Free Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress by Jan Morris

them, nor the will to fall into action, were wanting if it appeared requisite, however remotely, for the safety of the British Empire’. The winter had gone, and the spring had arrived with its promise of flooded streams and heat-haze, before the troops crossed the Indus River and marched up the mountain valleys towards Quetta, Kandahar and Kabul. For the first time since the days of Alexander the Great, it was said, the ‘flags of a civilized nation’ flew across the Indus.
    The soldiers’ progress was laborious, for behind them in an apparently endless stream there stumbled some 38,000 camp followers and 30,000 camels. The army was to live off the country, but took with it nevertheless thirty days’ rations of grain, and enough sheep and cattle for ten weeks’ meat. It also carried an astonishing supply of inessentials. Two hundred and sixty camels, it was said, were needed to carry the personal gear of the commanding general and his staff. One brigadier needed sixty. One regiment required two just for its Manila cigars. There were tons of soap, gallons of wine, crates of jam, crockery, linen, potted meats. Each officer was allowed a minimum of ten domestic servants—most had many more—not counting the grooms for his camels and the six bearers he needed if he took a palanquin.
    Every regiment had 600 stretcher-bearers. Every platoon of every regiment had its water-carriers, its saddlers, its blacksmiths, itscobblers, its tailors, its laundry-men, and there were the men who polished brasses, and the men who put up tents, and the cooks, the orderlies, the stable-boys—together with all their wives, and all their children, and often aunts, uncles or grandparents—and troops of prostitutes from half India, with fiddlers, dancing-girls, fortune-tellers, metal-workers, wood-gatherers—with herdsmen to look after the cattle, sheep and goats, and butchers to slaughter them—and there were carts and wagons by the thousand, palanquins, drays, chargers, ponies, dogs—and so all this great multitude stumbled away to war, each corps with its band playing, a regiment of Queen’s cavalry, two of Company cavalry, nine regiments of infantry, engineers, gunners, Shah Shuja’s 6,000 hopeful sepoys and those splendid prancing banditti, the Yellow Boys. A mighty dust hung in the air behind them, as a sign that the Raj was marching.
6
    As a military operation the invasion was a qualified success. The army presently ran short of supplies, as its lines of communication grew more tenuous, and it was repeatedly harassed by the Afghan marksmen of the passes. Its intelligence proved faulty, too, perhaps because it had no intelligence department. But Ghazni, the first place to offer formal resistance, was taken by storm in a neat little coup d ’ armes ‚ and when Afghan forces consequently fell back in confusion, the Dost himself, refusing British terms of ‘honourable asylum’ in India, fled north to take refuge with the crazy Nasrullah Khan, Amir of Bokhara, who promptly locked him up. Organized opposition seemed to be at an end, and on August 6, 1839, Shah Shuja, supported by the full panoply of British imperial power, entered Kabul to re-assume his throne.
    Aesthetically the King’s return was fine. A scramble of low mud buildings and roofed bazaars, dominated by the powerful silhouette of the Bala Hissar, Kabul was just the place for pageantry, and the King cut a sufficiently imposing figure. His coronet unfortunately no longer bore the diamond called the Koh-i-Nor, Light of the Universe, for that well-known gem had long before been extractedby Ranjit Singh as a fee for his hospitality, but in other respects the restored ruler of Afghanistan adequately looked the part. He was a good-looking man, dark of skin and stoutly built, with his luxuriant beard dyed black, and he was gorgeously dressed that day, and scintillated with jewelry, and rode a white charger accoutred in gold. Beside him rode the representatives of the British