Deep, romantic and savage

In 1842 my cousin Charles Gascoyne was home from India on furlough, when he heard some devastating news. His regiment, the 5th Bengal Light Cavalry, had been retreating from Kabul through the winter-bound Khyber Pass where it was wiped out by Afghan tribesmen. A memorial tablet in St Peter’s Church in Calcutta still vividly records his fellow officers, ‘the lamented braves’, who

though greatly outnumbered by a most treacherous foe in snowy wastes and rugged defiles, for several days and nights together, without shelter or even a tent, and suffering from extremes of cold, hunger and thirst, in the depths of winter, sold their lives dearly, as became British soldiers.

Over 16,000 people died. Charles never recovered from the shock, and from the loss of so many friends.

Paddy Docherty’s excellent history brings home how the sheer physical geography of the Khyber Pass shaped events, just as much as the sword-wielding Ghazis who crouched behind every ‘rugged defile’. He describes its mouth yawning open, then closing up ‘like a muscle contracting’. The border town of Torkham resembles ‘the debris from a rock fall’ strewn beneath a ridge as jagged as ‘a madly serrated blade’.

For millennia this mountainous crevice, in some places only 16 metres wide, has been the conduit by which armies squeezed from arid Afghanistan out to the fertile plains of the Punjab. It has seen the ebb and flow of warriors from ancient Persians to Greeks, Scythians, Kushans, White Huns, Turks, Mongols, Mughals, Afghans, Mauryans, Parthians, Sikhs and Pathans, and ultimately to today’s Americans and British and their Al-Qaeda prey.

Until the British first invaded Afghanistan in 1839, the flow was mostly west-east, bringing empires, cultures and trade — although ivory, spices, textiles and Buddhism also flowed back the other way.