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The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80

by Archibald Forbes · English · Gutenberg #8428 · 552,804 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80

Author: Archibald Forbes


        
Release date: July 1, 2005 [eBook #8428]
                Most recently updated: April 11, 2022

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AFGHAN WARS 1839-42 AND 1878-80 ***




[Illustration: Sir Frederick Roberts]

       *       *       *       *       *

THE AFGHAN WARS 1839-42 AND 1878-80

by ARCHIBALD FORBES

With Portraits and Plans

       *       *       *       *       *

CONTENTS

PART I.--THE FIRST AFGHAN WAR

CHAP.

   I.--PRELIMINARY

  II.--THE MARCH TO CABUL

 III.--THE FIRST YEAR OF OCCUPATION

  IV.--THE SECOND YEAR OF OCCUPATION

   V.--THE BEGINNING OF THE END

  VI.--THE ROAD TO RUIN

 VII.--THE CATASTROPHE

VIII.--THE SIEGE AND DEFENCE OF JELLALABAD

  IX.--RETRIBUTION AND RESCUE


PART II.--THE SECOND AFGHAN WAR

   I.--THE FIRST CAMPAIGN

  II.--THE OPENING OF THE SECOND CAMPAIGN

 III.--THE LULL BEFORE THE STORM

  IV.--THE DECEMBER STORM

   V.--ON THE DEFENSIVE IN SHERPUR

  VI.--AHMED KHEL

 VII.--THE AMEER ABDURRAHMAN

VIII.--MAIWAND AND THE GREAT MARCH

  IX.--THE BATTLE OF CANDAHAR

       *       *       *       *       *

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS AND PLANS

  PORTRAIT OF SIR FREDERICK ROBERTS  _Frontispiece_

  PLAN OF CABUL, THE CANTONMENT

  PORTRAIT OF SIR GEORGE POLLOCK

  PORTRAIT OF SIR LOUIS CAVAGNARI AND SIRDARS

  PLAN OF CABUL SHOWING THE ACTIONS, DEC. 11-14

  PLAN OF ACTION, AHMED KHEL

  PORTRAIT OF THE AMEER ABDURRAHMAN

  PLAN OF THE ACTION OF MAIWAND

  PLAN OF THE ACTION OF CANDAHAR

_The Portraits of Sir G. Pollock and Sir F. Roberts are engraved by
permission of Messrs Henry Graves & Co._

       *       *       *       *       *




THE AFGHAN WARS




PART I: _THE FIRST AFGHAN WAR_




CHAPTER I: PRELIMINARY


Since it was the British complications with Persia which mainly
furnished what pretext there was for the invasion of Afghanistan by an
Anglo-Indian army in 1839, some brief recital is necessary of the
relations between Great Britain and Persia prior to that aggression.

By a treaty, concluded between England and Persia in 1814, the former
state bound itself, in case of the invasion of Persia by any European
nation, to aid the Shah either with troops from India or by the payment
of an annual subsidy in support of his war expenses. It was a dangerous
engagement, even with the _caveat_ rendering the undertaking inoperative
if such invasion should be provoked by Persia. During the fierce
struggle of 1825-7, between Abbas Meerza and the Russian General
Paskevitch, England refrained from supporting Persia either with men or
with money, and when prostrate Persia was in financial extremities
because of the war indemnity which the treaty of Turkmanchai imposed
upon her, England took advantage of her needs by purchasing the
cancellation of the inconvenient obligation at the cheap cost of about
£300,000. It was the natural result of this transaction that English
influence with the Persian Court should sensibly decline, and it was not
less natural that in conscious weakness Persia should fall under the
domination of Russian influence.

Futteh Ali, the old Shah of Persia, died in 1834, and was succeeded by
his grandson Prince Mahomed Meerza, a young man who inherited much of
the ambition of his gallant father Abbas Meerza. His especial
aspiration, industriously stimulated by his Russian advisers, urged him
to the enterprise of conquering the independent principality of Herat,
on the western border of Afghanistan. Herat was the only remnant of
Afghan territory that still remained to a member of the legitimate royal
house. Its ruler was Shah Kamran, son of that Mahmoud Shah who, after
ousting his brother Shah Soojah from the throne of Cabul, had himself
been driven from that elevation, and had retired to the minor
principality of Herat. The young Shah of Persia was not destitute of
justification for his designs on Herat. That this was so was frankly
admitted by Mr Ellis, the British envoy to his Court, who wrote to his
Government that the Shah had fair claim to the sovereignty of
Afghanistan as far as Ghuznee, and that Kamran's conduct in occupying
part of the Persian province of Seistan had given the Shah 'a full
justification for commencing hostilities against Herat.'

The serious phase of the situation for England and India was that
Russian influence was behind Persia in this hostile action against
Herat. Mr Ellis pointed out that in the then existing state of relations
between Persia and Russia, the progress of the former in Afghanistan was
tantamount to the advancement of the latter. But unfortunately there
remained valid an article in the treaty of 1814 to the effect that, in
case of war between the Afghans and the Persians, the English Government
should not interfere with either party unless when called on by both to
mediate. In vain did Ellis and his successor M'Neill remonstrate with
the Persian monarch against the Herat expedition. An appeal to St
Petersburg, on the part of Great Britain, produced merely an evasive
reply. How diplomatic disquietude had become intensified may be inferred
from this, that whereas in April 1836 Ellis wrote of Persia as a Russian
first parallel of attack against India, Lord Auckland, then
Governor-General of India, directed M'Neill, in the early part of 1837,
to urge the Shah to abandon his enterprise, on the ground that he (the
Governor-General) 'must view with umbrage and displeasure schemes of
interference and conquest on our western frontier.'

The Shah, unmoved by the representations of the British envoy, marched
on Herat, and the siege was opened on November 23d, 1837. Durand, a
capable critic, declares that the strength of the place, the resolution
of the besiegers, the skill of their Russian military advisers, and the
gallantry of the besieged, were alike objects of much exaggeration. 'The
siege was from first to last thoroughly ill-conducted, and the defence,
in reality not better managed, owed its _éclat_ to Persian ignorance,
timidity and supineness. The advice of Pottinger, the gallant English
officer who assisted the defence, was seldom asked, and still more
seldom taken; and no one spoke more plainly of the conduct of both
besieged and besiegers than did Pottinger himself.' M'Neill effected
nothing definite during a long stay in the Persian camp before Herat,
the counteracting influence of the Russian envoy being too strong with
the Shah; and the British representative, weary of continual slights, at
length quitted the Persian camp completely foiled. After six days'
bombardment, the Persians and their Russian auxiliaries delivered an
assault in force on June 23d, 1838. It failed, with heavy loss, and the
dispirited Shah determined on raising the siege. His resolution was
quickened by the arrival of Colonel Stoddart in his camp, with the
information that a military force from Bombay, supported by ships of
war, had landed on the island of Karrack in the Persian Gulf, and with
the peremptory ultimatum to the Shah that he must retire from Herat at
once. Lord Palmerston, in ordering this diversion in the Gulf, had
thought himself justified by circumstances in overriding the clear and
precise terms of an article in a treaty to which England had on several
occasions engaged to adhere. As for the Shah, he appears to have been
relieved by the ultimatum. On the 9th September he mounted his horse and
rode away from Herat. The siege had lasted nine and a half months.
To-day, half a century after Simonich the Russian envoy followed Mahomed
Shah from battered but unconquered Herat, that city is still an Afghan
place of arms.

Shah Soojah-ool Moolk, a grandson of the illustrious Ahmed Shah, reigned
in Afghanistan from 1803 till 1809. His youth had been full of trouble
and vicissitude. He had been a wanderer, on the verge of starvation, a
pedlar and a bandit, who raised money by plundering caravans. His
courage was lightly reputed, and it was as a mere creature of
circumstance that he reached the throne. His reign was perturbed, and in
1809 he was a fugitive and an exile. Runjeet Singh, the Sikh ruler of
the Punjaub, defrauded him of the famous Koh-i-noor, which is now the
most precious of the crown jewels of England, and plundered and
imprisoned the fallen man. Shah Soojah at length escaped from Lahore.
After further misfortunes he at length reached the British frontier
station of Loodianah, and in 1816 became a pensioner of the East India
Company.

After the downfall of Shah Soojah, Afghanistan for many years was a prey
to anarchy. At length in 1826, Dost Mahomed succeeded in making himself
supreme at Cabul, and this masterful man thenceforward held sway until
his death in 1863, uninterruptedly save during the three years of the
British occupation. Dost Mahomed was neither kith nor kin to the
legitimate dynasty which he displaced. His father Poyndah Khan was an
able statesman and gallant soldier. He left twenty-one sons, of whom
Futteh Khan was the eldest, and Dost Mahomed one of the youngest. Futteh
Khan was the Warwick of Afghanistan, but the Afghan 'Kingmaker' had no
Barnet as the closing scene of his chequered life. Falling into hostile
hands, he was blinded and scalped. Refusing to betray his brothers, he
was leisurely cut to pieces by the order and in the presence of the
monarch whom he had made. His young brother Dost Mahomed undertook to
avenge his death. After years of varied fortunes the Dost had worsted
all his enemies, and in 1826 he became the ruler of Cabul. Throughout
his long reign Dost Mahomed was a strong and wise ruler. His youth had
been neglected and dissolute. His education was defective, and he had
been addicted to wine. Once seated on the throne, the reformation of our
Henry Fifth was not more thorough than was that of Dost Mahomed. He
taught himself to read and write, studied the Koran, became scrupulously
abstemious, assiduous in affairs, no longer truculent but courteous. He
is said to have made a public acknowledgment of the errors of his
previous life, and a firm profession of reformation; nor did his after
life belie the pledges to which he committed himself. There was a fine
rugged honesty in his nature, and a streak of genuine chivalry;
notwithstanding the despite he suffered at our hands, he had a real
regard for the English, and his loyalty to us was broken only by his
armed support of the Sikhs in the second Punjaub war.

The fallen Shah Soojah, from his asylum in Loodianah, was continually
intriguing for his restoration. His schemes were long inoperative, and
it was not until 1832 that certain arrangements were entered into
between him and the Maharaja Runjeet Singh. To an application on Shah
Soojah's part for countenance and pecuniary aid, the Anglo-Indian
Government replied that to afford him assistance would be inconsistent
with the policy of neutrality which the Government had imposed on
itself; but it unwisely contributed financially toward his undertaking
by granting him four months' pension in advance. Sixteen thousand rupees
formed a scant war fund with which to attempt the recovery of a throne,
but the Shah started on his errand in February 1833. After a successful
contest with the Ameers of Scinde, he marched on Candahar, and besieged
that fortress. Candahar was in extremity when Dost Mahomed, hurrying
from Cabul, relieved it, and joining forces with its defenders, he
defeated and routed Shah Soojah, who fled precipitately, leaving behind
him his artillery and camp equipage, During the Dost's absence in the
south, Runjeet Singh's troops crossed the Attock, occupied the Afghan
province of Peshawur, and drove the Afghans into the Khyber Pass. No
subsequent efforts on Dost Mahomed's part availed to expel the Sikhs
from Peshawur, and suspicious of British connivance with Runjeet Singh's
successful aggression, he took into consideration the policy of
fortifying himself by a counter alliance with Persia. As for Shah
Soojah, he had crept back to his refuge at Loodianah.

Lord Auckland succeeded Lord William Bentinck as Governor-General of
India in March 1836. In reply to Dost Mahomed's letter of
congratulation, his lordship wrote: 'You are aware that it is not the
practice of the British Government to interfere with the affairs of
other independent states;' an abstention which Lord Auckland was soon to
violate. He had brought from England the feeling of disquietude in
regard to the designs of Persia and Russia which the communications of
our envoy in Persia had fostered in the Home Government, but it would
appear that he was wholly undecided what line of action to pursue.
'Swayed,' says Durand, 'by the vague apprehensions of a remote danger
entertained by others rather than himself,' he despatched to Afghanistan
Captain Burnes on a nominally commercial mission, which, in fact, was
one of political discovery, but without definite instructions. Burnes,
an able but rash and ambitious man, reached Cabul in September 1837, two
months before the Persian army began the siege of Herat. He had a strong
prepossession in favour of the Dost, whose guest he had already been in
1832, and the policy he favoured was not the revival of the legitimate
dynasty in the person of Shah Soojah, but the attachment of Dost Mahomed
to British interests by strengthening his throne and affording him
British countenance.

Burnes sanguinely believed that he had arrived at Cabul in the nick of
time, for an envoy from the Shah of Persia was already at Candahar,
bearing presents and assurances of support. The Dost made no concealment
to Burnes of his approaches to Persia and Russia, in despair of British
good offices, and being hungry for assistance from any source to meet
the encroachments of the Sikhs, he professed himself ready to abandon
his negotiations with the western powers if he were given reason to
expect countenance and assistance at the hands of the Anglo-Indian
Government. Burnes communicated to his Government those friendly
proposals, supporting them by his own strong representations, and
meanwhile, carried away by enthusiasm, he exceeded his powers by making
efforts to dissuade the Candahar chiefs from the Persian alliance, and
by offering to support them with money to enable them to make head
against the offensive, by which Persia would probably seek to revenge
the rejection of her overtures. For this unauthorised excess of zeal
Burnes was severely reprimanded by his Government, and was directed to
retract his offers to the Candahar chiefs. The situation of Burnes in
relation to the Dost was presently complicated by the arrival at Cabul
of a Russian officer claiming to be an envoy from the Czar, whose
credentials, however, were regarded as dubious, and who, if that
circumstance has the least weight, was on his return to Russia utterly
repudiated by Count Nesselrode. The Dost took small account of this
emissary, continuing to assure Burnes that he cared for no connection
except with the English, and Burnes professed to his Government his
fullest confidences in the sincerity of those declarations. But the tone
of Lord Auckland's reply, addressed to the Dost, was so dictatorial and
supercilious as to indicate the writer's intention that it should give
offence. It had that effect, and Burnes' mission at once became
hopeless. Yet, as a last resort, Dost Mahomed lowered his pride so far
as to write to the Governor-General imploring him 'to remedy the
grievances of the Afghans, and afford them some little encouragement and
power.' The pathetic representation had no effect. The Russian envoy,
who was profuse in his promises of everything which the Dost was most
anxious to obtain, was received into favour and treated with
distinction, and on his return journey he effected a treaty with the
Candahar chiefs, which was presently ratified by the Russian minister at
the Persian Court. Burnes, fallen into discredit at Cabul, quitted that
place in August 1838. He had not been discreet, but it was not his
indiscretion that brought about the failure of his mission. A nefarious
transaction, which Kaye denounces with the passion of a just
indignation, connects itself with Burnes' negotiations with the Dost;
his official correspondence was unscrupulously mutilated and garbled in
the published Blue Book with deliberate purpose to deceive the British
public.

Burnes had failed because, since he had quitted India for Cabul, Lord
Auckland's policy had gradually altered. Lord Auckland had landed in
India in the character of a man of peace. That, so late as April 1837,
he had no design of obstructing the existing situation in Afghanistan is
proved by his written statement of that date, that 'the British
Government had resolved decidedly to discourage the prosecution by the
ex-king Shah Soojah-ool-Moolk, so long as he may remain under our
protection, of further schemes of hostility against the chiefs now in
power in Cabul and Candahar.' Yet, in the following June, he concluded a
treaty which sent Shah Soojah to Cabul, escorted by British bayonets. Of
this inconsistency no explanation presents itself. It was a far cry from
our frontier on the Sutlej to Herat in the confines of Central Asia--a
distance of more than 1200 miles, over some of the most arduous marching
ground in the known world. No doubt the Anglo-Indian Government was
justified in being somewhat concerned by the facts that a Persian army,
backed by Russian volunteers and Russian roubles, was besieging Herat,
and that Persian and Russian emissaries were at work in Afghanistan.
Both phenomena were rather of the 'bogey' character; how much so to-day
shows when the Afghan frontier is still beyond Herat, and when a
descendant of Dost Mahomed still sits in the Cabul _musnid_. But neither
England nor India scrupled to make the Karrack counter-threat which
arrested the siege of Herat; and the obvious policy as regarded
Afghanistan was to watch the results of the intrigues which were on
foot, to ignore them should they come to nothing, as was probable, to
counteract them by familiar methods if serious consequences should seem
impending. Our alliance with Runjeet Singh was solid, and the quarrel
between Dost Mahomed and him concerning the Peshawur province was
notoriously easy of arrangement.

On whose memory rests the dark shadow of responsibility for the first
Afghan war? The late Lord Broughton, who, when Sir John Cam Hobhouse,
was President of the Board of Control from 1835 to 1841, declared
before a House of Commons Committee, in 1851, 'The Afghan war was done
by myself; entirely without the privity of the Board of Directors.' The
meaning of that declaration, of course, was that it was the British
Government of the day which was responsible, acting through its member
charged with the control of Indian affairs; and further, that the
directorate of the East India Company was accorded no voice in the
matter. But this utterance was materially qualified by Sir J. C.
Hobhouse's statement in the House of Commons in 1842, that his despatch
indicating the policy to be adopted, and that written by Lord Auckland,
informing him that the expedition had already been undertaken, had
crossed each other on the way.

It would be tedious to detail how Lord Auckland, under evil counsel,
gradually boxed the compass from peace to war. The scheme of action
embodied in the treaty which, in the early summer of 1838, was concluded
between the Anglo-Indian Government, Runjeet Singh, and Shah Soojah, was
that Shah Soojah, with a force officered from an Indian army, and paid
by British money, possessing also the goodwill and support of the
Maharaja of the Punjaub, should attempt the recovery of his throne
without any stiffening of British bayonets at his back. Then it was
urged, and the representation was indeed accepted, that the Shah would
need the buttress afforded by English troops, and that a couple of
regiments only would suffice to afford this prestige. But Sir Harry
Fane, the Commander-in-Chief, judiciously interposed his veto on the
despatch of a handful of British soldiers on so distant and hazardous an
expedition. Finally, the Governor-General, committed already to a
mistaken line of policy, and urged forward by those about him, took the
unfortunate resolution to gather together an Anglo-Indian army, and to
send it, with the ill-omened Shah Soojah on its shoulders, into the
unknown and distant wilds of Afghanistan. This action determined on, it
was in accordance with the Anglo-Indian fitness of things that the
Governor-General should promulgate a justificatory manifesto. Of this
composition it is unnecessary to say more than to quote Durand's
observation that in it 'the words "justice and necessity" were applied
in a manner for which there is fortunately no precedent in the English
language,' and Sir Henry Edwardes' not less trenchant comment that 'the
views and conduct of Dost Mahomed were misrepresented with a hardihood
which a Russian statesman might have envied.'

All men whose experience gave weight to their words opposed this
'preposterous enterprise.' Mr Elphinstone, who had been the head of a
mission to Cabul thirty years earlier, held that 'if an army was sent up
the passes, and if we could feed it, no doubt we might take Cabul and
set up Shah Soojah; but it was hopeless to maintain him in a poor, cold,
strong and remote country, among so turbulent a people.' Lord William
Bentinck, Lord Auckland's predecessor, denounced the project as an act
of incredible folly. Marquis Wellesley regarded 'this wild expedition
into a distant region of rocks and deserts, of sands and ice and snow,'
as an act of infatuation. The Duke of Wellington pronounced with
prophetic sagacity, that the consequence of once crossing the Indus to
settle a government in Afghanistan would be a perennial march into that
country.




CHAPTER II: THE MARCH TO CABUL


The two main objects of the venturesome offensive movement to which Lord
Auckland had committed himself were, first, the raising of the Persian
siege of Herat if the place should hold out until reached--the recapture
of it if it should have fallen; and, secondly, the establishment of Shah
Soojah on the Afghan throne. The former object was the more pressing,
and time was very precious; but the distances in India are great, the
means of communication in 1838 did not admit of celerity, and the
seasons control the safe prosecution of military operations.
Nevertheless, the concentration of the army at the frontier station of
Ferozepore was fully accomplished toward the end of November. Sir Harry
Fane was to be the military head of the expedition, and he had just
right to be proud of the 14,000 carefully selected and well-seasoned
troops who constituted his Bengal contingent. The force consisted of two
infantry divisions, of which the first, commanded by Major-General Sir
Willoughby Cotton, contained three brigades, commanded respectively by
Colonels Sale, Nott, and Dennis, of whom the two former were to attain
high distinction within the borders of Afghanistan. Major-General Duncan
commanded the second infantry division of the two brigades, of which one
was commanded by Colonel Roberts, the gallant father of a gallant son,
the other by Colonel Worsley. The 6000 troops raised for Shah Soojah,
who were under Fane's orders, and were officered from our army in India,
had been recently and hurriedly recruited, and although rapidly
improving, were not yet in a state of high efficiency. The contingent
which the Bombay Presidency was to furnish to the 'Army of the Indus,'
and which landed about the close of the year near the mouth of the
Indus, was under the command of General Sir John Keane, the
Commander-in-Chief of the Bombay army. The Bombay force was about 5000
strong.

Before the concentration at Ferozepore had been completed, Lord Auckland
received official intimation of the retreat of the Persians from before
Herat. With their departure had gone, also, the sole legitimate object
of the expedition; there remained but a project of wanton aggression and
usurpation. The Russo-Persian failure at Herat was scarcely calculated
to maintain in the astute and practical Afghans any hope of fulfilment
of the promises which the western powers had thrown about so lavishly,
while it made clear that, for some time at least to come, the Persians
would not be found dancing again to Russian fiddling. The abandonment of
the siege of Herat rendered the invasion of Afghanistan an aggression
destitute even of pretext. The Governor-General endeavoured to justify
his resolution to persevere in it by putting forth the argument that its
prosecution was required, 'alike in observation of the treaties entered
into with Runjeet Singh and Shah Soojah as by paramount considerations
of defensive policy.' A remarkable illustration of 'defensive policy' to
take the offensive against a remote country from whose further confines
had faded away foiled aggression, leaving behind nothing but a bitter
consciousness of broken promises! As for the other plea, the tripartite
treaty contained no covenant that we should send a corporal's guard
across our frontier. If Shah Soojah had a powerful following in
Afghanistan, he could regain his throne without our assistance; if he
had no holding there, it was for us a truly discreditable enterprise to
foist him on a recalcitrant people at the point of the bayonet.

One result of the tidings from Herat was to reduce by a division the
strength of the expeditionary force. Fane, who had never taken kindly to
the project, declined to associate himself with the diminished array
that remained. The command of the Bengal column fell to Sir Willoughby
Cotton, with whom as his aide-de-camp rode that Henry Havelock whose
name twenty years later was to ring through India and England. Duncan's
division was to stand fast at Ferozepore as a support, by which
disposition the strength of the Bengal marching force was cut down to
about 9500 fighting men. After its junction with the Bombay column, the
army would be 14,500 strong, without reckoning the Shah's contingent.
There was an interlude at Ferozepore of reviews and high jinks with the
shrewd, debauched old Runjeet Singh; of which proceedings Havelock in
his narrative of the expedition gives a detailed account, dwelling with
extreme disapprobation on Runjeet's addiction to a 'pet tipple' strong
enough to lay out the hardest drinker in the British camp, but which the
old reprobate quaffed freely without turning a hair.

At length, on December 10th, 1838, Cotton began the long march which was
not to terminate at Cabul until August 6th of the following year. The
most direct route was across the Punjaub, and up the passes from
Peshawur, but the Governor-General had shrunk from proposing to Runjeet
Singh that the force should march through his territories, thinking it
enough that the Maharaja had permitted Shah Soojah's heir, Prince
Timour, to go by Peshawur to Cabul, had engaged to support him with a
Sikh force, and had agreed to maintain an army of reserve at Peshawur.
The chosen route was by the left bank of the Sutlej to its junction with
the Indus, down the left bank of the Indus to the crossing point at
Roree, and from Sukkur across the Scinde and northern Belooch provinces
by the Bolan and Kojuk passes to Candahar, thence by Khelat-i-Ghilzai
and Ghuznee to Cabul. This was a line excessively circuitous, immensely
long, full of difficulties, and equally disadvantageous as to supplies
and communications. On the way the column would have to effect a
junction with the Bombay force, which at Vikkur was distant 800 miles
from Ferozepore. Of the distance of 850 miles from the latter post to
Candahar the first half to the crossing of the Indus presented no
serious difficulties, but from Sukkur beyond the country was
inhospitable and cruelly rugged. It needed little military knowledge to
realise how more and yet more precarious would become the communications
as the chain lengthened, to discern that from Ferozepore to the Indus
they would be at the mercy of the Sikhs, and to comprehend this also,
that a single serious check, in or beyond the passes, would involve all
but inevitable ruin.

Shah Soojah and his levies moved independently some marches in advance
of Cotton. The Dooranee monarch-elect had already crossed the Indus, and
was encamped at Shikarpore, when he was joined by Mr William Hay
Macnaghten, of the Company's Civil Service, the high functionary who had
been gazetted as 'Envoy and Minister on the part of the Government of
India at the Court of Shah Soojah-ool-Moolk.' Durand pronounces the
selection an unhappy one, 'for Macnaghten, long accustomed to
irresponsible office, inexperienced in men, and ignorant of the country
and people of Afghanistan, was, though an erudite Arabic scholar,
neither practised in the field of Asiatic intrigue nor a man of action.
His ambition was, however, great, and the expedition, holding out the
promise of distinction and honours, had met with his strenuous
advocacy.' Macnaghten was one of the three men who chiefly inspired Lord
Auckland with the policy to which he had committed himself. He was the
negotiator of the tripartite treaty. He was now on his way toward a
region wherein he was to concern himself in strange adventures, the
outcome of which was to darken his reputation, consign him to a sudden
cruel death, bring awful ruin on the enterprise he had fostered, and
inflict incalculable damage on British prestige in India.

Marching through Bhawulpore and Northern Scinde, without noteworthy
incident save heavy losses of draught cattle, Cotton's army reached
Roree, the point at which the Indus was to be crossed, in the third week
of January 1839. Here a delay was encountered. The Scinde Ameers were,
with reason, angered by the unjust and exacting terms which Pottinger
had been instructed to enforce on them. They had been virtually
independent of Afghanistan for nearly half a century; there was now
masterfully demanded of them quarter of a million sterling in name of
back tribute, and this in the face of the fact that they held a solemn
release by Shah Soojah of all past and future claims. When they demurred
to this, and to other exactions, they were peremptorily told that
'neither the ready power to crush and annihilate them, nor the will to
call it into action, was wanting if it appeared requisite, however
remotely, for the safety and integrity of the Anglo-Indian empire and
frontier.'

It was little wonder that the Ameers were reluctant to fall in with
terms advanced so arrogantly. Keane marched up the right bank of the
Indus to within a couple of marches of Hyderabad, and having heard of
the rejection by the Ameers of Pottinger's terms, and of the gathering
of some 20,000 armed Belooches about the capital, he called for the
co-operation of part of the Bengal column in a movement on Hyderabad.
Cotton started on his march down the left bank, on January Jeth, with
5600 men. Under menaces so ominous the unfortunate Ameers succumbed.
Cotton returned to Roree; the Bengal column crossed the Indus, and on
February 20th its headquarters reached Shikarpore. Ten days later,
Cotton, leading the advance, was in Dadur, at the foot of the Bolan
Pass, having suffered heavily in transport animals almost from the
start. Supplies were scarce in a region so barren, but with a month's
partial food on his beasts of burden he quitted Dadur March 10th, got
safely, if toilsomely, through the Bolan, and on 26th reached Quetta,
where he was to halt for orders. Shah Soojah and Keane followed, their
troops suffering not a little from scarcity of supplies and loss of
animals.

Keane's error in detaining Cotton at Quetta until he should arrive
proved itself in the semi-starvation to which the troops of the Bengal
column were reduced. The Khan of Khelat, whether from disaffection or
inability, left unfulfilled his promise to supply grain, and the result
of the quarrel which Burnes picked with him was that he shunned coming
in and paying homage to Shah Soojah, for which default he was to suffer
cruel and unjustifiable ruin. The sepoys were put on half, the camp
followers on quarter rations, and the force for eleven days had been
idly consuming the waning supplies, when at length, on April 6th, Keane
came into camp, having already formally assumed the command of the whole
army, and made certain alterations in its organisation and subsidiary
commands. There still remained to be traversed 147 miles before Candahar
should be reached, and the dreaded Kojuk Pass had still to be
penetrated.

Keane was a soldier who had gained a reputation for courage in Egypt and
the Peninsula. He was indebted to the acuteness of his engineer and the
valour of his troops, for the peerage conferred on him for Ghuznee, and
it cannot be said that during his command in Afghanistan he disclosed
any marked military aptitude. But he had sufficient perception to
recognise that he had brought the Bengal column to the verge of
starvation in Quetta, and sufficient common sense to discern that, since
if it remained there it would soon starve outright, the best thing to be
done was to push it forward with all possible speed into a region where
food should be procurable. Acting on this reasoning, he marched the day
after his arrival. Cotton, while lying in Quetta, had not taken the
trouble to reconnoitre the passes in advance, far less to make a
practicable road through the Kojuk defile if that should prove the best
route. The resolution taken to march through it, two days were spent in
making the pass possible for wheels; and from the 13th to the 21st the
column was engaged in overcoming the obstacles it presented, losing in
the task, besides, much baggage, supplies, transport and ordnance
stores. Further back in the Bolan Willshire with the Bombay column was
faring worse; he was plundered severely by tribal marauders.

By May 4th the main body of the army was encamped in the plain of
Candahar. From the Kojuk, Shah Soojah and his contingent had led the
advance toward the southern capital of the dominions from the throne of
which he had been cast down thirty years before. The Candahar chiefs had
meditated a night attack on his raw troops, but Macnaghten's intrigues
and bribes had wrought defection in their camp; and while Kohun-dil-Khan
and his brothers were in flight to Girishk on the Helmund, the infamous
Hadji Khan Kakur led the venal herd of turncoat sycophants to the feet
of the claimant who came backed by the British gold, which Macnaghten
was scattering abroad with lavish hand. Shah Soojah recovered from his
trepidation, hurried forward in advance of his troops, and entered
Candahar on April 24th. His reception was cold. The influential chiefs
stood aloof, abiding the signs of the times; the populace of Candahar
stood silent and lowering. Nor did the sullenness abate when the
presence of a large army with its followers promptly raised the price of
grain, to the great distress of the poor. The ceremony of the solemn
recognition of the Shah, held close to the scene of his defeat in 1834,
Havelock describes as an imposing pageant, with homagings and royal
salutes, parade of troops and presentation of _nuzzurs_; but the arena
set apart for the inhabitants was empty, spite of Eastern love for a
_tamasha_, and the display of enthusiasm was confined to the immediate
retainers of His Majesty.

The Shah was eager for the pursuit of the fugitive chiefs; but the
troops were jaded and sickly, the cavalry were partially dismounted, and
what horses remained were feeble skeletons. The transport animals
needed grazing and rest, and their loss of numbers to be made good. The
crops were not yet ripe, and provisions were scant and dear. When, on
May 9th, Sale marched toward Girishk, his detachment carried half
rations, and his handful of regular cavalry was all that two regiments
could furnish. Reaching Girishk, he found that the chiefs had fled
toward Seistan, and leaving a regiment of the Shah's contingent in
occupation, he returned to Candahar.

Macnaghten professed the belief, and perhaps may have deluded himself
into it, that Candahar had received the Shah with enthusiasm. He was
sanguine that the march to Cabul would be unopposed, and he urged on
Keane, who was wholly dependent on the Envoy for political information,
to move forward at once, lightening the difficulties of the march by
leaving the Bombay troops at Candahar. But Keane declined, on the advice
of Thomson, his chief engineer, who asked significantly whether he had
found the information given him by the political department in any
single instance correct. Food prospects, however, did not improve at
Candahar, and leaving a strong garrison there as well, curious to say,
as the siege train which with arduous labour had been brought up the
passes, Keane began the march to Cabul on June 27th. He had supplies
only sufficient to carry his army thither on half rations. Macnaghten
had lavished money so freely that the treasury chest was all but empty.
How the Afghans regarded the invasion was evinced by condign slaughter
of our stragglers.

As the army advanced up the valley of the Turnuk, the climate became
more temperate, the harvest was later, and the troops improved in health
and spirit. Concentrating his forces, Keane reached Ghuznee on July
21st. The reconnaissance he made proved that fortress occupied in force.
The outposts driven in, and a close inspection made, the works were
found stronger than had been represented, and its regular reduction was
out of the question without the battering train which Keane had allowed
himself to be persuaded into leaving behind. A wall some 70 feet high
and a wet ditch in its front made mining and escalade alike
impracticable. Thomson, however, noticed that the road and bridge to the
Cabul gate were intact. He obtained trustworthy information that up to a
recent date, while all the other gates had been built up, the Cabul gate
had not been so dealt with. As he watched, a horseman was seen to enter
by it. This was conclusive. The ground within 400 yards of the gate
offered good artillery positions. Thomson therefore reported that
although the operation was full of risk, and success if attained must
cost dear, yet in the absence of a less hazardous method of reduction
there offered a fair chance of success in an attempt to blow open the
Cabul gate, and then carry the place by a _coup de main_. Keane was
precluded from the alternative of masking the place and continuing his
advance by the all but total exhaustion of his supplies, which the
capture of Ghuznee would replenish, and he therefore resolved on an
assault by the Cabul gate.

During the 21st July the army circled round the place, and camped to the
north of it on the Cabul road. The following day was spent in
preparations, and in defeating an attack made on the Shah's contingent
by several thousand Ghilzai tribesmen of the adjacent hill country. In
the gusty darkness of the early morning of the 23d the field artillery
was placed in battery on the heights opposite the northern face of the
fortress. The 13th regiment was extended in skirmishing order in the
gardens under the wall of this face, and a detachment of sepoys was
detailed to make a false attack on the eastern face. Near the centre of
the northern face was the Cabul gate, in front of which lay waiting for
the signal, a storming party consisting of the light companies of the
four European regiments, under command of Colonel Dennie of the 13th.
The main column consisted of two European regiments and the support of a
third, the whole commanded by Brigadier Sale; the native regiments
constituted the reserve. All those dispositions were completed by three
A.M., and, favoured by the noise of the wind and the darkness, without
alarming the garrison.

Punctually at this hour the little party of engineers charged with the
task of blowing in the gate started forward on the hazardous errand.
Captain Peat of the Bombay Engineers was in command. Durand, a young
lieutenant of Bengal Engineers, who was later to attain high
distinction, was entrusted with the service of heading the explosion
party. The latter, leading the party, had advanced unmolested to within
150 yards of the works, when a challenge, a shot and a shout gave
intimation of his detection. A musketry fire was promptly opened by the
garrison from the battlements, and blue lights illuminated the approach
to the gate, but in the fortunate absence of fire from the lower works
the bridge was safely crossed, and Peat with his handful of linesmen
halted in a sallyport to cover the explosion operation. Durand advanced
to the gate, his sappers piled their powder bags against it and
withdrew; Durand and his sergeant uncoiled the hose, ignited the
quick-match under a rain from the battlements of bullets and
miscellaneous missiles, and then retired to cover out of reach of the
explosion.

At the sound of the first shot from the battlements, Keane's cannon had
opened their fire. The skirmishers in the gardens engaged in a brisk
fusillade. The rattle of Hay's musketry was heard from the east. The
garrison was alert in its reply. The northern ramparts became a sheet of
flame, and everywhere the cannonade and musketry fire waxed in noise and
volume. Suddenly, as the day was beginning to dawn, a dull, heavy sound
was heard by the head of the waiting column, scarce audible elsewhere
because of the boisterous wind and the din of the firing. A pillar of
black smoke shot up from where had been the Afghan gate, now shattered
by the 300 pounds of gunpowder which Durand had exploded against it. The
signal to the storming party was to be the 'advance' sounded by the
bugler who accompanied Peat. But the bugler had been shot through the
head. Durand could not find Peat. Going back through the bullets to the
nearest party of infantry, he experienced some delay, but at last the
column was apprised that all was right, the 'advance' was sounded,
Dennie and his stormers sped forward, and Sale followed at the head of
the main column.

After a temporary check to the latter, because of a misconception, it
pushed on in close support of Dennie. That gallant soldier and his
gallant followers had rushed into the smoking and gloomy archway to find
themselves met hand to hand by the Afghan defenders, who had recovered
from their surprise. Nothing could be distinctly seen in the narrow
gorge, but the clash of sword blade against bayonet was heard on every
side. The stormers had to grope their way between the yet standing walls
in a dusk which the glimmer of the blue light only made more perplexing.
But some elbow room was gradually gained, and then, since there was
neither time nor space for methodic street fighting, each loaded section
gave its volley and then made way for the next, which, crowding to the
front, poured a deadly discharge at half pistol-shot into the densely
crowded defenders. Thus the storming party won steadily its way, till at
length Dennie and his leading files discerned over the heads of their
opponents a patch of blue sky and a twinkling star or two, and with a
final charge found themselves within the place.

A body of fierce Afghan swordsmen projected themselves into the interval
between the storming party and the main column. Sale, at the head of the
latter, was cut down by a tulwar stroke in the face; in the effort of
his blow the assailant fell with the assailed, and they rolled together
among the shattered timbers of the gate. Sale, wounded again on the
ground, and faint with loss of blood, called to one of his officers for
assistance. Kershaw ran the Afghan through the body with his sword; but
he still struggled with the Brigadier. At length in the grapple Sale got
uppermost, and then he dealt his adversary a sabre cut which cleft him
from crown to eyebrows. There was much confused fighting within the
place, for the Afghan garrison made furious rallies again and again; but
the citadel was found open and undefended, and by sunrise British
banners were waving above its battlements Hyder Khan, the Governor of
Ghuznee, one of the sons of Dost Mahomed, was found concealed in a house
in the town and taken prisoner. The British loss amounted to about 200
killed and wounded, that of the garrison, which was estimated at from
3000 to 4000 strong, was over 500 killed. The number of wounded was not
ascertained; of prisoners taken in arms there were about 1600. The booty
consisted of numerous horses, camels and mules, ordnance and military
weapons of various descriptions, and a vast quantity of supplies of all
kinds.

Keane, having garrisoned Ghuznee, and left there his sick and wounded,
resumed on July 30th his march on Cabul. Within twenty-four hours after
the event Dost Mahomed heard of the fall of Ghuznee. Possessed of the
adverse intelligence, the Dost gathered his chiefs, received their
facile assurances of fidelity, sent his brother the Nawaub Jubbar Khan
to ask what terms Shah Soojah and his British allies were prepared to
offer him, and recalled from Jellalabad his son Akbar Khan, with all the
force he could muster there. The Dost's emissary to the allied camp was
informed that 'an honourable asylum' in British India was at the service
of his brother; an offer which Jubbar Khan declined in his name without
thanks. Before he left to share the fortunes of the Dost, the Sirdar is
reported to have asked Macnaghten, 'If Shah Soojah is really our king,
what need has he of your army and name? You have brought him here,' he
continued, 'with your money and arms. Well, leave him now with us
Afghans, and let him rule us if he can.' When Jubbar Khan returned to
Cabul with his sombre message, the Dost, having been joined by Akbar
Khan, concentrated his army, and found himself at the head of 13,000
men, with thirty guns; but he mournfully realised that he could lean no
reliance on the constancy and courage of his adherents. Nevertheless, he
marched out along the Ghuznee road, and drew up his force at Urgundeh,
where he commanded the most direct line of retreat toward the western
hill country of Bamian, in case his people would not fight, or should
they fight, if they were beaten.

There was no fight in his following; scarcely, indeed, was there a loyal
supporter among all those who had eaten his salt for years. There was
true manhood in this chief whom we were replacing by an effete puppet.
The Dost, Koran in hand, rode among his perfidious troops, and conjured
them in the name of God and the Prophet not to dishonour themselves by
transferring their allegiance to one who had filled Afghanistan with
infidels and blasphemers. 'If,' he continued, 'you are resolved to be
traitors to me, at least enable me to die with honour. Support the
brother of Futteh Khan in one last charge against these Feringhee dogs.
In that charge he will fall; then go and make your own terms with Shah
Soojah.' The high-souled appeal inspired no worthy response; but one is
loth to credit the testimony of the soldier-of-fortune Harlan that his
guards forsook the Dost, and that the rabble of troops plundered his
pavilion, snatched from under him the pillows of his divan, seized his
prayer carpet, and finally hacked into pieces the tent and its
appurtenances. On the evening of August 2d the hapless man shook the
dust of the camp of traitors from his feet, and rode away toward Bamian,
his son Akbar Khan, with a handful of resolute men, covering the retreat
of his father and his family. Tidings of the flight of Dost Mahomed
reached Keane on the 3d, at Sheikabad, where he had halted to
concentrate; and Outram volunteered to head a pursuing party, to consist
of some British officers as volunteers, some cavalry and some Afghan
horse. Hadji Khan Kakur, the earliest traitor of his race, undertook to
act as guide. This man's devices of delay defeated Outram's fiery
energy, perhaps in deceit, perhaps because he regarded it as lacking
discretion. For Akbar Khan made a long halt on the crown of the pass,
waiting to check any endeavour to press closely on his fugitive father,
and it would have gone hard with Outram, with a few fagged horsemen at
his back, if Hadji Khan had allowed him to overtake the resolute young
Afghan chief. As Keane moved forward, there fell to him the guns which
the Dost had left in the Urgundeh position. On August 6th he encamped
close to Cabul; and on the following day Shah Soojah made his public
entry into the capital which he had last seen thirty years previously.
After so many years of vicissitude, adventure and intrigue, he was again
on the throne of his ancestors, but placed there by the bayonets of the
Government whose creature he was, an insult to the nation whom he had
the insolence to call his people.

The entry, nevertheless, was a goodly spectacle enough. Shah Soojah,
dazzling in coronet, jewelled girdle and bracelets, but with no
Koh-i-noor now glittering on his forehead, bestrode a white charger,
whose equipments gleamed with gold. By his side rode Macnaghten and
Burnes; in the pageant were the principal officers of the British army.
Sabres flashed in front of the procession, bayonets sparkled in its
rear, as it wended its way through the great bazaar which Pollock was to
destroy three years later, and along the tortuous street to the gate of
the Balla Hissar. But neither the monarch nor his pageant kindled the
enthusiasm in the Cabulees. There was no voice of welcome; the citizens
did not care to trouble themselves so much as to make him a salaam, and
they stared at the European strangers harder than at his restored
majesty. There was a touch of pathos in the burst of eagerness to which
the old man gave way as he reached the palace, ran through the gardens,
visited the apartments, and commented on the neglect everywhere
apparent. Shah Soojah was rather a poor creature, but he was by no means
altogether destitute of good points, and far worse men than he were
actors in the strange historical episode of which he was the figurehead.
He was humane for an Afghan; he never was proved to have been untrue to
us; he must have had some courage of a kind else he would never have
remained in Cabul when our people left it, in the all but full assurance
of the fate which presently overtook him as a matter of course. Havelock
thus portrays him: 'A stout person of the middle height, his chin
covered with a long thick and neatly trimmed beard, dyed black to
conceal the encroachments of time. His manner toward the English is
gentle, calm and dignified, without haughtiness, but his own subjects
have invariably complained of his reception of them as cold and
repulsive, even to rudeness. His complexion is darker than that of the
generality of Afghans, and his features, if not decidedly handsome, are
not the reverse of pleasing; but the expression of his countenance would
betray to a skilful physiognomist that mixture of timidity and duplicity
so often observable in the character of the higher order of men in
Southern Asia.'




CHAPTER III: THE FIRST YEAR OF OCCUPATION


Sir John Kaye, in his picturesque if diffuse history of the first Afghan
war, lays it down that, in seating Shah Soojah on the Cabul throne, 'the
British Government had done all that it had undertaken to do,' and
Durand argues that, having accomplished this, 'the British army could
have then been withdrawn with the honour and fame of entire success.'
The facts apparently do not justify the reasoning of either writer. In
the Simla manifesto, in which Lord Auckland embodied the rationale of
his policy, he expressed the confident hope 'that the Shah will be
speedily replaced on his throne by his own subjects and adherents, and
when once he shall be received in power, and the independence and
integrity of Afghanistan established, the British army will be
withdrawn.' The Shah had been indeed restored to his throne, but by
British bayonets, not by 'his own subjects and adherents.' It could not
seriously be maintained that he was secure in power, or that the
independence and integrity of Afghanistan were established when British
troops were holding Candahar, Ghuznee and Cabul, the only three
positions where the Shah was nominally paramount, when the fugitive Dost
was still within its borders, when intrigue and disaffection were
seething in every valley and on every hill-side, and when the
principality of Herat maintained a contemptuous independence. Macnaghten
might avow himself convinced of the popularity of the Shah, and believe
or strive to believe that the Afghans had received the puppet king
'with feelings nearly amounting to adoration,' but he did not venture
to support the conviction he avowed by advocating that the Shah should
be abandoned to his adoring subjects. Lord Auckland's policy was
gravely and radically erroneous, but it had a definite object, and that
object certainly was not a futile march to Cabul and back, dropping
incidentally by the wayside the aspirant to a throne whom he had himself
put forward, and leaving him to take his chance among a truculent and
adverse population. Thus early, in all probability, Lord Auckland was
disillusioned of the expectation that the effective restoration of Shah
Soojah would be of light and easy accomplishment, but at least he could
not afford to have the enterprise a _coup manqué_ when as yet it was
little beyond its inception.

The cost of the expedition was already, however, a strain, and the
troops engaged in it were needed in India. Lord Auckland intimated to
Macnaghten his expectation that a strong brigade would suffice to hold
Afghanistan in conjunction with the Shah's contingent, and his desire
that the rest of the army of the Indus should at once return to India.
Macnaghten, on the other hand, in spite of his avowal of the Shah's
popularity, was anxious to retain in Afghanistan a large body of troops.
He meditated strange enterprises, and proposed that Keane should support
his project of sending a force toward Bokhara to give check to a Russian
column which Pottinger at Herat had heard was assembling at Orenburg,
with Khiva for its objective. Keane derided the proposal, and Macnaghten
reluctantly abandoned it, but he demanded of Lord Auckland with success,
the retention in Afghanistan of the Bengal division of the army. In the
middle of September General Willshire marched with the Bombay column,
with orders, on his way to the Indus to pay a hostile visit to Khelat,
and punish its khan for the 'disloyalty' with which he had been charged,
a commission which the British officer fulfilled with a skill and
thoroughness that could be admired with less reservation had the
aggression on the gallant Mehrab been less wanton. A month later Keane
started for India by the Khyber route, which Wade had opened without
serious resistance when in August and September he escorted through the
passes Prince Timour, Shah Soojah's heir-apparent. During the temporary
absence of Cotton, who accompanied Keane, Nott had the command at
Candahar, Sale at and about Cabul, and the troops were quartered in
those capitals, and in Jellalabad, Ghuznee, Charikar and Bamian. The
Shah and the Envoy wintered in the milder climate of Jellalabad, and
Burnes was in political charge of the capital and its vicinity.

It was a prophetic utterance that the accomplishment of our military
succession would mark but the commencement of our real difficulties in
Afghanistan. In theory and in name Shah Soojah was an independent
monarch; it was, indeed, only in virtue of his proving himself able to
rule independently that he could justify his claim to rule at all. But
that he was independent was a contradiction in terms while British
troops studded the country, and while the real powers of sovereignty
were exercised by Macnaghten. Certain functions, it is true, the latter
did permit the nominal monarch to exercise. While debarred from a voice
in measures of external policy, and not allowed to sway the lines of
conduct to be adopted toward independent or revolting tribes, the Shah
was allowed to concern himself with the administration of justice, and
in his hands were the settlement, collection and appropriation of the
revenue of those portions of the kingdom from which any revenue could be
exacted. He was allowed to appoint as his minister of state, the
companion of his exile, old Moolla Shikore, who had lost both his memory
and his ears, but who had sufficient faculty left to hate the English,
to oppress the people, to be corrupt and venal beyond all conception,
and to appoint subordinates as flagitious as himself. 'Bad ministers,'
wrote Burnes, 'are in every government solid ground for unpopularity;
and I doubt if ever a king had a worse set than has Shah Soojah.' The
oppressed people appealed to the British functionaries, who remonstrated
with the minister, and the minister punished the people for appealing to
the British functionaries. The Shah was free to confer grants of land on
his creatures, but when the holders resisted, he was unable to enforce
his will since he was not allowed to employ soldiers; and the odium of
the forcible confiscation ultimately fell on Macnaghten, who alone had
the ordering of expeditions, and who could not see the Shah belittled by
non-fulfilment of his requisitions.

Justice sold by venal judges, oppression and corruption rampant in every
department of internal administration, it was no wonder that nobles and
people alike resented the inflictions under whose sting they writhed.
They were accustomed to a certain amount of oppression; Dost Mahomed had
chastised them with whips, but Shah Soojah, whom the English had
brought, was chastising them with scorpions. And they felt his yoke the
more bitterly because, with the shrewd acuteness of the race, they
recognised the really servile condition of this new king. They fretted,
too, under the sharp bit of the British political agents who were strewn
about the country, in the execution of a miserable and futile policy,
and whose lives, in a few instances, did not maintain the good name of
their country. Dost Mahomed had maintained his sway by politic
management of the chiefs, and through them of the tribes. Macnaghten
would have done well to impress on Shah Soojah the wisdom of pursuing
the same tactics. There was, it is true, the alternative of destroying
the power of the barons, but that policy involved a stubborn and
doubtful struggle, and prolonged occupation of the country by British
troops in great strength. Macnaghten professed our occupation of
Afghanistan to be temporary; yet he was clearly adventuring on the rash
experiment of weakening the nobles when he set about the enlistment of
local tribal levies, who, paid from the Royal treasury and commanded by
British officers, were expected to be staunch to the Shah, and useful in
curbing the powers of the chiefs. The latter, of course, were alienated
and resentful, and the levies, imbued with the Afghan attribute of
fickleness, proved for the most part undisciplined and faithless.

The winter of 1839-40 passed without much noteworthy incident. The
winter climate of Afghanistan is severe, and the Afghan, in ordinary
circumstances, is among the hibernating animals. But down in the Khyber,
in October, the tribes gave some trouble. They were dissatisfied with
the amount of annual black-mail paid them for the right of way through
their passes. When the Shah was a fugitive thirty years previously, they
had concealed and protected him; and mindful of their kindly services,
he had promised them, unknown to Macnaghten, the augmentation of their
subsidy to the old scale from which it had gradually dwindled. Wade,
returning from Cabul, did not bring them the assurances they expected,
whereupon they rose and concentrated and invested Ali Musjid, a fort
which they regarded as the key of their gloomy defile. Mackeson, the
Peshawur political officer, threw provisions and ammunition into Ali
Musjid, but the force, on its return march, was attacked by the hillmen,
the Sikhs being routed, and the sepoys incurring loss of men and
transport. The emboldened Khyberees now turned on Ali Musjid in earnest;
but the garrison was strengthened, and the place was held until a couple
of regiments marched down from Jellalabad, and were preparing to attack
the hillmen, when it was announced that Mackeson had made a compact with
the chiefs for the payment of an annual subsidy which they considered
adequate.

Afghanistan fifty years ago, and the same is in a measure true of it
to-day, was rather a bundle of provinces, some of which owned scarcely a
nominal allegiance to the ruler in Cabul, than a concrete state. Herat
and Candahar were wholly independent, the Ghilzai tribes inhabiting the
wide tracts from the Suliman ranges westward beyond the road through
Ghuznee, between Candahar and Cabul, and northward into the rugged
country between Cabul and Jellalabad, acknowledged no other authority
than that of their own chiefs. The Ghilzais are agriculturists,
shepherds, and robbers; they are constantly engaged in internal feuds;
they are jealous of their wild independence, and through the centuries
have abated little of their untamed ferocity. They had rejected
Macnaghten's advances, and had attacked Shah Soojah's camp on the day
before the fall of Ghuznee. Outram, in reprisal, had promptly raided
part of their country. Later, the winter had restrained them from
activity, but they broke out again in the spring. In May Captain
Anderson, marching from Candahar with a mixed force about 1200 strong,
was offered battle near Jazee, in the Turnuk, by some 2000 Ghilzai horse
and foot. Andersen's guns told heavily among the Ghilzai horsemen, who,
impatient of the fire, made a spirited dash on his left flank. Grape and
musketry checked them; but they rallied, and twice charged home on the
bayonets before they withdrew, leaving 200 of their number dead on the
ground. Nott sent a detachment to occupy the fortress of
Khelat-i-Ghilzai, between Candahar and Ghuznee, thus rendering the
communications more secure; and later, Macnaghten bribed the chiefs by
an annual subsidy of £600 to abstain from infesting the highways. The
terms were cheap, for the Ghilzai tribes mustered some 40,000 fighting
men.

Shah Soojah and the Envoy returned from Jellalabad to Cabul in April
1840. A couple of regiments had wintered not uncomfortably in the Balla
Hissar. That fortress was then the key of Cabul, and while our troops
remained in Afghanistan it should not have been left ungarrisoned a
single hour. The soldiers did their best to impress on Macnaghten the
all-importance of the position. But the Shah objected to its continued
occupation, and Macnaghten weakly yielded. Cotton, who had returned to
the chief military command in Afghanistan, made no remonstrance; the
Balla Hissar was evacuated, and the troops were quartered in cantonments
built in an utterly defenceless position on the plain north of Cabul, a
position whose environs were cumbered with walled gardens, and commanded
by adjacent high ground, and by native forts which were neither
demolished nor occupied. The troops, now in permanent and regularly
constructed quarters, ceased to be an expeditionary force, and became
substantially an army of occupation. The officers sent for their wives
to inhabit with them the bungalows in which they had settled down. Lady
Macnaghten, in the spacious mission residence which stood apart in its
own grounds, presided over the society of the cantonments, which had all
the cheery surroundings of the half-settled, half-nomadic life of our
military people in the East. There were the 'coffee house' after the
morning ride, the gathering round the bandstand in the evening, the
impromptu dance, and the _burra khana_ occasionally in the larger
houses. A racecourse had been laid out, and there were 'sky' races and
more formal meetings. And so 'as in the days that were before the flood,
they were eating and drinking, and marrying and giving in marriage, and
knew not until the flood came, and took them all away.'

Macnaghten engaged himself in a welter of internal and external
intrigue, his mood swinging from singular complacency to a disquietude
that sometimes approached despondency. It had come to be forced on him,
in spite of his intermittent optimism, that the Government was a
government of sentry-boxes, and that Afghanistan was not governed so
much as garrisoned. The utter failure of the winter march attempted by
Peroffski's Russian column across the frozen steppes on Khiva was a
relief to him; but the state of affairs in Herat was a constant trouble
and anxiety. Major Todd had been sent there as political agent, to make
a treaty with Shah Kamran, and to superintend the repair and improvement
of the fortifications of the city. Kamran was plenteously subsidised; he
took Macnaghten's lakhs, but furtively maintained close relations with
Persia. Detecting the double-dealing, Macnaghten urged on Lord Auckland
the annexation of Herat to Shah Soojah's dominions, but was instructed
to condone Kamran's duplicity, and try to bribe him higher. Kamran by no
means objected to this policy, and, while continuing his intrigues with
Persia, cheerfully accepted the money, arms and ammunition which
Macnaghten supplied him with so profusely as to cause remonstrance on
the part of the financial authorities in Calcutta. The
Commander-in-Chief was strong enough to counteract the pressure which
Macnaghten brought to bear on Lord Auckland in favour of an expedition
against Herat, which his lordship at length finally negatived, to the
great disgust of the Envoy, who wrote of the conduct of his chief as
'drivelling beyond contempt,' and 'sighed for a Wellesley or a
Hastings.' The ultimate result of Macnaghten's negotiations with Shah
Kamran was Major Todd's withdrawal from Herat. Todd had suspended the
monthly subsidy, to the great wrath of Kamran's rapacious and
treacherous minister Yar Mahomed, who made a peremptory demand for
increased advances, and refused Todd's stipulation that a British force
should be admitted into Herat. Todd's action in quitting Herat was
severely censured by his superiors, and he was relegated to regimental
duty. Perhaps he acted somewhat rashly, but he had not been kept well
informed; for instance, he had been unaware that Persia had become our
friend, and had engaged to cease relations with Shah Kamran--an
important arrangement of which he certainly should have been cognisant.
Macnaghten had squandered more gold on Herat than the fee-simple of the
principality was worth, and to no purpose; he left that state just as he
found it, treacherous, insolent, greedy and independent.

The precariousness of the long lines of communications between British
India and the army in Afghanistan--a source of danger which from the
first had disquieted cautious soldiers--was making itself seriously
felt, and constituted for Macnaghten another cause of solicitude. Old
Runjeet Singh, a faithful if not disinterested ally, had died on June
27th, 1839, the day on which Keane marched out from Candahar. The breath
was scarcely out of the old reprobate when the Punjaub began to drift
into anarchy. So far as the Sikh share in it was concerned, the
tripartite treaty threatened to become a dead letter. The Lahore Durbar
had not adequately fulfilled the undertaking to support Prince Timour's
advance by the Khyber, nor was it duly regarding the obligation to
maintain a force on the Peshawur frontier of the Punjaub. But those
things were trivial in comparison with the growing reluctance manifested
freely, to accord to our troops and convoys permission to traverse the
Punjaub on the march to and from Cabul. The Anglo-Indian Government sent
Mr Clerk to Lahore to settle the question as to the thoroughfare. He had
instructions to be firm, and the Sikhs did not challenge Mr Clerk's
stipulation that the Anglo-Indian Government must have unmolested right
of way through the Punjaub, while he undertook to restrict the use of it
as much as possible. This arrangement by no means satisfied the exacting
Macnaghten, and he continued to worry himself by foreseeing all sorts of
troublous contingencies unless measures were adopted for 'macadamising'
the road through the Punjaub.

The summer of 1840 did not pass without serious interruptions to the
British communications between Candahar and the Indus; nor without
unexpected and ominous disasters before they were restored. General
Willshire, with the returning Bombay column, had in the previous
November stormed Mehrab Khan's ill-manned and worse armed fort of
Khelat, and the Khan, disdaining to yield, had fallen in the hopeless
struggle. His son Nusseer Khan had been put aside in favour of a
collateral pretender, and became an active and dangerous malcontent. All
Northern Beloochistan fell into a state of anarchy. A detachment of
sepoys escorting supplies was cut to pieces in one of the passes. Quetta
was attacked with great resolution by Nusseer Khan, but was opportunely
relieved by a force sent from another post. Nusseer made himself master
of Khelat, and there fell into his cruel hands Lieutenant Loveday, the
British political officer stationed there, whom he treated with great
barbarity, and finally murdered. A British detachment under Colonel
Clibborn, was defeated by the Beloochees with heavy loss, and compelled
to retreat. Nusseer Khan, descending into the low country of Cutch,
assaulted the important post of Dadur, but was repulsed, and taking
refuge in the hills, was routed by Colonel Marshall with a force from
Kotree, whereupon he became a skulking fugitive. Nott marched down from
Candahar with a strong force, occupied Khelat, and fully re-established
communications with the line of the Indus, while fresh troops moved
forward into Upper Scinde, and thence gradually advancing to Quetta and
Candahar, materially strengthened the British position in Southern
Afghanistan.

Dost Mahomed, after his flight from Cabul in 1839, had soon left the
hospitable refuge afforded him in Khooloom, a territory west of the
Hindoo Koosh beyond Bamian, and had gone to Bokhara on the treacherous
invitation of its Ameer, who threw him into captivity. The Dost's family
remained at Khooloom, in the charge of his brother Jubbar Khan. The
advance of British forces beyond Bamian to Syghan and Bajgah, induced
that Sirdar to commit himself and the ladies to British protection. Dr
Lord, Macnaghten's political officer in the Bamian district, was a rash
although well-meaning man. The errors he had committed since the opening
of spring had occasioned disasters to the troops whose dispositions he
controlled, and had incited the neighbouring hill tribes to active
disaffection. In July Dost Mahomed made his escape from Bokhara, hurried
to Khooloom, found its ruler and the tribes full of zeal for his cause,
and rapidly grew in strength. Lord found it was time to call in his
advance posts and concentrate at Bamian, losing in the operation an
Afghan regiment which deserted to the Dost. Macnaghten reinforced
Bamian, and sent Colonel Dennie to command there. On September 18th
Dennie moved out with two guns and 800 men against the Dost's advance
parties raiding in an adjacent valley. Those detachments driven back,
Dennie suddenly found himself opposed to the irregular mass of Oosbeg
horse and foot which constituted the army of the Dost. Mackenzie's
cannon fire shook the undisciplined horde, the infantry pressed in to
close quarters, and soon the nondescript host of the Dost was in panic
flight, with Dennie's cavalry in eager pursuit. The Dost escaped with
difficulty, with the loss of his entire personal equipment. He was once
more a fugitive, and the Wali of Khooloom promptly submitted himself to
the victors, and pledged himself to aid and harbour the broken chief no
more. Macnaghten had been a prey to apprehension while the Dost's
attitude was threatening; he was now in a glow of joy and hope.

But the Envoy's elation was short-lived. Dost Mahomed was yet to cause
him much solicitude. Defeated in Bamian, he was ready for another
attempt in the Kohistan country to the north of Cabul. Disaffection was
rife everywhere throughout the kingdom, but it was perhaps most rife in
the Kohistan, which was seething with intrigues in favour of Dost
Mahomed, while the local chiefs were intensely exasperated by the
exactions of the Shah's revenue collectors. Macnaghten summoned the
chiefs to Cabul. They came, they did homage to the Shah and swore
allegiance to him; they went away from the capital pledging each other
to his overthrow, and jeering at the scantiness of the force they had
seen at Cabul. Intercepted letters disclosed their schemes, and in the
end of September Sale, with a considerable force, marched out to
chastise the disaffected Kohistanees. The fort of Tootundurrah fell
without resistance. Julgah, however, the next fort assailed, stubbornly
held out, and officers and men fell in the unsuccessful attempt to storm
it. In three weeks Sale marched to and fro through the Kohistan,
pursuing will-o'-the-wisp rumours as to the whereabouts of the Dost,
destroying forts on the course of his weary pilgrimage, and subjected
occasionally to night attacks.

Meanwhile, in the belief that Dost Mahomed was close to Cabul, and
mournfully conscious that the capital and surrounding country were ripe
for a rising, Macnaghten had relapsed into nervousness, and was a prey
to gloomy forebodings. The troops at Bamian were urgently recalled.
Cannon were mounted on the Balla Hissar to overawe the city, the
concentration of the troops in the fortress was under consideration, and
men were talking of preparing for a siege. How Macnaghten's English
nature was undergoing deterioration under the strain of events is shown
by his writing of the Dost: 'Would it be justifiable to set a price on
this fellow's head?' How his perceptions were warped was further evinced
by his talking of 'showing no mercy to the man who has been the author
of all the evil now distracting the country,' and by his complaining of
Sale and Burnes that, 'with 2000 good infantry, they are sitting down
before a fortified place, and are afraid to attack it.'

Learning that for certain the Dost had crossed the Hindoo Koosh from
Nijrao into the Kohistan, Sale, who had been reinforced, sent out
reconnaissances which ascertained that he was in the Purwan Durrah
valley, stretching down from the Hindoo Koosh to the Gorebund river;
and the British force marched thither on 2d November. As the village
was neared, the Dost's people were seen evacuating it and the adjacent
forts, and making for the hills. Sale's cavalry was some distance in
advance of the infantry of the advance guard, but time was precious.
Anderson's horse went to the left, to cut off retreat down the Gorebund
valley. Fraser took his two squadrons of Bengal cavalry to the right,
advanced along the foothills, and gained the head of the valley. He was
too late to intercept a small body of Afghan horsemen, who were already
climbing the upland; but badly mounted as the latter were, he could
pursue them with effect. But it seemed that the Afghans preferred to
fight rather than be pursued. The Dost himself was in command of the
little party, and the Dost was a man whose nature was to fight, not to
run. He wheeled his handful so that his horsemen faced Fraser's troop
down there below them. Then the Dost pointed to his banner, bared his
head, called on his supporters in the name of God and the Prophet to
follow him against the unbelievers, and led them down the slope.

Fraser had formed up his troopers when recall orders reached him. Joyous
that the situation entitled him to disobey them, he gave instead the
word to charge. As the Afghans came down at no great pace, they fired
occasionally; either because of the bullets, or because of an access of
pusillanimity, Fraser's troopers broke and fled ignominiously. The
British gentlemen charged home unsupported. Broadfoot, Crispin and Lord
were slain; Ponsonby, severely wounded and his reins cut, was carried
out of the _mêlée_ by his charger; Fraser, covered with blood and
wounds, broke through his assailants, and brought to Sale his report of
the disgrace of his troopers. After a sharp pursuit of the poltroons,
the Dost and his followers leisurely quitted the field.

Burnes wrote to the Envoy--he was a soldier, but he was also a
'political,' and political employ seemed often in Afghanistan to
deteriorate the attribute of soldierhood--that there was no alternative
for the force but to fall back on Cabul, and entreated Macnaghten to
order immediate concentration of all the troops. This letter Macnaghten
received the day after the disaster in the Kohistan, when he was taking
his afternoon ride in the Cabul plain. His heart must have been very
heavy as he rode, when suddenly a horseman galloped up to him and
announced that the Ameer was approaching. 'What Ameer?' asked
Macnaghten. 'Dost Mahomed Khan,' was the reply, and sure enough there
was the Dost close at hand. Dismounting, this Afghan prince and
gentleman saluted the Envoy, and offered him his sword, which Macnaghten
declined to take. Dost and Envoy rode into Cabul together, and such was
the impression the former made on the latter that Macnaghten, who a
month before had permitted himself to think of putting a price on 'the
fellow's' head, begged now of the Governor-General 'that the Dost be
treated more handsomely than was Shah Soojah, who had no claim on us.'
And then followed a strange confession for the man to make who made the
tripartite treaty, and approved the Simla manifesto: 'We had no hand in
depriving the Shah of his kingdom, _whereas we ejected the Dost, who
never offended us, in support of our policy, of which he was the
victim_.'

Durand regards Dost Mahomed's surrender as 'evincing a strange
pusillanimity.' This opprobrious judgment appears unjustified. No doubt
he was weary of the fugitive life he had been leading, but to pronounce
him afraid that the Kohistanees or any other Afghans would betray him is
to ignore the fact that he had been for months among people who might,
any hour of any day, have betrayed him if they had chosen. Nobler
motives than those ascribed to him by Durand may be supposed to have
actuated a man of his simple and lofty nature. He had given the
arbitrament of war a trial, and had realised that in that way he could
make no head against us. He might, indeed, have continued the futile
struggle, but he was the sort of man to recognise the selfishness of
that persistency which would involve ruin and death to the devoted
people who would not desert his cause while he claimed to have a cause.
When historians write of Afghan treachery and guile, it seems to have
escaped their perception that Afghan treachery was but a phase of Afghan
patriotism, of an unscrupulous character, doubtless, according to our
notions, but nevertheless practical in its methods, and not wholly
unsuccessful in its results. It may have been a higher and purer
patriotism that moved Dost Mahomed to cease, by his surrender, from
being an obstacle to the tranquillisation of the country of which he had
been the ruler.




CHAPTER IV: THE SECOND YEAR OF OCCUPATION


Dost Mahomed remained for a few days in the British cantonments on the
Cabul plain, an honoured guest rather than a prisoner. His soldierly
frankness, his bearing at once manly and courteous, his honest liking
for and trust in our race, notwithstanding the experiences which he had
undergone, won universal respect and cordiality. Officers who stood
aloof from Shah Soojah vied with each other in evincing to Dost Mahomed
their sympathy with him in his fallen fortunes. Shah Soojah would not
see the man whom he had ingloriously supplanted, on the pretext that he
'could not bring himself to show common civility to such a villain.' How
Macnaghten's feeling in regard to the two men had altered is disclosed
by his comment on this refusal. 'It is well,' he wrote, 'as the Dost
must have suffered much humiliation in being subjected to such an
ordeal.'

In the middle of November 1840 the Dost began his journey toward British
India, accompanied by Sir Willoughby Cotton, who was finally quitting
Afghanistan, and under the escort of a considerable British force which
had completed its tour of duty in Afghanistan. Sale succeeded Cotton in
temporary divisional command pending the arrival of the latter's
successor. About the middle of December Shah Soojah and his Court,
accompanied by the British Envoy, arrived at Jellalabad for the winter,
Burnes remaining at Cabul in political charge.

Macnaghten was mentally so constituted as to be continually alternating
between high elation and the depths of despondency; discerning to-day
ominous indications of ruin in an incident of no account, and to-morrow
scorning imperiously to recognise danger in the fierce rising of a
province. It may almost be said that each letter of his to Lord Auckland
was of a different tone from the one which had preceded it. Burnes, who
was nominally Macnaghten's chief lieutenant, with more self-restraint,
had much the same temperament. Kaye writes of him: 'Sometimes sanguine,
sometimes despondent, sometimes confident, sometimes credulous, Burnes
gave to fleeting impressions all the importance and seeming permanency
of settled convictions, and imbued surrounding objects with the colours
of his own varying mind.' But if Burnes had been a discreet and
steadfast man, he could have exercised no influence on the autocratic
Macnaghten, since between the two men there was neither sympathy nor
confidence. Burnes had, indeed, no specific duties of any kind; in his
own words, he was in 'the most nondescript situation.' Macnaghten gave
him no responsibility, and while Burnes waited for the promised
reversion of the office of envoy, he chiefly employed himself in writing
long memorials on the situation and prospects of affairs, on which
Macnaghten's marginal comments were brusque, and occasionally
contemptuous. The resolute and clear-headed Pottinger, who, if the
opportunity had been given him, might have buttressed and steadied
Macnaghten, was relegated to provincial service. Throughout his career
in Afghanistan the Envoy could not look for much advice from the
successive commanders of the Cabul force, even if he had cared to
commune with them. Keane, indeed, did save him from the perpetration of
one folly. But Cotton appears to have been a respectable nonentity. Sale
was a stout, honest soldier, who was not fortunate on the only occasion
which called him outside of his restricted _métier_. Poor Elphinstone
was an object for pity rather than for censure.

It happened fortunately, in the impending misfortunes, that two men of
stable temperament and lucid perception were in authority at Candahar.
General Nott was a grand old Indian officer, in whom there was no guile,
but a good deal of temper. He was not supple, and he had the habit of
speaking his mind with great directness, a propensity which accounted,
perhaps, for the repeated supersessions he had undergone. A
clear-headed, shrewd man, he was disgusted with very many things which
he recognised as unworthy in the conduct of the affairs of Afghanistan,
and he was not the man to choose mild phrases in giving vent to his
convictions. He had in full measure that chronic dislike which the
Indian commander in the field nourishes to the political officer who is
imposed on him by the authorities, and who controls his measures and
trammels his actions. Nott's 'political,' who, the sole survivor of the
men who were prominent during this unhappy period, still lives among us
esteemed and revered, was certainly the ablest officer of the unpopular
department to which he belonged; and how cool was Henry Rawlinson's
temper is evinced in his ability to live in amity with the rugged and
outspoken chief who addressed him in such a philippic as the
following--words all the more trenchant because he to whom they were
addressed must have realised how intrinsically true they were:--

'I have no right to interfere with the affairs of this country, and I
never do so. But in reference to that part of your note where you speak
of political influence, I will candidly tell you that these are not
times for mere ceremony, and that under present circumstances, and at a
distance of 2000 miles from the seat of the supreme Government, I throw
responsibility to the wind, and tell you that in my opinion you have not
had for some time past, nor have you at present, one particle of
political influence in this country.'

Nott steadily laboured to maintain the _morale_ and discipline of his
troops, and thus watching the flowing tide of misrule and embroilment,
he calmly made the best preparations in his power to meet the storm the
sure and early outbreak of which his clear discernment prognosticated.

Shah Soojah's viceroy at Candahar was his heir-apparent Prince Timour.
The Dooranee chiefs of Western Afghanistan had not unnaturally expected
favours and influence under the rule of the Dooranee monarch; and while
in Candahar before proceeding to Cabul, and still uncertain of what
might occur there, Shah Soojah had been lavish of his promises. The
chiefs had anticipated that they would be called around the vice-throne
of Prince Timour; but Shah Soojah made the same error as that into which
Louis XVIII. fell on his restoration. He constituted his Court of the
men who had shared his Loodianah exile. The counsellors who went to
Candahar with Timour were returned _émigrés_, in whom fitness for duty
counted less than the qualification of companionship in exile. Those
people had come back to Afghanistan poor; now they made haste to be rich
by acts of oppressive injustice, in the exaction of revenue from the
people, and by intercepting from the Dooranee chiefs the flow of royal
bounty to which they had looked forward.

Uktar Khan was prominent among the Dooranee noblemen, and he had the
double grievance of having been disappointed of the headship of the
Zemindawar province on the western bank of the Helmund, and having been
evilly entreated by the minions of Prince Timour. He had raised his clan
and routed a force under a royalist follower, when Nott sent a
detachment against him. Uktar Khan had crossed the Helmund into
Zemindawar, when Farrington attacked him, and, after a brisk fight,
routed and pursued him. The action was fought on January 3, 1841, in the
very dead of winter; the intensity of the cold dispersed Uktar's levies,
and Farrington returned to Candahar.

In reply to Macnaghten's demand for information regarding the origin of
this outbreak, Rawlinson wrote him some home truths which were very
distasteful. Rawlinson warned his chief earnestly of the danger which
threatened the false position of the British in Afghanistan. He pointed
out how cruel must be the revenue exactions which enabled Prince
Timour's courtiers to absorb great sums. He expressed his suspicion that
Shah Soojah had countenanced Uktar Khan's rising, and spoke of intrigues
of dark and dangerous character. Macnaghten scouted Rawlinson's warning,
and instructed him that 'it will make the consideration of all questions
more simple if you will hereafter take for granted that as regards us
"the king can do no wrong."' However, he and the Shah did remove from
Candahar the Vakeel and his clique of obnoxious persons, who had been
grinding the faces of the people; and the Envoy allowed himself to hope
that this measure would restore order to the province of Candahar.

The hope was vain, the evil lay deeper; disaffection to the Shah and
hatred to the British power were becoming intensified from day to day,
and the aspiration for relief was swelling into a passion. In the days
before our advent there had been venality and corruption in public
places--occasionally, likely enough, as Macnaghten asserted, to an
extent all but incredible. But exaction so sweeping could have occurred
only in regions under complete domination; and in Afghanistan, even to
this day, there are few regions wholly in this condition. When the yoke
became over-weighty, a people of a nature so intractable knew how to
resent oppression and oppose exaction. But now the tax gatherer
swaggered over the land, and the people had to endure him, for at his
back were the soldiers of the Feringhees and the levies of the Shah. The
latter were paid by assignments on the revenues of specified districts;
as the levies constituted a standing army of some size, the
contributions demanded were heavier and more permanent than in bygone
times. Macnaghten, aware of the discontent engendered by the system of
assignments, desired to alter it. But the Shah's needs were pressing;
the Anglo-Indian treasury was strained already by the expenditure in
Afghanistan; and it was not easy in a period of turmoil and rebellion to
carry out the amendment of a fiscal system. That, since the surrender of
the Dost, there had been no serious rising in Northern or Eastern
Afghanistan, sufficed to make Macnaghten an optimist of the moment. He
had come by this time to a reluctant admission of the fact against which
he had set his face so long, that Shah Soojah was unpopular. 'He has
incurred,' he wrote, 'the odium that attaches to him from his alliance
with us'; but the Envoy would not admit that our position in Afghanistan
was a false one, in that we were maintaining by our bayonets, against
the will of the Afghans, a sovereign whom they detested. 'It would,' he
pleaded, 'be an act of downright dishonesty to desert His Majesty before
he has found the means of taking root in the soil to which we have
transplanted him.' While he wrote, Macnaghten must have experienced a
sudden thrill of optimism or of self-delusion, for he continued: 'All
things considered, the present tranquillity of this country is to my
mind perfectly miraculous. Already our presence has been infinitely
beneficial in allaying animosities and in pointing out abuses.' If it
had been the case that the country was tranquil, his adjective would
have been singularly appropriate, but not precisely in the sense he
meant to convey.

But there was no tranquillity, miraculous or otherwise. While Macnaghten
was writing the letter which has just been quoted, Brigadier Shelton,
who, about the New Year, had reached Jellalabad with a brigade from
British India in relief of the force which was withdrawing with Cotton,
was contending with an outbreak of the wild and lawless clans of the
Khyber. When Macnaghten wrote, he had already received intelligence of
the collapse of his projects in Herat, and that Major Todd, who had been
his representative there, judging it imperative to break up the mission
of which he was the head, had abruptly quitted that city, and was on his
way to Candahar. Mischief was simmering in the Zemindawar country. The
Ghilzai tribes of the region between Candahar and Ghuznee had accepted a
subsidy to remain quiet, but the indomitable independence of this wild
and fierce race was not to be tamed by bribes, and the spirit of
hostility was manifesting itself so truculently that a British garrison
had been placed in Khelat-i-Ghilzai, right in the heart of the disturbed
territory. This warning and defensive measure the tribes had regarded
with angry jealousy; but it was not until a rash 'political' had
directed the unprovoked assault and capture of a Ghilzai fort that the
tribes passionately flew to arms, bent on contesting the occupation of
their rugged country. Colonel Wymer was sent from Candahar with a force,
escorting a convoy of stores intended for the equipment of
Khelat-i-Ghilzai. The tribes who had been loosely beleaguering that
place marched down the Turnuk upon Wymer, and on May 19th attacked him
with great impetuosity, under the command of a principal chief who was
known as the 'Gooroo.' Wymer, in the protection of his convoy, had to
stand on the defensive. The Ghilzais, regardless of the grape which tore
through their masses, fell on sword in hand, and with an intuitive
tactical perception struck Wymer simultaneously in front and flank. His
sepoys had to change their dispositions, and the Ghilzais took the
opportunity of their momentary dislocation to charge right home. They
were met firmly by the bayonet, but again and again the hillmen renewed
their attacks; and it was not till after five hours of hard fighting
which cost them heavy loss, that at length, in the darkness, they
suddenly drew off. Had they been Swiss peasants defending their
mountains, or Poles struggling against the ferocious tyranny of Russia,
their gallant effort might have excited praise and sympathy. Had they
been Soudanese, a statesman might have spoken of them as a people
'rightly struggling to be free'; as it was, the Envoy vituperated them
as 'a parcel of ragamuffins,' and Wymer's sepoys were held to have
'covered themselves with glory.' Macnaghten proceeded to encourage a
sense of honour among the tribes by proposing the transfer to another
chief, on condition of his seizing and delivering over the inconvenient
'Gooroo,' of the share of subsidy of which the latter had been in
receipt.

While this creditable transaction was under consideration, Uktar Khan
was again making himself very unpleasant; so much so that Macnaghten was
authorising Rawlinson to offer a reward of 10,000 rupees for his
capture, which accomplished, Rawlinson was instructed to 'hang the
villain as high as Haman.' The gallows was not built, however, on which
Uktar was to hang, although that chief sustained two severe defeats at
the hands of troops sent from Candahar, and had to become a fugitive.
The Ghilzais, who had gathered again after their defeat under the
'Gooroo,' had made little stand against the detachment which Colonel
Chambers led out from Candahar, and they were again temporarily
dispersed. The 'Gooroo' himself was in our hands. If the disaffection
was in no degree diminished, the active ebullitions of it were assuredly
quelled for the time. It was true, to be sure, that Akbar Khan, the
fierce and resolute son of Dost Mahomed, had refused the Envoy's
overtures to come in, and was wandering and plotting in Khooloom, quite
ready to fulfil Macnaghten's prophetic apprehension that 'the fellow
will be after some mischief should the opportunity present itself'; that
the Dooranees were still defiant; that an insurgent force was out in the
Dehrawat; and that the tameless chief Akram Khan was being blown from a
gun by the cruel and feeble Timour. But unquestionably there was a
comparative although short-lived lull in the overt hostility of the
Afghan peoples against Shah Soojah and his foreign supporters; and
Macnaghten characteristically announced that 'the country was quiet from
Dan to Beersheba.' To one of his correspondents he wrote: 'From Mookoor
to the Khyber Pass, all is content and tranquillity; and wherever we
Europeans go, we are received with respect, attention and welcome. I
think our prospects are most cheering; and with the materials we have
there ought to be little or no difficulty in the management of the
country. The people are perfect children, and they should be treated as
such. If we put one naughty boy in the corner, the rest will be
terrified.'

General Nott at Candahar, who 'never interfered in the government of the
country,' but regarded the situation with shrewd, clear-headed common
sense, differed utterly from the Envoy's view. The stout old soldier did
not squander his fire; it was a close volley he discharged in the
following words: 'The conduct of the thousand and one politicals has
ruined our cause, and bared the throat of every European in this country
to the sword and knife of the revengeful Afghan and bloody Belooch; and
unless several regiments be quickly sent, not a man will be left to
describe the fate of his comrades. Nothing will ever make the Afghans
submit to the hated Shah Soojah, who is most certainly as great a
scoundrel as ever lived.'

Nott's conclusions were in the main justified by after events, but the
correctness of his premiss may be questioned. That the conduct of some
of the political officers intensified the rancour of the Afghans is
unhappily true, but the hate of our domination, and of the puppet thrust
upon them by us, seems to have found its origin in a deeper feeling. The
patriotism of a savage race is marked by features repulsive to civilised
communities, but through the ruthless cruelty of the indiscriminate
massacre, the treachery of the stealthy stab, and the lightly broken
pledges, there may shine out the noblest virtue that a virile people can
possess. A semi-barbarian nation whose manhood pours out its blood like
water in stubborn resistance against an alien yoke, may be pardoned for
many acts shocking to civilised communities which have not known the
bitterness of stern and masterful subjugation.




CHAPTER V: THE BEGINNING OF THE END


The deceptive quietude of Afghanistan which followed the sharp lessons
administered to the Dooranees and the Ghilzais was not seriously
disturbed during the month of September 1841, and Macnaghten was in a
full glow of cheerfulness. His services had been recognised by his
appointment to the dignified and lucrative post of Governor of the
Bombay Presidency, and he was looking forward to an early departure for
a less harassing and tumultuous sphere of action than that in which he
had been labouring for two troubled years. The belief that he would
leave behind him a quiescent Afghanistan, and Shah Soojah firmly
established on its throne, was the complement, to a proud and zealous
man, of the satisfaction which his promotion afforded.

One distasteful task he had to perform before he should go. The Home
Government had become seriously disquieted by the condition of affairs
in Afghanistan. The Secret Committee of the Court of Directors, the
channel through which the ministry communicated with the
Governor-General, had expressed great concern at the heavy burden
imposed on the Indian finances by the cost of the maintenance of the
British force in Afghanistan, and by the lavish expenditure of the
administration which Macnaghten directed. The Anglo-Indian Government
was urgently required to review with great earnestness the question of
its future policy in regard to Afghanistan, and to consider gravely
whether an enterprise at once so costly and so unsatisfactory in results
should not be frankly abandoned. Lord Auckland was alive to the
difficulties and embarrassments which encompassed the position beyond
the Indus, but he was loth to admit that the policy of which he had been
the author, and in which the Home Government had abetted him so eagerly,
was an utter failure. He and his advisers finally decided in favour of
the continued occupation of Afghanistan; and since the Indian treasury
was empty, and the annual charge of that occupation was not less than a
million and a quarter sterling, recourse was had to a loan, Macnaghten
was pressed to effect economies in the administration, and he was
specially enjoined to cut down the subsidies which were paid to Afghan
chiefs as bribes to keep them quiet. Macnaghten had objected to this
retrenchment, pointing out that the stipends to the chiefs were simply
compensation for the abandonment by them of their immemorial practice of
highway robbery, but he yielded to pressure, called to Cabul the chiefs
in its vicinity, and informed them that thenceforth their subsidies
would be reduced. The chiefs strongly remonstrated, but without effect,
and they then formed a confederacy of rebellion. The Ghilzai chiefs were
the first to act. Quitting Cabul, they occupied the passes between the
capital and Jellalabad, and entirely intercepted the communications with
India by the Khyber route.

Macnaghten did not take alarm at this significant demonstration,
regarding the outbreak merely as 'provoking,' and writing to Rawlinson
that 'the rascals would be well trounced for their pains.' Yet warnings
of gathering danger were rife, which but for his mood of optimism should
have struck home to his apprehension. Pottinger had come down from the
Kohistan, where he was acting as political officer, bent on impressing
on him that a general rising of that region was certain unless strong
measures of prevention were resorted to. For some time before the actual
outbreak of the Ghilzais, the Afghan hatred to our people had been
showing itself with exceptional openness and bitterness. Europeans and
camp followers had been murdered, but the sinister evidences of growing
danger had been regarded merely as ebullitions of private rancour. Akbar
Khan, Dost Mahomed's son, had moved forward from Khooloom into the
Bamian country, and there was little doubt that he was fomenting the
disaffection of the Ghilzai chiefs, with some of whom this indomitable
man, who in his intense hatred of the English intruders had resolutely
rejected all offers of accommodation, and preferred the life of a
homeless exile to the forfeiture of his independence, was closely
connected by marriage.

The time was approaching when Sale's brigade was to quit Cabul on its
return journey to India. Macnaghten seems to have originally intended to
accompany this force, for he wrote that he 'hoped to settle the hash of
the Ghilzais on the way down, if not before.' The rising, however,
spread so widely and so rapidly that immediate action was judged
necessary, and on October 9th Colonel Monteath marched towards the
passes with his own regiment, the 35th Native Infantry, some artillery
and cavalry details, and a detachment of Broadfoot's sappers.

How able, resolute, and high-souled a man was George Broadfoot, the
course of this narrative will later disclose. He was one of three
gallant brothers, all of whom died sword in hand. The corps of sappers
which he commanded was a remarkable body--a strange medley of
Hindustanees, Goorkhas, and Afghan tribesmen of divers regions. Many
were desperate and intractable characters, but Broadfoot, with mingled
strength and kindness, moulded his heterogeneous recruits into skilful,
obedient and disciplined soldiers. Broadfoot's description of his
endeavours to learn something of the nature of the duties expected of
him in the expedition for which he had been detailed, and to obtain such
equipment as those duties might require, throws a melancholy light on
the deteriorated state of affairs among our people at this period, and
on the relations between the military and civilian authorities.

Broadfoot went for information, in the first instance, to Colonel
Monteath, who could give him no orders, having received none himself.
Monteath declined to apply for details as to the expedition, as he knew
'these people' (the authorities) too well; he was quite aware of the
danger of going on service in the dark, but explained that it was not
the custom of the military authorities at Cabul to consult or even
instruct the commanders of expeditions. Broadfoot then went to the
General. Cotton's successor in the chief military command in Afghanistan
was poor General Elphinstone, a most gallant soldier, but with no
experience of Indian warfare, and utterly ignorant of the Afghans and of
Afghanistan. Wrecked in body and impaired in mind by physical ailments
and infirmities, he had lost all faculty of energy, and such mind as
remained to him was swayed by the opinion of the person with whom he had
last spoken. The poor gentleman was so exhausted by the exertion of
getting out of bed, and being helped into his visiting-room, that it was
not for half-an-hour, and after several ineffectual efforts, that he
could attend to business. He knew nothing of the nature of the service
on which Monteath was ordered, could give Broadfoot no orders, and was
unwilling to refer to the Envoy on a matter which should have been left
to him to arrange. He complained bitterly of the way in which he was
reduced to a cypher--'degraded from a general to the "Lord-Lieutenant's
head constable."' Broadfoot went from the General to the Envoy, who 'was
peevish,' and denounced the General as fidgety. He declared the enemy to
be contemptible, and that as for Broadfoot and his sappers, twenty men
with pickaxes were enough; all they were wanted for was to pick stones
from under the gun wheels. When Broadfoot represented the inconvenience
with which imperfect information as to the objects of the expedition was
fraught, Macnaghten lost his temper, and told Broadfoot that, if he
thought Monteath's movement likely to bring on an attack, 'he need not
go, he was not wanted'; whereupon Broadfoot declined to listen to such
language, and made his bow. Returning to the General, whom he found
'lost and perplexed,' he was told to follow his own judgment as to what
quantity of tools he should take. The Adjutant-General came in, and
'this officer, after abusing the Envoy, spoke to the General with an
imperiousness and disrespect, and to me, a stranger, with an insolence
it was painful to see the influence of on the General. His advice to his
chief was to have nothing to say to Macnaghten, to me, or to the
sappers, saying Monteath had men enough, and needed neither sappers nor
tools.' At parting the poor old man said to Broadfoot: 'If you go out,
for God's sake clear the passes quickly, that I may get away; for if
anything were to turn up, I am unfit for it, done up in body and mind.'
This was the man whom Lord Auckland had appointed to the most
responsible and arduous command at his disposal, and this not in
ignorance of General Elphinstone's disqualifications for active service,
but in the fullest knowledge of them!

Monteath's camp at Bootkhak, the first halting-place on the Jellalabad
road, was sharply attacked on the night of the 9th, and the assailants,
many of whom were the armed retainers of chiefs living in Cabul sent out
specially to take part in the attack, although unsuccessful, inflicted
on Monteath considerable loss. Next day Sale, with H.M.'s 13th, joined
Monteath, and on the 13th he forced the long and dangerous ravine of the
Khoord Cabul with sharp fighting, but no very serious loss, although
Sale himself was wounded, and had to relinquish the active command to
Colonel Dennie. Monteath encamped in the valley beyond the pass, and
Sale, with the 13th, returned without opposition to Bootkhak, there to
await reinforcements and transports. In his isolated position Monteath
remained unmolested until the night of the 17th, when he repulsed a
Ghilzai attack made in considerable strength, and aided by the treachery
of 'friendly' Afghans who had been admitted into his camp; but he had
many casualties, and lost a number of camels. On the 20th Sale,
reinforced by troops returned from the Zurmut expedition, moved forward
on Monteath, and on the 22d pushed on to the Tezeen valley, meeting with
no opposition either on the steep summit of the Huft Kotul or in the
deep narrow ravine opening into the valley. The Ghilzais were in force
around the mouth of the defile, but a few cannon-shots broke them up.
The advance guard pursued with over-rashness; the Ghilzais rallied, in
the skirmish which ensued an officer and several men were killed, and
the retirement of our people unfortunately degenerated into precipitate
flight, with the Ghilzais in hot pursuit. The 13th, to which the
fugitive detachment mainly belonged, now consisted mainly of young
soldiers, whose constancy was impaired by this untoward occurrence.

Macnaghten had furnished Sale with a force which, in good heart and
vigorously commanded, was strong enough to have effected great things.
The Ghilzai chief of Tezeen possessed a strong fort full of supplies,
which Dennie was about to attack, when the wily Afghan sent to Major
Macgregor, the political officer accompanying Sale, a tender of
submission. Macgregor fell into the snare, desired Sale to countermand
the attack, and entered into negotiations. In doing so he committed a
fatal error, and he exceeded his instructions in the concessions which
he made. Macnaghten, it was true, had left matters greatly to
Macgregor's discretion; and if 'the rebels were very humble,' the Envoy
was not disposed to be too hard upon them. But one of his firm
stipulations was that the defences of Khoda Buxsh's fort must be
demolished, and that Gool Mahomed Khan 'should have nothing but war.'
Both injunctions were disregarded by Macgregor, who, with unimportant
exceptions, surrendered all along the line. The Ghilzais claimed and
obtained the restoration of their original subsidies; a sum was handed
to them to enable them to raise the tribes in order to keep clear the
passes; Khoda Buxsh held his fort, and sold the supplies it contained to
Sale's commissary at a fine price. Every item of the arrangement was
dead in favour of the Ghilzais, and contributory to their devices. Sale,
continuing his march, would be separated further and further from the
now diminished force in Cabul, and by the feigned submission the chiefs
had made they had escaped the permanent establishment of a strong
detachment in their midst at Tezeen.

Macnaghten, discontented though he was with the sweeping concessions
which Macgregor had granted to the Ghilzais, put the best face he could
on the completed transaction, and allowed himself to believe that a
stable settlement had been effected. On the 26th Sale continued his
march, having made up his baggage animals at the expense of the 37th
Native Infantry, which, with half of the sappers and three guns of the
mountain train, he sent back to Kubbar-i-Jubbar, there to halt in a
dangerously helpless situation until transport should be sent down from
Cabul. His march as far as Kutti Sung was unmolested. Mistrusting the
good faith of his new-made allies, he shunned the usual route through
the Purwan Durrah by taking the mountain road to the south of that
defile, and thus reached the Jugdulluk valley with little opposition,
baulking the dispositions of the Ghilzais, who, expecting him to
traverse the Purwan Durrah, were massed about the southern end of the
defile, ready to fall on the column when committed to the tortuous
gorge.

From the Jugdulluk camping ground there is a steep and winding ascent of
three miles, commanded until near the summit by heights on either side.
Sale's main body had attained the crest with trivial loss, having
detached parties by the way to ascend to suitable flanking positions,
and hold those until the long train of slow-moving baggage should have
passed, when they were to fall in and come on with the rear-guard. The
dispositions would have been successful but that on reaching the crest
the main body, instead of halting there for the rear to close up,
hurried down the reverse slope, leaving baggage, detachments, and
rear-guard to endure the attacks which the Ghilzais promptly delivered,
pressing fiercely on the rear, and firing down from either side on the
confused mass in the trough below. The flanking detachments had
relinquished their posts in panic, and hurried forward in confusion to
get out of the pass. The rear-guard was in disorder, when Broadfoot,
with a few officers and some of his sappers, valiantly checked the
onslaught, but the crest was not crossed until upwards of 120 men had
fallen, the wounded among whom had to be abandoned with the dead. On
October 30th Sale's force reached Gundamuk without further molestation,
and halted there temporarily to await orders. During the halt melancholy
rumours filtered down the passes from the capital, and later came
confirmation of the evil tidings from the Envoy, and orders from
Elphinstone directing the immediate return of the brigade to Cabul, if
the safety of its sick and wounded could be assured. Sale called a
council of war, which pronounced, although not unanimously, against a
return to Cabul; and it was resolved instead to march on to Jellalabad,
which was regarded as an eligible _point d'appui_ on which a relieving
force might move up and a retiring force might move down. Accordingly
on November 11th the brigade quitted Gundamuk, and hurried down rather
precipitately, and with some fighting by the way, to Jellalabad, which
was occupied on the 14th.

Some members of the Gundamuk council of war, foremost among whom was
Broadfoot, argued vigorously in favour of the return march to Cabul.
Havelock, who was with Sale as a staff-officer, strongly urged the
further retreat into Jellalabad. Others, again, advocated the middle
course of continuing to hold Gundamuk. It may be said that a daring
general would have fought his way back to Cabul, that a prudent general
would have remained at Gundamuk, and that the occupation of Jellalabad
was the expedient of a weak general. That a well-led march on Cabul was
feasible, although it might have been difficult and bloody, cannot be
questioned, and the advent of such men as Broadfoot and Havelock would
have done much toward rekindling confidence and stimulating the
restoration of soldierly virtue, alike in the military authorities and
in the rank and file of the Cabul force. At Gundamuk, again, the
brigade, well able to maintain its position there, would have made its
influence felt all through the Ghilzai country and as far as Cabul. The
evacuation of that capital decided on, it would have been in a position
to give the hand to the retiring army, and so to avert at least the
worst disasters of the retreat. The retirement on Jellalabad, in the
terse language of Durand, 'served no conceivable purpose except to
betray weakness, and still further to encourage revolt.'

While Sale was struggling through the passes on his way to Gundamuk, our
people at Cabul were enjoying unwonted quietude. Casual entries in Lady
Sale's journal, during the later days of October, afford clear evidence
how utterly unconscious were they of the close gathering of the storm
that so soon was to break upon them. Her husband had written to her from
Tezeen that his wound was fast healing, and that the chiefs were
extremely polite. She complains of the interruption of the mails owing
to the Ghilzai outbreak, but comforts herself with the anticipation of
their arrival in a day or two. She was to leave Cabul for India in a few
days, along with the Macnaghtens and General Elphinstone, and her diary
expresses an undernote of regret at having to leave the snug house in
the cantonments which Sale had built on his own plan, the excellent
kitchen garden in which her warrior husband, in the intervals of his
soldiering duties, grew fine crops of peas, potatoes, cauliflowers and
artichokes, and the parterres of flowers which she herself cultivated,
and which were the admiration of the Afghan gentlemen who came to pay
their morning calls.

[Illustration: CABUL the CANTONMENT _and the_ Surrounding COUNTRY.]

The defencelessness of the position at Cabul had long engaged the
solicitude of men who were no alarmists. Engineer officer after engineer
officer had unavailingly and a half from the cantonments, with the Cabul
river intervening. With Shelton's troops and those in the cantonments
General Elphinstone had at his disposition, apart from the Shah's
contingent, four infantry regiments, two batteries of artillery, three
companies of sappers, a regiment of cavalry, and some irregular horse--a
force fully equipped and in good order. In the Balla Hissar Shah Soojah
had a considerable, if rather mixed, body of military and several guns.

The rising of the 2d November may not have been the result of a fully
organised plan. There are indications that it was premature, and that
the revolt in force would have been postponed until after the expected
departure of the Envoy and the General with all the troops except
Shelton's brigade, but for an irrepressible burst of personal rancour
against Burnes. Durand holds, however, that the malcontents acted on the
belief that to kill Burnes and sack the Treasury was to inaugurate the
insurrection with an imposing success. Be this as it may, a truculent
mob early in the morning of November 2d assailed Burnes' house. He at
first regarded the outbreak as a casual riot, and wrote to Macnaghten to
that effect. Having harangued the throng without effect, he and his
brother, along with William Broadfoot his secretary, prepared for
defence. Broadfoot was soon killed, and a little later Burnes and his
brother were hacked to pieces in the garden behind the house. The
Treasury was sacked; the sepoys who had guarded it and Burnes' house
were massacred, and both buildings were fired; the armed mob swelled in
numbers, and soon the whole city was in a roar of tumult.

Prompt and vigorous military action would no doubt have crushed the
insurrection, at least for the time. But the indifference, vacillation
and delay of the British authorities greatly encouraged its rapid
development. Macnaghten at first 'did not think much of it.' Shelton was
ordered into the Balla Hissar, countermanded, a second time ordered, and
again instructed to halt for orders. At last the Envoy himself
despatched him, with the loose order to act on his own judgment in
communication with the Shah. Shelton marched into the Balla Hissar with
part of his force, and the rest of it was moved into the cantonments.
When the Brigadier went to the Shah, that potentate demanded to know who
sent him, and what he had come for. But the Shah, to do him justice, had
himself taken action. Informed that Burnes was attacked and the city in
revolt, he had ordered Campbell's regiment of his own levies and a
couple of guns to march to his assistance. Campbell recklessly attempted
to push his way through the heart of the city, instead of reaching
Burnes' house by a circuitous but opener route, and after some sharp
street fighting in which he lost heavily, he was driven back, unable to
penetrate to the scene of plunder and butchery. Shelton remained
inactive in the Balla Hissar until Campbell was reported beaten and
retreating, when he took some feeble measures to cover the retreat of
the fugitives, who, however, abandoned their guns outside the fortress.
The day was allowed to pass without anything further being done, except
the despatch of an urgent recall to Major Griffiths, whom Sale had left
at Kubbar-i-Jubbar, and that good soldier, having fought every step of
the way through the passes, brought in his detachment in unbroken order
and without loss of baggage, notwithstanding his weakness in transport.
Shelton, reinforced in the Balla Hissar, maintained an intermittent and
ineffectual fire on the city. Urgent orders were despatched to Sale,
recalling him and his brigade--orders with which, as has been mentioned,
Sale did not comply--and also to Nott, at Candahar, begging him to send
a brigade to Cabul. In compliance with this requisition, Maclaren's
brigade immediately started from Candahar, but soon returned owing to
the inclemency of the weather.

Captain Mackenzie was in charge of a fort containing the Shah's
commissariat stores; this fort was on the outskirts of a suburb of
Cabul, and was fiercely attacked on the 2d. For two days Mackenzie
maintained his post with unwearying constancy. His garrison was short of
water and of ammunition, and the fort was crowded with women and
children, but he held on resolutely until the night of the 3d. No
assistance was sent, no notice, indeed, of any kind was taken of him;
his garrison was discouraged by heavy loss, and by the mines which the
enemy were pushing forward. At length, when the gate of the fort had
been fired, and his wounded were dying for lack of medical aid, he
evacuated the fort, and fought his way gallantly into cantonments,
bringing in his wounded and the women and children. With this solitary
exception the Afghans had nowhere encountered resistance, and the
strange passiveness of our people encouraged them to act with vigour.
From the enclosed space of the Shah Bagh, and the adjacent forts of
Mahmood Khan and Mahomed Shereef, they were threatening the Commissariat
fort, hindering access to it, and besetting the south-western flank of
the cantonments. A young officer commanded the hundred sepoys
garrisoning the Commissariat fort; he reported himself in danger of
being cut off, and Elphinstone gave orders that he and his garrison
should be brought off, and the fort and its contents abandoned. Several
efforts to accomplish the withdrawal were thwarted by the Afghan
flanking fire, with the loss of several officers and many men. The
commissary officer urged on the General the disastrous consequences
which the abandonment of the fort would entail, containing as it did all
the stores, adding that in cantonments there were only two days'
supplies, without prospect of procuring any more. Orders were then sent
to Warren to hold out to the last extremity; which instructions he
denied having received. Early in the morning of the 5th troops were
preparing to attack the Afghan fort and reinforce the Commissariat fort,
when Warren and his garrison reached the cantonments. The gate of the
Commissariat fort had been fired, but the enemy had not effected an
entrance, yet Warren and his people had evacuated the fort through a
hole cut in its wall. Thus, with scarcely a struggle to save it, was
this vital fort allowed to fall into the enemy's hands, and
thenceforward our unfortunate people were to be reduced to precarious
and scanty sources for their food.

From the 5th to the 9th November there was a good deal of desultory
fighting, in the course of which, after one failure, Mahomed Shereef's
fort was stormed by a detachment of our people, under the command of
Major Griffiths; but this success had little influence on the
threatening attitude maintained by the Afghans. On the 9th, owing to the
mental and physical weakness of poor General Elphinstone, Brigadier
Shelton was summoned into cantonments from the Balla Hissar, bringing
with him part of the garrison with which he had been holding the latter
post. The hopes entertained that Shelton would display vigour, and
restore the confidence of the troops, were not realised. He from the
first had no belief in the ability of the occupants of the cantonment to
maintain their position, and he never ceased to urge prompt retreat on
Jellalabad. From the purely military point of view he was probably
right; the Duke of Wellington shared his opinion when he said in the
House of Lords: 'After the first few days, particularly after the
negotiations at Cabul had commenced, it became hopeless for General
Elphinstone to maintain his position.' Shelton's situation was
unquestionably a very uncomfortable one, for Elphinstone, broken as he
was, yet allowed his second in command no freedom of action, and was
testily pertinacious of his prerogative of command. If in Shelton, who
after his manner was a strong man, there had been combined with his
resolution some tact and temper, he might have exercised a beneficial
influence. As it was he became sullen and despondent, and retired behind
an 'uncommunicative and disheartening reserve.' Brave as he was, he
seems to have lacked the inspiration which alone could reinvigorate the
drooping spirit of the troops. In a word, though he probably was, in
army language, a 'good duty soldier,' he certainly was nothing more. And
something more was needed then.

Action on Shelton's part became necessary the day after he came into
cantonments. The Afghans occupied all the forts on the plain between the
Seah Sung heights and the cantonments, and from the nearest of them, the
Rikabashee fort, poured in a heavy fire at close range, which the return
artillery fire could not quell. On Macnaghten's urgent requisition the
General ordered out a strong force, under Shelton, to storm the
obnoxious fort. Captain Bellew missed the gate, and blew open merely a
narrow wicket, but the storming party obeyed the signal to advance.
Through a heavy fire the leaders reached the wicket, and forced their
way in, followed by a few soldiers. The garrison of the fort hastily
evacuated it, and all seemed well, when a sudden stampede ensued--the
handful which, led by Colonel Mackrell of the 44th and Lieutenant Bird
of the Shah's force, had already entered the fort, remaining inside it.
The runaway troops were rallied with difficulty by Shelton and the
subordinate officers, but a call for volunteers from the European
regiment was responded to but by one solitary Scottish private. After a
second advance, and a second retreat--a retreat made notwithstanding
strong artillery and musketry support--Shelton's efforts brought his
people forward yet again, and this time the fort was occupied in force.
Of those who had previously entered it but two survivors were found. The
Afghans, re-entering the fort, had hacked Mackrell to pieces and
slaughtered the men who tried to escape by the wicket. Lieutenant Bird
and a sepoy, from a stable the door of which they had barricaded with
logs of wood, had fended off their assailants by a steady and deadly
fire, and when they were rescued by the entrance of the troops they had
to clamber out over a pile of thirty dead Afghans whom the bullets of
the two men had struck down.

It had come to our people in those gloomy days, to regard as a 'triumph'
a combat in which they were not actually worsted; and even of such
dubious successes the last occurred on November 13, when the Afghans,
after having pressed our infantry down the slopes of the Behmaroo ridge,
were driven back by artillery fire, and forced by a cavalry charge to
retreat further, leaving behind them a couple of guns from which they
had been sending missiles into the cantonments. One of those guns was
brought in without difficulty, but the other the Afghans covered with
their jezail fire. The Envoy had sent a message of entreaty that 'the
triumph of the day' should be completed by its capture. Major Scott of
the 44th made appeal on appeal, ineffectually, to the soldierly feelings
of his men, and while they would not move the sepoys could not be
induced to advance. At length Eyre spiked the piece as a precautionary
measure, and finally some men of the Shah's infantry succeeded in
bringing in the prize. The return march of the troops into cantonments
in the dark, was rendered disorderly by the close pressure of the
Afghans, who, firing incessantly, pursued the broken soldiery up to the
entrance gate.

On the depressed garrison of the Cabul cantonments tidings of disaster
further afield had been pouring in apace. Soon after the outbreak of the
rising, it was known that Lieutenant Maule, commanding the Kohistanee
regiment at Kurdurrah, had been cut to pieces, with his adjutant and
sergeant-major, by the men of his own corps; and on November 6th
intelligence had come in that the Goorkha regiment stationed at Charikar
in the Kohistan, where Major Pottinger was Resident, was in dangerous
case, and that Codrington, its commandant, and some of his officers had
already fallen. And now, on the 15th, there rode wearily into
cantonments two wounded men, who believed themselves the only British
survivors of the Charikar force. Pottinger was wounded in the leg,
Haughton, the adjutant of the Goorkha corps, had lost his right hand,
and his head hung forward on his breast, half severed from his body by a
great tulwar slash. Of the miserable story which it fell to Pottinger to
tell only the briefest summary can be given. His residence was at
Lughmanee, a few miles from the Charikar cantonments, when early in the
month a number of chiefs of the Kohistan and the Nijrao country
assembled to discuss with him the terms on which they would reopen the
communications with Cabul. Those chiefs proved treacherous, slew
Rattray, Pottinger's assistant, and besieged Pottinger in Lughmanee.
Finding his position untenable, he withdrew to Charikar under cover of
night. On the morning of the 5th the Afghans assailed the cantonments.
Pottinger was wounded, Codrington was killed, and the Goorkhas were
driven into the barracks. Haughton, who succeeded to the command of the
regiment, made sortie on sortie, but was finally driven in, and the
enemy renewed their assaults in augmented strength. Thenceforward the
position was all but hopeless. On the 10th the last scant remains of
water was distributed. Efforts to procure water by sorties on the nights
of the 11th and 12th were not successful, and the corps fell into
disorganisation because of losses, hardships, exhaustion, hunger and
thirst. Pottinger and Haughton agreed that there was no prospect of
saving even a remnant of the regiment unless by a retreat to Cabul,
which, however, was clearly possible only in the case of the stronger
men, unencumbered with women and children, of whom, unfortunately, there
was a great number in the garrison. On the afternoon of the 13th
Haughton was cut down by a treacherous native officer of the artillery,
who then rushed out of the gate, followed by all the gunners and most of
the Mahommedans of the garrison. In the midst of the chaos of
disorganisation, Dr Grant amputated Haughton's hand, dressed his other
wounds, and then spiked all the guns. When it was dark, the garrison
moved out, Pottinger leading the advance, Dr Grant the main body, and
Ensign Rose the rear-guard. From the beginning of the march, discipline
was all but entirely in abeyance; on reaching the first stream, the last
remains of control were lost, and the force was rapidly disintegrating.
Pottinger and Haughton, the latter only just able to keep the saddle,
pushed on toward Cabul, rested in a ravine during the day, evaded the
partisan detachment sent out from Cabul to intercept them, rode through
sleeping Cabul in the small hours of the morning, and after being
pursued and fired upon in the outskirts of the city, finally attained
the cantonments. It was afterwards learned that a portion of the
regiment had struggled on to within twenty miles from Cabul, gallantly
headed by young Rose and Dr Grant. Then the remnant was destroyed. Rose
was killed, after despatching four Afghans with his own hand. Dr Grant,
escaping the massacre, held on until within three miles of the
cantonments, when he too was killed.

Macnaghten was naturally much depressed by the news communicated by
Pottinger, and realised that the Afghan masses already encompassing the
position on the Cabul plain would certainly be increased by bands from
the Kohistan and Nijrao, flushed already with their Charikar success. He
sided strongly with the large party among the officers who were
advocating the measure of abandoning the cantonments altogether, and
moving the force now quartered there to the safer and more commanding
position in the Balla Hissar. The military chiefs opposed the project,
and propounded a variety of objections to it, none of which were without
weight, yet all of which might have been overcome by energy and proper
dispositions. Shelton, however, was opposed to the scheme, since if
carried out it would avert or postpone the accomplishment of his policy
of retreat on Jellalabad; Elphinstone was against it in the inertia of
debility, and the project gradually came to be regarded as abandoned.
Another project, that of driving the Afghans from Mahmood Khan's fort,
commanding the direct road between the cantonments and the Balla
Hissar, and of occupying it with a British force, was so far advanced
that the time for the attempt was fixed, and the storming party actually
warned, when some petty objection intervened and the enterprise was
abandoned, never to be revived.

The rising was not three days old when already Elphinstone had lost
heart. On the 5th he had written to Macnaghten suggesting that the
latter should 'consider what chance there is of making terms,' and since
then he had been repeatedly pressing on the Envoy the 'hopelessness of
further resistance.' Macnaghten, vacillating as he was, yet had more
pith in his nature than was left in the debilitated old general. He
wrote to Elphinstone on the 18th recommending, not very strenuously, the
policy of holding out where they were as long as possible, and indeed
throughout the winter, if subsistence could be obtained. He pointed out
that in the cantonments, which he believed to be impregnable, there were
at least the essentials of wood and water. Arguing that a retreat on
Jellalabad must be most disastrous, and was to be avoided except in the
last extremity, he nevertheless ended somewhat inconsistently by leaving
to the military authorities, if in eight or ten days there should appear
no prospect of an improvement of the situation, the decision whether it
would be wiser to attempt a retreat or to withdraw from the cantonments
into the Balla Hissar.

Far from improving, the situation was speedily to become all but
hopeless. The village of Behmaroo, built on the north-eastern slope of
the ridge of the same name bounding the plain on the north-west, lay
about half a mile due north of the cantonments, part of which some of
the houses on the upper slope commanded. From this village, after the
loss of the Commissariat fort, our people had been drawing supplies. On
the morning of the 22d the Afghans were seen moving in force from Cabul
toward Behmaroo, obviously with intent to occupy the village, and so
deprive the occupants of the cantonments of the resource it had been
affording them. A detachment under Major Swayne, sent out to forestall
this occupation, found Behmaroo already in the possession of a body of
Kohistanees, who had so blocked the approaches that Swayne did not
consider himself justified in attempting the fulfilment of his orders to
storm the place; and he contented himself with maintaining all day an
ineffectual musketry fire on it. A diversion in his favour by a gun
supported by cavalry had no result save that of casualties to the
gunners and troopers; reinforcements brought out by Shelton effected
nothing, and in the evening the troops were recalled. On this ill-fated
day Akbar Khan, Dost Mahomed's fierce and implacable son, arrived in
Cabul, and the evil influence on the British fortunes which he exerted
immediately made itself felt, for the events of the following day were
to bring about a crisis in the fate of our ill-starred people.

Recognising the mischief wrought by the hostile occupation of our only
source of supplies, the Envoy strongly urged the immediate despatch of a
strong force to occupy the Behmaroo ridge, and dislodge from the village
its Kohistanee garrison. Shelton opposed the measure, urging the
dispirited state of the troops, their fatigue from constant defensive
duty, and their weakened physique because of poor and scanty rations. He
was overruled, and before daybreak of the 23d a force under his command,
consisting of five companies of the 44th, twelve companies of native
infantry, some cavalry, and one horse-artillery gun, was in position on
the north-eastern extremity of the ridge overhanging the village. The
gun opened fire on the village with grape, and after a short resistance
the greater part of its garrison quitted it. The storming party
entrusted to Major Swayne did not, however, act, and was withdrawn.
Leaving a detachment on the knoll above the village, Shelton moved his
force along the upland to a position near the gorge intersecting the
ridge, forming his infantry into two squares, with the cavalry in rear.
The further hill beyond the gorge was crowded with hostile Afghans from
Cabul, and the long-range fire of their jezails across the dividing
depression, carried execution into the squares which Shelton had
inexplicably formed as if to furnish his foes with a target which they
could not miss. The muskets of his men could not retaliate, and the
skirmishers he threw forward to the brow of his hill could not endure
the Afghan fire. Shelton's single gun maintained a hot and telling fire
on the Afghan masses on the opposite hill, and baulked an attempt
against his right flank made by the Afghan cavalry swarming in the outer
plain; but when its vent became too hot for the gunners to serve it, the
dullest comprehension became alive to the folly of sending a single gun
into the field.

Shelton's men, falling fast though they were, and faint with fatigue and
thirst, yet had endured for hours a fusillade to which they could not
reply, when a body of Afghan fanatics suddenly sprang up out of the
gorge, swept back with their fire the few skirmishers who had been still
holding the brow of the hill, and planted their flag within thirty yards
of the front of the nearer of the squares. Shelton offered a large
reward to the man who should bring it in, but there was no response. In
a passion of soldierly wrath, the veteran commanded a bayonet charge;
not a man sprang forward at the summons which British soldiers are wont
to welcome with cheers. The cowed infantry remained supine, when their
officers darted forward and threw stones into the faces of the enemy;
the troopers heard but obeyed not that trumpet-call to 'Charge!' which
so rarely fails to thrill the cavalryman with the rapture of the fray.
The gunners only, men of that noble force the Company's Horse-Artillery,
quitted themselves valiantly. They stood to their piece to the bitter
end. Two of them were killed beside it, another was severely wounded, a
fourth, refusing to run, took refuge under the gun, and miraculously
escaped death. But the gallant example of the artillerymen in their
front did not hearten the infantrymen of the leading square. The panic
spread among them, and they broke and fled. Fortunately they were not
pursued. The rear square stood fast, and the officers by great exertion
succeeded in rallying the fugitives under the cover it afforded. The
news that a principal chief, Abdoolah Khan, had been severely wounded in
the plain gave pause to the offensive vigour of the Afghans, and the
assailants fell back, abandoning the gun, but carrying off the limber
and gun-team. Our people reoccupied the position, the gun recommenced
its fire, and if the cavalry and infantry could have been persuaded to
take the offensive the battle might have been retrieved. But they
remained passive. The reinforced Afghans renewed their long-range fire
with terrible effect; most of the gunners had fallen, and the Brigadier,
recognising the growing unsteadiness of his command and the imminent
danger of capture to which the solitary gun was again exposed, ordered a
retirement on the detachment left near Behmaroo and the limbering up of
the gun, to which a second limber had been sent out from the
cantonments. The movement was scarcely begun when a rush of fanatic
Afghans completely broke the square, and all order and discipline then
disappeared. A regular rout set in down the hill toward cantonments, the
fugitives disregarding the efforts of the officers to rally them, and
the enemy in full pursuit, the Afghan cavalry making ghastly slaughter
among the panic-stricken runaways. The detachment near Behmaroo
attempted to fall back in orderly fashion, but the reinforced garrison
of the village swept out upon it, surrounded it, broke it up, and threw
it into utter rout with the loss of a large proportion of its strength,
one whole company being all but annihilated. It seemed as if pursued and
pursuers would enter the cantonments together so closely were they
commingled; but the fire from the ramparts and an opportune charge of
horse arrested the pursuit. Yet Eyre reckons as the chief reason why all
the British force that had gone out to battle was not destroyed, the
fact that a leading Afghan chief forced his men to spare the fugitives,
and ultimately halted and withdrew his people when the opportunity for
wholesale slaughter lay open to them. Most of the wounded were left on
the field, where they were miserably cut to pieces; and the gun, which
had been overturned in the attempt of the drivers to gallop down the
face of the hill, finally passed into the possession of the Afghans.
Shelton's dispositions as a commander could not well have been worse;
his bearing as a soldier, although undaunted, imparted to his hapless
troops nothing of inspiration. The obstinacy with which he held the hill
after the impossibility of even partial success must have been patent to
him, was universally condemned. It need scarcely be added that his loss
was very severe.

No more fighting was possible. What, then, was to be done? Elphinstone
and Shelton were at one in opposing removal into the Balla Hissar.
Macnaghten, to whom Shah Soojah had communicated his urgent
recommendation of that measure as the only expedient which could secure
the safety of the British troops, fell in with the views of the military
authorities. There came to him a letter from Osman Khan, the chief who
had called off his adherents on the previous day from pursuing the
fugitives fleeing into cantonments. Osman wrote that, if his troops had
followed up their successes, the loss of the cantonments and the
destruction of the British force were inevitable; but, he continued,
that it was not the wish of the chiefs to proceed to such extremities,
their sole desire being that our people should quietly evacuate the
country, leaving the Afghan sirdars to govern it according to their own
customs, and with a king of their own choosing. In communicating this
letter to General Elphinstone, Sir William asked for the latter's
opinion on the military possibility, or the reverse, of the retention of
the British position in Afghanistan. Elphinstone, in reply, enumerated
sundry reasons which led him to the conclusion which he stated, that 'it
is not feasible any longer to maintain our position in this country, and
that you ought to avail yourself of the offer to negotiate which has
been made to you.'




CHAPTER VI: THE ROAD TO RUIN


As the result of the military disaster of November 23d, and of the
representations of the General, recorded in the last chapter,
Macnaghten, with whatever reluctance, permitted himself to entertain
proposals for an arrangement made by the Afghan leaders. From the
beginning of the outbreak, while urging on the military authorities to
exert themselves in putting down the revolt, he had been engaged in
tortuous and dangerous intrigues, with the object of sowing discord
among the Afghan chiefs, and thus weakening the league of hostility
against Shah Soojah and his British supporters. In the conduct of these
intrigues he used the services of Mohun Lal, who had been one of Burnes'
assistants, and who, having escaped the fate of his chief, had found
refuge in the city residence of a Kuzzilbash chief. Mohun Lal was a
fitting agent for the sort of work prescribed to him, and he burrowed
and suborned with assiduity, and not altogether without success. But it
is unhappily true that he was commissioned to carry out a darker
enterprise, the removal by assassination of certain of the more
virulently hostile among the Afghan leaders. The incident is the
blackest of the many discreditable transactions which chequer the inner
political history of this melancholy chapter of our annals. It is
unfortunately certain that Lieutenant John Conolly, Macnaghten's kinsman
and his confidential representative with Shah Soojah, authorised Mohun
Lal, in writing, to compass the taking off of prominent Afghan leaders.
In a letter to Mohun Lal, of 5th November, Conolly wrote: 'I promise
10,000 rupees for the head of each rebel chief.' Again, on the 11th, he
wrote: 'There is a man called Hadji Ali, who might be induced by a bribe
to try and bring in the heads of one or two of the Mufsids. Endeavour to
let him know that 10,000 rupees will be given for each head, or even
15,000 rupees.' Two chiefs certainly did die under suspicious
circumstances, and in each case the blood-money was claimed. It was
refused by Mohun Lal on the plea that the stipulation that the heads of
the dead Afghans should be brought in was not fulfilled.

Whether Macnaghten inspired those nefarious machinations, whether indeed
he was actively aware of them, are questions which, in the absence of
conclusive evidence, may judiciously be left unanswered. There is extant
a letter from him to Mohun Lal, written December 1st, which has the
following passage: 'I am sorry to find from your letter of last night
that you should have supposed it was ever my object to encourage
assassination. The rebels are very wicked men, but we must not take
unlawful means to destroy them.' And later he is reported to have
informed an Afghan deputation that, 'as a British functionary, nothing
would induce him to pay a price for blood.' Durand holds that it was the
belief on the part of the Afghan chiefs that the British Envoy had set a
price on their heads which destroyed all confidence in Macnaghten's good
faith, and which was Akbar Khan's chief incentive to his murder.

The terms proffered on November 25th by an Afghan deputation were so
humiliating that Macnaghten peremptorily rejected them; and the threat
of immediate hostilities unless our people promptly surrendered their
arms and withdrew was not carried out. A period of inaction strangely
ensued, which on the Afghan side was a treacherous lull, but which
Macnaghten, hoping against hope that some turn in our favour might yet
occur, regarded with complacency. The chiefs, aware that winter was
approaching with added hardship to the forlorn garrison, temporarily
desisted from urging negotiations. But the British military authorities,
with troops living from hand to mouth on precarious half rations, and
with transport cattle dying fast of starvation, kept urging the Envoy to
activity in making terms, if absolute starvation was to be averted.
Futile projects were discussed between Envoy and General, only to be put
aside. As the dreary days of inaction and depletion passed, the
deterioration of military spirit among our people manifested itself more
and more plainly. British soldiers stolidly watched the Afghans
destroying our bridge across the Cabul river, within a quarter of a mile
from cantonments. Scared by the threat of an assault, which, in the
scornful words of brave Lady Sale, a child with a stick might have
repulsed, the garrison of the Mahomed Shereef fort abandoned it in a
panic, the white soldiers of the 44th showing the example of
pusillanimity to the sepoys whom their cowardice demoralised. Next day
the detachment of the 44th which had guarded an exposed position had to
be withdrawn, ceding the post of honour to the stauncher sepoys. The
camp followers were living on carrion; the commissaries reported but
four days' provisions in store, and their inability to procure any more
supplies. At length on December 8th the four senior military officers
informed the Envoy that it was imperatively necessary he should
negotiate a retreat, on the best terms he could obtain.

Macnaghten had to bring himself to recognise that the alternatives were
negotiation or starvation, and on the 11th December, with a draft treaty
in his hand, he met the principal Afghan chiefs on the river side
between the cantonments and the city. After the introductory palavers,
Macnaghten read the proposed treaty, whose purport was as follows: that
the British should evacuate Afghanistan forthwith unmolested, furnished
with supplies and accompanied by hostages, on their march to India; that
the Dost, his family, and other Afghan political exiles, should be
allowed to return to their country; that Shah Soojah should have the
option of remaining at Cabul or going down to India; that amnesty should
be accorded to all adherents of Shah Soojah and his British allies; that
all prisoners should be released; and that perpetual friendship and
mutual good offices should thenceforth endure between the British and
the Afghans.

Akbar Khan made demur to some of the provisions, but was overruled, and
the main stipulations of the treaty were agreed to by the chiefs. The
conference broke up with the understanding that the British troops
should evacuate cantonments within three days, and that meanwhile
provisions should be sent in for their use. The treaty was simply a
virtual capitulation all along the line; but the inherent falseness of
our position, the incapacity of the military chiefs, and the debased
spirit of the troops, consequent partly on low rations but mainly
because of the utter absence of competent and vigorous leadership such
as a Broadfoot or a Havelock would have supplied, enforced on the
reluctant Envoy conditions humiliating beyond previous parallel in the
history of our nation.

From the outset the Afghan chiefs defaulted from their promise of
sending in supplies, but some grain was brought into cantonments by the
troops, whose evacuation of the Balla Hissar on the 13th was effected
under humiliating circumstances. The Afghans demanded the surrender of
the forts in British occupation in the vicinity of the cantonments. The
requisition was complied with, and the Magazine fort furnished the enemy
with both arms and ammunition.

The three stipulated days passed away, and still the British force
remained motionless in the cantonments. Macnaghten was bent on
procrastination, and circumstances seemed to favour a policy which to
all but himself was inexplicable. By the treaty, Shah Soojah was in
effect committed to withdraw to India, but soon after its acceptance the
chiefs had invited him to remain in Cabul as king, on the stipulation
that he should give his daughters in marriage to leaders of the
malcontents. After considerable deliberation, the Shah had consented to
remain on the condition named, but a few days later he withdrew his
acceptance. His vacillation increased the suspicions of the chiefs, and
they demanded the immediate evacuation of the cantonments, refusing to
furnish provisions until that was done. Meanwhile they sent in no
transport animals, although large sums had been handed over for their
purchase. Our people were still immobile, and already, on the 18th,
there had occurred a fall of snow several inches deep.

The Envoy was engaged in strange and dubious intrigues, and since the
Afghans were not fulfilling their share of the treaty obligations, he
appears to have regarded himself as no longer bound by its conditions,
and free to try to obtain better terms from other sources, in pursuit of
which purpose he was expending money in a variety of directions. The
dark and unscrupulous Mohun Lal was his confidant and instrument. Akbar
Khan and the chiefs of his party had become aware of Macnaghten's
machinations, and they laid a snare for him into which he fell with open
eyes. Emissaries were sent to him with the sinister proposals that the
British should remain in Afghanistan until the spring, when they were to
withdraw as of their own accord; that the head of Ameenoolla Khan, one
of the most powerful and obnoxious of the rebel leaders, should be
presented to the Envoy in return for a stipulated sum of money; and that
for all those services the British Government should requite Akbar Khan
with a present of thirty lakhs of rupees, and an annual pension of four
lakhs. Macnaghten refused peremptorily the proffer of Ameenoolla's head,
but did not reject co-operation in that chiefs capture by a dubious
device in which British troops were to participate; he did not hesitate
to accept the general terms of the proposals; and he consented to hold a
conference with Akbar Khan on the following day to carry into effect the
projected measures.

On the morning of the 23d the deceived and doomed man, accompanied by
his staff-officers, Lawrence, Trevor and Mackenzie, rode out from
cantonments to keep the fateful tryst on the bank of the Cabul river.
His manner was 'distracted and hurried.' When he told Lawrence of the
nature of the affair on which he was going, that shrewd officer
immediately warned him that it was a plot against him. 'A plot!' he
replied hastily, 'let me alone for that; trust me for that!' and
Lawrence desisted from useless expostulation. Poor old Elphinstone had
scented treachery; but the Envoy had closed his mouth with the impatient
words: 'I understand these things better than you!' As he rode out, he
admitted the danger of the enterprise, but argued that if it succeeded
it was worth all risks. 'At all events,' he ended, 'let the loss be what
it may, I would rather die a hundred deaths than live the last six weeks
over again.' The escort halted, and the four British gentlemen advanced
to the place of rendezvous, whither came presently Akbar Khan and his
party. Akbar began the conference by asking the Envoy if he was ready to
carry out the proposals presented to him overnight. 'Why not?' was Sir
William's short reply. A number of Afghans, armed to the teeth, had
gradually formed a circle around the informal durbar. Lawrence and
Mackenzie pointed out this environment to some of the chiefs, who
affected to drive off the intruders with their whips; but Akbar observed
that it did not matter, as they 'were all in the secret.' 'Suddenly,'
wrote Mackenzie, 'I heard Akbar call out, "Begeer! begeer!" ("Seize!
seize!") and turning round I saw him grasp the Envoy's left hand with an
expression on his face of the most diabolical ferocity. I think it was
Sultan Jan who laid hold of the Envoy's right hand. They dragged him in
a stooping posture down the hillock, the only words I heard poor Sir
William utter being, "Az barae Khooda" ("For God's sake"). I saw his
face, however, and it was full of horror and astonishment.' Neither
Mackenzie nor Lawrence, the surviving companions of the Envoy, witnessed
the actual end. 'Whether,' writes Kaye, 'he died on the spot, or whether
he was slain by the infuriated ghazees, is not very clearly known; but
the fanatics threw themselves on the prostrate body and hacked it with
their knives.' There is no doubt that the head of the unfortunate
Macnaghten was paraded in triumph through the streets of Cabul, and that
the mangled trunk, after being dragged about the city, was hung up in
the great bazaar. Of the three officers who accompanied the Envoy to
the conference, Trevor was massacred, Lawrence and Mackenzie were saved
with difficulty by friendly chiefs, and brought into the city, where
they and Captain Skinner joined the hostages, Captains Connolly and
Airey, under the safe roof of the venerable Mahomed Zemaun Khan.

That Akbar and the confederate chiefs spread a snare for the Envoy is
plain, and that they regarded his acceptance of their deceitful
proposals as a proof of his faithlessness to the treaty obligations to
which he had bound himself. It was no element in their reasoning that
since they had not regarded the treaty the British functionary might
without breach of faith hold that it did not bind him. But it is
improbable that the murder of Macnaghten was actually included in their
scheme of action. Their intention seems to have been to seize him as a
hostage, with intent thus to secure the evacuation of Afghanistan and
the restoration of Dost Mahomed. The ill-fated Envoy's expressions on
his way to the rendezvous indicate his unhinged state of mind. He went
forth to sure treachery; Akbar's gust of sudden fury converted the
planned abduction into savage murder, and his abrupt pistol bullet
baulked the more wily and less ruthless project which had probably been
devised in cold blood.

The escort brought back into cantonments tidings that the Envoy had been
seized. The garrison got under arms, and remained passive throughout the
day. The defences were manned at night, in the apprehension that the
noise and disturbance in the city portended an assault; but that clamour
was caused by the mustering of the Afghans in expectation that the
British would attack the city, bent on vengeance on the murderers of the
Envoy. Action of that nature was, however, wholly absent from the
prostrate minds of the military chiefs. On the following afternoon
Captain Lawrence transmitted certain overtures from the chiefs, as the
result of a conference held by them, when, notwithstanding severe
comments on the conduct of the Envoy, professions were made of sincere
regret for his death. With certain alterations and additions, the treaty
drawn up by Macnaghten was taken by the chiefs as the basis for the
negotiations which they desired to renew. Major Pottinger, as now the
senior 'political' with the force, was called on by General Elphinstone
to undertake the task of conducting negotiations with the Afghan
leaders. The high-souled Pottinger rose at the summons from the sickbed
to which he had been confined ever since his wonderful escape from
Charikar, and accepted the thankless and distasteful duty. It is not
necessary to recount the details of negotiations, every article and
every stage of which display the arrogance of the men who knew
themselves masters of the situation, and reveal not less the degrading
humiliation to which was submitting itself a strong brigade of British
troops, whose arms were still in the soldiers' hands, and over whose
ranks hung banners blazoned with victories that shall be memorable down
the ages. On the sombre and cheerless Christmas Day Pottinger rose in
the council of men who wore swords, and remonstrated with soldierly
vigour and powerful argument against the degrading terms which the
chiefs had contumeliously thrown to them. He produced letters from
Jellalabad and Peshawur giving information of reinforcements on the way
from India, and urging the maintenance of resistance. He argued that to
conclude a treaty with the Afghans would be a fatal error, and suggested
two alternative courses which offered a prospect of saving their honour
and part of the army--the occupation of the Balla Hissar, which was the
preferable measure, or the abandonment of camp, baggage, and
encumbrances, and forcing a retreat down the passes. The
council--Pottinger must have written sarcastically when he termed it a
'council of war'--unanimously decided that to remain in Cabul and to
force a retreat were alike impracticable, and that nothing remained but
the endeavour to release the army by agreeing to the conditions offered
by the enemy. 'Under these circumstances,' in the words of Pottinger,
'as the Major-General coincided with the officers of the council, and
refused to attempt occupying the Balla Hissar, and as his second in
command declared that impracticable, I considered it my duty,
notwithstanding my repugnance to and disapproval of the measure, to
yield, and attempt to carry on a negotiation.'

This Pottinger accordingly did. The first demand with which he had to
comply was to give bills for the great sums promised by the Envoy to the
chiefs for their services in furthering and supporting his treaty. This
imposition had to be submitted to, since the Afghans stopped the
supplies until the extortion was complied with. The next concession
required was the surrender of the artillery of the force, with the
exception of six field and three mule guns; and the military chiefs
endured this humiliation, against which even the demoralised soldiery
chafed. Then the demand for hostages had to be complied with, and four
officers were sent on to join the two hostages already in Afghan hands.
The chiefs had demanded four married hostages, with their wives and
children, and a circular was sent round offering to volunteers the
inducement of a large stipend; but the sentiment of repulsion was too
strong to be overcome by the bribe. The sick and wounded who could not
bear the march were sent into the city in accordance with an article of
the treaty, two surgeons accompanying their patients.

The treaty, ratified by the leading chiefs and sent into cantonments on
New Year's Day 1842, provided that the British troops, within
twenty-four hours after receiving transport, and under the protection of
certain chiefs and an adequate escort, should begin their march of
evacuation, the Jellalabad garrison moving down to Peshawur in advance;
that the six hostages left in Cabul should be well treated, and
liberated on the arrival at Peshawur of Dost Mahomed; the sick and
wounded left behind to be at liberty to return to India on their
recovery; all small arms and ordnance stores in the cantonment magazine
to be made over to the Afghans 'as a token of friendship,' on which
account also, they were to have all the British cannon except as above
mentioned; the Afghans to escort the Ghuznee garrison in safety to
Peshawur; and a further stipulation was that the British troops in
Candahar and Western Afghanistan were to resign the territories occupied
by them and start quickly for India, provisioned and protected from
molestation by the way.

Severe and humiliating as were those terms, they were not obtained
without difficulty. The terms put forward in the earlier drafts of the
treaty were yet more exacting, and the tone of the demands was abrupt,
contemptuous, and insulting. Pottinger had to plead, to entreat, to be
abject; to beg the masterful Afghans 'not to overpower the weak with
sufferings'; 'to be good enough to excuse the women from the suffering'
of remaining as hostages; and to entreat them 'not to forget kindness'
shown by us in former days. One blushes not for but with the gallant
Pottinger, loyally carrying out the miserable duty put upon him. The
shame was not his; it lay on the council of superior officers, who
overruled his remonstrances, and ground his face into the dust.

Our people were made to pass under the yoke every hour of their wretched
lives during those last winter days in the Cabul cantonments. The
fanatics and the common folk of the city and its environs swarmed around
our petty ramparts, with their foul sneers and their blackguard taunts,
hurled with impunity from where they stood at the muzzles of the loaded
guns which the gunners were forbidden to fire. Officers and rank and
file were in a condition of smouldering fury, but no act of reprisal or
retribution was permitted. If the present was one continuous misery,
the future lowered yet more gloomily. It was of common knowledge as well
in the cantonments as in the city, that the engagements made by the
chiefs were not worth the paper on which they had been written, and
that treachery was being concerted against the force on its impending
travail through the passes. It was told by a chief to one of the
officers who was his friend, that Akbar Khan had sworn to have in his
possession the British ladies as security for the safe restoration of
his own family and relatives, and, strange forecast to be fulfilled
almost to the very letter, had vowed to annihilate every soldier of the
British army with the exception of one man, who should reach Jellalabad
to tell the story of the massacre of all his comrades. Pottinger was
well aware how desperate was the situation of the hapless people on
whose behalf he had bent so low his proud soul. Mohun Lal warned him of
the treachery the chiefs were plotting, and assured him that unless
their sons should accompany the army as hostages, it would be attacked
on the march. Day after day the departure was delayed, on the pretext
that the chiefs had not completed their preparations for the safe
conduct of the force and its encumbrances. Day after day the snow was
falling with a quiet, ruthless persistency. The bitter night frosts were
destroying the sepoys and the camp followers, their vitality weakened by
semi-starvation and by the lack of firewood which had long distressed
them. At length on January 5th, Sturt the engineer officer got his
instructions to throw down into the ditch a section of the eastern
rampart, and so furnish a freer exit than the gates could afford. The
supply of transport was inadequate, provisions were scant, and the
escort promised by the chiefs was not forthcoming. Pottinger advised
waiting yet a little longer, until supplies and escort should arrive;
but for once the military chiefs were set against the policy of delay,
and firm orders were issued that the cantonments should be evacuated on
the following day.

Shah Soojah remained in Cabul. The resolution became him better than
anything else we know of the unfortunate man. It may be he reasoned that
he had a chance for life by remaining in the Balla Hissar, and that from
what he knew, there was no chance of life for anyone participating in
the fateful march. He behaved fairly by the British authorities, sending
more than one solemn warning pressing on them the occupation of the
Balla Hissar. And there was some dignity in his appeal to Brigadier
Anquetil, who commanded his own contingent, 'if it were well to forsake
him in the hour of need, and to deprive him of the aid of that force
which he had hitherto been taught to regard as his own?'




CHAPTER VII: THE CATASTROPHE


The ill-omened evacuation by our doomed people of the cantonments
wherein for two months they had undergone every extremity of humiliation
and contumely, was begun on the dreary winter morning of January 6th,
1842. Snow lay deep on plain and hill-side; the cruel cold, penetrating
through the warmest clothing, bit fiercely into the debilitated and
thinly clad frames of the sepoys and the great horde of camp followers.
The military force which marched out of cantonments consisted of about
4500 armed men, of whom about 690 were Europeans, 2840 native soldiers
on foot, and 970 native cavalrymen. The gallant troop of Company's
Horse-Artillery marched out with its full complement of six guns, to
which, with three pieces of the mountain train, the artillery arm of the
departing force was restricted by the degrading terms imposed by the
Afghan chiefs. In good heart and resolutely commanded, a body of
disciplined troops thus constituted, and of a fighting strength so
respectable, might have been trusted not only to hold its own against
Afghan onslaught, but if necessary to take the offensive with success.
But alas, the heart of the hapless force had gone to water, its
discipline was a wreck, its chiefs were feeble and apathetic; its steps
were dogged by the incubus of some 12,000 camp followers, with a great
company of women and children. The awful fate brooded over its forlorn
banners of expiating by its utter annihilation, the wretched folly and
sinister prosecution of the enterprise whose deserved failure was to be
branded yet deeper on the gloomiest page of our national history, by the
impending catastrophe of which the dark shadow already lay upon the
blighted column.

The advance began to move out from cantonments at nine A.M. The march
was delayed at the river by the non-completion of the temporary bridge,
and the whole of the advance was not across until after noon. The main
body under Shelton, which was accompanied by the ladies, invalids, and
sick, slowly followed. It as well as the advance was disorganised from
the first by the throngs of camp followers with the baggage, who could
not be prevented from mixing themselves up with the troops. The Afghans
occupied the cantonments as portion after portion was evacuated by our
people, rending the air with their exulting cries, and committing every
kind of atrocity. It was late in the afternoon before the long train of
camels following the main body had cleared the cantonments; and
meanwhile the rear-guard was massed outside, in the space between the
rampart and the canal, among the chaos of already abandoned baggage. It
was exposed there to a vicious jezail fire poured into it by the
Afghans, who abandoned the pleasures of plunder and arson for the yet
greater joy of slaughtering the Feringhees. When the rear-guard moved
away in the twilight, an officer and fifty men were left dead in the
snow, the victims of the Afghan fire from the rampart of the cantonment;
and owing to casualties in the gun teams it had been found necessary to
spike and abandon two of the horse-artillery guns.

The rear-guard, cut into from behind by the pestilent ghazees, found its
route encumbered with heaps of abandoned baggage around which swarmed
Afghan plunderers. Other Afghans, greedier for blood than for booty,
were hacking and slaying among the numberless sepoys and camp followers
who had dropped out of the column, and were lying or sitting on the
wayside in apathetic despair, waiting for death and careless whether it
came to them by knife or by cold. Babes lay on the snow abandoned by
their mothers, themselves prostrate and dying a few hundred yards
further on. It was not until two o'clock of the following morning that
the rear-guard reached the straggling and chaotic bivouac in which its
comrades lay in the snow at the end of the first short march of six
miles. Its weary progress had been illuminated by the conflagration
raging in the cantonments, which had been fired by the Afghan fanatics,
rabid to erase every relic of the detested unbelievers.

It was a night of bitter cold. Out in the open among the snow, soldiers
and camp followers, foodless, fireless, and shelterless, froze to death
in numbers, and numbers more were frost-bitten. The cheery morning noise
of ordinary camp life was unheard in the mournful bivouac. Captain
Lawrence outlines a melancholy picture. 'The silence of the men betrayed
their despair and torpor. In the morning I found lying close to me,
stiff, cold, and quite dead, in full regimentals, with his sword drawn
in his hand, an old grey-haired conductor named Macgregor, who, utterly
exhausted, had lain down there silently to die.' Already defection had
set in. One of the Shah's infantry regiments and his detachment of
sappers and miners had deserted bodily, partly during the march of the
previous day, partly in the course of the night.

No orders were given out, no bugle sounded the march, on the morning of
the 7th. The column heaved itself forward sluggishly, a mere mob of
soldiers, camp followers and cattle, destitute of any semblance of order
or discipline. Quite half the sepoys were already unfit for duty; in
hundreds they drifted in among the non-combatants and increased the
confusion. The advance of the previous day was now the rear-guard. After
plundering the abandoned baggage, the Afghans set to harassing the
rear-guard, whose progress was delayed by the disorderly multitude
blocking the road in front. The three mountain guns, temporarily
separated from the infantry, were captured by a sudden Afghan rush. In
vain Anquetil strove to rouse the 44th to make an effort for their
recapture. Green was more successful with his handful of artillerymen,
who followed him and the Brigadier and spiked the pieces, but being
unsupported were compelled a second time to abandon them. On this march
it became necessary also, from the exhaustion of their teams, to spike
and abandon two more of the horse-artillery guns; so that there now
remained with the force only a couple of six-pounders. While the
rear-guard was in action, a body of Afghan horse charged on the flank,
right into the heart of the baggage column, swept away much plunder, and
spread confusion and dismay far and wide. The rear of the column would
probably have been entirely cut off, but that reinforcements from the
advance under Shelton pushed back the enemy, and by crowning the lateral
heights kept open the thoroughfare. At Bootkhak was found Akbar Khan,
who professed to have been commissioned to escort the force to
Jellalabad, and who blamed our people for having marched out prematurely
from the cantonments. He insisted on the halt of the column at Bootkhak
until the following morning, when he would provide supplies, but he
demanded an immediate subsidy of 15,000 rupees, and that Pottinger,
Lawrence and Mackenzie should be given up to him as hostages that the
force would not march beyond Tezeen until tidings should arrive that
Sale had evacuated Jellalabad. Those officers by the General's
instructions joined the Afghan chief on the following morning, and
Akbar's financial requisition was obsequiously fulfilled. After two
days' marching our people, who had brought out with them provisions for
but five and a half days, expecting within that time to reach
Jellalabad, were only ten miles forward on their march.

Another night passed, with its train of horrors--starvation, cold,
exhaustion, death. Lady Sale relates that scarcely any of the baggage
now remained; that there was no food for man or beast; that snow lay a
foot deep on the ground; that even water from the adjacent stream was
difficult to obtain, as the carriers were fired on in fetching it; and
that she thought herself fortunate in being sheltered in a small tent in
which 'we slept nine, all touching each other.' Daylight brought merely
a more bitter realisation of utter misery. Eyre expresses his wonderment
at the effect of two nights' exposure to the frost in disorganising the
force. 'It had so nipped even the strongest men as to completely
prostrate their powers and incapacitate them for service; even the
cavalry, who suffered less than the rest, were obliged to be lifted on
their horses.' In fact, only a few hundred serviceable men remained. At
the sound of hostile fire the living struggled to their feet from their
lairs in the snow, stiffened with cold, all but unable to move or hold a
weapon, leaving many of their more fortunate comrades stark in death. A
turmoil of confusion reigned. The Afghans were firing into the rear of
the mass, and there was a wild rush of camp followers to the front, who
stripped the baggage cattle of their loads and carried the animals off,
leaving the ground strewn with ammunition, treasure, plate, and other
property. The ladies were no longer carried in litters and palanquins,
for their bearers were mostly dead; they sat in the bullet fire packed
into panniers slung on camels, invalids as some of them were--one poor
lady with her baby only five days old. Mess stores were being recklessly
distributed, and Lady Sale honestly acknowledges that, as she sat on her
horse in the cold, she felt very grateful for a tumbler of sherry, which
at any other time would have made her 'very unladylike,' but which now
merely warmed her. Cups full of sherry were drunk by young children
without in the least affecting their heads, so strong on them was the
hold of the cold.

It was not until noon that the living mass of men and animals was once
more in motion. The troops were in utter disorganisation; the baggage
was mixed up with the advance guard; the camp followers were pushing
ahead in precipitate panic. The task before the wretched congeries of
people was to thread the stupendous gorge of the Khoord Cabul pass--a
defile about five miles long, hemmed in on either hand by steeply
scarped hills. Down the bottom of the ravine dashed a mountain torrent,
whose edges were lined with thick layers of ice, on which had formed
glacier-like masses of snow. The 'Jaws of Death' were barely entered
when the slaughter began. With the advance rode several Afghan chiefs,
whose followers, by their command, shouted to the Ghilzais lining the
heights to hold their fire, but the tribesmen gave no heed to the
mandate. Lady Sale rode with the chiefs. The Ghilzai fire at fifty yards
was close and deadly. The men of the advance fell fast. Lady Sale had a
bullet in her arm, and three more through her dress. But the weight of
the hostile fire fell on the main column, the baggage escort, and the
rear-guard. Some of the ladies, who mostly were on camels which were led
with the column, had strange adventures. On one camel was quite a group.
In one of its panniers were Mrs Boyd and her little son, in the other
Mrs Mainwaring, with her own infant and Mrs Anderson's eldest child. The
camel fell, shot. A Hindustanee trooper took up Mrs Boyd _en croupe_,
and carried her through in safety; another horseman behind whom her son
rode, was killed, and the boy fell into Afghan hands. The Anderson girl
shared the same fate. Mrs Mainwaring, with her baby in her arms,
attempted to mount a baggage pony, but the load upset, and she pursued
her way on foot. An Afghan horseman rode at her, threatened her with his
sword, and tried to drag away the shawl in which she carried her child.
She was rescued by a sepoy grenadier, who shot the Afghan dead, and then
conducted the poor lady along the pass through the dead and dying,
through, also, the close fire which struck down people near to her,
almost to the exit of the pass, when a bullet killed the chivalrous
sepoy, and Mrs Mainwaring had to continue her tramp to the bivouac
alone.

A very fierce attack was made on the rear-guard, consisting of the 44th.
In the narrow throat of the pass the regiment was compelled to halt by a
block in front, and in this stationary position suffered severely. A
flanking fire told heavily on the handful of European infantry. The
belated stragglers masked their fire, and at length the soldiers fell
back, firing volleys indiscriminately into the stragglers and the
Afghans. Near the exit of the pass a commanding position was maintained
by some detachments which still held together, strengthened by the only
gun now remaining, the last but one having been abandoned in the gorge.
Under cover of this stand the rear of the mass gradually drifted forward
while the Afghan pursuit was checked, and at length all the surviving
force reached the camping ground. There had been left dead in the pass
about 500 soldiers and over 2500 camp followers.

Akbar and the chiefs, taking the hostages with them, rode forward on the
track of the retreating force. Akbar professed that his object was to
stop the firing, but Mackenzie writes that Pottinger said to him:
'Mackenzie, remember if I am killed that I heard Akbar Khan shout "Slay
them!" in Pushtoo, although in Persian he called out to stop the
firing.' The hostages had to be hidden away from the ferocious ghazees
among rocks in the ravine until near evening, when in passing through
the region of the heaviest slaughter they 'came upon one sight of horror
after another. All the bodies were stripped. There were children cut in
two. Hindustanee women as well as men--some frozen to death, some
literally chopped to pieces, many with their throats cut from ear to
ear.'

Snow fell all night on the unfortunates gathered tentless on the Khoord
Cabul camping ground. On the morning of the 9th the confused and
disorderly march was resumed, but after a mile had been traversed a halt
for the day was ordered at the instance of Akbar Khan, who sent into
camp by Captain Skinner a proposal that the ladies and children, with
whose deplorable condition he professed with apparent sincerity to
sympathise, should be made over to his protection, and that the married
officers should accompany their wives; he pledging himself to preserve
the party from further hardships and dangers, and afford its members
safe escort through the passes in rear of the force. The General had
little faith in the Sirdar, but he was fain to give his consent to an
arrangement which promised alleviation to the wretchedness of the
ladies, scarce any of whom had tasted a meal since leaving Cabul. Some,
still weak from childbirth, were nursing infants only a few days old;
other poor creatures were momentarily apprehending the pangs of
motherhood. There were invalids whose only attire, as they rode in the
camel panniers or shivered on the snow, was the nightdresses they wore
when leaving the cantonments in their palanquins, and none possessed
anything save the clothes on their backs. It is not surprising, then,
that dark and doubtful as was the future to which they were consigning
themselves, the ladies preferred its risks and chances to the awful
certainties which lay before the doomed column. The Afghan chief had
cunningly made it a condition of his proffer that the husbands should
accompany their wives, and if there was a struggle in the breasts of the
former between public and private duties, the General humanely decided
the issue by ordering them to share the fortunes of their families.

Akbar Khan sent in no supplies, and the march was resumed on the morning
of the both by a force attenuated by starvation, cold, and despair,
diminished further by extensive desertion. After much exertion the
advance, consisting of all that remained of the 44th, the solitary gun,
and a detachment of cavalry, forced a passage to the front through the
rabble of camp followers, and marched unmolested for about two miles
until the Tunghee Tariki was reached, a deep gorge not more than ten
feet wide. Men fell fast in the horrid defile, struck down by the Afghan
fire from the heights; but the pass, if narrow, was short, and the
advance having struggled through it moved on to the halting-place at
Kubbar-i-Jubbar, and waited there for the arrival of the main body. But
that body was never to emerge from out the shambles in the narrow throat
of the Tunghee Tariki. The advance was to learn from the few stragglers
who reached it the ghastly truth that it now was all that remained of
the strong brigade which four days before had marched out from the Cabul
cantonments. The slaughter from the Afghan fire had blocked the gorge
with dead and dying. The Ghilzai tribesmen, at the turn into the pen at
the other end of which was the blocked gorge, had closed up fiercely.
Then the steep slopes suddenly swarmed with Afghans rushing sword in
hand down to the work of butchery, and the massacre stinted not while
living victims remained. The rear-guard regiment of sepoys was
exterminated, save for two or three desperately wounded officers who
contrived to reach the advance.

The remnant of the army consisted now of about seventy files of the
44th, about 100 troopers, and a detachment of horse-artillery with a
single gun. The General sent to Akbar Khan to remonstrate with him on
the attack he had allowed to be made after having guaranteed that the
force should meet with no further molestation. Akbar protested his
regret, and pleaded his inability to control the wild Ghilzai hillmen,
over whom, in their lust for blood and plunder, their own chiefs had
lost all control; but he was willing to guarantee the safe conduct to
Jellalabad of the European officers and men if they would lay down their
arms and commit themselves wholly into his hands. This sinister proposal
the General refused, and the march was continued, led in disorder by the
remnant of the camp followers. In the steep descent from the Huft Kotul
into the Tezeen ravine, the soldiers following the rabble at some
distance, came suddenly on a fresh butchery. The Afghans had suddenly
fallen on the confused throng, and the descent was covered with dead and
dying.

During the march from Kubbar-i-Jubbar to the Tezeen valley Shelton's
dogged valour had mainly saved the force from destruction. With a few
staunch soldiers of his own regiment, the one-armed veteran, restored
now to his proper _métier_ of stubborn fighting man, had covered the
rear and repelled the Ghilzai assaults with persevering energy and
dauntless fortitude. And he it was who now suggested, since Akbar Khan
still held to his stipulation that the force should lay down its arms,
that a resolute effort should be made to press on to Jugdulluk by a
rapid night march of four-and-twenty miles, in the hope of clearing the
passes in that vicinity before the enemy should have time to occupy
them.

That the attempt would prove successful was doubtful, since the force
was already exhausted; but it was the last chance, and Shelton's
suggestion was adopted. In the early moonlight the march silently began,
an ill omen marking the start in the shape of the forced abandonment of
the last gun. Fatal delay occurred between Seh Baba and Kutti Sung
because of a panic among the camp followers, who, scared by a few shots,
drifted backwards and forwards in a mass, retarding the progress of the
column and for the time entirely arresting the advance of Shelton's and
his rear-guard. The force could not close up until the morning, ten
miles short of Jugdulluk, and already the Afghans were swarming on every
adjacent height. All the way down the broken slope to Jugdulluk the
little column trudged through the gauntlet of jezail fire which lined
the road with dead and wounded. Shelton and his rear-guard handful
performed wonders, again and again fending off with close fire and
levelled bayonets the fierce rushes of Ghilzais charging sword in hand.
The harassed advance reached Jugdulluk in the afternoon of the 11th, and
took post behind some ruins on a height by the roadside, the surviving
officers forming line in support of the gallant rear-guard struggling
forward through its environment of assailants. As Shelton and his brave
fellows burst through the cordon they were greeted by cheers from the
knoll. But there was no rest for the exhausted people, for the Afghans
promptly occupied commanding positions whence they maintained a fire
from which the ruins afforded but scant protection. To men parched with
thirst the stream at the foot of their knoll was but a tantalising
aggravation, for to attempt to reach it was certain death. The snow they
devoured only increased their sufferings, and but little stay was
afforded by the raw flesh of a few gun bullocks. Throughout the day
volley after volley was poured down upon the weary band by the
inexorable enemy. Frequent sallies were made, and the heights were
cleared, but the positions were soon reoccupied and the ruthless fire
was renewed.

Captain Skinner, summoned by Akbar, brought back a message that General
Elphinstone should visit him to take part in a conference, and that
Brigadier Shelton and Captain Johnson should be given over as hostages
for the evacuation of Jellalabad. Compliance was held to be imperative,
and the temporary command was entrusted to Brigadier Anquetil. Akbar
was extremely hospitable to his compulsory guests; but he insisted on
including the General among his hostages, and was not moved by
Elphinstone's representations that he would prefer death to the disgrace
of being separated from his command in its time of peril. The Ghilzai
chiefs came into conference burning with hatred against the British, and
revelling in the anticipated delights of slaughtering them. Akbar seemed
sincere in his effort to conciliate them, but was long unsuccessful.
Their hatred seemed indeed stronger than their greed; but at length
toward nightfall Akbar announced that pacific arrangements had been
accepted by the tribes, and that what remained of the force should be
allowed to march unmolested to Jellalabad.

How futile was the compact, if indeed there was any compact, was soon
revealed. The day among the ruins on the knoll had passed in dark and
cruel suspense--in hunger, thirst, and exhaustion, in the presence of
frequent death; and as the evening fell, in anguish and all but utter
despair. As darkness set in the conviction enforced itself that to
remain longer in the accursed place was madness; and the little band,
leaving behind perforce the sick and wounded, marched out, resolute to
push through or die fighting. In the valley the only molestation at
first was a desultory fire from the camping Ghilzais, who were rather
taken by surprise, but soon became wide awake to their opportunities.
Some hurried forward to occupy the pass rising from the valley to the
Jugdulluk crest; others, hanging on the rear and flanks of the column
encumbered with its fatal incubus of camp followers, mixed among the
unarmed throng with their deadly knives, and killed and plundered with
the dexterity of long practice. Throughout the tedious march up the
steeply rising defile a spattering fire came from the rocks and ridges
flanking the track, all but blocked by the surging concourse of
miserable followers. The advance had to employ cruel measures to force
its way through the chaos toward the crest. As it is approached from the
Jugdulluk direction the flanking elevations recede and merge in the
transverse ridge, which is crowned by a low-cut abrupt rocky upheaval,
worn down somewhat where the road passes over the crest by the friction
of traffic. Just here the tribesmen had constructed a formidable abattis
of prickly brushwood, which stretched athwart the road, and dammed back
the fugitives in the shallow oval basin between the termination of the
ravine and the summit of the ridge. In this trap were caught our hapless
people and the swarm of their native followers, and now the end was very
near. From behind the barrier, and around the lip of the great trap, the
hillmen fired their hardest into the seething mass of soldiers and
followers writhing in the awful Gehenna on which the calm moon shone
down. On the edges of this whirlpool of death the fell Ghilzais were
stabbing and hacking with the ferocious industry inspired by thirst for
blood and lust for plunder. It is among the characteristics of our
diverse-natured race to die game, and even to thrill with a strange
fierce joy when hope of escape from death has all but passed away and
there remains only to sell life at the highest possible premium of
exchange. Among our people, face to face with death on the rocky
Jugdulluk, officers and soldiers alike fought with cool deadly rancour.
The brigadier and the private engaged in the same fierce _mêlée_, fought
side by side, and fell side by side. Stalwart Captain Dodgin of the 44th
slew five Afghans before he fell. Captain Nicholl of the
horse-artillery, gunless now, rallied to him the few staunch gunners who
were all that remained to him of his noble and historic troop, and led
them on to share with him a heroic death.

All did not perish on the rugged summit of the Jugdulluk. The barrier
was finally broken through, and a scant remnant of the force wrought out
its escape from the slaughter-pit. Small detachments, harassed by sudden
onslaughts, and delayed by reluctance to desert wounded comrades, were
trudging in the darkness down the long slope to the Soorkhab. The
morning of the 13th dawned near Gundamuk on the straggling group of some
twenty officers and forty-five European soldiers. Its march arrested by
sharp attacks, the little band moved aside to occupy a defensive
position on an adjacent hillock. A local sirdar invited the senior
officer to consult with him as to a pacific arrangement, and while Major
Griffiths was absent on this errand there was a temporary suspension of
hostilities. The Afghans meanwhile swarmed around the detachment with a
pretence of friendship, but presently attempts were made to snatch from
the soldiers their arms. This conduct was sternly resented, and the
Afghans were forced back. They ascended an adjacent elevation and set
themselves to the work of deliberately picking off officer after
officer, man after man. The few rounds remaining in the pouches of the
soldiers were soon exhausted, but the detachment stood fast, and calmly
awaited the inevitable end. Rush after rush was driven back from its
steadfast front, but at last, nearly all being killed or wounded, a
final onset of the enemy, sword in hand, terminated the struggle, and
completed the dismal tragedy. Captain Souter of the 44th, with three or
four privates all of whom as well as himself were wounded, was spared
and carried into captivity; he saved the colours of his regiment, which
he had tied round his waist before leaving Jugdulluk. A group of mounted
officers had pushed forward as soon as they had cleared the barrier on
the crest. Six only reached Futtehabad in safety. There they were
treacherously offered food, and while they halted a few moments to eat
two were cut down. Of the four who rode away three were overtaken and
killed within four miles of Jellalabad; one officer alone survived to
reach that haven of refuge.

The ladies, the married officers, and the original hostages, followed
Akbar Khan down the passes toward Jugdulluk, pursuing the line of
retreat strewn with its ghastly tokens of slaughter, and recognising
almost at every step the bodies of friends and comrades. At Jugdulluk
they found General Elphinstone, Brigadier Shelton, and Captain Johnson,
and learned the fate which had overtaken the marching force. On the
following day Akbar quitted Jugdulluk with his hostages and the ladies,
all of whom were virtually prisoners, and rode away through the
mountains in a northerly direction. On the fourth day the fort of
Budiabad in the Lughman valley was reached, where Akbar left the
prisoners while he went to attempt the reduction of Jellalabad.




CHAPTER VIII: THE SIEGE AND DEFENCE OF JELLALABAD


Sale's brigade, retreating from Gundamuk, reached Jellalabad on the 12th
November 1841. An investigation into the state of the fortifications of
that place showed them, in their existing condition, to be incapable of
resisting a vigorous assault. But it was resolved to occupy the place,
and to Captain George Broadfoot, as garrison engineer, was committed the
duty of making it defensible. This assuredly was no light task. The
enciente was far too extensive for the slender garrison, and its tracing
was radically bad. The ramparts were so dilapidated that in places they
were scarcely discernible, and the ruins strewn over what should have
been the glacis afforded near cover to assailants, whose attitude was
already so threatening as to hinder the beginning of repairing
operations. Their fire swept the defences, and their braves capered
derisively to the strains of a bagpipe on the adjacent rocky elevation,
which thenceforth went by the name of 'Piper's Hill.' A sortie on the
15th cleared the environs of the troublesome Afghans, supplies began to
come in, and Broadfoot was free to set his sappers to the task of
repairing the fortifications, in which work the entrenching tools he
had wrenched from the Cabul stores proved invaluable. How greatly Sale
had erred in shutting up his force in Jellalabad was promptly
demonstrated. The connecting posts of Gundamuk and Peshbolak had to be
evacuated; and thus, from Jumrood at the foot of the Khyber up to Cabul,
there remained no intermediate post in British possession with the
solitary exception of Jellalabad, and communications were entirely
interrupted except through the medium of furtive messengers.

The Jellalabad garrison was left unmolested for nearly a fortnight, and
the repairs were well advanced when on the 29th the Afghans came down,
invested the place, and pushed their skirmishers close up to the walls.
On December 1st Colonel Dennie headed a sortie, which worsted the
besiegers with considerable slaughter and drove them from the vicinity.
Bad news came at intervals from Cabul, and at the new year arrived a
melancholy letter from Pottinger, confirming the rumours already rife of
the murder of the Envoy, and of the virtual capitulation to which the
Cabul force had submitted. A week later an official communication was
received from Cabul, signed by General Elphinstone and Major Pottinger,
formally announcing the convention which the Cabul force had entered
into with the chiefs, and ordering the garrison of Jellalabad forthwith
to evacuate that post and retire to Peshawur, leaving behind with 'the
new Governor,' an Afghan chief who was the bearer of the humiliating
missive, the fortress guns and such stores and baggage as there lacked
transport to remove. The council of war summoned by Sale was unanimous
in favour of non-compliance with this mandate. Broadfoot urged with
vigour that an order by a superior who was no longer a free agent and
who issued it under duress, could impose no obligation of obedience.
Sale pronounced himself untrammelled by a convention forced from people
'with knives at their throats,' and was resolute in the expression of
his determination to hold Jellalabad unless ordered by the Government to
withdraw.

More and more ominous tidings poured in from Cabul. A letter received on
January both reported the Cabul force to be still in the cantonments,
living utterly at the mercy of the Afghans; another arriving on the 12th
told of the abandonment of the cantonments and the beginning of the
march, but that the forlorn wayfarers were lingering in detention at
Bootkhak, halted in their misery by the orders of Akbar Khan. Those
communications in a measure prepared the people in Jellalabad for
disaster, but not for the awful catastrophe of which Dr Brydon had to
tell, when in the afternoon of the 13th the lone man, whose approach to
the fortress Lady Butler's painting so pathetically depicts, rode
through the Cabul gate of Jellalabad. Dr Brydon was covered with cuts
and contusions, and was utterly exhausted. His first few hasty sentences
extinguished all hope in the hearts of the listeners regarding their
Cabul comrades and friends.

There was naturally great excitement in Jellalabad, but no panic. The
working parties were called in, the assembly was sounded, the gates were
closed, the walls were lined, and the batteries were manned; for it was
believed for the moment that the enemy were in full pursuit of fugitives
following in Brydon's track. The situation impressed Broadfoot with the
conviction that a crisis had come in the fortunes of the Jellalabad
garrison. He thought it his duty to lay before the General the
conditions of the critical moment which he believed to have arrived,
pointing out to him that the imperative alternatives were that he should
either firmly resolve on the defence of Jellalabad to the last
extremity, or that he should make up his mind to a retreat that very
night, while as yet retreat was practicable. Sale decided on holding on
to the place, and immediately announced to the Commander-in-Chief his
resolve to persevere in a determined defence, relying on the promise of
the earliest possible relief.

Because of the defection of his Sikh auxiliaries and the
faint-heartedness of his sepoys, Wild's efforts to cross the threshold
of the Khyber had failed, and with the tidings of his failure there came
to Sale the information that the effort for his relief must be
indefinitely postponed. It may be assumed that this intimation weakened
in some degree the General's expressed resolution to hold Jellalabad
with determination, and it is not to be denied that this resolution was
in a measure conditional on the not unwarranted expectation of early
relief. Neither he nor his adviser Macgregor appears to have realised
how incumbent on the garrison of Jellalabad it was to hold out to the
last extremity, irrespective of consequences to itself, unless it should
receive a peremptory recall from higher authority; or to have recognised
the glorious opportunity presented of inspiriting by its staunch
constancy and high-souled self-abnegation a weak government staggering
under a burden of calamity. Than Sale no braver soldier ever wore sword,
but a man may delight to head a forlorn hope and yet lack nerve to carry
with high heart a load of responsibility; nor was Macgregor so
constituted as to animate his chief to noble emprise. Fast on the heels
of the gloomy tidings from the Khyber mouth there came to them from Shah
Soojah, who was still the nominal sovereign at Cabul, a curt peremptory
letter obviously written under compulsion, of which the following were
the terms: 'Your people have concluded a treaty with us; you are still
in Jellalabad; what are your intentions? Tell us quickly.'

Sale summoned a council of war, which assembled at his quarters on
January 27th. Its proceedings were recorded, and the documents laid
before it were preserve

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