan'

Afghanistan 1841 - Ice Skating and Cricket

Had I but my kingdom, how glad I should be to see an Englishman at Cabool, and to open the road tween Europe and India.
Shah Shooja quoted by Alexander Burnes, 'Travels into Bokhara', John Murray 1835.

I'm handing over this whole post, pretty much, to the Reverend George Gleig, and these excerpts from his "With Sale in Afghanistan" that Murray published in 1843, the year after the military catasrophe of the First Afghan War...and the bloody massacre of the retreat from Kabul.

Gleig, a Murray mainstay in the Quarterly Review and elsewhere, was a quite extraordinary fellow, a Church of Scotland Minister and Army Chaplain, a veteran of Waterloo and the Peninsular War and a military historian of a very high order. In 1841 and 2 he served with General "Fighting Bob" Sale in the Afghan conflict.

To begin our acquaintance with his memory and his talent, let us look at his description of the political situation, and of life in the British Army Cantonment at Kabul in 1841, before the waste matter hit the you know what, and establish a bit of Victorian tone to our continuing story:

'There was no increase of good feeling on the part of the inhabitants towards the invaders. The province submitted, or appeared to submit, to the rule of Shah Shujah, but of enthusiasm in his cause no class of society exhibited a sign...'

Gleig continues:

'...the city was quiet and so were the towns and villages dependent on it; and the whole of general Elphinstone's command...being concentrated around Cabul, it is hardly to be wondered at if men, accustomed to give the law and to be obeyed, should have discredited all rumours of a rebellion...there was society in the cantonments, for many of the officers had been joined by their wives and families...Parties rode hither and thither to visit and inspect such objects of curiosity as were described to them. Baba Shah's tomb, the obelisk of which tradition ascribes the structure to Alexander the Great...and as far into the mountains as it was deemed prudent to go, offered irresistable attractions to the admirers of both nature and art...

(James Rattry's illustration of this tomb is at the beginning of this post. Tourist attraction, you see.)

Wherever Englishmen go, they sooner or later introduce among the people whom they visit a taste for manly sports. Horse racing and cricket were both got up in the vicinity of Cabul; and in both the chiefs and people soon learned to take a lively interest...being great gamblers, they looked on with astonishment at the bowling, batting and fagging out of the English players; but it does not appear that they were ever tempted to lay aside their flowing robes and huge turbans...on the other hand, our countrymen attended them to their mains of cocks, quails and other fighting animals, and betting freely, lost or won their rupees in the best possible humour. In like manner, our people indulged them from time to time in trials of strength and feats of agility...very muich to the astonishment of their new friends, they in every instance threw the most noted of the Cabul wrestlers. The result of this was to create among the Afghans a good deal of personal liking for their conquerors.

There is a lake about five or six miles from Cabul...in the winter of 1839-40, it was covered with a coat of ice more than ordinarily thick, on which the Afghans used to practice the art of sliding, far more skillfully, as well as gracefully, than their European visitors...the clumsy manner in which the Feringhees assayed that boyish sport whiuch induced them to reiterate that heat and not cold was the white man's element...our young gentlemen set themselves to the fabrication of skates, and in due time a party of skaters, equipped for the exercise, appeared on the lake. The Afghans stared in mute amazement "Now we see that you are not like the infidel Hindoos that follow you: you are men, born and bred like ourselves...we wish that you had come among us as friends... for you are fine fellows one by one, though as a body, we hate you"'.

Yes... well by the time he wrote this memoir, the Reverend knew what was coming next.

The illustration by James Rattry below shows the British encampment outside Kabul. You see how exposed in was. On the left of the city in the background is the Bel Hissar...the fortified ancient centre where the King lived...and roughly in the middle is the location of the Envoy Alexander Burnes house..where his murder took place, and the insurrection began.

Bala Hissar and city of Caubul with the British cantonments from ...
This lithograph is taken from plate 16 of 'Afghaunistan' by Lieutenant James
Rattray. Kabul ha... ... Artist: James Rattray (1818-1854). ...
www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/onlineex/apac/other/019xzz000000562u00016000.html
- 25k - Cached Version

Temple of 'Ahmed Shauh', King of Afghanistan
This lithograph was taken from plate 27 of 'Afghaunistan' by Lietenant
James Rattray.
The tomb... ... Artist: James Rattray. Medium: Lithograph, coloured.
Date: 1848 ...
www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/onlineex/apac/other/019xzz000000562u00027000.html
- 25k - Cached Version

Puppet Kings and Security forces: Afghanistan 1839

The Afghans do not appear to have the smallest prejudice against Christians.
'Travels in Bokhara' by Alexander Burnes, published by John Murray 1835

We've met Alexander Burnes who was a sensual, ambitious young Scotsman on the make, a talented linguist who argued for one policy...that of offering support to Dost Mohammed's rule in Kabul as a bulwark against the Russians, but who changed to supporting the Dost's overthrow when that became the policy of his superiors, and accompanied the Army of the Indus that overthrew Dost Mohammed in 1838, reversing the policy of containment, and pursuing what was then called "forward policy" in Afghanistan, denying it to the Russians through a military presence, rather as the 2001 invasion was supposed to deny the country as a base of operations to Al Quaida.

Entirely understandable from a careerist point of view...that way lay promotion...but it did identify him personally, among the Afghans, as a perjurer...perfidious Albion in a single pair of pants.

Later, once the army was in occupation of Kabul, it was his anxiety to be rid of his boss, Mcnaghten, and thus secure his own promotion, that led him to underestimate the danger faced by the British Army of occupation…If there was peace, then his boss would leave, and he’d get the top job for himself. So he told everyone, including himself, that there was peace, though he knew deep down this wasn’t true.

In the end, it was his ambition to be visible, combined with this last misjudgement that led him and his brother to their nemesis, and the long knives in the garden of his house in Kabul in November 1841.

Burnes murder was the start of an insurrection that was to drive the British out in ignominious, bloody defeat.

To continue my series of posts on Murray publications and its paralells with our more resonant military SNAFU, I'm handing over for a moment to the introduction written by Patrick Macrory (the author whose "Signal Catastrophe" inspired the first Flashman novel) to a book that called 'Disaster in Afghanistan' by Lady Florentia Sale, published by Longmans in 1969 in their Military Memoirs series, but which was reprinted from an original published by the firm of John Murray in 1843 in the immediate wake of said catastrophe.

This is his description of the situation in which the army of occupation found itself, Macrory as a proper military historian saying it better than I could.

'Kabul was entered on 7th August 1839, and Shah Soojah was restored to his throne. Dost Mohammed fled into the interior, where for some fifteen months he carried on a desultory guerilla warfare. He then made his surrender to the British Envoy at Kabul, and was sent off to an honourable exile in India. There he was presently joined by all his family, with the significant exception of his favourite son, Akbar Khan. Akbar preferred to live an outlaw's life somewhere out beyond the Hindu Kush and implacably bided his time.'

Back to me.

This is a picture of the court of the puppet King as rendered by Lt James Rattray, a friend of Burnes, reproduced by kind permission of the British Library.

The British and Sikh installed King proved to be unpopular, however...a bit like Mohammed Karzai today...but as with Karzai, the only alternative ruler was the enemy, so the Regime Change, which had been intended to be an Afghan only affair, required the continued presence of British troops.

I trust this is making you feel sick?

McCrory continues:

'Reluctantly the British decided that some of their own troops must remain in Afghanistan for Soojah's protection. So, when General Keane and the greatest part of the Army of the Indus marched back to India at the end of 1839, a division was left at Kandahar under General Nott and a force of two brigades at Kabul itself...Soojah, for reasons of prestige, opposed (their) being housed in the Bala Hissar, the great citadel...that contained his own palace, and it was decided to build cantonments on the plain a mile or so outside the city...as badly designed as they were badly sited.'

So far so familiar...but then we get to some more Victorian touches and nuances...a bit of the old Raj...the women arrived.

'Before the end of 1839, MacNaghten, realizing the that the occupation was going to be indefinitely prolonged, sent for his wife to join him at Kabul. The sepoys too, were encouraged to bring up their families".

I do have to love how the Brits, no matter where in the world they are, still think they're in Surrey. I suspect this is the secret of their former success. Here, Mcrory describes their life in Kabul:

'Life in the cantonments was a gay butterfly existence. There were horse racing, hunting and amateur theatricals. When winter gripped the land, the British had skates made by the farriers and skimmed over the frozen lakes to the astonishment of the Afghans...the same could be said in summer of cricket.'

Finally, Macrory quotes Alexander Burnes, hero of my earlier posts in this series, now "British Resident", who had a courtyarded mansion in the city, saying that at his weekly dinner parties he could lay before his guests:

'champagne, hock, madeira, sherry, port, claret, suaterne, not forgetting a glass of curacoa and maraschino, and the hermetically sealed salmon and hotchpotch [veritable hotchpotch, all the way 'frae' Aberdeen], for deuced good it is, the peas as big as if they had been soaked for bristling'.

Good old Sandy...a party animal to the last...

Next...the Reverend George Gleig and his first hand account (published, naturally, by the Murrays) of the calm before the storm.

Interior of the palace of Shauh Shujah Ool Moolk, Late King of Cabul.
This lithograph is taken from plate 3 of 'Afghaunistan' by Lieutenant James Rattray. Used by permission of the British Library.

Imperial Intrigue and vanishing Russian agents - Alexander Burnes and Henry Rawlinson on Her Majesty's Secret Service

Ah, those Murray authors!

Whether they went in search of Godliness or a good time, they surely got around...further research reveals there were two of them kicking around on secret business in Afghanistan in the 1830s, running into Russian spies who were on the same mission as themselves. Much as in Afghanistan now you can't tell who is working for who without a crib sheet.

We've already met Alexander Burnes...here's the other one, Henry Rawlinson, later to be the discoverer and decipherer of Ancient Sanskrit in Mesopotamia, from Patrick Mcrory's Signal Catastrophe, Hodder and Stoughten 1966 (republished as 'Kabul Catastrophe' in 1986).

"Major Rawlinson, an officer on the staff of the British Minister at Teheran, was bivouacking one night in the wild desert country about a hundred miles west of Heart…he found another party camping nearby. Some of them…wore Cossack uniform...Their officer rose and bowed politely in silence…Rawlinson addressed him in French, but he shook his head. The Englishman tried his own language and was answered in Russian. Rawlinson then switched to Persian and the stranger replied in halting Uzbeg-Turkish, of which the British officer knew just enough to carry on a simple conversation…the two officers smoked a silent friendly pipe together and Rawlinson rode on his way…Two days later the young Cossack officer rode into the Persian camp and at once greeted Rawlinson in excellent French with the smiling comment that "it would not do to be too familiar with strangers in the desert". Rawlinson, realizing that this was the first evidence of direct communication between St Petersburg and Kabul, immediately posted back the 750 miles to Teheran to report to his minister that he had met a Russian emissary to Dost Mohammed, and that his name was Captain Vickovich."

(Though he only had a walk on part in this adventure, because he SURVIVED it...we will be meeting Henry Rawlinson again in my NEXT series of posts...from Iraq...and no, Virginia, we didn't invade Iraq in the 1840s...that had to wait till the 1920s...no, what Rawlinson was doing in Iraq a few years later, in company with Murray author, Henry Austen Layard, was digging up Nineveh and confirming the bible as an historical document...later...later)

Meantime, "We are in a mess here" wrote Alexander Burnes, in Kabul to negotiate with the then ruler there, Dost Mohammed, to a friend; "the emperor of Russia has sent an envoy to Kabul to offer Dost Mohammed Khan money to fight Runjeet Singh!!! I could not believe my eyes and ears; but Captain Vickovich arrived here with a blazing letter, three feet long...the Amir came over to me sharp, and offered to do as I like…and I sent an express at once to my Lord A, telling him that after this I knew not what might happen, and it was now a neck-and-neck race between Russia and us."

Burnes, as envoy, now found himself in a cleft stick. He was not authorised to offer the Dost anything by way of an alliance because the Brits were simultaneously making lifelong chums of the Sikhs (at least until we had a war with THEM...which wasn't long in coming...1842, actually).

"Russia has come forward with offers…Persia has been lavish in her promises, and Bokhara and other states have not been backward.Yet...the chief of Caubaul declares that he prefers the friendly offices of the British...I have no authority…am I to stand by and see us ruined at Kandahar?"

But by the time Burnes was writing this, in late 1838, the decision to invade Afghanistan (in order to prevent Dost Mohammed from making an alliance with Russia, which he had no intention of doing, then or later) had already been taken.

This is confirmed by what happened next. Burnes had left Kabul. Soon after however, the then Russian allies, the Persians, abandoned their siege of Herat. Lord Palmerston, who had long maintained a suspicious and hostile attitude towards Russia, protested to the embarassed Russians about them sending an agent to Kabul and Count Nesselrode, a Russian diplomat who knew that his Tsar's ambitions in the region were unrealistic hogwash, took the opportunity to disavow his own agent…he pretended he had no knowledge of him, (John le Carre didn't invent all this stuff, it seems) saying he:

"knew no Captain Vickovish except an adventurer of that name who had been ...engaged lately in some unauthorised intrigues at Kabul and Kandahar."

As Mcrory continues the story:

"Vickovich realised that he was to be a sacrifice on the altar of appeasement. He went back to his hotel, wrote a few bitter and reproachful messages, burnt the rest of his papers and blew out his brains".

Yes, well, all a great spy story to be later thrillingly retold by Murray author Peter Hopkirk in 'The Great Game' .

But, in the meantime, McCrory says: "The Russian backed threat to Afghanistan had melted like snow in summer. Now was the time far the british to leave well alone."

Fat chance, as we'll see. Meanwhile, the enticing Afghan women above are again taken from the exquisite work of Lt James Rattray who was in the British Army of the Indus that invaded Afghanistan in 1838. It wasn't all about politics, you know...

As we shall see.

'Ghiljie women in the lower orders' taken from plate 6 of 'Afghaunistan' by Lieutenant James Rattray Used by permission of the British Library.

Death on the Frontier - The End of Our Man in Bokhara.

I'm moving on next to contemporary accounts of what became of the British Army of the Indus in the Kabul uprising of 1841, and the events that followed. What with already being dead and everything, our hero, Alexander Burnes, unfortunately, wasn't able to offer us any insights into the forces that the British invasion had unleashed. Or indeed to illuminate the ghastly sequence of events that had led him and so many others to their joint and several demise. So, for succeeding posts, we will have to turn elsewhere.

So, later on, we'll be hearing from two other Murray authors, Lady Florentia Sale and George Gleig, both eyewitnesses, about what happened next, as well as digging a little deeper into the causes of the disaster.

In the meantime, here are Burnes last written words, from his journal on the night of 31st October 1841: "What will this day bring forth? It will make or mar me, I suppose. Before the sun sets I shall know whether I go to Europe or succeed McNaghten. I grow very tired of praise and I suppose I shall get tired of censure in time."

McNaghten, by the way, was his chief, who he hoped to succeed as Envoy of Her Majesty. For the sake of promotion, Burnes had downplayed the danger they were facing...his chief would only leave,(and Burnes succeed him) only if all were quiet...so Burnes had to make himself believe that all was quiet...

On the morning of 2nd November,Alexander Burnes, traveller, spy and celebrity author, along with his young brother Charles was cut to pieces in the garden of his house in Kabul, within sight of the garrison cantonments. They had been led into the garden by a mysterious Kashmiri who helped them into disguises, but when he had them among the mob, cried out:

"See, friends, here is Sikundar Burnes!"

Our Man in Bokhara - Alexander Burnes and Disaster in Afghanistan 1841 - Part Three

"He made me repeat the kualma or creed in Persian and in Arabic to his inexpressible delight. He said that our greatness had risen from a knowledge of mankind and attending to other peoples' customs as well as our own." Alexander Burnes, 'Travels into Bokhara', John Murray, London, 1834

Alexander Burnes, Travel Writer, Diplomat and Spy, was one of those 19th Century Brits who partook of "otherness".First, he was a Scot. Second, he was a gifted linguist, fluent in Persian and Urdu, read enough Arabic to talk about the Koran in Kabul,( impressing the hell out of his host, Dost Mohammed), and spoke enough Punjabi to get by disguised as a merchant, negotiating his way past bandits on the road into the Hindu Kush and in negotiating entrance at all to the city of Bokhara in Central Asia, a sacred city of Islam forbidden to non Muslims, and especially to the "Feringee"...meaning Franks...or Europeans.

(Memories of the atrocities of the 11th century Crusaders die hard out there...as George Bush might be able to tell you.)

By "otherness", I mean transformation. As we know from the story of Lawrence of Arabia, there was, for the likes of TE Lawrence and Richard Burton and Alexander Burnes, all to a degree outsiders in their own cultures, a certain liberation in embracing the East. There are undertones of both the sexual and spiritual to this "Orientalism" as Edward Said famously described it. There are a number of other examples from the John Murray stable.Byron himself found a personal liberation in Ottoman territories. Isabella Bird recovered health and confidence only when hiking up mopuntains in the Americas or China...

One has to read between the lines a little, but both in Burnes' published writings and what I've seen and read of his private correspondence, he was one of those rare birds of the Imperial flock who found the strangeness of foriegn parts stimulating, and that he wanted to remake himself in that other place.

(The illustration above, by the way, is called "Arab companions of Alexander Burnes"...They were not, of course, "Arabs" at all...but that term signifies exactly the "Eastern Other")

Again, it is clear that Burnes delights in associating himself with that earlier "Sekundar"...Alexander the Great...seeking out relics, imagining he has located battlefields. He walks the valleys of the Sind and Sutej with a mental map of conquest, and of another self, already in his mind.

Which makes me think that this man's presence in later fiction extends past his being a character (and model) in the first Flashman book. Daniel Dravitt in Kipling's 'Man who would be King' again comes to imagine himself as 'Alexander Redux' in an unnamed city in Central Asia, till he too is destroyed like Burnes was, by feeling himself more at home than was justified.

But I'm anticipating events I'm going to deal with later. Getting ahead of myself.

One of the disciplines and pleasures of reading archive correspondance is that it takes you to the past in the historic present tense. Someone writing a letter is only thinking of the moment. So let's rejoin Burnes at a moment in Cairo in March1835.

He's on his way back East after scoring spectacular success in a diplomatic mission to the Punjab and Afghanistan, and his onward travels into central Asia and the Persian Empire...had reported his success to his chiefs, and to a public eager for tales of travel and discovery...and is now writing a curiously "constructed" version of himself to the son of his publisher, the future John Murray III...Take a look at them at the top of this entry...and reproduced here.

In the John Murray Archive are two versions of the same letter...facsimilies. It has been copied, presumably by one of Murray's clerks, preserving even the upside down placing of the postscript at the top of the letter...it has been treasured then, marked out as special. The physical peculiarity of the letter as object has been highlighted and reproduced as somehow special. This colours the reading and quoting of its text...enriches its voice:

He describes the

"Pyramids of Egypt, which, as my favourite author Gibbon says 'still stand erect and unshaken above the floods of the Nile, after an hundred generations of the leaves of autumn have dropped into the grave'"

He continues: "I cannot believe myself so far distant from the salons of London, but the moment I reach Alexandria the line of demarkation was too apparent, the transition from civilisation to barbarism was instantaneous and we recieved before leaving the steamer the astounding information that 15,000 individuals had died of plague withion the last three months and that 1298 had perished on the previous day..."

He is letting us and the Murrays know that A) It's rough out here, and B) he's right at home.

He knowingly quotes Byron to a Murray...from the poem Childe Harold...exclaiming happily "New shores descried made every bosom gay" He talks, as Byron famously did of the Pillars of Hercules, Lisbon...the Kingdom of the Goths...of the world through the glass of books...

(It is extraordinary how everything I come accross in this archive seems to lead back to Byron by some route or other)

Knowingly, flatteringly, he goes on: "The Quarterly is lying before me and strangely enough I have been perusing the very article which treats of Mohammed Ali in that able essay regarding the encroachments of Russia...Cairo is in sight, the boatmen are singing a song of delight in the music(?) not such however as attended on Cleopatra in her galley nor enough to make charmed into a forgetfulness of all your many attentions to me..."

Both for it's charm and it's intrigue, I have to call this double version of himself en route to his last mission my First Treasure on my voyage of search of Alexander Burnes...

Coming next...another oriental treasure...a letter in Farsi, or Persian - a language of Afghanistan, to Burnes, written by the great Runjeet Singh, to whom Burnes was to deliver some Shire horses (horses of that size being unfamiliar in those parts) while conducting, rather more plausibly, an intelligence mission to secure British alliances with the Sikhs of Lahore, explore possibilities with the new Ruler of Afghanistan.

(or of Kabul anyway...no one person has EVER succeeded in ruling the whole territory, statehood or not)

the redoubtable Dost Mohammed...before proceeding to explore the Russian presence in their own backyard of Bokhara.

He didn't find any Russians there, not this first time...but that's to get ahead of myself again. I must stop doing that. He'll meet them soon enough.

Our Man in Bokhara - Alexander Burnes and Disaster in Afghanistan 1841 - Part Two

"Runjeet Singh enquired whether wine was best before or after food; and laughed heartily after an answer from myself when I recommended both"
Alexander Burnes, 'Travels into Bokhara', published by John Murray, London, 1834

So who was this Alexander Burnes? The first thing I read was that he was Scottish, which is always agreeable. He came from Montrose, one of four sons of the Provost, from a family that claimed a connection with the poet. The added "e" in "Burnes" bespeaks a certain gentrification, as indeed does the fact that two of his brothers were doctors... both the one who died with him, cut to pieces in a garden in Kabul in November of 1841, and his surviving brother, who corresponded with the Murrays after his death.

One of the features (and indeed organising principles) of this blog is that the letter and business archives of the Murray's publishing house should act as a kind of lens into history, so I thought I'd best start there...and I'd have to say (with some relief given the scale of the story of which they form a tiny but significant part) that the collection's holdings from Burnes are quite modest. Modest...but oddly potent. After all, he died young with only one proper book under his belt, "Travels to Bokhara", written on the long voyage home in 1833. It was this book that made him famous and got him knighted.

As he wrote to his mother in 1834:
'I have been inundated by visits from authors, publishers, societies and whatnot…I am a perfect wild beast.'

One of the publishers was, of course, John Murray. He confided further in a another letter home that King William himself had said to him in Brighton:

"Really, sir, you are a wonderful man. I heard you were an able man, but now I know you are most able. I trust in God your life may be spared, that our Eastern Empire may benefit by the talents and abilities which you possess"

His second book, "Cabool" is both politically cagey and fragmentary by comparison.

(I should just add for my far more assiduous library colleagues that the reason I don't cite the exact dates for these letters is that I don't know what they are. They are quoted from "Kabul Catastrope" by the otherwise redoubtable military historian Patrick Macrory...and he doesn't either)

Burnes was our first "Man in Bokhara" and elsewhere...but he was hardly the last. And hardly the last to die in the service of political gamesmanship in that part of the world. To attempt to understand his story might illuminate our own concerns.

Here are a couple of highlights from the archive for me, that have led me into particular lines of speculation about character and politics...which are, after all, the twin concerns of the playwright as well as the reader in me. First a letter written from his brother's house in London on January 25th, 1834, on his return from his first great foray into spying and negotiating for the Empire on the North West Frontier. Burnes is writing to Murray about the publication of his first book "Travels into Bokhara" which deals with a diplomatic mission to Runjeet Singh, the Sikh ruler of the Punjab, and his further explorations of culture and river systems...all the way to the Holy Muslim City of Bokhara in central Asia (via a bit of exploration of the new regime of Dost Mohammed in Kabul).

The first thing I noticed was that his signature is rather fabulous. And the second thing I noticed is his concern for his own image and the robust health of his ego. He writes that he's:

"accepting the sum of 800 guineas, the amount fixed on by you. I might. I am aware, have received a larger sum of money for my work but I feel much obliged to you for your liberal offer...You are of course fully aware from my personal communications with you that I have to submit a proof sheet to the authorities as the work goes on and that they have it in their power to strike out any political observations that are likely to give offence. I am sure that their pruning will much improve the work and I pledge myself that the arrangements will not cause delay...

With reference to your request that my picture should form the frontispiece of the book, I am ready to comply with it on these terms that the likeness be given in costume with these words under it "The costume of Bokhara" It will be well known that it is a portrait and will save me from the appearance of vanity..."

In both ego and appetite for danger, he seems to anticipate Lawrence of Arabia. Here he is writing about the portrait again on June 13th 1834:

'I see the advertisement in the quarterly states my book to be accompanied by a "portrait of the author". You would oblige me very much by altering this in the subsequent advertisements for the portrait is engraved as the "Costume of Bokhara". It was intended to have the knowing ones to find it out, Believe me, most truly yours, Alexander Burnes.'

He only wants the best people to know that this is his picture...a reputation is a thing to be managed in the interests of a career. He's not wrong about that.

On the 28th of December, now en-route back to the East for his next mission, he is writing to Murray in a jolly mood from Paris...there is a definite change in tone which indicates both that the two were now friendly, (through Burnes and Murray's son, John Murray lll, were of an age) and that Burnes knew how to have himself a good time. It's the rather naughty letter of a younger man who knows he'll be indulged his peccadilloes...

"what with dances and dinners time flies faster in this capital than ever I have found it - I have been living FAST in every sense of the word and for a stake of five francs in the lottery have my fellow traveller and myself...2700 francs which we hold FAST but like a good Christian, I shall render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and scatter it in Paris..."

Then follows Burnes' approbation of the 2nd edition proofs...which is the one I've seen...he admires the book's production, and he's right...it's quite gorgeous. He also likes the size of it, which will make the book like Lyell's 'Principles of Geology' (1833), but he talks about engravings again and says:

"I would like however if you could make some alteration in my visage in the "Costume of Bokhara" for it is said to be so arch and cunning that I shall be handed down to posterity as a real Tartar!!... I am enjoying Paris very much and think that your son's prediction of my never getting beyond it will prove true...with my best wishes to him and your family, believe me, yours ever sincerely..."

I think we can infer from these letters that Sandy is a bit of a man for the ladies, a man concerned with and aware of, his own attractiveness. Maybe George MacDonald Fraser, author of the Flashman books, took more than Burnes' ability with languages, and propensity to travel through barbaric regions in disguise, as a model for his roguish hero...

Next time, an image conscious communication from Egypt, and my first treasure from this story of derring do along the frontiers of the Empire...

Disaster in Afghanistan 1841 - Part One - Our Man in Bokhara - Alexander Burnes

"In the year 1831 I was deputed in a political capacity to the court of Lahore, charged with a letter from the King of England, and a present of fine horses to the ruler of the country." Alexander Burnes 'Travels into Bokhara', published by John Murray, London, 1834.

The very first time I visited the Murray's extraordinary house of business in Albemarle Street, John Murray 7th, with courtesy undimmed by his having given this tour ten thousand times before, showed me the gallery of portraits of Murray authors from the last two hundred and fifty years. There was Byron, of course, and Scott. There was David Livingstone, Disraeli...

Many of these portraits were paintings commissioned by the publishers for their books. The originals now hang in the Murray's drawing rooms. He stopped me at this one.

"Him",he said, "I wish you'd do something about him." It's a couple of years later, sir.But here goes.

"This is Sir Alexander Burnes "in the costume of a native of Bokhara." he said. I looked at it, and I was lucky enough to know a little about who this was.

"Sekundar Burnes" I said. And John Murray's eyes lit up.

I then had to explain, slightly apologetically, that the reason I knew who he was, was that I'm a big fan of the Flashman novels (see previous post) by George MacDonald Fraser...and Burnes is a minor character in the first of them (and one of the best) "Flashman" - which deals with the immediate aftermath of Flashy's rustification from Rugby School, his joining the army, and immediately getting mixed up with skullduggery and wenching on the North West Frontier in 1841 and 2.

From the novel, Burnes, I knew, was an intelligence officer. One of those epic Victorian adventurers...who had gathered intelligence and conducted diplomacy in southern and central Asia. Obsessed with his namesake, Alexander the Great, whose traces in that part of the world he assiduously traced, Burnes was one of the desert loving English...and met his melancholy fate in Kabul as the first prominent British casualty in the great disaster of the First Afghan War.

In the novel, Flashman becomes a hero because he is one of only two survivors of the horrific retreat from Kabul in 1842. This is the event that launches him on his fictional career of poltroonery in every available trouble spot in 19th century military history. In real life, it was only a field surgeon, Doctor James Brydon, out of at least 12,000 military and civilian personnel, who crawled wounded into Jallalabad in January of 1842.

I vaguely knew who Burnes was, then, and promised John Murray I'd try to find out more. And so I have. The following series of posts record some of the things I've found in the John Murray Archive about Burnes, whose books on his "Travels to Bokhara" and "Cabool" Murray published in 1834 and 1841 respectively...

Just as a taster, before we get going on the archive material, here’s a little bit of Kipling...from the Barrack room Ballads, a light hearted ditty called 'The young British Soldier' which illustrates the continuing resonances of the massacre that was to come, and that brought generations of British pilgrims to the gravesites of what a later Murray author, Peter Hopkirk, echoing Kipling (who in turn was echoing Arthur Connolly, another of it's martyr) was to immortalise as 'The Great Game'

"When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains

And the women come out to cut up what remains

Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains

And go to your Gawd like a soldier"

Yes, it was a bit like that...