Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 56, No. 346, August, 1844. Various
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vexed at the disappointment, just then remarked an English officer marching in command of some matchlocks—him he persuaded to join the chase. Outram leading, the whole party pushed on, under a severe fire, to the very topmost pinnacle of the rocks, where was flying the consecrated banner, green and white, of the fanatic Mussulmans. This was captured, the standard-bearer was shot, thirty or forty killed, and about fifty made prisoners.
The sequel we give from page 164 of the History, edited by Mr. Charles Nash:4—"A scene now ensued, much less pleasant to contemplate. It of course became a question what to do with the captives, and they were brought before the Shah. Some of them were released, upon their declaring that they had been forced into the ranks of the king's opponents against their will." We pause to remark, that already in this fact, viz. the cheerful dismissal of prisoners upon their own verbal assurance of friendliness, though so little reconcilable with the furious service on which they were taken, there is enough to acquit the Shah of unmerciful designs. He made an opening through which all might have escaped. "But," proceeds the author, "the majority, excited by fanaticism, were not restrained, even by the Shah's presence, from evincing their animosity towards his person, and avowing their determination to have been to seek his life. One of them, more violent than the rest, upon the interference of one of his majesty's attendants, stabbed him with his dagger; and they were then" [then? what! because one was worse than the rest?] "immediately ordered for execution. Two of them, however, were afterwards spared; one upon the plea of his being a Syud," (i.e., a descendant collaterally from the Prophet,) "and the other, because he pleaded hard for his life."
This account is not very luminous; and it is painful to observe that the man who was abject, and the man who was lucky, were the two selected for mercy. What proportion had previously been dismissed, is not said. The affair occasioned much discussion, as we all know; and the author speaks doubtfully of the necessity5 under which the execution took place, as not "satisfactorily ascertained." He speaks even more doubtfully of the persons supposed to be implicated, viz. the Shah and the commander-in-chief, than of the thing. Little, indeed, could have been known distinctly, where rumour ascribed to each separately the most contradictory acts and motives. Us it surprises, that Lord Keane has not publicly explained himself under such gloomy insinuations. But, in the mean time, this is plain, that the Shah is entitled to benefit by the doubts hanging over the case, not less than our own officer. The writer suggests as one reason for a favourable judgment on the Shah, "previous acts of humanity in the course of his life." Undoubtedly there are such acts, and there are none well attested in the opposite scale. In particular, he spared the eyes of his brother Mahmood, when, by all oriental policy, he had every temptation to incapacitate an active competitor for the throne. Two considerations heighten the merit of this merciful forbearance; Mahmood was the elder, a fact which slightly improved his title; and Mahmood, in a similar situation, had not spared the eyes of an elder brother.
We may certainly, therefore, dismiss the charges of cruelty against the Shah, unless hereafter they shall be better established. But in doing this, it is right to make one remark, overlooked by all who have discussed the subject. If these Ghazees were executed as murderers elect, and as substantially condemned by the very name and character which they assumed, the usages of war in all civilized countries would sustain the sentence; though still there is a difficulty where, on one side, the parties were not civilized. But if they were executed as traitors and rebels taken in arms, such an act, pendente lite, and when as yet nobody could say who was sovereign, must be thought little short of a murder.
With the remaining charge we shall make short work. The reader would laugh heartily if we should call the Dey of Tunis a dissenter, the Pasha of Egypt an old nonconformist, or the Turkish sultan a heretic. But this way of viewing Islamism in some inconceivable relation to the Church of England, or to Protestantism, would not be more extravagant than the attempt to fasten upon an oriental prince the charge of debauchery and a dissolute life. The very viciousness of Asiatic institutions protects him from such reproaches. The effeminate delicacy of easterns, and the morbid principle of seclusion on which they build their domestic honour, will for ever secure both Hindoo Pagans and Mussulmans from blame of this kind, until they pass under the influence of a happier religion. How can they act licentiously, in a way cognizable or proveable, whom rank and usage will not permit to wander, and who cannot have a temptation to wander, from their own harems, authorized by the institutions of their country?
This last charge, indeed, being so intrinsically absurd, is hardly of a nature to have merited any answer, had it not been the one most insisted upon in England, where its ludicrousness is not so apparent, until the mind is recalled from the life of Christendom to that very different life which prevails in Asia. The charge then exhales into vapour; and a man laughs as a ship's company on the broad Atlantic would laugh, if charged with roaming abroad at night.
But why do we notice personal considerations at all, in a case where public relations to Affghanistan should naturally be paramount? We notice them, because our own press dwelt on personal qualities almost exclusively; and since this Cabool tragedy will make the whole Affghan policy immortal, we are anxious, by dispersing the cloud of calumny connected with the object of our choice, to clear the ground for a juster estimate of what was either good or erroneous in our further conduct. Not that personal accomplishments of mind or of body were unimportant in a ruler of simple half-barbarous men; nor again is it to be denied that Dost Mahommed, from advantages of age, (forty-five years against the seventy of the Shah,) and from experience more direct and personal, would, under equal circumstances, have been the better man. But the circumstances were not equal. The Dost could not have been more than a provincial ruler in the land; consequently he could not have undertaken that responsibility for the whole which formed the precise postulate of our Indian government.
Yet because the Dost could not meet our purposes, is it true that the Shah could? That is the point we are going to consider; and to have postponed this question to a question of personalities, even if those personalities had been truly stated, is specifically the error which vitiated all the speculations of our domestic press. We say then, that Shah Soojah had a primâ facie fitness for our purposes which the Dost had not; Soojah was the brother, son, and grandson of men who had ruled all Affghanistan; nay, in a tumultuary way, he had ruled all Affghanistan himself. So far he had something to show, and the Dost had nothing; and so far Lord Auckland was right. But he was wrong, and, we are convinced, ruinously wrong, by most extravagantly overrating that one advantage. The instincts of loyalty, and the prestige of the royal title, were in no land that ever was heard of so feeble as in coarse, unimaginative Affghanistan. Money was understood: meat and drink were understood: a jezail was understood but nothing spiritual or ancestral had any meaning for an Affghan. Deaf and blind he was to such impressions and perhaps of all the falsehoods which have exploded in Europe for the last six years, the very greatest is that of the Edinburgh Review, in saying that the Suddozye families were "sacred" and inviolable to Affghans. How could such a privilege clothe the species or subdivision, when even the Dooaraunee or entire genus was submitted to with murmurs under the tyranny of accident. In what way had they won their ascendency? By thumps, by hard knocks, by a vast assortment of kicks, and by no means through any sanctity of blood. Sanctity indeed!—we should be glad to see the Affghan who would not, upon what he held a sufficient motive, have cut the throat of any shah or shahzade, padishah, or caliph, though it had been that darling of European childhood—Haroun Alraschid himself.
But how could royalty enjoy any privilege of consecration in a land where it was yet but two generations old? Even those two had been generations of tumultuous struggle. Oftener had the Shah been seen racing for his life on a Arab of the Hedjas, than eating "dillecrout"6 in peace, or dealing round a card-table grand crosses of the Dooraunee order. The very origin of Affghan royalty fathoms the shallowness of the water on which it floated. Three coincidences of luck had raised Ahmed to the throne. One dark night his master Kouli Khan, for the benefit of all Asia, had his throat cut. This Kouli, or Nadir Shah, was much more of a monster than Ahmed; but not very much less of a usurper. Riding off with his cavalry from Persia to Candahar, Ahmed these robbed a caravan! Upon which every
But afterwards, at page 166, there is a dreadful insinuation that such a necessity might have founded itself on the danger of taking prisoners "in a camp already subsisting on half and quarter rations." Now we, in a paper on Casuistry, (long since published by this journal,) anticipated this shocking plea, contending that Napoleon's massacre of 4000 young Albanians at Jaffa, could draw no palliation from the alleged shortness of provisions, whether true or false; and on the ground that a civilized army, consciously under circumstances which will not allow it to take prisoners, has no right to proceed. Napoleon's condition had not changed from the time of leaving Cairo. We little expected to see a Jaffa plea urged, even hypothetically, for a British army.
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