The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [501]
Wigram remarked dryly that he expected a great many people had said as much of Macnaghten in '38, though that hadn't prevented him from being murdered by the Afghans three years later, after being largely responsible for attempting to foist Shah Shuja on the throne, and almost wholly responsible for allowing large numbers of British women and children and their down-country servants to join the Occupation Forces in Kabul and be massacred in the Kurd Kabul passes together with the retreating army. As Wally had-also studied that disastrous campaign, he was temporarily silenced, and confined himself to listening to Ash and Wigram discussing the possibility of being able to discover what was actually going on in Kabul and whether the Russian threat was real or only a turnip lantern being used by the Forward Policy bloc to frighten the electorate into supporting another war of aggression.
‘But supposing we could get the information?’ said Ash some ten minutes later. ‘We'd have no guarantee that it would be accepted if it turned out to contradict what they want to believe.’
‘None,’ confirmed Wigram; ‘except that if by “they” you mean Cavagnari, he would never suppress it. That's one thing I am sure about. He has his own spies of course, as we have always had ours – after all, it was in our original charter that we should employ “men capable of collecting trustworthy intelligence beyond as well as within our borders”, and as Deputy Commissioner of Peshawar, Cavagnari probably employs a good many of the same. But I'll go bail that anything of a political nature that they send him – anything to do with Shere Ali's relations with Russia for instance – is sent on at once to Simla, as anything we ourselves could tell him in that line would be too, regardless of whether it contradicted his own theories or not. In any case, one has to try. One can't sit back with folded hands and watch a shipload of passengers heading towards a hidden reef without making any attempt to light a flare or send up a rocket or do anything at all to try and warn them, even if it's only to yell or blow a whistle!’
‘No,’ agreed Ash slowly. ‘One has to do something – even when the chances are that it will prove useless.’
‘Yes, that's it. That's how I feel,’ sighed Wigram, enormously relieved. He leaned back in his chair, and grinning at Ash said: ‘I remember when you first joined us we used to rib you over a habit you had of saying that this or that was “unfair” – it was a favourite word of yours in those days. Well, speaking for myself, I've no objection to fighting a war: it's my trade. But I'd prefer to think that I was fighting in a just one; or at the very least, one that could not have been avoided. And I believe that this one can be. It's not too late.’
Ash remained silent, and Wigram saw that although his gaze appeared to be fixed on the dark oblong of the doorway through which his wife had left, his eyes had the blind unfocused look of one whose thoughts have travelled many miles, or perhaps years away. And indeed Ash was remembering the past and hearing once again as he had in Lalji's audience chamber in Gulkote and in the chattri at Bhithor, a long-dead voice exhorting a four-year-old boy not to forget that injustice was the worst sin in the world and must be fought wherever it was found… ‘even when you know that you cannot win’.
Wigram, who did not know