240 DESTINY DISRUPTED
A great deal of preparation and yet not nearly enough, because British
troops crushed the rebellion quickly and then went on a rampage of their
own, plundering Indian cities for about a month, hauling frightened locals
out of their homes and massacring them in the streets. In at least one case,
they had native prisoners line up along a pit and shot them in groups of
ten so that when they died they would fall conveniently into the hole,
which made burying them easier.^6 British historian Sir Charles Crosth-
waite depicted the victorious campaign as a British Iliad, calling it the
"epic of the Race."
Once the mutiny had been totally quelled, the British abandoned all
pretense, sent the pitiful last Moghul monarch into exile, and relegated the
East India Company to private status. The crown took charge oflndia di-
rectly. The ninety-year period of direct British rule that ensued was called
"the Raj."
British leaders regarded India as the "jewel in Queen Victoria's crown"
and guarded it even more jealously than before. In 1878, detecting new
Russian interest in Afghanistan, they tried to occupy Kabul again. Once
again, however, they miscalculated the difficulties of occupying a moun-
tainous territory inhabited by so many hostile and mutually antagonistic
tribes. It wasn't that the land was hard to "conquer," as Europeans under-
stood the term conquest. Great Britain easily marched into the capital, put
its own compliant nominee on the throne, and appointed an "envoy" to
direct him. In most contexts, this would have been conquest. But the
British found that bending Afghan leaders to their will did them little
good. The leaders they bent simply broke off in their hands and ended up
as their dependents, not their tools, while the tribal people they were sup-
posedly the rulers of operated in the hills as leaderless guerillas. The second
Anglo-Afghan War took a nasty turn when the British envoy Cavagnari
was killed and ruinous urban battles broke out; in the end the British were
forced to pull back to the subcontinent again.
In the wake of this second Anglo-Afghan war, the Russians and British
decided the territory ruled by the Afghan tribes cost too much to occupy
and agreed to make the whole place a buffer zone between their empires:
the Russians would not come south of the Oxus River, if the British would
agree not to push north of an arbitrary line in the desert drawn by British
diplomat Mortimer Durand. The territory between these lines became