Accompanying the Anglo-Indian troops was Russophobe bureaucrat Sir William Hay Macnaghten, who was to be the British chief representative, and Shah Shuja, “the once and future king.” The largest military expedition ever mounted by the East India Company, the invading force lumbered through the rugged Afghan landscape with 58,000 people, 30,000 camels (300 for the wine alone) and a pack of foxhounds for hunting. In March 1839, the grandly named Army of the Indus, “led by lancers in scarlet cloaks and plumed shakos,” marched into Afghanistan (then known as Khurasan) by way of the Bolan Pass. “I see these three books very much as the East India Company trilogy,” he says. This exhaustively researched book has a leaner storyline than his two earlier historical narratives, White Mughals (2002) and The Last Mughal (2006). THE greatest military disaster in the history of British India - a “signal catastrophe,” as a participant later described it - is the subject of prizewinning and bestselling British historian and travel writer William Dalrymple’s Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan. Cover-story-33 Entrance to the Bolan Pass from Dadur in 1839 when the Army of the Indus marched through it
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