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 intrusted 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 _metier_ 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 _melee_, 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 Broad-foot 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 preserved by Captain Henry Havelock in his capacity as Sale’s staff-officer. Record and papers were reclaimed from Havelock’s custody by General Sale before the evacuation of Afghanistan, and had been long lost to sight. They have recently been deposited among the records of the India Office, but not before their latest non-official possessor had published some extracts from them. It is to be hoped that the more important documents may be given to the public in full, since passages from documents, whether intentionally or not, may be so extracted as to be misleading. Broadfoot, who had been a member of the council of war, and who was apparently aware of the suppression of the official records, wrote in 1843 a detailed narrative of its proceedings while his recollection of them was still fresh, and this narrative he sent to Havelock, desiring him to note ‘any points erroneously stated, distinguishing between what you may merely not remember and what you know I am mistaken in.’ Havelock, who was a loyal and ardent admirer of General Sale, having sparsely annotated Broadfoot’s narrative, returned it with the statement that he had compared it with memoranda still in his possession, and that he considered that it ‘contributes a fair and correct statement of that which occurred.’ The officers comprising the council to whom Sale and Macgregor addressed themselves were Colonel Dennie of the 13th, Colonel Monteath of the 35th N.I., Captains Backhouse and Abbott of the artillery, Captain Oldfield commanding the cavalry, and Captain Broadfoot the garrison engineer. The following is a summary of the proceedings, as recorded by Broadfoot and authenticated by Havelock.
After a few formal words from General Sale, he called on Macgregor to submit a matter on which that political officer and himself were agreed. Macgregor then described the situation from the point of view of Sale and himself, and expressed their united conviction that nothing was to be hoped for from the Government. Reserving his own liberty of action, he sought the opinion of the officers on offers received from Akbar Khan to treat for the evacuation of Afghanistan, and he laid before them a draft answer to Shah Soojah’s curt letter, professing the readiness of the garrison to evacuate Jellalabad on his requisition, since it was held only for him, but naming certain conditions: the exchange of hostages, the restoration of British prisoners and hostages in exchange for the Afghan hostages on arrival of the force at Peshawur, escort thither ‘in safety and honour,’ with arms, colours, and guns, and adequate assistance of supplies and transport. Both Sale and Macgregor frankly owned that they were resolved to yield, and negotiate for safe retreat.
Great excitement from the first had pervaded the assemblage, and when Macgregor had finished his statement Broadfoot arose in his wrath. He declined to believe that the Government had abandoned the Jellalabad garrison to its fate, and there was a general outburst of indignation when Sale produced a letter carrying that significance. Broadfoot waxed so warm in his remonstrances against the proposed action that an adjournment was agreed to. Next day Sale and Macgregor urged that it was impossible to hold out much longer, that later retreat would be impracticable, and that the scheme they proposed was safe and honourable. Broadfoot denounced it as disgraceful, contended that they could hold Jellalabad indefinitely–‘could colonise if they liked’–and retreat at discretion. He denied that the place was held for Shah Soojah, and challenged their right to surrender the post unless by Government order. Hostages he proclaimed worthless while the Afghans held heavier pledges of ours in the shape of prisoners and hostages. He denounced as disgraceful the giving of hostages on our part. Monteath’s remark that nobody would go as a hostage roused Oldfield to express himself tersely but pointedly on the subject. ‘I for one,’ he exclaimed in great agitation, ‘will fight here to the last drop of my blood, but I plainly declare that I will never be a hostage, and I am surprised that anyone should propose such a thing, or regard an Afghan’s word as worth anything.’ The resolution to treat for the abandonment of Jellalabad was carried, Oldfield only voting with Broadfoot against it, but the stipulations: regarding hostages were omitted. Broadfoot continued to press modifications of the conditions set out in the proposed reply, pleading, but in vain, that the restoration of the prisoners in Afghan hands before departure of the garrison should be insisted on; and that since evacuation was resolved on, it should at least be conducted as a military operation, and not degradingly under escort. Then, and little wonder, he objected to expressions in the draft letter as too abject, and he was successful in procuring the alteration of them. The letter was written out, signed by Macgregor, and despatched to Cabul. It was agreed that those members of the council who chose to do should record in writing the reasons for their votes, and this was done by Dennie, Monteath, Abbott, and Broadfoot.
Broadfoot, pending an answer from Cabul, set the garrison to work in digging a ditch round the fortifications. The reply from the Shah, to the effect ‘If you are sincere in offers, let all the chief gentlemen affix their seals,’ was laid before the reassembled council on February 12th. The implied imputation on the good faith of British officers might well have stung to indignation the meekest; but the council’s opinion was taken as to the expediency of complying with the derogatory request made by the Shah, as well as of a stipulation–a modification of what Broadfoot had originally urged in vain–for the surrender of all prisoners, hostages, sick, and wounded under detention in Afghanistan, on the arrival at Peshawur of the Jellalabad brigade. The members of council, who in the long interval since the previous meeting had been gradually regaining their self-respect and mental equipoise, unanimously declined to accept the proposals tendered them by their commanding officer and his political ally; and a letter written by Monteath was accepted, which ‘was not a continuation of the negotiation.’
Thus ended the deliberations of the memorable council of war, whose eleventh hour resolve to ‘hold the fort’ mainly averted the ruin of British prestige in India and throughout the regions bordering on our Eastern Empire; and the credit of its final decision to repudiate the humiliating proposals of Sale and Macgregor belongs to George Broadfoot, who was firmly though silently backed by Havelock. The day after that decision was formulated a letter came from Peshawur informing the garrison that every effort would be made for its relief; and thenceforth there was no more talk of surrender, nor was the courage of the little brigade impaired even when the earthquake of February 19th shook the newly repaired fortifications into wreck. Broadfoot’s vehement energy infected the troops, and by the end of the month the parapets were entirely restored, the bastions repaired, and every battery re-established.
After the council of war had rejected the proposals laid before it, a decision which in effect involved the maintenance of the defence to the last extremity, nearly two months passed without the occurrence of any important event, except the speedily retrieved misfortune of the earthquake of February 19th. The close investment of the place by Akbar Khan thwarted the efforts of the foraging parties to obtain much needed supplies. Those efforts were not vigorous, for Sale, aware of his garrison’s poverty of ammunition, was bent on a passive defence, and steadily refused his consent to vigorous sorties. The policy may have had its abstract merits, but it was certainly unsatisfactory in this respect, that perseverance in it involved the unpleasantness of apparently inevitable starvation. General Pollock had arrived in Peshawur, and was making energetic efforts to get his force in order for the accomplishment of the relief of Jellalabad. But he foresaw serious delays, and so late as the middle of March was still unable to specify with any definiteness the probable date of his arrival at that place. The European troops in Jellalabad would be out of meat rations early in April, and Havelock’s calculation was that the grain, on which mainly subsisted the native soldiers, who had been on half rations since the new year, would be exhausted before the middle of that month. Sale modified his policy of inactivity when he learned that the blockading Afghans were attempting to drive a mine under a salient of the defences, and Dennie on March 11th led out a sally, destroyed the works, and thrust back Akbar’s encroachments. The general lack of vigour, however, on the garrison’s part emboldened the Afghans so much that they actually grazed their flocks of sheep within 600 yards of the walls. This was too impudent, and the General consented to a raid, which resulted in the acquisition of some 500 sheep, an invaluable addition to the commissariat resources. It is worth recording that the native regiment gave up its share of the sheep to the soldiers of the 13th, on the ground that Europeans needed animal food more than did natives of India.
On April 6th the Afghan leader fired a salute in triumph for a supposititious repulse of Pollock in the Khyber. In regard to what then happened there is a strange conflict of testimony. General Sale, in a private letter written six weeks later, states: ‘I made my arrangements with Macgregor to sally the next day, provided we did not hear that Pollock had forced the pass.’ Akbar’s salutes, and the information of spies that Pollock had fallen back, ‘made us look very grave–our case desperate, our provisions nearly out, and no relief at hand. I therefore decided to play a bold stroke to relieve ourselves, and give courage to Pollock’s force in case of success. If we failed in thrashing Akbar, we would have left our bones on the field.’ Abbott’s diary of April 5th and 6th records that spies reported that Pollock had been repulsed at Ali Musjid, and that the heads of three of his officers had been sent in to Akbar, whereupon ‘all the commanding officers waited on the General, beseeching him to attack Akbar instantly. The 13th and the battery got all ready for work, but the old General was obstinate, and refused to act.’ Backhouse’s diary (April 6th) mentions that Pollock having been reported repulsed, and Akbar having fired a salute, the officers commanding corps and detachments went in a body and proposed to the General to attack Akbar instantly, but without success. ‘Immediately the matter was broached, the General set his face against anything of the kind, and disagreed about every point–insisted that the enemy had 5000 or 6000 men in camp, and were too strong for us; and then, the next minute, that it was no use going out as we couldn’t punish them, as they _wouldn’t stand_; and concluding with usual excuse for inactivity, “It isn’t our game.” Words ran precious high….’
Whether spontaneously or under pressure, General Sale must have ordered a sortie in force; for at dawn of the 7th three infantry columns marched out by the Cabul gate, the right commanded by Havelock, the centre by Dennie, the left by Monteath, General Sale being in command of the whole force. Akbar, reputed about 5000 strong, was in formation in front of his camp about three miles west of Jellalabad, his left flank resting on the river, with an advanced post of 300 men in the ‘patched up’ fort about midway between his camp and Jellalabad. The prescribed tactics were to march straight on the enemy, with which Monteath and Havelock complied; but Dennie, whether with or without orders is a matter in dispute, diverged to assail the ‘patched up’ fort. The outer defences were carried, gallant old Dennie riding at the head of his men to receive his death wound. In vain did the guns for which Sale had sent batter at the inner keep, and the General abandoning the attempt to reduce it, led on in person the centre column. Meanwhile Havelock and Monteath had been moving steadily forward, until halted by orders when considerably advanced. Havelock had to form square once and again against the Afghan horsemen, who, however, did not dare to charge home. The artillery came to the front at the gallop, and poured shot and shell into Akbar’s mass. The three columns, now abreast of each other, deployed into line, and moving forward at the double in the teeth of the Afghan musketry fire, swept the enemy clean out of his position, capturing his artillery, firing his camp, and putting him to utter rout. Akbar, by seven o’clock in the April morning, had been signally beaten in the open field by the troops he had boasted of blockading in the fortress.
The garrison of Jellalabad had thus wrought out its own relief. Thenceforth it experienced neither annoyance nor scarcity. Pollock arrived a fortnight after the dashing sally which had given the garrison deliverance, and the head of his column was played into its camp on the Jellalabad plain by the band of the 13th, to the significant tune ‘Oh, but ye’ve been lang o’coming.’ The magniloquent Ellenborough dubbed Sale’s brigade ‘the Illustrious Garrison,’ and if the expression is overstrained, its conduct was without question eminently creditable.
CHAPTER IX: RETRIBUTION AND RESCUE
It was little wonder that the unexpected tidings of the Cabul outbreak, and the later shock of the catastrophe in the passes, should have temporarily unnerved the Governor-General. But Lord Auckland rallied his energies with creditable promptitude. His successor was on the voyage out, and in the remnant of his term that remained he could not do more than make dispositions which his successor might find of service. Every soldier of the ‘Army of Retribution’ was despatched to the frontier during Lord Auckland’s rule. Lord Auckland appointed to the command of the troops which he was sending forward a quiet, steadfast, experienced officer of the artillery arm, who had fought under Lake at Deig and Bhurtpore, and during his forty years of honest service had soldiered steadily from the precipices of Nepaul to the rice-swamps of the Irrawaddy. Pollock was essentially the fitting man for the service that lay before him, characterised as he was by strong sense, shrewd sagacity, calm firmness, and self-command. When his superior devolved on him an undue onus of responsibility he was to prove himself thoroughly equal to the occasion, and the sedate, balanced man murmured not, but probably was rather amused when he saw a maker of phrases essaying to deck himself in his laurels. There were many things in Lord Auckland’s Indian career of which it behoved him to repent, but it must go to his credit that he gave Pollock high command, and that he could honestly proclaim, as he made his preparations to quit the great possession whose future his policy had endangered, that he had contributed toward the retrieval of the crisis by promptly furthering ‘such operations as might be required for the maintenance of the honour and interests of the British Government.’
Brigadier Wild reached Peshawur with a brigade of four sepoy regiments just before the new year. He was destitute of artillery, his sepoys were in poor heart, and the Sikh contingent was utterly untrustworthy. To force the Khyber seemed hopeless. Wild, however, made the attempt energetically enough. But the Sikhs mutinied, expelled their officers, and marched back to Peshawur; Wild’s sepoys, behaving badly, were driven back with loss from the mouth of the pass, and Wild himself was wounded. When Pollock reached Peshawur on February 6th, 1842, he found half of Wild’s brigade sick in hospital, and the whole of it in a state of utter demoralisation. A second brigade commanded by Brigadier-General McCaskill, had accompanied Pollock, the sepoys of which promptly fell under the evil influence of Wild’s dispirited and disaffected regiments. Pollock had to resist the pressing appeals for speedy relief made to him from Jellalabad, and patiently to devote weeks and months to the restoration of the morale and discipline of the disheartened sepoys of his command, and to the reinvigoration of their physique. By kindness combined with firmness he was able gradually to inspire them with perfect trust and faith in him, and when in the end of March there reached him a third brigade, comprising British cavalry and horse-artillery, ordered forward by Lord Auckland on receipt of tidings of the destruction of the Cabul force, he felt himself at length justified in advancing with confidence.
[Illustration: Sir George Pollock]
Before daylight on the morning of April 5th Pollock’s army about 8000 strong, consisting of eight infantry regiments, three cavalry corps, a troop and two batteries of artillery, and a mountain train, marched from the Jumrood camping ground into the portals of the Khyber. Pollock’s scheme of operations was perfect in conception and complete in detail. His main column, with strong advance and rear-guards, was to pursue the usual road through the pass. It was flanked on each side by a chain of infantry detachments, whose assigned duty was to crown the heights and sweep them clear of assailants in advance of the head of the central column. The Afreedi hill men had blocked the throat of the pass by a formidable barrier, behind which they were gathered in force, waiting for the opportunity which was never to come to them. For the main body of Pollock’s force serenely halted, while the flanking columns, breaking into skirmishing order, hurried in the grey dawn along the slopes and heights, dislodging the Afreedi pickets as they advanced, driving them before them with resolute impetuosity, and pushing forward so far as to take in reverse with their concentrated fire the great barrier and its defenders. The clansmen, recognising the frustration of their devices, deserted the position in its rear, and rushed tumultuously away to crags and sungahs where knife and jezail might still be plied. The centre column then advanced unmolested to the deserted barricade, through which the sappers soon cleared a thoroughfare. The guns swept with shrapnel the hill-sides in front, the flanking detachments pushed steadily further and yet further forward, chasing and slaying the fugitive hillmen; and the Duke of Wellington’s observation was that morning fully made good, that he had never heard that our troops were not equal, as well in their personal activity as in their arms, to contend with and overcome any natives of hills whatever.’ The whole British force, in its order of three columns, the centre in the bed of the hollow, the wings on the flanking ridges, steadily if slowly moved on in the assured consciousness of victory. It was sunset before the rear-guard was in camp under the reoccupied Ali Musjid. The Sikh troops who were to keep open Pollock’s communications with Peshawur moved simultaneously on Ali Musjid by a more circuitous route.
While Pollock was halted opposite the throat of the Khyber waiting for the demolition of the Afreedi barricade, the ill-starred Shah Soojah was being murdered, on his way from the Balla Hissar of Cabul to review on the Siah Sung slopes the reinforcements which Akbar Khan was clamouring that he should lead down to aid that Sirdar in reducing Jellalabad before relief should arrive. Ever since the outbreak of November Shah Soojah had led a dog’s life. He had reigned in Cabul, but he had not ruled. The Sirdars dunned him for money, and jeered at his protestations of poverty. It is not so much a matter of surprise that he should have been murdered as that, feeble, rich, and loathed, he should have been let live so long. It does not seem worth while to discuss the vexed question whether or not he was faithful to his British allies. He was certainly entitled to argue that he owed us nothing, since what we did in regard to him was nakedly for our own purposes. Shah Soojah’s second son Futteh Jung had himself proclaimed his father’s successor. The vicissitudes of his short reign need not be narrated. While Pollock was gathering his brigades at Gundamuk in the beginning of the following September, a forlorn Afghan, in dirty and tattered rags, rode into his camp. This scarecrow was Futteh Jung, who, unable to endure longer his sham kingship and the ominous tyranny of Akbar Khan, had fled from Cabul in disguise to beg a refuge in the British camp.
Pollock’s march from Ali Musjid to Jellalabad was slow, but almost unmolested. He found, in his own words, ‘the fortress strong, the garrison healthy; and except for wine and beer, better off than we are.’ One principal object of his commission had been accomplished; he had relieved the garrison of Jellalabad, and was in a position to ensure its safe withdrawal. But his commission gave him a considerable discretion, and a great company of his countrymen and countrywomen were still in Afghan durance. The calm pulsed, resolute commander had views of his own as to his duty, and he determined in his patient, steadfast way to tarry a while on the Jellalabad plain, in the hope that the course of events might play into his hands.
Maclaren’s brigade, which in the beginning of November 1841 General Elphinstone had instructed General Nott to despatch with all speed to Cabul, returned to Candahar early in December. Nott in despatching it had deferred reluctantly to superior authority, and probably Maclaren not sorry to have in the snowfall a pretext for retracing his steps. Atta Mahomed Khan, sent from Cabul to foment mischief in the Candahar regions, had gathered to his banner a considerable force. General Nott quietly waited until the Sirdar, at the head of some 10,000 men, came within five miles of Candahar, and then he crushed him after twenty minutes’ fighting. The fugitives found refuge in the camp of the disaffected Dooranee chiefs, whose leader Meerza Ahmed was sedulously trying to tamper with Nott’s native troops, severe weather hindering the General from attacking him. Near the end of February there reached Nott a letter two months old from Elphinstone and Pottinger, ordering him to evacuate Candahar and retire to India, in pursuance of the convention into which they had entered. The Dooranee chiefs astutely urged that Shah Soojah, no longer supported by British bayonets, was now ruling in Cabul, as an argument in favour of Nott’s withdrawal. Nott’s answer was brief: ‘I will not treat with any person whatever for the retirement of the British troops from Afghanistan, until I have received instructions from the Supreme Government’–a blunt sentence in curious contrast to the missive which Sale and Macgregor laid before the Jellalabad council of war. When presently there came a communication from Government intimating that the continued occupation of Candahar was regarded as conducive to the interest of the state, Nott and Rawlinson were in a position to congratulate themselves on having anticipated the wishes of their superiors. The situation, however, became so menacing that early in March its Afghan inhabitants were expelled from the city of Candahar to the last soul; and then Nott, leaving a garrison in the place, took the field in force. The old soldier, wary as he was, became the victim of Meerza’s wily strategy. As he advanced, the Afghans retired, skirmishing assiduously. Leaving Nott in the Turnuk valley, they doubled back on Candahar, and in the early darkness of the night of the 10th March they furiously assailed the city gates. They fired one of the gates, and the swarming ghazees tore down with fury its blazing planks and the red-hot ironwork. The garrison behaved valiantly. Inside the burning gate they piled up a rampart of grain bags, on which they trained a couple of guns loaded with case. For three hours after the gate fell did the fanatics hurl assault after assault on the interior barricade. They were terribly critical hours, but the garrison prevailed, and at midnight, with a loss of many hundreds, the obstinate assailants sullenly drew off. Nott, although urgently summoned, was unable to reach Candahar until the 12th.
Candahar was fortunately preserved, but at the end of March the unpleasant tidings came that Ghuznee, which British valour had carried by storm three years before, had now reverted into Afghan possession. The siege had lasted for nearly three and a half months. In mid-December the besiegers occupied the city in force, introduced by the citizens through a subterranean way; and the garrison, consisting chiefly of a regiment of sepoys, withdrew into the citadel. The bitter winter and the scant rations took the heart out of the natives of the warm and fertile Indian plains; but nevertheless it was not until March 6th that the garrison, under pledge of being escorted to Peshawur with colours, arms, and baggage, marched out. The unfortunates would have done better to have died a soldierly death, with arms in their hands and the glow of fighting in their hearts. As the event was, faith with them was broken, and save for a few officers who were made prisoners, most were slaughtered, or perished in a vain attempt to escape.
During his long isolation Nott’s resources had been seriously depleted, and he had ordered up from Scinde a brigade, escorting much needed treasure, ammunition, and medicines. Brigadier England was entrusted with the command of this force, whose assemblage at Quetta was expected about the end of March. Pending its gathering England had moved out toward the entrance of the Kojuk Pass, where he met with a sharp and far from creditable repulse, and fell back on Quetta miserably disheartened, suggesting in his abjectness that Nott should abandon Candahar and retire on him. The stout old soldier at Candahar waxed wroth at the limpness of his subordinate, and addressed to England a biting letter, ordering peremptorily the latter’s prompt advance to Candahar, engaging to dry-nurse him through the Kojuk by a brigade sent down from Candahar for the purpose, and remarking sarcastically, ‘I am well aware that war cannot be made without loss; but yet perhaps British troops can oppose Asiatic armies without defeat.’ Thus exhorted England moved, to find his march through the Kojuk protected by Wymer’s sepoys from Candahar, who had crowned the lateral heights before he ventured into the pass; and he reached Candahar without maltreatment on the 10th May, bringing to Nott the much needed supplies which rendered that resolute man equal to any enterprise.
It remained, however, to be seen whether any enterprise was to be permitted to him and to his brother commander lying in camp on the Jellalabad plain. Lord Ellenborough, the successor of Lord Auckland, had struck a firm if somewhat inexplicit note in his earliest manifesto, dated March 13th. A single sentence will indicate its tenor: ‘Whatever course we may hereafter take must rest solely on military considerations, and hence in the first instance regard to the safety of our detached garrisons in Afghanistan; to the security of our troops now in the field from unnecessary risks; and finally, to the re-establishment of our military reputation by the infliction upon the Afghans of some signal and decisive blow.’ Those were brave words, if only they had been adhered to. But six weeks later his lordship was ordering Nott to evacuate Candahar and fall back on Quetta, until the season should permit further retirement to the Indus; and instructing Pollock, through the Commander-in-Chief, to withdraw without delay every British soldier from Jellalabad to Peshawur, except under certain specified eventualities, none of which were in course of occurrence. Pollock temporised, holding on to his advanced position by the plea of inability to retire for want of transport, claiming mildly to find discretionary powers in the Government instructions, and cautiously arguing in favour of an advance by a few marches to a region where better climate was to be found, and whence he might bring to bear stronger pressure for the liberation of the prisoners. Nott was a narrower man than Pollock. When he got his orders he regarded them as strictly binding, no matter how unpalatable the injunctions. ‘I shall not lose a moment,’ he wrote, ‘in making arrangements to carry out my orders, without turning to the right or the left, and without inquiring into the reasons for the measures enjoined, whatever our own opinions or wishes may be.’ He reluctantly began preparations for withdrawal. Carriage was ordered up from Quetta, and a brigade was despatched to withdraw the garrison of Khelat-i-Ghilzai, and to destroy the fort which Craigie had so long and valiantly defended.
It would be tedious to detail the vacillations, the obscurities, and the tortuosities of Lord Ellenborough’s successive communications to his two Generals in Afghanistan. Pollock had been permitted to remain about Jellalabad until the autumn should bring cooler marching weather. Nott had been detained at Candahar by the necessity for crushing menacing bodies of tribal levies, but as July waned his preparations for withdrawal were all but complete. On the 4th of that month Lord Ellenborough wrote to him, reiterating injunctions for his withdrawal from Afghanistan, but permitting him the alternatives of retiring by the direct route along his line of communications over Quetta and Sukkur, or of boxing the compass by the curiously circuitous ‘retirement’ _via_ Ghuznee, Cabul, and Jellalabad. Pollock, for his part, was permitted, if he thought proper, to advance on Cabul in order to facilitate Nott’s withdrawal, if the latter should elect to ‘retreat’ by the circuitous route which has just been described.
One does not care to characterise the ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ policy of a Governor-General who thus shuffled off his responsibility upon two soldiers who previously had been sedulously restricted within narrow if varying limits. Their relief from those trammels set them free, and it was their joy to accept the devolved responsibility, and to act with soldierly initiative and vigour. The chief credit of the qualified yet substantial triumph over official hesitation certainly belongs to Pollock, who gently yet firmly forced the hand of the Governor-General, while Nott’s merit was limited to a ready acceptance of the responsibility of a proffered option. A letter from Nott intimating his determination to retire by way of Cabul and Jellalabad reached Pollock in the middle of August, who immediately advanced from Jellalabad; and his troops having concentrated at Gundamuk, he marched from that position on 7th September, his second division, commanded by M’Caskill, following next day. Pollock was woefully short of transport, and therefore was compelled to leave some troops behind at Gundamuk, and even then could carry only half the complement of tentage. But his soldiers, who carried in their haversacks seven days’ provisions, would gladly have marched without any baggage at all, and the chief himself was eager to hurry forward, for Nott had written that he expected to reach Cabul on 15th September, and Pollock was burning to be there first. In the Jugdulluk Pass, on the 8th, he found the Ghilzais in considerable force on the heights. Regardless of a heavy artillery fire they stood their ground, and so galled Pollock’s troops with sharp discharges from their jezails that it became necessary to send infantry against them. They were dislodged from the mountain they had occupied by a portion of the Jellalabad brigade, led by gallant old General Sale, who had his usual luck in the shape of a wound.
This Jugdulluk fighting was, however, little more than a skirmish, and Pollock’s people were to experience more severe opposition before they should emerge from the passes on to the Cabul plain. On the morning of the 13th the concentrated force had quitted its camp in the Tezeen valley, and had committed itself without due precaution to the passage of the ravine beyond, when the Afghan levies with which Akbar Khan had manned the flanking heights, opened their fire. The Sirdar had been dissuaded by Captain Troup, one of his prisoners, from attempting futile negotiations, and advised not to squander lives in useless opposition. Akbar had replied that he was too deeply committed to recede, and that his people were bent on fighting. They were not baulked in the aspiration, which assuredly their opponents shared with at least equal zeal. Pollock’s advance-guard was about the middle of the defile, when the enemy were suddenly discovered blocking the pass in front, and holding the heights which Pollock’s light troops should have crowned in advance of the column. Akbar’s force was calculated to be about 15,000 strong, and the Afghans fought resolutely against the British regiments which forced their way up the heights on the right and left. The ghazees dashed down to meet the red soldiers halfway, and up among the precipices there were many hand-to-hand encounters, in which the sword and the bayonet fought out the issue. The Afghans made their last stand on the rocky summit of the Huft Kotul; but from this commanding position they were finally driven by Broadfoot’s bloodthirsty little Goorkhas, who, hillmen themselves from their birth, chased the Afghans from crag to crag, using their fell kookeries as they pursued. It was Akbar Khan’s last effort, and the quelling of it cost Pollock the trivial loss of thirty-two killed and 130 wounded. There was no more opposition, and it was well for the Afghans, for the awful spectacles presented in the Khoord Cabul Pass traversed on the following day, kindled in Pollock’s soldiers a white heat of fury. ‘The bodies,’ wrote Backhouse in his unpublished diary, ‘lay in heaps of fifties and hundreds, our gun wheels crushing the bones of our late comrades at every yard for four or five miles; indeed, the whole march from Gundamuk to Cabul may be said to have been over the bodies of the massacred army.’ Pollock marched unmolested to Cabul on the 15th, and camped on the old racecourse to the east of the city.
Nott, in evacuating Candahar, divided his force into two portions, the weaker of which General England took back to India by Quetta and Sukkur, while on August 9th Nott himself, with two European battalions, the ‘beautiful sepoy regiments’ of which he had a right to be proud, and his field guns, marched away from Candahar, his face set towards Cabul. His march was uneventful until about midway between Khelat-i-Ghilzai and Ghuznee, when on the 28th the cavalry, unsupported and badly handled in a stupid and unauthorised foray, lost severely in officers and men, took to flight in panic, and so gave no little encouragement to the enemy hanging on Nott’s flank. Two days later Shumshoodeen, the Afghan leader, drew up some 10,000 men in order of battle on high ground left of the British camp. Nott attacked with vigour, advancing to turn the Afghan left. In reprisal the enemy threw their strength on his left, supporting their jezail fire with artillery, whereupon Nott changed front to the left, deployed, and then charged. The Afghans did not wait for close quarters, and Nott was no more seriously molested. Reaching the vicinity of Ghuznee on September 5th, he cleared away the hordes hanging on the heights which encircle the place. During the night the Afghans evacuated Ghuznee. Soon after daylight the British flag was waving from the citadel. Having fulfilled Lord Ellenborough’s ridiculous order to carry away from the tomb of Sultan Mahmoud in the environs of Ghuznee, the supposititious gates of Somnath, a once famous Hindoo shrine in the Bombay province of Kattiawar, Nott marched onward unmolested till within a couple of marches of Cabul, when near Maidan he had some stubborn fighting with an Afghan force which tried ineffectually to block his way. On the 17th he marched into camp four miles west of Cabul, whence he could discern, not with entire complacency, the British ensign already flying from the Balla Hissar, for Pollock had won the race to Cabul by a couple of days.
For months there had been negotiations for the release of the British prisoners whom Akbar Khan had kept in durance ever since they came into his hands in the course of the disastrous retreat from Cabul in January, but they had been unsuccessful, and now it was known that the unfortunate company of officers, women, and children, had been carried off westward into the hill country of Bamian. Nott’s officers, as the Candahar column was nearing Cabul, had more than once urged him to detach a brigade in the direction of Bamian in the hope of effecting a rescue of the prisoners, but he had steadily refused, leaning obstinately on the absence from the instructions sent him by Government of any permission to engage in the enterprise of attempting their release. He was not less brusque in the intimation of his declinature when Pollock gave him the opportunity to send a force in support of Sir Richmond Shakespear, whom, with a detachment of Kuzzilbash horse, Pollock had already despatched on the mission of attempting the liberation of the prisoners. The narrow old soldier argued doggedly that Government ‘had thrown the prisoners overboard.’ Why, then, should he concern himself with their rescue? If his superior officer should give him a firm order, of course he would obey, but he would obey under protest. Pollock disdained to impose so enviable a duty on a recalcitrant man, and committed to Sale the honourable and welcome service–all the more welcome to that officer because his wife and daughter were among the captives. At the head of his Jellalabad brigade, he was to push forward by forced marches on the track of Shakespear and his horsemen.
The strange and bitter experiences of the captives, from that miserable January Sabbath day on which they passed under the ‘protection’ of Akbar Khan until the mid-September noon when Shakespear galloped into their midst, are recorded in full and interesting detail in Lady Sale’s journal, in Vincent Eyre’s _Captivity_, and in Colin Mackenzie’s biography published under the title of _Storms and Sunshine of a Soldier’s Life_. Here it is possible only briefly to summarise the chief incidents of the captivity. The unanimous testimony of the released prisoners was to the effect that Akbar Khan, violent, bloody, and passionate man though he was, behaved toward them with kindness and a certain rude chivalry. They remained for nearly three months at Budiabad, living in great squalor and discomfort. For the whole party there were but five rooms, each of which was occupied by from five to ten officers and ladies, the few soldiers and non-commissioned officers, who were mostly wounded, being quartered in sheds and cellars. Mackenzie drily remarks that the hardships of the common lot, and the close intimacy of prison life, brought into full relief good and evil qualities; ‘conventional polish was a good deal rubbed off and replaced by a plainness of speech quite unheard of in good society.’ Ladies and gentlemen were necessitated to occupy the same room during the night, but the men ‘cleared out’ early in the morning, leaving the ladies to themselves. The dirt and vermin of their habitation were abominably offensive to people to whom scrupulous cleanliness was a second nature. But the captives were allowed to take exercise within a limited range; they had among them a few books, and an old newspaper occasionally came on to them from Jellalabad, with which place a fitful correspondence in cypher was surreptitiously maintained. They had a few packs of playing cards; they made for themselves backgammon and draught-boards, and when in good spirits they sometimes played hopscotch and blindman’s-buff with the children of the party. The Sundays were always kept scrupulously, Lawrence and Mackenzie conducting the service in turn.
The earthquake which shook down the fortifications of Jellalabad brought their rickety fort about the ears of the captives. Several escaped narrowly with their lives when walls and roofs yawned and crumbled, and all had to turn out and sleep in the courtyard, where they suffered from cold and saturating dews. After the defeat of Akbar by the Jellalabad garrison on April 7th, there was keen expectation that Sale would march to their rescue, but he came not, and there were rumours among the guards of their impending massacre in revenge for the crushing reverse Akbar had experienced. Presently, however, Mahomed Shah Khan, Akbar’s lieutenant, arrived full of courtesy and reassurance, but with the unwelcome intimation that the prisoners must prepare themselves to leave Budiabad at once, and move to a greater distance from Jellalabad and their friends. For some preparation was not a difficult task. ‘All my worldly goods,’ wrote Captain Johnson, ‘might be stowed away in a towel.’ Others who possessed heavier impedimenta, were lightened of the encumbrance by the Ghilzai Sirdar, who plundered indiscriminately. The European soldiers were left behind at Budiabad, and the band of ladies and gentlemen started on the afternoon of April 10th, in utter ignorance of their destination, under the escort of a strong band of Afghans. At the ford across the Cabul river the cavalcade found Akbar Khan wounded, haggard, and dejected, seated in a palanquin, which, weak as he was, he gave up to Ladies Macnaghten and Sale, who were ill. A couple of days were spent at Tezeen among the melancholy relics of the January slaughter, whence most of the party were carried several miles further into the southern mountains to the village of Zandeh, while General Elphinstone, whose end was fast approaching, remained in the Tezeen valley with Pottinger, Mackenzie, Eyre, and one or two others. On the evening of April 23d the poor General was finally released from suffering of mind and body. Akbar, who when too late had offered to free him, sent the body down to Jellalabad under a guard, and accompanied by Moore the General’s soldier servant; and Elphinstone lies with Colonel Dennie and the dead of the defence of Jellalabad in their nameless graves in a waste place within the walls of that place. Toward the end of May the captives were moved up the passes to the vicinity of Cabul, where Akbar Khan was now gradually attaining the ascendant. Prince Futteh Jung, however, still held out in the Balla Hissar, and intermittent firing was heard as the weary _cortege_ of prisoners reached a fort about three miles short of Cabul, which the ladies of the proprietor’s zenana had evacuated in their favour. Here they lived if not in contentment at least in considerable comfort and amenity. They had the privacy of a delightful garden, and enjoyed the freedom of bathing in the adjacent river. After the strife between Akbar Khan and Futteh Jung ceased they were even permitted to exchange visits with their countrymen, the hostages quartered on the Balla Hissar. They were able to obtain money from the Cabul usurers, and thus to supply themselves with suitable clothing and additions to their rations, and their mails from India and Jellalabad were forwarded to them without hindrance. The summer months were passed in captivity, but it was no longer for them a captivity of squalor and wretchedness. Life was a good deal better worth living in the pleasant garden house on the bank of the Logur than it had been in the noisome squalor of Budiabad and the vermin-infested huddlement of Zandeh. But they still-lived under the long strain of anxiety and apprehension, for none of them knew what the morrow might bring forth. While residing in the pleasant quarters in the Logur valley the captives of the passes were joined by nine officers, who were the captives of Ghuznee. After the capitulation the latter had been treated with cruel harshness, shut up in one small room, and debarred from fresh air and exercise. Colonel Palmer, indeed, had undergone the barbarity of torture in the endeavour to force him to disclose the whereabouts of treasure which he was suspected of having buried.
Akbar had full and timely intimation of the mutual intention of the British generals at Jellalabad and Candahar to march on Cabul, and did not fail to recognise of what value to him in extremity might be his continued possession of the prisoners. They had been warned of their probable deportation to the remote and rugged Bamian; and the toilsome journey thither was begun on the evening of August 25th. A couple of ailing families alone, with a surgeon in charge of them, were allowed to remain behind; all the others, hale and sick, had to travel, the former on horseback, the latter carried in camel panniers. The escort consisted of an irregular regiment of Afghan infantry commanded by one Saleh Mahomed Khan, who when a subadar serving in one of the Shah’s Afghan regiments had deserted to Dost Mahomed. The wayfarers, female as well as male, wore the Afghan costume, in order that they might attract as little notice as possible.
Bamian was reached on September 3d, where the wretchedness of the quarters contrasted vividly with the amenity of those left behind on the Cabul plain. But the wretchedness of Bamian was not to be long endured. An intimacy had been struck up between Captain Johnson and Saleh Mahomed, and the latter cautiously hinted that a reward and a pension might induce him to carry his charges into the British camp. On September 11th there was a private meeting between the Afghan commandant and three British officers, Pottinger, Johnson, and Lawrence. Saleh Mahomed intimated the receipt of instructions from the Sirdar to carry the prisoners over the Hindoo Koosh into Khooloom, and leave them there to seeming hopeless captivity. But on the other hand a messenger had reached Saleh from Mohun Lal with the assurance that General Pollock, if he restored the prisoners, would ensure him a reward of 20,000 rupees, and a life pension of 12,000 rupees a year. Saleh Mahomed demanded and received a guarantee from the British officers; and the captives bound themselves to make good from their own resources their redemption money. The Afghan ex-Subadar proved himself honest; the captives were captives no longer, and they proceeded to assert themselves in the masterful British manner. They hoisted the national flag; Pottinger became once again the high-handed ‘political,’ and ordered the local chiefs to come to his durbar and receive dresses of honour. Their fort was put into a state of defence, and a store of provisions was gathered in case of a siege. But in mid-September came the tidings that Akbar had been defeated at Tezeen, and had fled no one knew whither, whereupon the self-emancipated party set out on the march to Cabul. At noon of the 17th they passed into the safe guardianship of Shakespear and his horsemen. Three days later, within a march of Cabul, there was reached the column which Sale had taken out, and on September 21st Pollock greeted the company of men and women whose rescue had been wrought out by his cool, strong steadfastness.
Little more remains to be told. There was an Afghan force still in arms at Istalif, a beautiful village of the inveterately hostile Kohistanees; a division marched to attack it, carried the place by assault, burnt part of it, and severely smote the garrison. Utter destruction was the fate of Charikar, the capital of the Kohistan, where Codrington’s Goorkha regiment had been destroyed. Pollock determined to ‘set a mark’ on Cabul to commemorate the retribution which the British had exacted. He spared the Balla Hissar, and abstained from laying the city in ruins, contenting himself with the destruction of the principal bazaar, through which the heads of Macnaghten and Burnes had been paraded, and in which their mangled bodies had been exposed. Prince Futteh Jung, tired of his vicissitudes in the character of an Afghan monarch, ceded what of a throne he possessed to another puppet of his race, and gladly accompanied the British armies to India. Other waifs of the wreck of a nefarious and disastrous enterprise, among them old Zemaun Khan, who had been our friend throughout, and the family of the ill-fated Shah Soojah, were well content to return to the exile which afforded safety and quietude. There also accompanied the march of the humane Pollock a great number of the mutilated and crippled camp followers of Elphinstone’s army who had escaped with their lives from its destruction. On the 12th of October the forces of Pollock and of Nott turned their backs on Cabul, which no British army was again to see for nearly forty years, and set out on their march down the passes. Jellalabad and Ali Musjid were partially destroyed in passing. Pollock’s division reached Peshawur without loss, thanks to the precautions of its chief; but with M’Caskill and Nott the indomitable Afghans had the last word, cutting off their stragglers, capturing their baggage, and in the final skirmish killing and wounding some sixty men of Nott’s command.
Of the bombastic and grotesque paeans of triumph emitted by Lord Ellenborough, whose head had been turned by a success to which he had but scantly contributed, nothing need now be said, nor of the garish pageant with which he received the armies as they re-entered British territory at Ferozepore. As they passed down through the Punjaub, Dost Mahomed passed up on his way to reoccupy the position from which he had been driven. And so ended the first Afghan war, a period of history in which no redeeming features are perceptible except the defence of Jellalabad, the dogged firmness of Nott, and Pollock’s noble and successful constancy of purpose. Beyond this effulgence there spreads a sombre welter of misrepresentation and unscrupulousness, intrigue, moral deterioration, and dishonour unspeakable.
PART II: THE SECOND AFGHAN WAR
CHAPTER I: THE FIRST CAMPAIGN
A brief period of peace intervened between the ratification of the treaty of Gundamuk on May 30th, 1879, and the renewal of hostilities consequent on the massacre at Cabul of Sir Louis Cavagnari and the whole _entourage_ of the mission of which he was the head. There was nothing identical or even similar in the motives of the two campaigns, and regarded purely on principle they might be regarded as two distinct wars, rather than as successive campaigns of one and the same war. But the interval between them was so short that the ink of the signatures to the treaty of Gundamuk may be said to have been scarcely dry when the murder of the British Envoy tore that document into bloody shreds; and it seems the simplest and most convenient method to designate the two years of hostilities from November 1878 to September 1880, as the ‘second Afghan war,’ notwithstanding the three months’ interval of peace in the summer of 1879.
Dost Mahomed died in 1863, and after a long struggle his son Shere Ali possessed himself of the throne bequeathed to him by his father. The relations between Shere Ali and the successive Viceroys of India were friendly, although not close. The consistent aim of the British policy was to maintain Afghanistan in the position of a strong, friendly, and independent state, prepared in certain contingencies to co-operate in keeping at a distance foreign intrigue or aggression; and while this object was promoted by donations of money and arms, to abstain from interference in the internal affairs of the country, while according a friendly recognition to the successive occupants of its throne, without undertaking indefinite liabilities in their interest. The aim, in a word, was to utilise Afghanistan as a ‘buffer’ state between the northwestern frontier of British India and Russian advances from the direction of Central Asia. Shere Ali was never a very comfortable ally; he was of a saturnine and suspicious nature, and he seems also to have had an overweening sense of the value of the position of Afghanistan, interposed between two great powers profoundly jealous one of the other. He did not succeed with Lord Northbrook in an attempt to work on that Viceroy by playing off the bogey of Russian aggression; and as the consequence of this failure he allowed himself to display marked evidences of disaffected feeling. Cognisance was taken of this ‘attitude of extreme reserve,’ and early in 1876 Lord Lytton arrived in India charged with instructions to break away from the policy designated as that of ‘masterly inactivity,’ and to initiate a new basis of relations with Afghanistan and its Ameer.
Lord Lytton’s instructions directed him to despatch without delay a mission to Cabul, whose errand would be to require of the Ameer the acceptance of a permanent Resident and free access to the frontier positions of Afghanistan on the part of British officers, who should have opportunity of conferring with the Ameer on matters of common interest with ‘becoming attention to their friendly councils.’ Those were demands notoriously obnoxious to the Afghan monarch and the Afghan people. Compliance with them involved sacrifice of independence, and the Afghan loathing of Feringhee officials in their midst had been fiercely evinced in the long bloody struggle and awful catastrophe recorded in earlier pages of this volume. Probably the Ameer, had he desired, would not have dared to concede such demands on any terms, no matter how full of advantage. But the terms which Lord Lytton was instructed to tender as an equivalent were strangely meagre. The Ameer was to receive a money gift, and a precarious stipend regarding which the new Viceroy was to ‘deem it inconvenient to commit his government to any permanent pecuniary obligation.’ The desiderated recognition of Abdoolah Jan as Shere Ali’s successor was promised with the qualifying reservation that the promise ‘did not imply or necessitate any intervention in the internal affairs of the state.’ The guarantee against foreign aggression was vague and indefinite, and the Government of India reserved to itself entire ‘freedom of judgment as to the character of circumstances involving the obligation of material support.’
The Ameer replied to the notice that a mission was about to proceed to Cabul by a courteous declinature to receive an Envoy, assigning several specious reasons. He was quite satisfied with the existing friendly relations, and desired no change in them; he could not guarantee the safety of the Envoy and his people; if he admitted a British mission, he would have no excuse for refusing to receive a Russian one. An intimation was conveyed to the Ameer that if he should persist in his refusal to receive the mission, the Viceroy would have no other alternative than to regard Afghanistan as a state which had ‘voluntarily isolated itself from the alliance and support of the British Government.’ The Ameer arranged that the Vakeel of the Indian Government should visit Simla, carrying with him full explanations, and charged to lay before the Viceroy sundry grievances which were distressing Shere Ali. That functionary took back to Cabul certain minor concessions, but conveyed the message also that those concessions were contingent on the Ameer’s acceptance of British officers about his frontiers, and that it would be of no avail to send an Envoy to the conference at Peshawur for which sanction was given, unless he were commissioned to agree to this condition as the fundamental basis of a treaty. Before the Vakeel quitted Simla he had to listen to a truculent address from Lord Lytton, in the course of which Shere Ali’s position was genially likened to that of ‘an earthen pipkin between two iron pots.’ Before Sir Lewis Pelly and the Ameer’s representative met at Peshawur in January 1877, Shere Ali had not unnaturally been perturbed by the permanent occupation of Quetta, on the southern verge of his dominions, as indicating, along with other military dispositions, an intended invasion. The Peshawur conference, which from the first had little promise, dragged on unsatisfactorily until terminated by the death of the Ameer’s representative, whereupon Sir Lewis Pelly was recalled by Lord Lytton, notwithstanding the latter’s cognisance that Shere Ali was despatching to Peshawur a fresh Envoy authorised to assent to all the British demands. The justification advanced by Lord Lytton for this procedure was the discovery purported to have been made by Sir Lewis Pelly that the Ameer was intriguing with General Kaufmann at Tashkend. Since Shere Ali was an independent monarch, it was no crime on his part to enter into negotiations with another power than Great Britain, although if the worried and distracted man did so the charge of folly may be laid to him, since the Russians were pretty certain to betray him after having made a cat’s-paw of him, and since in applying to them he involved himself in the risk of hostile action on the part of the British. The wisdom of Lord Lytton’s conduct is not apparent. The truculent policy of which he was the instrument was admittedly on the point of triumphing; and events curiously falsified his short-sighted anticipation of the unlikelihood, because of the Russo-Turkish war then impending, of any _rapprochement_ between the Ameer and the Russian authorities in Central Asia. The Viceroy withdrew his Vakeel from Cabul, and in the recognition of the Ameer’s attitude of ‘isolation and scarcely veiled hostility’ Lord Salisbury authorised Lord Lytton to protect the British frontier by such measures as circumstances should render expedient, ‘without regard to the wishes of the Ameer or the interests of his dynasty.’ Lord Lytton took no measures, expedient or otherwise, in the direction indicated by Lord Salisbury; the Ameer, as if he had been a petted boy consigned to the corner, was abandoned to his sullen ‘isolation,’ and the Russians adroitly used him to involve us in a war which lasted two years, cost us the lives of many valiant men, caused us to incur an expenditure of many millions, and left our relations with Afghanistan in all essential respects in the same condition as Lord Lytton found them when he reached India with the ‘new policy’ in his pocket.
If the Russians could execute as thoroughly as they can plan skilfully, there would be hardly any limit to their conquests. When England was mobilising her forces after the treaty of San Stefano, and ordering into