Part 33 (2/2)

His was an unprovoked, almost an unpremeditated invasion. It burst upon India like a monsoon storm, swift, lurid, almost terrible in the rapidity with which action follows menace. And like that same storm it came, it pa.s.sed, and the blue, unclouded sky seemed far away from the desolation and havoc that had been wrought.

In many ways this, the last, was the worst of all the sacks which India had suffered. To begin with, it came so late in time. Towards the middle of the eighteenth century one does not expect a robbing raid on so vast a scale. It seems almost incredible that an army of eighty thousand men should march through a country bent on plunder, and plunder only.

Then its sole object--gold--was such a mean one. No political reason lay at the back of the raid. Nadir had no ambitions. He did not wish to add to his kings.h.i.+p; it was all wilful, wicked, merciless greed.

Yet Nadir-Shah himself was not absolutely a mean man. He was a native of Khorasan, that is to say, an Afghan, born of no particular family, but born a warrior. At the age of seventeen he was taken prisoner by the Usbeks, but after four years of captivity made his escape.

Then he took service with the King of Khorasan, but, believing himself ill-rewarded for a success against the Tartars, gave up his command, and became, frankly, a freebooter.

A few years later, on the sh.o.r.es of the Caspian Sea, he threw in his fortunes with those of a Persian princeling _en retraite_, and in his name fought a variety of battles, in which he was invariably victorious. They ended in the nominal restoration of Tahmasp to the throne of his fathers. But behind Tahmasp sate Nadir, who had become the idol of the Persian people; and small wonder, since he had raised the nation from abject slavery to such military glory as Persia has seldom possessed.

It was necessary, however, to continue soldierly exploits; so Nadir set to work to settle a dispute with the Turks who had taken Tabriz.

He had recovered it, when trouble in Khorasan called him back, and kept him employed for so long, that when he returned to the capital, Isphahan, it was to find that his puppet Tahmasp had, during his absence, become a person of much importance, and was exercising all the royal prerogatives.

This did not suit Nadir, so, on the excuse of lack of statesmans.h.i.+p in concluding a treaty with the Turks, he deliberately deposed Tahmasp, and set his infant son in his stead.

This was practically the beginning of Nadir's reign, but he refrained from a.s.suming the t.i.tle of King until many victories over the Turks and Russians had strengthened his hold on the Persians.

Then, covered with glory, he a.s.sembled all the dignitaries, civil and military, to the number of about one hundred thousand in a sort of mutual admiration conference, when, no doubt by previous arrangement, they offered him the crown, which, after some display of surprise and reluctance, he was pleased to accept.

Now this was all very deep-laid, very diplomatic; but Nadir's cleverness was at times too clever. In some of his campaigns he had deliberately changed his religion--or rather his denomination--becoming Sunni instead of s.h.i.+ah, in order to gain over a warlike tribe which was obdurately troublesome; now, hoping to stamp out any sentimental attachment to the dynasty which he had just deposed, and whose claim to kings.h.i.+p rested entirely on its champions.h.i.+p of the s.h.i.+ah tenets, he changed the national denomination, and declared Persia henceforward a Sunni country. It was a mistake; for though the Sunni section was pleased, the s.h.i.+ahs felt themselves alienated from their new king.

In another way Nadir showed more sense. It was his greatness as a general which had won him sovereignty, and he recognised that it must be kept by the same means; so he gathered together an army of eighty thousand men and set off to conquer Kandahar.

_L'appet.i.t vient en mangeant_. India lay just over the barrier of the Koh-i-Suleiman hills, and the tribes who had hitherto been subsidised by the Moghul Government to keep the peaks and pa.s.ses, were now sulky over their failure for some years past to squeeze anything out of the bankrupt Government of Delhi.

But even Nadir required some excuse for bald, brutal invasion. He therefore peremptorily demanded the expulsion of some Afghans who had fled from punishment to shelter in Indian territory. At all times it would have been difficult to lay hands on a band of wandering Pathans amongst the frontier hills, but Delhi was at this time distracted by fear of the Mahrattas, and still all uncertain whether to acknowledge Nadir-Shah's claim to kings.h.i.+p.

The hesitation suited the latter; he was over the border, had defeated a feeble resistance at Lah.o.r.e, and was within 100 miles of Delhi before he found himself faced by a real army.

There must surely be some malignant attraction about the wide plain of Paniput! Surely the Angel-of-Death must spread his wings over it at all times, since bitter battle has been fought on it again and again, and its sun-saturated sands have been sodden again and again with the blood of many men.

How many times has the fate of India been decided amongst its semi-barren stretches, where the low _dhak_ bushes glow like sunset clouds on the horizon? First by the mythical, legendary Pandus and Kurus, backed by the G.o.ds, protected by showers of celestial arrows.

Next, when Shahab-ud-din-Mahomed Ghori broke down the Rajput resistance, and Prithvi-raj, the flower of Rajput chivalry, was killed flying for his life amongst the sugarcane brakes. Timur pa.s.sed it by, but his great descendant Babar strewed the plain with dead in his victorious march to Delhi. Here Hemu met with crus.h.i.+ng defeat at Akbar's hands, and now Nadir was to carry on the tradition of death, until that last great fight in 1761, which ended the Mahratta power, and so paved the way for British supremacy.

How many men's dust is mingled with the soil of Paniput? All we know is that the life-blood of over a million is said to have been spilt upon it.

Nadir's battle, however, appears to have been a comparatively bloodless rout of an absolutely incapable enemy. Mahomed-Shah, the so-called emperor of all the Indies, at any rate gave up the struggle incontinently, sent in his submission, and the two kings journeyed peacefully together to Delhi, which they reached in March 1739. Did the populace come out to greet the sovereigns riding in, brother-like, hand in hand, to take up their residence in the palace built by Shahjahan? It is a quaint picture this, of cringing submission and reckless ascendency.

To Nadir's credit be it said that, whatever ultimate object of plunder he may have had, he wished to avoid bloodshed. For this purpose he stationed isolated pickets of chosen troops about the city and suburbs to keep order and protect the people. Unavailingly, for a strange thing happened. Whether owing to some deep-laid, well-known plan for poisoning the intruder which failed unexpectedly, or from some other cause, the report was spread abroad within forty-eight hours that Nadir-the-Conqueror, Nadir-the-mainspring-of-Conquest, was dead. The rumours blazed like wildfire through the bazaars. In quick impulse the mob fell on the pickets, and seven hundred Persians were weltering in their blood when Nadir himself rode through the midnight streets, intent, they say, on peace. But the provocation proved too much for his cold, cruel Persian temper.

Struck by stones and mud hurled at him from the houses, the officer next him killed by a bullet aimed at himself, he gave way to Berserk rage. It was just dawn when the ma.s.sacre he ordered began; it was nigh sunset when it ended, and night fell over one hundred and fifty thousand corpses. Nor did his revenge stop here. The treasure, which he would no doubt have extorted in any case, was now seized on by force, torture and murder being used to make the miserable inhabitants yield up every penny. Every kind of cruelty was employed in this extortion; numbers died from ill-usage, and many others destroyed themselves from fear of a disgraceful death. As an eye-witness writes: ”Sleep and rest forsook the city. In every chamber and house was heard the cry of affliction.”

The Afghan has always possessed a perfect genius for pillage, and after a short two months Nadir-Shah left Delhi, carrying away with him an almost incredible quant.i.ty of plunder, which it is very generally estimated at being worth 30,000,000; an enormous sum, but it must be remembered that the famous peac.o.c.k throne in itself was counted by Tavernier as equal to 6,000,000 sterling.

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