Jokes which still make me sad – British retreat from Kabul
There are many; French Colony, Chak Shazad, Jabra chowk, all dealt with separately. I have selected one man, strongest, or near so, in uniform, but weakest in shalwar. He used to tell everyone that while in shalwar he feels that if it slips or drops not only, he but his whole tribe will feel disgraced and ashamed for all time to come. Shalwar had already been made a part of the official dress. His fear was real.
As Governor of a province he invited to dinner High Court judges and the Supreme Court judges on the circuit there. I was one of them. His first remark which alerted me was “I do not know whether the judge’s children have gone after their mother or their father because all seek admission in technical and professional colleges on Governor’s reserved quota”. There was no response from any quarter.
He then took all of us to a photograph very well framed and nicely fixed on the wall and showed in it a tiered mountainous region with a road passing down below. In one of the Anglo-Afghan wars the Commander, in retreat, followed the road and the total force was decimated from the top hideouts which he had not been taken care to clear them or make them secure. Under a royal decree not only he was buried there but a chain put around his grave to perpetuate his indignity and disgrace. Years later his widow asked for the removal of the chain which was accepted as a token of royal mercy. One of the judges of the Supreme Court put the usual simple question as we do in court, inviting a loaded embarrassing reply.” Why are you showing this photograph to us” The answer “I wish I could take you all there.”
One day in the newspapers I read that the ex-Governor had been brutally killed by shots fired. It could be a matter of some satisfaction for the family or tribe that he had an honourable death at the hands of his sworn enemies all in the advancement of the enmity and the honour. Whenever I go over his life span and his utterances, about one and all, I feel very sad.
I searched for corroborative material and found two. I am reproducing them hereunder:
- William Dalrymple: Return of a King, First Afghan war, 1838 to 1842 in 568 pages, first published in 2013.
In 1839 British invaded Afghanistan for the first time with 20,000 British and East India Company troops and reestablished the throne of Shujaul Mulk. After two years Afghan people resisted in the name of Jihad. The war ended in Britain’s greatest humiliation of the nineteenth century; an entire army of the most powerful nation in the world ambushed in retreat and utterly routed by the Afghan tribesman. —called the British greatest imperial disaster of our times. P328. there were only two survivors of 750 garrisons. P.502 What Mirza Ata wrote after1842 remains equally true today, “it is certainly no easy thing to invade or govern the Kingdom of Khurassan”. - Wikipedia 1842 Retreat from Kabul.
“Assistant Surgeon William Brydon who was riding a pony taken from a mortally wounded officer after being begged by the man not to let it fall into anyone else’s hands—-Byron was asked what happened to the army to which he answered “ I am the army”—–Brydon later published a memoir of the death march. The pony that he rode was said to have lain down in a stable and never got up. For several nights’ lights were raised on the gates of Jalalabad and bugles were sounded from the walls in the hope of guiding any further survivors to safety. None appeared.
The End
Experiences of a Lifetime 