Heaven’s Command

by Jan Morris

  Each day more Afghans joined the rising, until a guerilla army of several thousand artisans and tradesmen swarmed around the cantonment, becoming bolder by the hour. It was a raggle-taggle army, by the standards of the victors of Waterloo who watched it apprehensively from their fortifications, but it was both skilful and determined: it had its own cavalry, its long-muzzled jezails easily outranged the British muskets, and its marksmanship was horribly exact. Soon the road between the cantonment and the city was blocked; worse still, the Afghans had seized the commissariat fort, plundered it, burnt it, and thus deprived the British of nearly all their stores. All this in full sight of the cantonment, within whose perimeter the decrepit general rambled on, and the private soldiers kicked their heels in half-mutinous despair—‘Why, Lord, sir’, complained Elphinstone to Macnaghten one day, after reviewing some of his soldiers, ‘when I said to them “Eyes right”, they all looked the other way’.

  They made a couple of sorties. Both failed ignominiously, the British infantry running away, and this was their last attempt at offensive action. They were beaten almost without a blow. Food was running short, winter was setting in, the troops were demoralized, the camp-followers were panic-stricken, the political officers were baffled or discredited, the commanding officer was all too often prostrate, the British Resident was dead. All the Afghans now seemed to be in arms against the British, and by the end of November Macnaghten had decided to negotiate a settlement.

  10

  At this climactic moment there arrived upon the scene a formidable Afghan leader—Akhbar Khan, the Dost’s son, who had been in exile in Turkestan, and who now returned to Kabul with a force of Uzbegs at his heels. With this fierce, sly but attractive potentate Macnaghten now opened negotiations. Arranging to meet him on the banks of the Kabul River on December 11th, the Envoy offered him the draft of a treaty of submission, couched in the most abject terms. The presence of the army in Afghanistan, it said, was apparently displeasing to the great majority of the Afghan nation; and since the only object of its presence there was the integrity, happiness and welfare of the Afghans, there was no point in its remaining. Macnaghten offered to evacuate the country at once, lock, stock and barrel, giving Shah Shuja the choice of going with them or remaining in Kabul, and promising to return Dost Mohammed to his country as soon as the army had safely passed through the Khyber on the road to India. In return, the Envoy suggested, the Afghans would guarantee the safe conduct of the British, and would immediately send provisions into the cantonment to keep them alive enough to march.

  The Afghans understandably accepted. They must have been astonished. It was agreed that the Kabul garrison would march in three days’ time: but in the meantime Macnaghten, who had just been appointed Governor of Bombay, and faintly hoped still to extract some credit from Kabul, embarked upon a subtler course of conduct. There arrived in the cantonment on the following evening an unexpected messenger from Akhbar. Captain ‘Gentleman Jim’ Skinner, a member of the celebrated Anglo-Indian fighting family, had not been seen since the start of the uprising, when he had been caught in Kabul: it transpired now that he had been befriended by Akhbar, and he came with a secret additional proposal from the prince. It was this: that he and Macnaghten should deceive the other Afghan leaders with a hidden compact Shah Shuja would remain upon his throne; Akhbar would be his Vizier, and would receive a large fee from the British Government, and a pension for life; the British could stay in the country for another eight months, and then leave apparently of their own free will. Face would be saved. Honour would be restored. Macnaghten would be Governor of Bombay. The original purpose of the invasion would be achieved.

  Bringing such a message, remarked Gentleman Jim, was like being loaded with combustibles, but the distraught Macnaghten snatched at the offer, and signed a statement in Persian to say so. Nothing, in a country so hideously entangled with double-cross, could have been more dangerous. Several people warned the Envoy of treachery, and suggested that it might all be a plot. ‘A plot!’ Macnaghten cried—‘a plot! let me alone for that—trust me for that!’ Anyway, as he told George Lawrence, it was worth the risk. ‘The life I have led for the last six weeks you, Lawrence, know well; and rather than be disgraced and live it over again, I would risk a hundred deaths. Success will save our honour, and more than make up for all risks.’

  So two days before Christmas, 1841, Sir William Macnaghten, with three British officers and a small detachment of Indian cavalry, rode out of camp once more to meet Akhbar Khan. They took with them a lovely Arab mare, as a present for the prince. There was snow on the ground, and they found Akhbar, with a group of chiefs and a hovering crowd of Ghazis, awaiting them some 360 yards from the cantonment. A carpet had been laid on the snow, and upon it Akhbar and Macnaghten, greeting each other courteously, sat down together. Akhbar spoke first. Was Macnaghten, he asked, ready to put into effect the proposition of the previous night? Why not? Macnaghten replied: and instantly Akhbar cried, ‘Seize them! Seize them!’, and the chiefs and onlookers fell upon the Englishmen to screams and imprecations from the Ghazis all around. Macnaghten’s Indian escort turned and fled. The three staff officers, almost before they knew what was happening, were bundled pillion on to horses and galloped away through the murderous Ghazis. One fell and was killed immediately. The other two were imprisoned in a nearby fort. Behind them, as they were swept away, they just had time to see the Envoy, his face ashen, being dragged head first down a snowy slope. ‘For God’s sake!’ they heard him cry in Persian, before they were out of earshot, and Macnaghten disappeared for ever.

  It is probable that Akhbar himself shot Macnaghten in the confusion, and that the maddened Ghazis then cut him to pieces with their knives. Later that day the imprisoned officers saw a dismembered hand bobbing up and down outside the bars of their window, and learnt that it was Macnaghten’s. ‘Look well,’ the Ghazis screamed at them, ‘yours will soon be the same!’ Though they did not know it, the Envoy’s head, deprived at last of top hat and spectacles, was already being paraded through the streets of the capital, while the rest of his corpse was suspended from a meat-hook in the great bazaar.

  11

  Even now the Afghans expected reprisals, but the British had lost all fight. All they wanted was escape. Far from unleashing his troops furiously upon the city, General Elphinstone, now further debilitated by a wound in the buttock, merely re-opened negotiations, as though Her Majesty’s Envoy and Plenipotentiary had never been murdered at all. This time there was no subterfuge. The Afghans dictated the terms, the British accepted them. The Army was to leave immediately, handing over hostages for the return of the Dost, together with all its treasure and almost all its guns. The Afghans in return promised to provide ‘an escort of trustworthy persons’ to see the British Army, 26 years after Waterloo, safely through the passes to the Indian frontier. Nobody believed them. It was Christmas Day, but the signing of the agreement gave no comfort to the British, who were now terrified, bitterly cold and very hungry—the only food the private soldiers got that day was a little flour with melted ghee. As the shivering army packed up its possessions, rumours of treachery haunted the camp. The eighteen chiefs who had signed the agreement, it was said, had secretly sworn to destroy the whole force, and all its followers. Lady Sale, diligently writing up her diary on Boxing Day, said she had been told that the chiefs meant to capture all the women and kill every man except one: and opening by chance a copy of Campbell’s poems, she found the stanza:

  Few, few shall part, where many meet!

  The snow shall be their winding sheet,

  And every turf beneath their feet

  Shall be a soldier’s sepulchre.

  On January 6, 1842, the army began its retreat, the most terrible in the history of British arms, and the completion of a tragedy whose ‘awful completeness’, as the historian Sir John Kaye was to write, was unexampled in the history of the world. To reach the safety of the British garrison at Jalalabad, the force had to travel through ni
nety miles of desolate mountain country, deep in snow, held in fief by the predatory Ghilzais, and now additionally infested with Ghazis too. The cold was terrible, and the march began in confusion. In all some 16,500 souls struggled out of the cantonment: about 700 Europeans, 3,800 Indian soldiers, the rest camp-followers and their families. More than a thousand horses went with them, together with bullocks to pull the carts, camels, mules and ponies. Most of the European women and children travelled in camel-panniers: the camp-followers straggled along behind as best they could, frightened, bewildered, littered with babies, and cooking-pots, and all the voluminous half-fastened baskets, boxes and bundles that poor Indians carried on the march.

  The moment the last soldiers of the rearguard left the cantonment gates, the mob poured in to plunder and destroy: and hovering always on the fringe of the column, sometimes sending peremptory messages to the general, sometimes coming close, sometimes disappearing, the chiefs of the Afghans predatorily rode. The retreat was a misery from the first step. As the troops marched in tolerable order along the snow-covered track across the plain, the camp followers in their thousands milled all about the column, turning the march into a muddled rout, pushing their way frantically towards the front, shouting and jostling, separating platoon from platoon, soldiers from their officers. Sometimes troops of Ghazi horsemen dashed among them, slashing with their sabres and galloping off with loot: the rearguard lost fifty men almost before it had left the lines.

  So it was obvious from the start that the Afghan assurances meant nothing. If the escort of chiefs was capable of keeping off the Ghazis and Ghalzais, it had no intention of doing so: this would be cat and mouse to the end. Within an hour or two many of the soldiers were frost-bitten, while hundreds of the Indian bearers threw down their loads in despair and ran away into the wilderness. Before it had left the valley the army was virtually without food, fuel, shelter or ammunition, and behind it left a trail of dead and dying people, like a track of litter after a grisly holiday—some wide-eyed and insensible, some pleading to be put out of their misery, some stabbed about with knives, for the fun of it, by the Afghan children who swarmed through the mêlée. When the British camped for the first night, only six miles from the city, they looked back to see the night sky red and flickering with the flames of the burning cantonment: and when the rearguard arrived in the small hours, exhausted from its running day-long battle, and its soldiers shouted in the darkness, ‘Where’s the 54th? Where’s the 6th?’, they found the camp in a state of nightmare chaos, men and women dying all around from hunger and exposure, and were told everywhere, as they looked for their units, that ‘no one knew anything about it’.

  12

  The retreat lasted just a week. During the first three days the way led through a series of precipitous passes, most of them 5,000 feet high and all deep in snow, and day by day the struggling mass of the British and their dependents grew smaller and weaker. They were never left at peace. Now and then they saw their escort chiefs, cloaked upon their horses upon distant knolls, or awaiting their arrival at the head of a pass, and sometimes Akhbar himself appeared with a demand for hostages, a gloating recrimination, or ever less convincing assurances of goodwill. Every day the harassment grew more brazen, until every gully seemed to hide an ambush of horsemen, and there were marksmen on every ridge.

  Terrible scenes were enacted in the snows. We see Lieutenant Melville of the 54th Native Infantry, speared and stabbed in back and head, crawling after the column on his hands and knees. We see Dr Cardew of the medical service, fearfully wounded, tied to the last gun and left beside the road to die, while his soldiers mumble their goodbyes to him. We see Mrs Boyd and her son Hugh, aged four, tumbled out of their panniers as the camel that carries them is hit by a bullet and crumples slowly, groaning, to its knees in the snow. In the middle of the carnage, the hunger, the cold, the terror, we see an Indian deserter from the Mission guard, blindfold and ragged, shot on the spot by a firing squad.

  On the fourth day Akhbar sent a message to Elphinstone suggesting that the English women should be handed over to his care. Eleven women and their children, including Lady Sale and Lady Macnaghten, were handed over to the care of the Afghans, together oddly enough with several of their husbands: they were taken away to a little fort in the hills, and fed that night on mutton and rice. By then the fighting strength of the army was down to 300 British infantry, about 480 sepoys, and 170 cavalrymen, most of them frostbitten, many snow-blind, many more without weapons or ammunition. They had passed through the first of the great passes, and there were seventy miles to go.

  By the end of the fifth day the last of the sepoys were dead or missing, and no baggage was left at all. For miles the track was thick with the corpses of the camp-followers. Perhaps 12,000 people had died since they left Kabul, only a few thousand Indians survived, and the only people fighting back were the men of the 44th Regiment and the 5th Light Cavalry. They had passed through the second and third of the passes, and were fifty miles from Jalalabad.

  On the sixth and seventh days the survivors struggled through the worst of all the ravines, the Jugdulluk, an allegorically gloomy defile, where the winding track passed between immense impending crags, and only a few scraggly holly oaks broke through the snow. Here the Afghans had blocked the way with a barrier of prickly ilex, six feet high. The soldiers fell upon it with their bare hands, while a fury of fire was poured at them from the ridges on either side, and Ghilzai horsemen galloped mercilessly among them—scrabbling frantically away with their frost-bitten fingers, dying in their hundreds, until at last a gap was made in the barricade and there was a mad rush of horsemen and foot-soldiers through it, the horses rearing, the shots flying, crazed soldiers sometimes shooting at their friends, and into the confusion the Afghans falling with their knives and long swords to leave the snow stained with blood, mashed about with footfalls, and littered with red-coat bodies.

  By the eighth day the army had no commander. Summoned to a conference at Akhbar’s camp, Elphinstone had been held there as a hostage, and his soldiers never saw him again. But by now there was virtually no army either: only some twenty officers and forty-five British soldiers had survived the slaughter in the Jugdulluk. At a hamlet called Gandamack they found themselves surrounded by Afghans and called to a parley—a handful of emaciated, exhausted and mostly unarmed Britons, with Captain Souter of the 44th wearing the regimental colours wound about his waist. It was a trick. The soldiers were slaughtered, only half a dozen being taken prisoner. The only survivors of the army now, apart from a few wandering sepoys, were fourteen horsemen, who, by-passing Gandamack, had galloped desperately towards Jalalabad—twenty miles away.

  By the ninth day only six survived—three captains, a lieutenant and two army doctors, one of whom, Dr Brydon, had already lost his horse, and had been given a pony by a wounded subahdar of the native infantry—‘take my horse’, the Indian had said, ‘and God send you may get to Jalalabad in safety’. At Futtehabad, sixteen miles from Jalalabad, the officers found themselves kindly welcomed by the villagers, who offered them food, and urged them to rest for a while: two of them were murdered there and then, three more were killed as they fled the place.

  13

  So there remained, on January 13, 1842, only one survivor of the Kabul army—Surgeon Brydon, Army Medical Corps, galloping desperately over the last few miles to Jalalabad, Afghans all around him like flies, throwing stones at him, swinging sabres, reducing him in the end to the hilt of his broken sword, which he threw in a horseman’s face. And quite suddenly, in the early afternoon, Brydon found himself all alone. The Afghans had faded away. There was nobody to be seen. Not a sound broke the cold air. He plodded on through the snow exhausted, leaning on the pony’s neck, and presently he saw in the distance the high mud walls of Jalalabad, with the Union Jack flying above. He took his forage cap from his head and feebly waved. The fortress gates opened; a group of officers ran out to greet him; and so the retreat from Kabul, and the first of Quee
n Victoria’s imperial wars, came to its grand and terrible end.

  ‘Did I not say so?’ said Colonel Dennie, who was watching from the walls. ‘Here comes the messenger’.1

  1 Though the British never liked using elephants in war—they suffered from footsores, and their ear-drums were vulnerable to the crack of rifle-fire.

  1 When the British acquired Hong Kong in 1841, indeed, in the course of a trade war against the Chinese, one commentator likened the new colony to ‘a notch cut in China as a woodsman notches a tree, to mark it for felling at a convenient opportunity’.

  1 Intelligence was limited, since no Briton in India understood their language.

  1 Notably Colonel Robert Warburton, who married a niece of the Dost, and whose son Sir Robert Warburton, half British, half Afghan, was to be the most celebrated frontier administrator of British India—‘uncrowned King of the Khyber’.

  1 A sensation that lingers even now. The plain has scarcely changed, and from the ridge to the east of the Bala Hissar, on one of those heavy hot mornings that contribute so powerfully to the flavour of Kabul, it is all too easy to imagine the isolation of the cantonment far below, and even to trace its outline in the dust. Kabulis well remember where it stood, for the war is a key event in Afghan national history.