Josiah the Great: The True Story of The Man Who Would Be King. Ben Macintyre
Читать онлайн.| Название | Josiah the Great: The True Story of The Man Who Would Be King |
|---|---|
| Автор произведения | Ben Macintyre |
| Жанр | Биографии и Мемуары |
| Серия | |
| Издательство | Биографии и Мемуары |
| Год выпуска | 0 |
| isbn | 9780007406852 |
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In the winter of 1839 a conqueror, enthroned on a large bull elephant, raised his standard in the wild mountains of the Hindu Kush. His soldiers cheered, fired matchlock rifles into the air, and beat swords against their hide shields. Two thousand native horsemen shouted their loyalty, each in his own tongue: Afghan Pathans, Persian Qizilbash, Hindus, Uzbeks, Tajiks and Hazaras of the highlands, descendants of the Mongol horde. Six cannon roared to salute the flag, the echoes ricocheting across the snowy pinnacles.
The commander reviewed his troops with satisfaction. Although he was not yet forty, the face above the long black beard was as rugged as the landscape around it. Beneath a flowing fox-fur cloak he wore robes of maroon and green satin, a girdle of silver and lace, and a great silver buckle in the shape of a soldier’s breastplate. His catskin cap was circled with gold.
Like Alexander of Macedon, who had led his army on the same mountain path twenty-one centuries earlier, the leader was called great by his followers, and his titles, past, present and future, were many: Prince of Ghor, Paramount Chief of the Hazarajat, Lord of Kurram, governor of Jasrota and Gujrat, personal surgeon to Maharajah Ranjit Singh of the Five Rivers, the Highly Stationed One equipped with Ardour and Might, Chief of the mighty Khans, Paragon of the Magnificent Grandees, Holy Sahib Zader, Companion of the Imperial Stirrup, Nearest Friend of Shah Shujah al-Moolk, King of Afghanistan, Chief Sirdar and Commandant of the invincible armies of Dost Mohammed Khan, mighty Amir of Kabul, Pearl of the Ages and Commander of the Faithful. Hallan Sahib Bahadur, victor of the battle of Jamrud, slayer of infidel Sikhs, scourge of Uzbek slavers, was even said to have magical powers. Some claimed that he was an expert alchemist who had forged a priceless talisman to make the dumb speak and conjured gold from base metal, a teller of stories in every tongue, and master in the art of intrigue. In his own language, the prince was known by other names: doctor, soldier, spy, botanist, naturalist and poet; but also mercenary, even mountebank.
His Highness never travelled without his books, and when the guard had been posted for the night and the mastiffs howled to ward off the wolf packs in the ravines, he retired to his tent and wrote, tumbling torrents of words in a language none but he could read. In his journal he recorded: ‘I unfurled my country’s banner to the breeze, under a salute of twenty-six guns, and the star-spangled banner gracefully waved amidst the icy peaks, seemingly sacred to the solitude of an undisturbed eternity.’
For His Highness Hallan Sahib had another name, and another title: Josiah Harlan, Quaker, of Chester County, Pennsylvania.
In 1989, as an aspiring foreign correspondent, I was sent to Afghanistan to cover the final stages of the decade-long war between the Soviet army and the CIA-backed Mujahideen guerrillas. Afghanistan was then the crucible of the Cold War. Just as the Russians and British had tussled for pre-eminence there in the nineteenth century, in the undeclared war Rudyard Kipling called ‘The Great Game’, so the US and USSR fought for supremacy in the Afghan mountains at the end of the twentieth. The Soviets were losing, and would soon withdraw, leaving behind 50,000 dead soldiers and a million dead Afghans.
Having made arrangements to link up with one of the seven Mujahideen groups, I headed to Peshawar on Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier, forty miles from the Afghan border. Once a part of Afghanistan itself and the summer capital of the Afghan kings, Peshawar was the principal staging post in Pakistan for the anti-Soviet insurgency. The bazaar was thronged with tough-looking Pushtuns, the Afghan warrior tribe the British knew as Pathans, many with machine guns slung casually over their shoulders. An enterprising stallholder offered to sell me a captured Soviet tank. I settled instead for the standard Mujahideen outfit, obligatory for any ‘resistance tour’: Pathan pancake hat and dun-coloured saggy pyjamas, or shalwar kamiz, over which I wore the regulation foreign correspondent’s sleeveless jacket with many unnecessary pockets. I had already grown something that might pass for a beard.
At dawn the next day, a trio of armed Mujahideen knocked at the door of my hotel room and led me to a waiting Jeep. For the next twelve hours we drove up the Khyber Pass, and then onto rocky tracks which wound deep into the mountains, until we finally arrived at the camp of the Mujahideen commander Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. I was too callow to know it at the time, but black-bearded Hekmatyar was the most fundamentalist of the Mujahideen leaders, a man as ruthless as he was ambitious, whose brutal shelling of Kabul in the civil war that followed killed thousands of civilians and devastated the city. The entrance to his camp was marked by a lone sentry and a large, dead vulture, impaled on a post, the first victim I had seen of the Afghan war.
Over the ensuing weeks I was swept away by my own Afghan adventure. The Mujahideen fighters looked after me as one might a vulnerable and rather dim younger brother, and I filed breathless despatches for my newspaper, with rather too much emphasis on the first person. I thought myself very dashing indeed.
Returning to Peshawar after my first stint ‘inside’, I went to the American Club, the social hub of the Western crowd. The place was often frequented by journalists, young ones like myself but also scarred veterans, along with arms dealers, aid workers and monosyllabic Americans who were probably spies or mercenaries. Almost everyone had stories of night skirmishes and narrow escapes,