Docherty The Khyber Pass

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ISBN: 978-0-571-31736-3
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 288 Seiten

The story of the Khyber Pass, the narrow mountain route which - more than any other single place on earth - has shaped civilisations. Thirty miles long, and in places no more than sixteen metres wide, the Pass is the only natural cutting through the great mountains of the Hindu Kush - and hence the one feasible route from Central Asia into India. Its story - of the rise and fall of empires - begins with Cyrus and Darius, the great Persian kings. Legendary conquerors soon follow: first Alexander the Great, then, much later, the White Huns (who would bind the heads of their children to make their appearance in battle more frightening) and Genghis Khan. In between are the Ancient Greeks, whose reach spread east to the Pass; and tribes of nomads and barbarians whose civilizations, Paddy Docherty shows, were much more sophisticated than commonly supposed. Here also are mountain warriors and religious visionaries - around the Pass arose three of the great world religions, Buddhism, Sikhism and Islam - as well as artists, poets and scientists. In more recent times, the British army suffered its infamous retreat from Kabul in 1842. The Khyber region is still largely lawless today, a place of gunsmiths and drug markets and the hideout of terrorists. Docherty's own travels in this true frontier - and the continuing presence of US and British troops in Afghanistan - bring the story into the twenty-first century.

Paddy Docherty, a Persian speaker, studied at Brasenose College, Oxford. For more information, see www.paddydocherty.com

Autoren/Hrsg.

Docherty, Paddy

Leseproben

Prologue

It was the bitter endgame of the disastrous First Afghan War. John Nicholson was riding through the Khyber Pass towards India, heading for the frontier and safety. A young subaltern in the army of British India, his regiment had been sent to Afghanistan following the invasion of 1839, and had remained while British fortunes in the country declined and then collapsed. As the main British army marched to its complete destruction on the terrible retreat from Kabul in January 1842, Nicholson and a handful of other British officers had been captured in Ghazni and endured several months of cruel captivity in Afghan hands. Then a new British force – known as the ‘Army of Retribution’ – had mounted a second invasion, taking their vicious revenge on the Afghan population and leaving Kabul in flames. Nicholson had been freed, and on the morning of 4 November 1842, the journey through the Khyber Pass – the legendary passage into India – was all that lay between him and allied territory.

The march from Kabul had been grim and dangerous. The dead of January still littered the roadside all the way from the Afghan capital to the city of Jalalabad, halfway to the Khyber: an army of over 16,000 soldiers and camp followers had been destroyed in just a few days as they struggled to quit Afghanistan along the difficult, mountainous route to India. Countless skeletons lay scattered about as a testament to the lethal thoroughness of both the Afghan tribesmen and the severe winter weather. Now these two killers had returned to harass the homeward journey of the Army of Retribution; though proclaimed by the British as the triumphant return of a conquering force, the withdrawal risked becoming a second costly retreat.

Despite the dangers of ambush and icy weather, Nicholson and his unit had arrived safely at the western entrance of the Khyber Pass on 1 November. Here he enjoyed some consolation for his sufferings of the last few months: he was reunited with his younger brother, Alexander, after a separation of almost four years. Having followed John into a military career, Alexander had sailed out to India earlier that year and had just arrived on the frontier with his regiment to cover the withdrawal of the army from Afghanistan. Given their youth – John Nicholson was nineteen, Alexander just seventeen – and the anxious circumstances in which they found themselves, it must have been an emotional meeting, but neither man left a written account. After two days together, the Nicholson brothers were again split up: John remained with the rearguard while Alexander set off into the Khyber Pass on 3 November, his regiment providing escort for an army division on its journey to India. John followed a day later.

Thus John Nicholson came to be riding through the Khyber Pass on a November day in 1842 amid the hurried, anxious withdrawal of a vulnerable army. Once through the thirty miles of this famous mountain route, he would be clear of Afghan territory and could rest at last after two years of war and captivity. Though short in distance, the narrow width and rocky heights of the Khyber Pass made it – especially in a time of war – the most precarious stretch of the road to India. The Pathan tribesmen of the Khyber were especially renowned for their ferocity, even in a country of fighting men, and were feared for their ability to close the road to unwelcome armies, or at least to make them pay the price. Hilltop forts kept watch over the full length of the Pass, simple strongholds that were manned by tribesmen in times of crisis, giving them a clear shot over most of this crucial passage. Set above cliffs and reached only by an arduous climb, they gave warning of intruders in the Khyber and allowed tribesmen to fire on the road at their leisure. In the most constricted stretches, where tan-coloured rock confines the road tightly, these tiny citadels commanded the passage with particular power (see colour plate 1). Elsewhere, still under the gaze of these box-like forts, lengths of the Pass widen out, the grand walls of rock drawing back from the road to stand a mile apart. Here the scattered houses and sentinel towers must have seemed less forbidding as Nicholson rode by with his regiment, the claustrophobia of the straits perhaps diminished by the broader sky, and the rugged scenery even acquiring a fleeting beauty. Such openness was deceptive, a momentary relief before the Pass closed up suddenly once again, like a muscle contracting.

Nicholson and his men would surely have felt at their most vulnerable at Ali Masjid, near the middle of the Pass: sheer cliffs rise up dramatically to some 500 feet, allowing the road just a few feet to squeeze through. The narrow heights of the Ali Masjid gap make it the most easily defended point in the Pass, a bastion from which a few sniping tribesmen can delay an entire army with ease.

On this occasion, no such obstacle was encountered, but after the force had squeezed its way through the straits of Ali Masjid, Nicholson and a companion, Ensign Julius Dennys, spotted the pale flesh of a European corpse some way off. Ignoring strict instructions not to leave the main path, the two officers rode over: it was clear that a British unit had been ambushed and overwhelmed. On reaching the body, they saw that it had been horribly mutilated and left dead and naked on the ground. By a dreadful chance, it was Alexander. His genitals had been hacked from his body and stuffed into his mouth in the Afghan custom. John Nicholson left no account of his emotions on finding his brother – Victorian soldiers not normally being given to such expression – but we can imagine it to be the worst shock possible. His companions wrote of his being overcome with grief as they buried the body inside the Khyber. John Nicholson would go on to rise to the rank of general before dying gloriously during the Indian Mutiny in 1857; his brother would have no such chance.

Over 150 years later, I stood by Ali Masjid, close to the place where Alexander Nicholson was killed, with the savage reputation of the Khyber Pass running through my mind; many such incidents in this hostile landscape left the British with a respectful fear of the Khyber throughout the years of the Raj. Moreover, its importance as the historic gateway to their valuable Indian empire gave them a sharp awareness that the Khyber Pass was a strategic possession without equal. The long and anxious experience of guarding the frontier came to raise the Khyber into a special category of imperial iconography, its very name conjuring images of mountains that were rugged, forbidding and – as the crucial line in the defence of India – matchless in their consequence. The Khyber Pass stood alongside the Straits of Gibraltar and the Suez Canal as one of the strategic keys that locked up the world before the age of flight, and thus became a critical focus for imperial anxiety and military planners. The Khyber Pass entered the British popular imagination as a romantic, legendary prize to be defended at all costs.

The Pass stretches for thirty miles through the Sefid Koh – the ‘White Mountains’ – from Afghanistan at the western end to the plains of Peshawar at the eastern. Its complete length now lies in the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan, the legendary North-West Frontier not just of Pakistan but of the entire Subcontinent. This was the front line in the defence of India, and the cause of concern through the centuries about the threat from Afghanistan and lands beyond it. Today it remains a turbulent frontier, as American and British soldiers – along with those of many other western nations – fight in Afghanistan against a resurgent Taliban and their Al Qaida allies. To gain a sight of this scene of conflict I continued west from Ali Masjid and stood by the neatly tended Khyber Rifles camp at Michni, looking down upon the border (see colour plate 2). Taking in a magnificent view of the western entrance to the Pass – a grand vista of rock and sky – I thought of the concentration of incident and activity that had passed through this slim mountain defile across the years. Sitting in the gap a tantalising mile or so ahead of me, the border town of Torkham marked the beginning of the Khyber with an assortment of small buildings clustered around the crossing point. The modest town seemed like debris from a rock fall, strewn at the base of the mountain and scattering into the evergreen trees that lay cast across the floor of the Pass. A mucky haze from kitchen fires drifted above the town, merging into the mist over the mountains beyond.

Hard up against the southern edge of the town, the dark brown rock rises in a sudden curve, forming a jagged ridge that stretches deep into the mountains. Beneath this madly serrated blade, a steep escarpment descends into the valley, the stone dusted with red. During the harsh winters, these heights gain a covering of snow. To the right, across the way, the north side of the Pass climbs more gently but to the same intractable peaks, the mountainside scarred with dual lines of road that cut sandy grey slashes in the greenish rock. Higher up is the railway, burrowing so frequently into the mountain that barely any of the track can be seen. An enduring relic of the British era but not currently in use, it terminates at the border. Below these roads and rails, the floor of the Pass widens once inside the entrance; between the great stony walls, trees and hillocks dot the stretch of dun earth. Michni perches above this scene, looking out upon the two huge flanks of mountain lunging in towards the narrow...