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

Empire, wearing the cocked hats, ostrich feathers and blue gold-laced trousers of the diplomatic uniform, and behind him the soldiers of the Raj, dusted down and fattened up after their year’s march from Ferozepore, demonstrated in simple terms the power behind his throne.
    The Kabulis, it is true, watched the King ride by in sullen silence. They paid more attention to the British diplomatists than to Shah Shuja, and very few citizens showed him any royal respect at all. But the old man was childishly pleased to be back in his palace (though everything, he said, seemed smaller than it used to be), and his British bodyguard, firing him a royal salute and offering him their insincere congratulations, for they all despised him, left him there with his own soldiers and returned to their camp. ‘I trust,’ said General Keane the commanding officer in his dispatch to Lord Auckland next day, ‘that we have thus accomplished all the objects which your Lordship had in contemplation, when you planned and formed the Army of the Indus, and the expedition into Afghanistan’: but he did not really think so, for he expressed his thoughts very differently in a private letter to a friend. ‘Mark my words,’ he said then, ‘it will not be long before there is here some signal catastrophe.’
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    Much of the army was now sent back to India, and General Keane went with it, leaving a division of infantry, a regiment of cavalry and an artillery battery. The Russians had vanished from Kabul, and the capital in its baleful edgy way was apparently docile. The British settled in. Their chief representatives were an Ulsterman and a Scot—Sir William Macnaghten, ‘Envoy and Minister at the Court of Shah Soojahool-Moolk’, and Sir Alexander Burnes, unexpectedly back in Kabul as British Resident. These ware now the real rulers of Afghanistan, the puppet-masters.
    Macnaghten had never been there before. He was 44, but looked much older—an Indian civil administrator, bespectacled, habitually top-hatted, with a dignified presence and plenty of ambition: ‘ our Lord Palmerston’, Emily Eden called him, perhaps a little cattily. He was a great linguist, and though his talents were mostly of the bureaucratic kind, his manner could be pedantic, his views were often fatuous and his appearance was, in that anomalous setting, sometimes a little comic, still he had courage and was honest—if not always with himself, at least with others. Burnes was a more elusive character. A kinsman of Burns the poet, he had begun life in the Company’s armies, but in his twenties had made a famous series of journeys in Central Asia, penetrating as far as Bokhara and the Caspian. He was lionized in England, where they called him Bokhara Burnes, and William IV had once summoned him to Brighton Pavilion and made him talk for an hour and a half about his amazing adventures. It was Burnes’ reports from Kabul, during his mission there in 1837, that had turned Auckland’s mind to the idea of invasion: though he had admired the Dost, still he prudently adjusted his views to the Governor-General’s policies, and had accordingly been knighted shortly before the war began. He was still only 34, a wistful-looking man with a long nose, a sparse moustache and pouches under his big brown eyes.
    Although the Dost was still alive, and there were signs that most of the Afghan tribal chiefs would never pledge allegiance toShuja, the British set out to enjoy themselves in Kabul. The 16th Lancers had unfortunately taken their foxhounds back to India with them, but there were many other pleasures available. The climate in the autumn was pleasant, the natives, if undemonstrative, seemed friendly enough, and there was little work to do. They built a racetrack, and skated on frozen ponds, and played cricket in the dust, even persuading a few Kabulis to take up the game. They learnt to enjoy the wrestling matches and cock-fights that the Afghans loved, and they organized amateur