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

dramatics. In the early mornings they went for rides over the hills: in the evenings they listened to band concerts; in the night, very often, they comforted themselves with seductive girls of Kabul. One or two married Afghans. 1 Others, beforevery long, were joined by their wives and children from India. There was no shortage of food now, and the officers entertained each other lavishly. Burnes used to give weekly dinner parties at his house in the city, with champagnes, sherries, clarets, liqueurs, hermetically sealed salmon and Scottish hotch-potch (‘veritable hotch-potch, all the way frae Aberdeen’).
    So safe did the British feel that presently the Army was moved out of Kabul proper, leaving the Shah protected only by his own levies in the Bala Hissar. Now the whole force was concentrated in a big cantonment on the low damp plain to the east, within sight of the citadel but about a mile from the city’s edge. It was a disturbing spot. The Kabul River ran across the plain, slate-grey and shaly, and between the camp and the city there were orchards and gardens, intersected by irrigation channels. In the spring the view could be beautiful enough, with the pinks and whites of the orchard blossoms, the shine of the water, the clutter of the bazaars and houses beyond, and the silhouette of the great fortress rising in tiers upon its hillock as a centre-piece to the scene. But all around the plain lay arid hills, one ridge beyond another, featureless and bare: and on their brown slopes stood here and there, relics of the centuries of Afghan feuding, small fortress-towers, some crumbled, some recently patched up, which gave to the whole place an ominous watchful air, as though even when one was thinking home-thoughts on the river bank, or hacking back to camp through the apple-orchards, one was never altogether unobserved. 1
    Here the Kabul Army ensconced itself, with all its camels and camp followers, all its appurtenance of stable, canteen, bazaar and married quarter. There were garrisons too at Kandahar and Ghazni to thewest, and at Jalalabad to the east, and in the field columns were always on the move, and Macnaghten’s political officers were ubiquitous. The British hoped that by a combination of display, bribery and coercion all the factions of Afghanistan could be persuaded into cooperation, but they never succeeded. Some groups of the community gave no trouble. Others, particularly the Muslim fanatics called Ghazis, and the Ghilzai tribe which controlled the main mountain passes into India, had to be repeatedly subdued by punitive expeditions, fun for the officers and good experience for the troops. Generally the political officers were treated with wary respect: but in the south at Kelat the half-naked and terribly emaciated corpse of Lieutenant Loveday was found chained to a camel-pannier, while over the border to the north Colonel Charles Stoddart, on a more advanced mission of intelligence, was thrown by the mad Nasrullah into a deep pit full of bones, decomposing matter and especially bred reptiles. 1
    Yet Macnaghten and Burnes felt sanguine. In his comfortable gardened Residency in the heart of the city, down the road from the Bala Hissar, Burnes had little to do but quite enjoyed himself—‘I lead a very pleasant life, and if rotundity and heartiness be proofs of health, I have them’. Macnaghten, whose wife presided graciously over the social life of the cantonment, lived no less contentedly in the Mission Residence upon the plain. ‘All things considered,’ he thought, ‘the perfect tranquillity of the country is to my mind perfectly miraculous. Already our presence has been infinitely beneficial in allaying animosities and pointing out abuses. … We are gradually placing matters on a firm and satisfactory basis … the country is perfectly quiet from Dan to Beersheba.’
    There remained the Dost, who in the summer of 1839 escaped from Bokhara and re-entered Afghanistan with a force of Uzbegs. For a