Josiah the Great: The True Story of The Man Who Would Be King. Ben Macintyre

mysterious, which like the obscurity of fate is invoked in the deep darkness of time.’

      Two days before the army was due to depart, a most peculiar figure appeared outside Harlan’s tent and demanded an audience. Tubby, barrel-chested and at least fifty years old, the man was missing his left arm from above the elbow, one eye was partly clouded over, the other glittered with intelligence, and both were crossed in an alarming manner. The fellow’s military bearing was complemented by a pair of enormous moustaches and a mighty curved sabre, or talwar, dangling from his belt. After offering a crisp salute with his remaining hand he launched into a bizarre prepared speech: ‘I have served His Majesty by flood and field, through good and evil fortune, to the footstool of the throne and the threshold of the jail. For twenty years have I been a slave to the king’s service in which I lost my left hand and had nothing but the stump of my arm to exhibit in lieu of honours and wealth and dignities, which the worthless have borne off in triumph, and I am still the unrewarded, the faithful, the brave, the famous Khan Gool Khan, Rossiladar, commander of a thousand men, fierce as lions, yesterday in the service of Shah Shujah, may he live forever.’ Finally, he got to the point: ‘Here I am in the Saheb’s service. May his house flourish, for the future I am his purchased slave and respect even the dog that licks his feet!’

      Once Gul Khan had regained his breath he explained that he was a Rohillah, a member of the Afghan tribe whose horse-trading enterprises in India had led to their establishing a number of small states along the north India trading routes. The Rohillahs were expert horsemen, and famous as mercenaries. Gul Khan announced that he had served for years as a soldier under the banner of Shah Shujah. ‘He had wandered many years with His Majesty, [and] had followed the fortunes of the ex-king when he fled from the prison to which Ranjeet Singh, after securing the Koh-i-Noor, had ignobly confined Shujah who was then his guest, had traversed the great Himalaya mountains when the royal fugitive, to escape the danger of recapture, fled from Lahore through the Kashmir and penetrating into Tibet, threaded the intricate mazes of those deep glens and unknown valleys, crossing pass after pass over mountainous routes covered with heavy forest or eternal snows and scarcely inhabited by man, the redoubt of the hyena, the leopard and the wolf, braving the rapacious brutes in his flight from the still more ferocious creature man!’

      Since Shujah’s arrival in Ludhiana, Gul Khan and his fellow Rohillahs had worked as mercenaries (or, more accurately, as freelance bandits) serving various princes in the surrounding areas. Declaring himself ‘thoroughly acquainted with the country I had before me’, the great Gul Khan now offered his services as risaldar, or native commander. Harlan had come across Rohillah mercenaries before, and noted sardonically: ‘The versatility of service for which the Rohillahs are remarkable gives them pre-eminent claims as traitors to their salt, and renders them useful but dangerous and unfaithful agents.’

      Mulling this singular job application, Harlan enquired how Gul Khan had lost his arm. At this the talkative Rohillah became taciturn, muttering vaguely that his injury had been ‘sustained upon the field of battle’. ‘He seemed averse to talk much and openly on the subject however voluble upon other matters,’ wrote Harlan. ‘I afterwards heard there were several versions concerning Gool Khan’s handless limb, and some ascribed that misfortune to the royal displeasure.’

      ‘I had then no suspicion of his honour or honesty,’ wrote Harlan, who would later come to doubt both. There was no time to substantiate Gul Khan’s claims, and for all his odd appearance he seemed the ideal lieutenant, his band of Rohillahs a useful addition to the ranks. ‘This was an enterprise requiring the perseverance of a fearless and determined spirit and a knowledge of the country,’ wrote Harlan. ‘Of the two first requirements I could boast the possession. The other essential was attained by enlisting individuals who knew the language, the people and the routes. These were present through Gool Khan, and he was forthwith installed as leader of the mercenary band who followed my fortunes.’

      On 7 November 1827 the inhabitants of Ludhiana turned out to witness Harlan’s departure: with Old Glory fluttering overhead, an American in a cocked hat rode out of town on a thoroughbred horse, accompanied by a mongrel dog, a ragtag army of mercenaries and a one-armed bandit. The British agent also watched him go, and informed Calcutta that Harlan was planning to cross the Indus, proceed to Peshawar and thence to Kabul itself. Claude Wade evidently did not expect to see him again.

      Harlan had originally intended to take the most direct route into Afghanistan, by crossing the Sutlej, passing through the Punjab and entering the country via Peshawar. Ranjit Singh, however, was still refusing to grant safe passage. Harlan put the delay down to inefficiency, but more likely the Sikh maharajah had got wind of Harlan’s plans and did not want a private army marching through his territory. ‘The dilatory proceedings of the Punjab court quickly exhausted my patience and in contempt of the procrastinating ruler, I determined upon taking the route via Bhawulpore across the Indus below Mooltaun, [to] follow up the right bank of the celebrated stream and reach Peshawar,’ thus avoiding the Punjab itself.

      Alexander the Great was much on Harlan’s mind, for he would be entering lands the Macedonian had conquered some twenty-one centuries earlier, although heading in the opposite direction. In 331 BC, having defeated the Achaemenid monarch Darius the Great, Alexander claimed the Persian empire, and marched eastwards into Afghanistan, founding cities as he went: Alexandria Arachosia near Kandahar, Alexandria-ad-Caucasum north of Kabul. Then, after a gruelling march over the Hindu Kush, he had penetrated the wild lands beyond the Oxus, building his most remote city at the northeastern limit of Persian influence: Alexandria-Eschate, ‘Alexandria-at-the-end-of-the-world’. As Darius had ruled through satraps, subordinate provincial governors, so Alexander appointed rulers in his wake to administer the expanding empire. In 327 BC he crossed back over the mountains, and set his sights on India, crossing the great Indus River in 326 B C and defeating Poros, the local king, at the battle of Jhelum. He had then marched south, through the lands Harlan now saw in the desert distance.

      As the troop marched alongside the Sutlej – ‘the Hysudrus of the Greeks’, noted Harlan – its leader observed that the local people had carved irrigation channels to cultivate patches of land on either side of the river. ‘The country was made to smell like the rose,’ he wrote. British engineers would eventually build a vast network of canals and waterworks, creating a new and fertile agrarian region, but in Harlan’s time patches of thick jungle still bordered the rivers, with scrub and desert beyond. ‘Here and there we struck the desert border as we advanced, a flat surface of sand extending to the horizon without vegetation.’ His excitement mounting, Harlan gazed across the plain towards ‘the interior of Asia, the land of caravans, the land of the elephant and tamarisk, and the dominion of the horse’.

      Before leaving Ludhiana, Harlan had purchased seven saddle horses for Gul Khan and the other officers, and seven camels to carry supplies, weapons and baggage. This included tents, a large armchair, folding chairs, tables, several dozen muskets (flintlocks and matchlocks), ammunition, gunpowder, rope and Harlan’s substantial library. For his own use the American had selected three horses: a sleek Arab, a grey from Tartary, and ‘a half-English brood mare named Flora’. Gentle and swift, Flora had been a gift from ‘a valued friend’, a British army colonel, and she was Harlan’s most prized possession.

      Behind the camels lumbered a line of carriage cattle, bearing additional food and forage. Since he was heading into country that was sparsely inhabited and probably hostile, Harlan wrote, ‘supplies of all kinds – water, flour, grain, forage and frequently wood – [must] be transported with the forces’. The baggage train moved with infuriating slowness. Nothing is ‘more certain to hamper the movements of an army than superfluous baggage or impedimenta’, wrote Harlan, who had brought only the bare minimum of personal luxuries, including tea, coffee, chocolate and spices. A plentiful supply of tobacco was stashed in his saddlebags, but in deference to Muslim beliefs he dispensed with alcohol entirely. ‘Long experience, general and personal, convinces me that the interdict of Muhammad had been attended with results divinely philanthropic to the myriads of his followers,’ he wrote. Harlan had been raised in a strictly abstemious Quaker culture, and while he sometimes drank socially or medicinally, he regarded drunkenness with pious disapproval.

      In other respects, however, he wore his Quakerism lightly