Retreat from Kabul: The First Anglo-Afghan War, 1839-1842 (Conflicts of Empire)

by George Bruce

  The Ghilzye tribe inhabited the country through which Keane now marched. They were hostile — two weeks earlier Shah Shuja had sent them 10,000 rupees (£1,000) and a Koran, the traditional way among the Afghans of seeking allegiance. The money was for ‘shooing the horses’, or to enable them to prepare for the march.

  Had they sworn allegiance on the sacred book, and had kept it, together with the money, he would know that they supported him. But they kept the money and contemptuously returned the Koran.

  So it was no surprise when on either side of the column detachments of Ghilzye cavalry appeared, waiting for the right time and place to attack. Keane ordered cavalry detachments at the front and rear and on the flanks of the column to be strengthened and to march with increased vigilance.

  But despite other rumours that a large-scale attack by Dost Mahommed was imminent, the tremendous heat was the worst enemy, taking the bigger toll of men and animals than the jezails of hostile tribesmen.

  On the eighth day the army marched at 2 a.m., when the temperature was already 76 degrees and a gale of hot wind scorched the men’s nostrils, dried the sweat on their faces and drove hot dust into their eyes.

  By 1 p.m. it had reached 120 degrees, a blaze of heat in which the stony landscape shimmered and the hovering vultures were the only sign of life. Soldiers went purple in the face, saw their comrades and the landscape dissolve into a flickering kaleidoscope and fall vomiting with heatstroke. They were picked up by the dhoolie bearers, but lacking shade few survived the overmastering heat.

  Keane ordered the two columns behind to close up by forced marches and on 20 July the entire army encamped at Nani, only a day’s march away from Ghazni.

  Meanwhile, Dost Mahommed was doing his best for the defence of his throne and country. One of his sons, Hyder Ali Khan, he had sent to Ghazni with orders to build up the four gateways in the great 70-foot walls of the city, clear the deep moat surrounding them, strengthen the fortifications and lay in enough food for the 3,000 fighting-men and the citizens to sustain a six-months’ siege.

  His other son, Akbar Khan, a ferocious young warrior who was later to show himself an implacable enemy of the British, he sent to the Khyber Pass to incite the tribes there against the force of Sikhs that Colonel Wade was about to march through from Peshawar against him.

  Dost Mahommed, according to Henry Durand, calculated that Ghazni would hold up Keane long enough for him, aided by the Ghilzye tribes, to attack the besieging force with superior numbers and under favourable circumstances. The strategy was sound, except that it was based on the false assumption that Keane had all the provisions he needed.

  In fact, when he reached Ghazni, Keane had only enough for two days — and no heavy artillery. Unless there was some way out in a desperate do-or-die attack, the army was doomed.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Among General Keane and his staff early on the morning of 21 July there can have been little devil-may-care ardour for battle — rather tension and anxiety marking the sweaty faces beneath the tall shakos as they rode out ahead of the army to reconnoitre Ghazni. And no sound but the creak of leather, the jingle of steel cavalry scabbards and the drumming of horses’ hooves.

  The time for words had passed weeks ago when Keane had taken the ill-considered decision whose results he was now frantic to see. At that moment, as he jolted uncomfortably in the saddle, Keane’s responsibility for leaving behind his heavy artillery must have weighed heavily upon him.

  In his younger days John Keane had been called ‘the fortunate youth’ because his career was generally believed to have been founded more upon good luck and influential friends than upon ability. In 1794, his father, M.P. for Bangor and Youghal, had bought him at the improbable age of thirteen a captaincy in a newly formed regiment. Promptly, the regiment was disbanded and lucky John was sent home for five years on half-pay.

  With this valuable military experience behind him and still only seventeen, he was appointed captain in the 44th Foot then in Egypt, where he served as aide-de-camp to Lord Cavan, Commander-in-Chief of British forces there. Lacking any more military know-how than what he had learned in this office, Keane four years later was made a major in the 60th Royal Americans, but he continued to serve Lord Cavan in Egypt and Malta for the next two years, after which he was able to purchase a lieutenant-colonelcy in the 13th Foot. He served with this regiment for several years in Ireland and later commanded it at the capture of Martinique from the French in 1809 — his first taste of real soldiering.

  Thereafter, his military ability was tested and found wanting, but good fortune and promotion still attended him. In 1813 he joined Wellington’s army as a brevet-colonel and commanded a brigade in the Peninsular War. But never once did that great commander deign to mention Keane’s name in his dispatches.

  Two years later, in January 1815, commanding a British brigade in the American War of Independence, he led a much criticised, unsuccessful attack on New Orleans, where he was wounded. He was appointed later that year to command a British infantry brigade of the army of occupation in France after the defeat of Napoleon — an appointment, lacking any stern tests, in which Keane should have done well, yet in 1817 Wellington was obliged to remove him.

  For six years, until 1823, Keane languished at home on half-pay, but in 1823 good fortune and helpful friends once more intervened and he was posted off to Jamaica to command British troops there for seven years.

  From this command he was raised at the ripe age of fifty-three to the prized post of Commander-in-Chief Bombay — a total stranger to command in India, with its racial, religious and military problems that many officers had learned to understand only after years of service there. Over the heads of officers like General Nott, who had spent their lives soldiering in India with success, Keane’s influential friends or his good luck won him this prized appointment.

  And now six years later, nearly sixty, he found himself leading this grim campaign in Afghanistan. Would his good luck, he must have wondered, hold out? Or would the grave and serious military errors he had committed shatter it and explode for ever the reputation of a dashing and capable commander which he had tried to foster in India?

  The aim of Afghan marksmen in the gardens surrounding the great fortress drew closer and their rounds whistled nearer. Keane and his party turned about and retreated out of range to wait for the army’s advance columns. Keane knew all he needed to know for the moment — the fortress was formidable and it would be defended.

  Soon was heard the rumble of the artillery on the road, the drumming of the cavalry horses on the right and the steady tramp of the infantry on the stony ground to the left. The clouds of dust would have signalled to the Ghazni garrison the approach of a powerful army.

  ‘Keane,’ noted Henry Durand, an engineer-lieutenant with the General’s party, ‘saluted with occasional shots from the Afghan skirmishers, had not to wait long before the heads of columns came into sight.’

  The General now ordered two companies of infantry to drive the Afghan marksmen from the gardens while the artillery placed a few guns where they could hit the fortress to draw Afghan fire and see how well it was defended.

  Captain Graves and Lieutenant Van Homrig each led a company of sepoys in an attack on the Afghan skirmishers in the outer gardens. The Afghans retired into a small stone building outside the main fortifications from which they began a brisk exchange of fire with the two companies.

  Thirty 9-pounders of the Horse Artillery and the Camel Battery were quickly ranged in line upon a plateau 700 yards from the fort with cavalry and infantry to guard them from sudden attack. The blue-coated gunners crouched with lighted port-fires — the quick-burning match that, applied to the vent at the end of the barrel exploded the powder charge.

  ‘Fire!’ A sudden metallic roar — the wheels rushed back with the recoil, the gunners thrust wet mops deep into the smoking black barrels to extinguished dangerous sparks, ready for the next powder charge.

  ‘Powder!’ The 2
-lb. charge was thrust down the barrel. ‘Load!’ The 9-lb. shrapnel shell, invented in 1794 by Lieutenant Henry Shrapnell, was rammed home — a hollow shell containing a score of shot an inch in diameter surrounding a powder charge fuzed to burst as needed.

  ‘Fire!’ The shell whistled over the Afghan ramparts and exploded with deadly effect over the defenders’ heads.

  Now the cannonade crashed from side to side as the Afghans fired back solid shot. ‘There were some casualties arising from this fire,’ Major Hough noted. ‘They had got the range pretty accurately and could they have sufficiently depressed their guns would have killed and wounded many. The shots struck close to the Regiment of Infantry, posted between a village and the angle of the fort and many struck the ground close to the Horse Artillery, some shot passing under the horses’ bellies and some reaching to the cavalry.’

  One of the enemy mounted up on the parapets, waved his flag and called out to the British to come on. A 9-pounder shot knocked off his head and down went his flag; the rest became more cautious. It was afterwards ascertained that the artillery had committed great havoc in the fort, killing and wounding many men and horses.

  Keane now ordered the guns to cease fire and the troops to withdraw — Captain Graves had been badly and Lieutenant Van Homrig slightly wounded; two sepoys were killed and six wounded.

  But Keane now knew without doubt that the Afghans would defend their fortress and that they were well supplied with the means of doing it.

  It must have been a depressing moment. What in heaven’s name could he do? Desperately, as a last hope, he sent Captain Thomson — the engineer officer who had told him about Ghazni’s ‘tumbledown walls’ — with an escort of infantry to reconnoitre the fortress closely on all sides, including the gates, and to report as to whether there was anywhere weak enough to attack with any chance of success.

  A ‘hot and well-directed fire’ Thomson relates, was aimed at him and his party from the walls, and the infantry escort drove off a squadron of Afghan horsemen who charged down at them from the neighbouring hills.

  ‘The fortifications,’ he soon reported, ‘were found equally strong all round, the only tangible point observed was the Kabul gateway, which offered the following advantages for a coup-de-main; the road up to the gate was clear; the bridge over the ditch was unbroken; there were good positions for the artillery within 350 yards of the walls on both sides of the road; and we had information that the gateway was not built up, a reinforcement from Kabul being expected.’

  Thomson therefore reported that the only feasible mode of attack, the only one which held the slightest prospect of success, was a dash at the Kabul gateway, blowing the gate open by bags of gunpowder.

  This report was supported by one Abdool Rusheed, a nephew of Dost Mahommed’s, who believing himself out of favour, had deserted to the cause of the Shah and had given Keane’s engineers precise information about the fortifications — only the Kabul gate, of all four, he reported, had not been filled in with masonry, a story again confirmed by the sight of an Afghan soldier entering it.

  Thomson knew well enough the risks of such an operation, and that even if successful it could mean severe losses. According to Durand, he said as much to Keane. As a safer alternative he suggested that instead of attacking Ghazni, the army should march to attack Dost Mahommed in the field — reported to be only five or six days’ march away — and after his defeat, which was certain, the defenders of Ghazni would surely surrender without a fight.

  Keane, says Durand, replied that it was not in his power ‘to adopt the safer alternative, as the army had only two, or at the utmost three days’ provisions, and could not therefore march against Dost Mahommed’.

  The die was cast and Keane chose the most dangerous but the only possible course, staking all upon immediate success in one desperate gambler’s throw.

  What if he failed? What if the explosion party were shot down before they were able to reach the gate? Or, if the gate were to be blown, what if the Afghans massed at the entrance and held it, while from the ramparts above their bullets cut down the British massed outside?

  After retiring with the probable loss of two or three thousand of his best men, Keane would be faced with two alternatives, both of which promised a fair chance of destruction. First, he could press on with his weakened army and face attack by Dost Mahommed’s force en route from Kabul, plus the three or four thousand cavalry that would pour out from Ghazni behind him. In this way he would go down fighting.

  Secondly, he could ignominiously accept total defeat, sue for terms and try to extricate his army from Afghanistan as best he could. But the trap that Dost Mahommed had set in letting the British force penetrate the mountain passes more or less unmolested would then be sprung. The Afghan ruler’s whole strength would be thrown against the British in terrain that favoured the attacker.

  Even if a rescue force were to be sent it would affect the outcome little because all its energies would be needed in self-defence. Keane’s entire army would be wiped out either by starvation or the Afghan sword and bullet.

  Whichever of the three courses he chose, Keane and his army faced impossible odds, but a violent blow against the enemy’s weakest point — the Kabul gate — offered a tiny chance of success.

  So Keane decided on this and assembled his staff to plan the assault. Macnaghten now sent the alarming news from the Shah’s camp that Dost Mahommed had marched from Kabul five days ago, on 16 July — his army was expected to be barely a day’s march from Ghazni by tomorrow, the 22nd.

  Every minute was now valuable — the attack must be won — or lost — at once. Keane ordered the army — encamped on the southern side of the fortress — to march in two columns, right and left of it, and take up positions on the Kabul instead of the Kandahar side. At 4 p.m. the march began.

  Darkness fell. Eerie blue lights, dropped around the fortress walls, were answered similarly by Afghan troops on the surrounding hills. Making a wide detour to keep out of range of the Afghan jezail fire, the British force stumbled along over the rough ground in the darkness, alert for a possible attack at any moment.

  While the march went on, Keane received information which must have led him to fear that his army would surely be attacked in this vulnerable situation. An engineer officer reported that Ensign Nicholson, of the Shah’s force, had told him that the intended assault on the fortress was widely known in the Shah’s camp, from whence inevitably, Dost Mahommed’s secret agents would swiftly have carried the news to Hyder Ali, the fortress commander.

  Keane had felt obliged to let Macnaghten know of the army’s peril and the projected do-or-die attack, so that he would be prepared for whatever was the outcome — ‘never anticipating that Macnaghten would divulge the scheme of attack, success in which mainly depended on secrecy and surprise’, Durand noted.

  But Macnaghten, ‘ignorant or heedless of the possible consequences’ made no secret of it in the Shah’s camp and it later transpired that when the news became known in the fortress Hyder Ali had expected an attack that very night. He must surely have considered then a night sortie or chupao in force against the British to anticipate their move.

  But presumably believing the fortress impregnable he sat tight, Keane’s luck held good and the straggling serpentine procession, several miles long in each direction, reached its destination unhindered except for the occasional spent round from a long-range jezail. The troops, tired and hungry, finally encamped just before midnight, but the miles and miles of baggage and supply columns were still lumbering in until late next morning.

  The army was now well placed. It could deploy for the attack on the Kabul gate; it could prevent Hyder Ali trying to escape to join his father Dost Mahommed; and it could stop any reinforcements reaching him from Kabul.

  At first light Sir John Keane reconnoitred the northern face of the fortress; the gateway, and the road leading up to it from the hills above. He approved the details of the plan and chose as the place where the troo
ps would await to advance, some fiat ground half a mile from the fortress near the stone pillars commemorating Mahmoud of Ghazni, a former ruling prince, and son of Ahmed Shah, the founder of the Afghan Empire.

  At the same time the dark-blue-clad artillery officers, led by Brigadier Stevenson, moved nearer to the fortress and under sharp enemy fire chose the exact positions from which the gunners could best give the infantry supporting fire. Keane and his staff then returned to their tents to work out the precise details. All their lives depended upon its success.

  Just before noon, trumpets sounded the alarm. A large force of Afghans with banners, about 4,000 men in all, had appeared on the crest of the hills to the east of the camp and were advancing in a great disorganised host to attack the Shah’s camp below.

  A force of the Shah’s cavalry reinforced by infantry and two British 9-pounder guns at once moved out to repulse them — perhaps even too quickly, before the attackers could fully commit themselves in the plain below. A few rounds of shrapnel killed or wounded numbers of the attackers. A cavalry charge led by Ensign Nicholson, seventeen years old, made them lose courage, turn about and scramble back up the rocky hill.

  Durand noted that a severe example might have been made had they been allowed to descend into the plain, but, however, Captain Outram with a party of infantrymen chased them up the hillside in face of heavy jezail fire to within fifty paces of their headquarters — marked by a standard-bearer holding a green-and-white banner, a sacred emblem later found to have been consecrated by the priests, to confer invincibility.

  A British marksman shot down the standard-bearer and the enemy fled. The standard and a batch of prisoners, were captured and taken back down the hillside in triumph.

  This first small clash was important, because it confirmed the British forces in their belief that when it came to open conflict in the field their organisation, disciplined attack and artillery gave them marked superiority over the Afghans.