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larger force than upon any other; and presented himself before Peshawur with so powerful an army, that Runjeet Singh, afraid to encounter him in the open field, had recourse to an act of the basest treachery by which the whole of that vast concourse of soldiers melted away in a single night. The incident is very striking, and as it is related on the authority of the agent, a Mr. Harlan, an American adventurer, who had no reluctance to take the whole disgrace upon himself, the statement may be relied upon. Runjeet despatched him as an envoy to the Afghan camp, and when he got there he employed himself in corrupting the followers of Dost Mahomed. He divided his brothers against him by exciting their jealousy, and prevailed upon one of them (of all others, too, the lately deposed chief of Peshawur) to withdraw suddenly from the camp about nightfall, with 10,000 retainers. "The chief," says Harlan, "accompanied me towards the Sikh camp, whilst his followers fled to their mountain fastnesses. So large a body retiring from the Ameer's control, in opposition to his will, and without previous intimation, threw the general camp into inextricable confusion, which terminated in the clandestine rout of his forces without beat of drum, or sound of bugle, or the trumpet's blast, in the quiet stillness of midnight. At daybreak no vestige of the Afghan camp was seen, where six hours before 50,000 men and 10,000 horses, with all the busy host of attendants, were rife with the tumult of wild emotion." The picture is startling. We cannot recall any similar incident of so surprising and even appalling a character.

Falling back upon Caubul with the remnant of his forces, Dost Mahomed shut himself up in his palace, and plunged deeply, says Mr. Kaye, into the study of the Koran. What consolation or wisdom he drew from its pages does not appear; but, rankling under the loss of territory, and the disaffection of his natural allies, and apprehending nothing less than an ultimate movement against the capital, he turned his thoughts upon the necessity of calling in foreign aid. His desire lay between Persia and the British; and while he was debating this problem in his mind, two new events, equally alarming from their strangeness, although totally opposite in their complexion, arrested his attention the appearance of an English Envoy at Caubul, and the advance of a Persian army against Herat. In each case the avowed purpose concealed a sinister design. Captain Burnes was despatched to the Afghan capital for the ostensible object of negociating a treaty of commerce, but with the secret object of political diplomacy; and Herat was besieged by the Persians avowedly because it was a depot for kidnapping and selling Persian subjects into slavery, but really to gratify the ambition of the young Shah, fostered and urged on by Russia, who had

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The Failure of the Caubul Mission.

241

her own ends to achieve by establishing the Persian power in that quarter. These two events, which occurred in the autumn of 1837, laid the seeds of the Afghan war. The recent death of the Khan of Herat gives additional interest to these details at the present moment, since there is reason to believe that a similar intrigue is going forward at the present moment in Central Asia, with the ascendancy of Russian influence in the background, pointing at no distant day to a Russian descent upon Hindostan.

The mission of Captain Burnes had been in some sort invited by Dost Mahomed. Upon Lord Auckland's accession to the office of Governor-General in 1836, Dost Mahomed addressed a letter of congratulation to his Lordship, asking his advice at the same time as to the course he ought to take in reference to the Sikhs. Lord Auckland's reply expressed the most friendly wishes for the prosperity of the Afghan nation, urged the expediency of opening the Indus, and hinted at a mission for the discussion of "commercial topics." As to the Afghans, his Lordship declared that it was not the practice of the British Government to interfere with the affairs of other independent states. Well may Mr. Kaye give vent to astonishment and regret that these repeated avowals of a policy of neutrality were so soon followed by a declaration of war. "With what feelings, three years afterwards," he exclaims, "when a British army was marching upon his capital, the Ameer must have remembered these words, it is not difficult to conjecture."

Captain Burnes' mission failed. Success was impossible for a negociation which was intended merely as a cloak for ulterior designs. The envoy had a task to perform which no diplomatic ingenuity could accomplish with credit. To talk politics, as a representative of the British Government, with the Ameer of Caubul, without being invested with the power to come to any definite conclusion, placed Burnes in a dilemma both painful and humiliating. Actuated personally by the most sincere desire to cultivate a friendly alliance with the Ameer, but constantly checked in his impulses, and defeated in his views, by the restrictions imposed upon him from head-quarters, we can hardly regard him as fulfilling a much more honourable office than that of a sort of authorized and authenticated spy. Dost Mahomed sought assistance from the British Government in the matter of Peshawur and the Sikhs; but the British Government, acting through Captain Burnes, would give him nothing but good advice-or advice, whether it was good or not. For a long time, much longer than the pride of a European power could have preserved its amicable dispositions in the face of such discouragements, the Ameer continued true to his desire to culti

VOL. XVI. NO. XXXI.

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vate our alliance; kept off the agents of Persia and Russia, who were besieging him with temptations; treated the most flattering offers coldly; and all in the hope of securing friendly relations with the English, which it was our interest as well as his own to cultivate. And it was not until Burnes received his final instructions to reject the Ameer's proposals, that Dost Mahomed reluctantly, but as a matter of necessity, turned his face, as the Easterns say, towards the masked enemies of England. The causes of Captain Burnes' failure are thus ably summed up by Mr. Kaye :

"His mission failed. What wonder? It could by no possibility have succeeded. If utter failure had been the great end sought to be accomplished, the whole business could not have been more cunningly devised. Burnes asked everything, and promised nothing. He was tied hand and foot. He had no power to treat with Dost Mahomed. All that he could do was to demand on one hand, and refuse on the other. He talked about the friendship of the British Government. Dost Mahomed asked for some proof of it; and no proof was forthcoming. The wonder is, not that the Ameer at last listened to the overtures of others, but that he did not seek other assistance before.

"No better proof of his earnest desire to cement an alliance with the British Government need be sought for than that involved in the fact of his extreme reluctance to abandon all hope of assistance from the British, and to turn his eyes in another direction. It was not until he was driven to despair by resolute refusals from the quarter whence he looked for aid, that he accepted the offers so freely made to him by other States, and set the seal upon his own destruction. 'Our Government,' said Burnes, would do nothing; but the Secretary of the Russian Legation came with the most direct offers of assistance and money, and as I had no power to counteract him by a similar offer, and got wigged for talking of it at a time when it would have been merely a dead letter to say Afghanistan was under our protection, I was obliged of course to give in.' What better result Lord Auckland could have anticipated it is hard to say. If the failure of the mission astonished him, he must have been the most sanguine of men."

While this unpropitious mission was working in vain at Caubul, our other agent, Mr. M'Neill, who had proceeded to the Persian camp before Herat, was exposed to a result still more disastrous. We considered the siege of Herat as a proceeding that involved a direct violation of existing treaties. Our language, on this point at least, was explicit, and Mr. M'Neill's instructions were clear and peremptory. He distinctly announced the views of the British Government to the Shah in the camp; and the message was afterwards repeated in unmistakable terms, when a naval armament was despatched to the

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Persian Gulf. But in spite of all our menaces and expostulations, the English agent was treated with open disrespect. Finding that his position entailed nothing but disgrace, he repeatedly applied for his dismissal, and at last was compelled to leave without it. "The Russians," observes Mr. Kaye, "were exalted at the Persian Court-the British were slighted and humiliated. There was not a tent-pitcher in the camp who did not know that the British mission was treated with intentional disrespect. It was time, therefore, to bring matters to a crisis." And the crisis came in a shape the Shah had scarcely anticipated.

"Reluctant as he was," says our author, "to terminate our diplomatic intercourse with Persia, Mr. M'Neill, on the 7th June, took his departure from the Persian camp. From the ramparts of Herat they looked out upon the striking of the English ambassador's tents, and a large party of horsemen were seen making their way across the plain. The rupture was now complete. Persia was no longer an ally of Great Britain."

The whole account of the siege of Herat given in this work, and derived in great part from unpublished sources, is one of the most vivid and animated pieces of historical writing with which we are acquainted. The sketch of the old city, seated with solid earthen walls, surrounded by a wet ditch, with its poor and oppressed population dirty and ill-clad, and going about in a hurried and anxious manner, "each man looking with suspicion into his neighbour's face," where few women were to be seen, and it was dangerous to be abroad after sunset, from the fear of being seized and sold into slavery,-a fear which prevailed so universally that the shops were shut before dark, and the stillness of the night was scared with uproars, and challenges, and cries for helpbrings the terrible scene in its ordinary state under the rule of terror of Prince Kamran palpably before us. This Prince Kamran, the son of Shah Mahmood, was the last remnant of the Suddozye race that retained a hold of power: an old and feeble man, broken down by long years of debauchery, whose sovereignty was little better than a ghastly pageant. The portrait of this bandit and sensualist is painted to the life; and the account of his return to Herat, upon the rumour of the advance of the Persians, “the streets lined with eager thousands, and the house-tops alive with gazers," is one of the many faithful pictures of Eastern life which abound in these volumes, and in which the author brings his descriptive powers to bear with the happiest effect upon his intimate knowledge of the habits and manners of the country. Shah Kamran had been absent upon a campaign in Seistan, when the intelligence reached him of the advance of the Persians upon Herat. He immediately returned home at the head

of his troops, accompanied by his Wuzeer, Yar Mahomed Khan, an individual who afterwards became so prominent in the entangled web of Afghan politics, and whose recent death has so unfortunately rekindled the old feuds and rivalries, that we must pause for a moment over Mr. Kaye's sketch of his character. This Yar Mahomed, he tells us, was a "stout, square-built man, of middle height, with a heavy, stern countenance; thick, negrolike lips; bad, straggling teeth; an overhanging brow, and an abruptly receding forehead." The outward appearance of the repulsive Wuzeer is not very promising; but, bad as it is, the qualities it conceals are worse. Of unquestionable courage and ability, affable and even serene and courteous in his bearing, this hideous man seems to have concentrated in his nature the most revolting attributes of the national character, rendered additionally dangerous by an amount of energy, tact, and knowledge, not very common amongst races distinguished rather by the extremes of languor and ferocity, than by constancy of purpose and mental activity.

"Of all the unscrupulous miscreants in Central Asia, Yar Mahomed was the most unscrupulous. His avarice and his ambition knew no bounds, and nothing was suffered to stand in the way of their gratification. Utterly without tenderness or compassion, he had no regard for the sufferings of others. Sparing neither sex nor age, he trod down the weak with an iron heel; and, a tyrant himself, encouraged the tyranny of his retainers. As faithless as he was cruel, there was no obligation which he had not violated, no treachery that had not stained his career. If there was an abler or a worse man in Central Asia, I have not yet heard his name."

While this sanguinary and unprincipled minister was accompanying through the gates of Herat the master whose seat he was destined to leap into soon afterwards, a stranger, of whose presence they were unconscious, and whose influence upon subsequent events invests every step of his progress with interest, was gazing down upon the cortege.

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Among the many who went forth on that September morning to witness the entrance of Shah Kamran into his capital, was a young European officer. Riding out a mile beyond the city walls, he picketed his horse in the court-yard of a deserted house, and joined a party of Afghans, who, sitting on the domed roof of the building, were watching the procession as it passed. He had entered Herat about a month before, after an adventurous journey from Caubul, through the Imauk and Hazareh countries. The name of this young officer was Eldred Pottinger."

Pottinger, at that time a lieutenant in the Bombay Artillery, was there in no official capacity, having been merely sent by his uncle, Colonel Pottinger, to explore Afghanistan with the view

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