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

he was marching into the unknown, news of his activities had reached home, where the Society of Friends convened a meeting to discuss the case of wandering Brother Harlan. A painful decision was reached: ‘Josiah Harlan, who has for many years been absent from this country, has violated our testimony against war by serving in the capacity of surgeon in an army. This meeting is of the judgement that the time has arrived when it is proper to testify its disunity with his conduct, and that he no longer retains the right of membership with the Religious Society of Friends.’ Harlan did not know that he had been disowned by his own Church. As a Freemason, he had little time for dogmatic religion, whether Islamic or Christian, but throughout the ensuing years of warfare and intrigue he continued to consider himself a Quaker.

      There was another, crucial item of luggage packed away on top of one of the camels, that no man who would be king, or king-maker, could do without. This was a large royal mace, described by Harlan as ‘an embossed silver stick five feet long tapering from a globular head two and a half inches in diameter’. The mace was an indispensable tool of courtly etiquette, a visible demonstration of royal clout to be carried on ceremonial occasions by a functionary known as the shaughaussy or ‘mace-bearer’, whose job, apart from looking appropriately official and dignified, was to act as the conveyer of important messages. The man responsible for this function in Harlan’s entourage was one Amirullah, a cadaverous Afghan with a long beard and opinions on everything, whose commanding figure and natural pomposity made him ideal for the task. He would become Harlan’s loyal confidant and his mascot. Impressing local chieftains along the route was not only good form, but a vital means of self-protection.

      Harlan was determined that although his troop might look like a posse of brigands, they would march like an army and be regulated by military discipline. The day began at 4 a.m., when the camp was roused by a bugle call, with the march beginning no more than an hour later. Once the sun was up the troop would pause for a breakfast of cold chapattis before resuming the march. At midday a halt was ordered, and the men would disperse to prepare meals in large dekshies or cooking pots, according to their different religious traditions, all of which Harlan meticulously noted in his journals. After the main meal of the day the march recommenced, ending in late afternoon at a campsite selected by an advance party. For his own accommodation Harlan had obtained ‘a large single poled tent’ which was surrounded by ‘Connaughts or extensive walls of cloth with bamboo stretchers’ to create a semi-private enclosure. The soldiers gathered for the night under a large tent without walls, while ‘the house servants and inferior attaches’ were housed in a third, smaller tent.

      When the march was passing through inhabited areas Harlan usually led the troop on horseback, noting that ‘the display of dignity is important’, but at other times he adopted another form of transport uniquely suited to the terrain. This was the cudjawa, or camel litter, the closest thing available to a first-class travelling compartment: ‘A covered box,’ in Harlan’s words, ‘provided with a cupola admitting of an upright sitting posture’ and made from scarlet woollen cloth. The cudjawa came complete with its own heating system for winter travel, and even bathroom facilities: ‘The interior being lined with woollen rugs, they prove to the traveller a very comfortable contrivance … ample enough to allow one to keep in them a small fire, and also to perform the required necessities.’ Regrettably, there is no contemporary account of quite how this mobile toilet operated.

      The comfort and seclusion of a cudjawa was a mode of travel particularly suited to a bookish man, and Harlan observed that with ‘a few days’ experience and a supply of literature, the passenger could readily engross the measure of a long journey, continually and often agreeably varied by ever changing scenes and novel incidents which serve to enliven him in this singularly Oriental and primitive mode, to cure the spirits and amuse the mind with strange reflections upon unfamiliar objects’. Jolting along at about two miles an hour, Harlan had ample opportunity to reread Elphinstone and what little other literature existed on Afghanistan, and imagine the terra incognita ahead.

       3 MY SWORD IS MY PASSPORT

      The Afghan empire had once been powerful beyond legend, wealthy beyond words. As Harlan wrote: ‘During the rule of the antient regime the kings possessed countless treasures and jewels and gold, supplying the expenses of licentiousness and luxury from previously accumulated hereditary wealth. Vast sums were disbursed in the capital cities of Kandahar, Cabul and Peshour.’ This was the empire forged in the mid-eighteenth century by the Afghan conqueror Ahmad Shah Abdali, founder of the Durrani dynasty, who had extended his rule from Kabul to Peshawar and Lahore, and finally to Delhi, Kashmir and Sind. He had crossed the Hindu Kush, subduing the Hazara tribes en route, and then vanquished the Uzbeks of Balkh and Kunduz, taking his realm to the border of modern Afghanistan. The death of Ahmad Shah in 1773 started the steady, bloody disintegration of his empire, and by the 1820s it had fragmented, shot through with fantastically complex internecine feuds, like veins through marble. For as long as anyone could remember a brutal civil war had raged in Afghanistan, punctuated by occasional interludes of tranquillity. Like the Wars of the Roses, two great families, rival clans within the Durrani elite, battled for supremacy: the Saddozai, of which Shah Shujah was the leading claimant, and the Barakzai, whose paramount chief, Dost Mohammed Khan, now ruled in Kabul. The Saddozai princes fought each other while resisting the growing power of the Barakzai clan, whose scions fought bitterly among themselves for supremacy.

      The period immediately before Harlan set out for Afghanistan had seen some particularly Byzantine plotting and fratricidal violence. In 1783, Zaman Shah, Ahmad Shah’s grandson (a Saddozai), ascended the throne with the support of Painda Khan (a Barakzai), who became his vizier. Nervous of Painda Khan’s growing power and aware that he was plotting a coup, Zaman Shah first dismissed, then executed him. The Barakzai vizier, however, had left behind no fewer than twenty-three sons, each anxious to avenge him and take power himself. The eldest of these, Fatah Khan, immediately set about provoking a rebellion: Zaman Shah was ousted in favour of his half-brother Shah Mahmud, and then blinded by having his eyeballs pierced with a lancet, the traditional fate of a deposed Afghan king. Shah Mahmud held on for just three years before he was deposed by another Saddozai, Zaman Shah’s brother Shah Shujah al-Moolk.

      Shah Shujah was in Peshawar, opening presents from Mountstuart Elphinstone, when he learned that Shah Mahmud was up in arms once more, with the backing of the troublesome Fatah Khan. After six years as king, Shujah was himself ousted and set off on the wandering path that would eventually lead him to Ludhiana. Shah Mahmud was reinstalled, but not for long. In 1818, history repeating itself, he became deeply suspicious of his Barakzai vizier, and Fatah Khan was put to death with an imaginative cruelty spectacular even by the exacting standards of the time. His eyes were removed with a dagger, and the top of his head was peeled off (‘an operation similar to the African mode of scalping’, observed Shah Shujah in his memoirs) before a slow public dismemberment. The blind vizier was led to a large tent erected for the purpose outside the western city of Herat, surrounded by his mortal enemies, and systematically murdered: ears, nose, hands and beard were cut off, and then his feet, before his throat was finally cut.

      This lingering death drove Fatah Khan’s many surviving brothers to a peak of vengeful fury (and temporary unity), and after a series of battles Mahmud, the Saddozai king, was beaten back to Herat. The Barakzai brothers set about dividing up the country among themselves: four of them held Peshawar, another five ruled over Kandahar, while Dost Mohammed Khan, the ablest of them all, established himself as chief of Ghazni and gradually set about extending his rule over Kabul. Having divided up the country as completely as their brother had once been dismembered, the remaining brothers naturally now fell to fighting each other.

      The Barakzais were a polygamous recipe for friction, sharing a single father but divided by multiple mothers: siblings sharing both mother and father tended to be allies, while half-brothers were more often at loggerheads. The bewildering confusion of plot and counterplot, blood feud coagulating on blood