Annex 1: Extant memorials in Afghanistan
To my knowledge the only extant funerary memorials from the period of the Second Afghan War are those in Kabul, in the Qabr Gorah in the Sherpur district of Kabul. This cemetery is known to most Westerners as the "Foreigners Cemetery," or the "Christian Cemetery," and, until the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, was maintained by a committee nominally under the direction of the British Embassy. After this date, it continued to be looked after by the Rev. Father Angelo Panigati, the Roman Catholic priest for many years attached to the chapel within the Italian Embassy at Kabul (see The New York Times International, April 13, 1989, and The Los Angeles Times, May 10, 1989, Pt. I, pp. 1, 10-11). In August 1993 the cemetery was visited by a British subject, T.A. Willasey-Wilsey (private communication). He reported that the walls and wooden gates were still intact, that the Afghan war memorial stones were still preserved in the southwest wall, and that in general the cemetery had not greatly suffered from vandalism. All the trees within the walls, however, had been cut down by Kabul residents for fuel owing to the difficulty of procuring fuel from outside the city, particularly since the Russian withdrawal and the presence of warring mujahadin factions surrounding the city.
The cemetery lies at the northern end of the Bemaru Hill and retains still the configuration given it by the British forces during their occupation of Kabul in 1879 and 1880. The cemetery lay just outside the Sherpur Cantonment, an enormous walled enclosure commenced by the amir Sher Ali Khan, but reinforced by the British forces garrisoned within its precinct. The site of the walls of this cantonment, now well within the expanded city, are still partly traceable in the modern city. Contemporary photographs of the cemetery exist, one made by the photographer John Burke (NAM neg. no. ******, Burke ***, being the best general view) who was present at Kabul from early December 1879 till April or May 1880. The cemetery is not large, and for the most part we may assume that it was chiefly commissioned and non-commissioned officers who were buried there. The bodies of the Other Ranks, when recovered, were frequently buried in mass graves. The locations of these, with the exception of the Maiwand burials, if recorded, are unknown to me.
In the rising gravel plain to the north of Kandahar, situated in the largest Muslim burial ground, is a still mud-walled compound where earth mounds mark British burials, presumably the graves of officers. When burials outside the city could not be made, references and photographs indicate that there was a cemtery on open ground within the northwest walls, and another cemetry close to the south, or Shikarper, gate to the city in open land marked “brickfields” on an as yet unpublished plan of the city. When the British were not restricted by siege, burials were also made outside the Shikarpur Gate, in vacant lands in the area of brick kilns. These lands were also employed as burning ghats for Hindu residents of Kandahar. Burials were made in several other areas around the wall of the city. Though cited in diaries of the period, I believe no visible remains have been located. There are no extant burial or memorial stones in any of these grounds. The last report of a very few fragmentary stones appears in the one volume, published by Miles Irving and George William de Rhé-Philipe, in the series Indian Monumental Inscriptions in 1910-1912 (see Bibliography). During the last half century I have neither heard, nor seen, and mention of an extant memorial stone having been found in the many places where the British died within Afghanistan.
Following the British evacuation of Kabul in August 1880, the cemetery in that city was apparently respected (if neglected) by the Afghans to judge from a report made by Charles E. Yate in October 1886 (see Northern Afghaistan, p. 369):
Colonel [William Ironside] Bax and Dr. [William] Owen paid a visit to the cemetery, which, they said, was very little disturbed; some of the graves had sunk and fallen in, and most of the tombstones were down on the ground, and the names carved on them had been chipped and defaced, apparently by mischievous boys, but a little repair would put all to rights again. This the Amir [Abdur Rahman] himself promised Sir West Ridgeway should be done, and, in fact, before we left Kabul orders were issued by his Highness for the wall to be built up afresh, and the whole cemetery to be repaired and preserved.
These usually minor depredations continued through the years (1959-1979) I anually visited, plotted, photographed, and recorded all the graves, some of which were more than once translated. Those stones with inlaid lead letters received the most attention, though the digging out of the lead caused no significant loss to the inscriptions. Bronze was also frequently removed from many of the graves where memorializers were unwise to have used it. To my knowledge, only one name was lost because the name formed part of the elaborate bronze cross marking the grave. But it was a sad loss because the grave was that of Hans Henning Haslund-Christiansen, a scholar who added much to our knowledge of the ethnology of Central Asia. My efforts to persuade the Danish government to replace the lost bronze cross with a more appropriate substance were not acknowledged.
The Sherpur and Kandahar cemeteries were not the only one where British war dead were buried in the Kabul region. References exist to burials at Charasiab, to the west of Kabul, where the last major battle was waged before the troops entered the city in October 1879. In the early days of the occupation troops were quartered in the Bala Hissar, and burials from this period were generally at Siah Sang, a hill within the city. There was at least one other proper cemetery somewhere below, or on the eastern slope of, the Koh-i Asmai, and until the 1930's a large Muslim burial ground still remained at Asmai. Another cemetery at Beni Shahr [Hissar], at the Kandahar road entry to Kabul, was also for a short time used in the opening days of the Kabul occupation.
Cemeteries existed, of course, by every town occupied by the British and Indian Armies during the war, and along the routes used by the army entering and leaving the country, as at Sei Baba and Sarobi, on the road between Kabul and Jalalabad, or at Shutar Gardan and Zaidabad, along the army's march toward Kabul in the autumn of 1879. Another cemetery was located in the Kurram Valley where those killed in the Battle of Peiwar Kotal, during the first phase, were interred, and this cemetery continued in use throughout the second phase of the war as well. Still another was located at Basawal were there was a major battle during the first phase, and where the deceased stationed in the area continued to be interred during the second phase.
Isolated burials, where soldiers fell in action, abounded wherever battles or skirmishes were waged and when it was impracticable to remove the bodies later to one of the more formally defined cemeteries. The locations of several of these cemeteries are known, especially at Kandahar. There was a cemetery at Safed Sang, close to Gandamak where the British and Afghans signed a treaty with the amir Yakub Khan in May 1879 which was to have concluded the war, but was, in fact, only its prelude, and this cemetery was afterward used during the second and longer phase of the war. A photograph exists of this burial ground (******). Many of the troops who died of sickness or wounds were buried in plots along the march routes into Afghanistan, between Quetta and Kandahar, and Peshawar, Jalalabad and Kabul. A few bodies were subsequently removed to sites in India, but these are exceptions. Others who died of sickness, or epidemics (chiefly cholera following the first phase) were buried at Landi Kotal in the Khyber Pass, or at Peshawar.
Stone memorials, however, are extant only in the Kabul/Sherpur cemetery, though a few remained at Kandahar during the early decades of the twentieth century. The Kabul/Sherpur memorials are no longer in situ. The cemetery has been in more or less constant use for the burials of foreigners who died in Kabul from the date of formation of the cemetery to the present day. The celebrated archaeologist and explorer of Central Asia, Sir Marc Aurel Stein, is buried there, as is the noted ethnologist of Mongolia Henning Haslund-Christensen, among diplomats, travellers, business men, and, in later years, many young people seeking a changed lifestyle through Asian travel and the ready availability of drugs in Afghanistan. In consequence, the memorial stones present in the cemetery today represent only the most recent level of burials in this restricted plot.
I am unacquainted with the precise details of the finding of the ten stone memorials from the Afghan Wars (one appears to bear the date 1842). Locally I have been told that the stones were discovered in a stone mason's shop where they were intended for re-engraving. But this may be no more than lore. Miles Irving (IMI, vol. 2, pt. 1, p. 9) reported early in the 20th century that "the tombstones have been taken off, and are now stored in a small hut in a corner of the cemetery, and many of them are broken." (This hut exists still, and contains now stones of deceased who have been repatriated, or, in one case at least, a stone which seems to have offended the sensibilities of a segment of the more fundamentalist Christian community.) On p. 182 of the same vol, Irving again records the following: "There are no inscriptions on the graves in the Kabul and Jalalabad cemeteries. The gravestones at Sherpur have been collected and deposited in a domed hut in the corner of the graveyard, but no record has been taken of the inscriptions." As we shall see, this statement is not accurate, as nine inscribed stones, and one possibly from the First Afghan War, in fact, exist still in the Kabul/Sherpur cemetery.
A more reliable account of the recovery appears in Chowkidar, vol. I, No. 2 (February 1978) p. 3: "Graveyards in Afghanistan struck a particular chord with our Chairman [Maj.-Gen. G.M. Dyer, CBE, DSO] who at the end of the Second World War collected badly damaged 19th century British gravestones at Kabul and built them into the south wall of the Shar-e-Nau Foreigners Cemetery." Whatever the circumstances of their discovery, the ten stones are, indeed, cemented into the south wall. Some are broken (as noted), others difficult to decipher owing to chipped letters and repeated careless lime-washing of the surrounding wall, frequently splashed over the stones. On numerous occasions between 1959 and 1979 I paid visits to the cemetery, to record and photograph recent burials (some of which vanished or were translated during this time) and by my last visit in April of 1979 had recorded and rechecked and photographed (with the help of companions) every extant monument in the cemetery. My record, therefore, covers nineteen years only in the long history of this cemetery, but for the present work I record only the relevant memorials.
All of the extant memorials save one (9th [The Queen's Royal] Lancers) are to single individuals. All of the individuals recorded here appear in the present roster, and reference should be made to the individual names in the body of this work for variants drawn from different records. The cemetery was visited briefly in August 1993 by T.A. Willasey-Wilsey (see Bibliography) and his subsequest report to BACSA indicates that as of that date the Anglo-Afghan war memorial stones had not suffered from the Russo-Afghan war (1979-1989) and subsequent civil war up to this date. No later account has been received.