While the massacre continued, Akbar himself hovered just out of sight, insisting that he was doing everything he could to restrain the local tribesmen. This was proving difficult, he protested, as even their own chiefs had little control over them. There may have been some truth in this latter claim, but there is no real evidence that he ever tried to get the chiefs to stop their men from attacking the retreating columns. Even so, astonishingly, Elphinstone continued to accept his solemn assurances that he was doing all in his power to try to save them. Two days later, on January 12, he once again offered them safe passage. By now Elphinstone’s force was down to fewer than 200 troops, plus some 2,000 camp-followers. The general felt that if any of them were to survive he had no choice but to come to terms with Akbar. Accordingly, with his second-in-command and another officer, he rode over to Akbar’s camp. Once more, however, it proved to be a trick. For it soon became clear, even to Elphinstone, that Akbar was unable to protect them, even if he had wanted to. When the general asked to be allowed to return to his troops, Akbar refused, thus adding the British commander to his growing band of hostages. Nonetheless, Elphinstone managed to smuggle a secret message to the officer he had left in command of the surviving troops ordering him to press on immediately.
It was now dark and for once the British caught the Afghans off their guard, although not for long. The tribesmen had constructed a formidable barrier across the narrow gorge, intending to fire down on the redcoats as it forced them to a halt. But not expecting the British to move at night, they had left it unmanned. Yet even as the troops were trying to tear it down with their bare hands, the Afghans discovered what was happening and attacked them from the rear. ‘The confusion was now terrible,’ wrote Brydon, ‘all discipline was at an end.’ It was every man for himself. In the darkness he suddenly realised that he was surrounded. Before he could ride off he was dragged from his horse and felled by a savage cut from a long Afghan knife. Had he not by a miracle had a copy of Blackwood’s Magazine stuffed in his cap, it would undoubtedly have killed him. As it was, the knife removed a large piece of his skull. ‘I was nearly stunned,’ he wrote, ‘but I managed to get to my knees.’ Seeing a second blow coming, he managed to parry it with the edge of his sword, slicing off some of his assailant’s fingers. As the weapon fell to the ground, the man ran off into the darkness, leaving Brydon horseless and alone.
Despite his severe head wound, the doctor managed to clamber over the partly demolished barricade without attracting any further attention from the enemy, who seemed to have gone off in pursuit of the others. Stumbling weakly on over the piles of corpses, he came upon a mortally wounded cavalryman. The soldier, who had been shot through the chest and was bleeding profusely, begged him to take his pony before someone else did. Moments later he fell back dead. Profoundly grateful to his unknown benefactor, Brydon mounted the pony and rode hurriedly off into the darkness in search of his surviving comrades.
The handful of officers and men who had fought their way out of the gorge, leaving behind them many dead and dying, now found themselves divided into two groups, one mounted and the other on foot. The fifteen-strong former group, to which Brydon had attached himself, decided to ride on ahead in the hope of reaching Jalalabad before their pursuers could catch up with them. The second, far larger party, consisting of twenty officers and forty-five other ranks, fought their way to the village of Gandamak, less than thirty miles from Jalalabad. They knew that if they could survive one more day they would reach the safety of the British garrison. But they soon found their way blocked by the Afghans. Overwhelmingly outnumbered, they realised that they now stood little chance of reaching safety. Forming themselves into a square, and with only twenty muskets between them and two rounds of ammunition each, they prepared to sell their lives dearly in a last desperate stand.
The Afghans at first offered to negotiate, insisting that a ceasefire had been agreed at last, and that to be safe the British need only hand over their weapons. When they refused, suspecting another trap, the Afghans attempted to disarm them. Immediately hand-to-hand fighting broke out. With their ammunition all spent, the British fought on with bayonet and sword, one officer killing five Afghans before being cut down himself. Only four prisoners were taken by the Afghans, the rest of the group – most of them men of the 44th Regiment of Foot – being slaughtered to a man. In 1979, nearly a century and a half later, the British anthropologist Dr Andre Singer climbed to the top of the hill where they died. There, beneath the rocks of this grim and remote place, he found what were clearly the bones of those gallant men. Villagers told him that, long ago, visitors from British India occasionally made their way to the spot, where they stood in silent homage.
Meanwhile, twelve miles to the east, and unaware of the fate of their comrades, the mounted party pressed hastily on towards Jalalabad. The group consisted of Brydon, three captains, three subalterns, another doctor and half a dozen other ranks. At the village of Futtehabad, only fifteen miles from Jalalabad, they were offered food, and being desperately hungry they accepted, glad also of a rest while it was prepared. After all they had been through, the village seemed singularly peaceful and divorced from war. But it was an illusion, and while they rested a secret signal was given to those waiting in the hills nearby. The first the British knew of their danger was when suddenly they spotted scores of armed horsemen galloping towards the village from all sides. As they grabbed their weapons and dashed for their horses, villagers flung themselves on the small party, while others opened fire on those who managed to mount and ride off. Only five of them, including Brydon, got clear of the village. However, very soon the pursuing Afghans had disposed of all but Brydon, who by a miracle escaped. Even so, his trials were not yet over, for three more times during the fifteen-mile ride to Jalalabad he ran into hostile Afghans.
The first group, some twenty strong, threw stones at him and lunged at him with their knives. ‘I with difficulty put my pony into a gallop,’ he wrote, ‘and taking my bridle in my teeth, cut right and left with my sword as I went through them. They could not reach me with their knives and I was only hit by one or two stones.’ A mile or two further on he encountered a second group, one of whom was armed with a jezail. Jabbing his exhausted pony with the point of his sword, Brydon managed to force it again into a gallop. The Afghan with the jezail fired at him from close range, snapping short the blade of his sword and hitting his pony in the groin, but missing him. By the time the weapon could be reloaded he was out of range.
Finally, ahead of him on the plain, Brydon spotted a party of horsemen. Believing them to be a British cavalry patrol from Jalalabad, he rode eagerly towards them. Too late, he realised they were Afghans. As he quickly turned away they saw him and sent one of their number after him. Recognising him as an Englishman, the man slashed at him with his sword. Brydon managed to block the blow with his own broken weapon. His enemy now turned and rode at him again. ‘This time, just as he was striking, I threw the handle of my sword at his head,’ wrote Brydon. Swerving to avoid it, the Afghan missed his aim, instead cutting the doctor’s left hand, in which he held his bridle. Feeling it go numb, he reached for the bridle with his other hand. ‘I suppose my foe thought it was for a pistol,’ Brydon recounts, ‘for he turned at once and made off as quick as he could.’
But his pistol, Brydon discovered to his dismay, had fallen from its holster, and he was now totally unarmed. His pony, bleeding badly from the wound in its groin, seemed unlikely to carry him much further. His own wounds, together with his hunger and exhaustion, had begun to take their toll. For the first time in those eight nightmarish days the doctor’s strength began to fail him. ‘All energy seemed to forsake me,’ he wrote, and he feared that he would fall from the saddle from sheer exhaustion. Any moment he expected to be attacked by Afghans, and this time he knew he was unlikely to survive. ‘I became nervous and frightened at shadows,’ he recounts. But he was closer to Jalalabad than he realised. It was at that moment that the sharp-eyed look-out on t
he ramparts spotted him and his pony as they struggled painfully across the plain.
Dr Brydon was the only one of the 16,000 souls who had left Kabul to complete the terrible course and reach Jalalabad in safety – and the first, on that fateful thirteenth day of January, 1842, to break the news of the disaster which had overtaken Elphinstone’s army to a horrified nation. But, as we shall see, he was not the sole survivor of the Kabul garrison. Besides the hostages held by Akbar, a number of sepoys and other Indians who had somehow escaped death by hiding in caves managed, during the ensuing months, to make their way home across the passes. Although Brydon himself recovered fully from his wounds to become the subject of one of the most celebrated paintings of Victorian times – Lady Butler’s Remnants of an Army – sad to relate his gallant pony, also depicted in the work, died from its wounds. ‘The poor pony, directly it was put in a stable, lay down and never rose again,’ wrote the doctor.
Neither Brydon nor the garrison then knew of the fate which had befallen the men of the 44th Regiment of Foot at Gandamak. For many nights afterwards a large fire was kept blazing at Jalalabad’s Kabul Gate, lights were placed on the ramparts and bugles were sounded regularly to guide in any stragglers trying to cross the exposed plain and reach the city under cover of darkness. But none ever came.
·21·
The Last Hours of Conolly and Stoddart
The dreadful tidings borne by Dr Brydon – the Messenger of Death, as he was to become known – reached Lord Auckland, the retiring Governor-General, in Calcutta, a fortnight later. The shock, his sister Emily noted, was to age him by ten years. Things had gone wrong so terribly fast. Only a few weeks earlier Sir William Macnaghten had written from Kabul assuring him that everything was firmly under control. And now his entire policy in Central Asia was in ruins. Far from establishing a friendly rule in Afghanistan to buttress India against Russian encroachments, it had led instead to one of the worst disasters ever to overtake a British army. A mob of mere heathen savages, armed with home-made weapons, had succeeded in routing the greatest power on earth. It was a devastating blow to British pride and prestige. The ignominy suffered by St Petersburg following the Khivan debacle was nothing compared to this. To the bemused Auckland, who had been reluctant to use British troops to unseat Dost Mohammed in the first place, it was ‘as inexplicable as it was appalling’. And now, with Akbar’s forces beginning to hammer at the gates of the two remaining British garrisons in Afghanistan, Jalalabad and Kandahar, fears arose that the warlike Afghans, flushed by victory, might pour down through the passes into northern India, as they had done more than once in the past.
London did not hear of the catastrophe for a further week. First to break the news, using the largest headline type it possessed, was The Times. ‘We regret to announce’, it declared, ‘that the intelligence which this express has brought us is . . . of the most disastrous and melancholy nature.’ In a leading article a few days later it thrust an accusing finger at St Petersburg – ‘whose growing influence amongst those tribes first called for our interference’, and whose secret agents were ‘examining with the greatest care’ the passes leading towards British India. It insisted that the insurrection was far too well organised to have been spontaneous, and found it highly suspicious that the first to be murdered was Sir Alexander Burnes, ‘the keenest antagonist of the Russian agents’. Others were less sure about Russia’s implication. But everyone, including the Duke of Wellington, blamed General Elphinstone for failing to crush the insurrection at the outset, and Lord Auckland for embarking on such folly in the first place. ‘Our worst fears regarding the Afghanistan expedition’, declaimed The Times smugly, ‘have been justified.’
The new Tory administration led by Sir Robert Peel could at least wash its hands of all responsibility for the disaster, placing this firmly on the shoulders of Melbourne’s Whigs, who had approved the invasion plan. However, it was now faced with the task of clearing up the mess and deciding how the Afghans were to be punished for their treachery, for the nation was demanding vengeance. Fortunately, the Tories’ own man – that old India hand Lord Ellenborough, thrice President of the Board of Control – was already on his way to replace Auckland as Governor-General, though he only learned of the catastrophe when he arrived off Madras on February 21. His brief from the government had been to withdraw the British garrisons from Afghanistan in line with its stringent new economic policies, but he now found himself facing a totally unexpected situation. That night, as his vessel bore him on to Calcutta, he wrote to Peel declaring that he proposed to restore Britain’s honour and pride by teaching the Afghans a lesson they would not forget in a hurry.
On reaching the capital, Ellenborough learned that his predecessor had already dispatched a force to Peshawar to try to relieve the hard-pressed garrisons at Jalalabad and Kandahar, and to try to free the British hostages held by Akbar. The new Governor-General now took command. On March 31 the Khyber Pass was forced by Major-General George Pollock, using the tactics of the Afghans themselves, and at a cost of only fourteen British lives. As Pollock’s flanking columns seized the heights, the astonished tribesmen for the first time found themselves shot down from above. Two weeks later the relief column was played into Jalalabad to the strains of the Scots air ‘Oh, but ye’ve bin lang a’coming’. Meanwhile, in a series of actions around Kandahar, the able British commander, General Sir William Nott, had driven back the Afghans threatening the garrison. He, like Pollock, was now ready and eager to march on Kabul to avenge Elphinstone’s humiliating defeat, not to mention the deaths of Burnes, Macnaghten and the countless soldiers and families who had perished on the death march.
It was at this point that Lord Ellenborough, so hawkish at first, began to get cold feet. Anxious about the continuing drain on India’s already depleted treasury (for London was resolutely refusing to contribute to the expedition’s costs), and perhaps fearing another catastrophe, the Governor-General argued that the Afghans had now received lesson enough at the hands of Pollock and Nott. ‘At last we have got a victory,’ he wrote to Peel, ‘and our military character is re-established.’ He ordered the two generals to return with their troops to India, leaving the hostages in Akbar’s possession. After all, the British still held Dost Mohammed, while Shah Shujah (or so Ellenborough believed) continued to rule Afghanistan, nominally anyway, from the walled fastness of the Bala Hissar. Once the British troops had been withdrawn from Afghanistan, Ellenborough reasoned, negotiations for the freeing of the hostages could commence in a calmer atmosphere. But what he did not then know was that the unfortunate Shujah was no longer alive. As Pollock’s men were fighting their way up the Khyber to Jalalabad, Shujah had been lured out of the Bala Hissar, ostensibly for talks, and instead had been riddled with bullets. Akbar’s triumph, however, had proved short-lived, as fears spread among the other chiefs over the prospect of being ruled by him or his father. Just as Macnaghten had foreseen, a fierce power struggle now arose between Akbar’s supporters and his foes.
Almost simultaneously, within the ranks of the British, a struggle of a different kind broke out. Ellenborough’s order to Pollock and Nott to evacuate Afghanistan without further chastising the murderous tribes was received with dismay and disbelief by both officers and men, who wanted blood. A battle of wills now followed between the two generals and the new Governor-General, with other senior military officers in India and at home taking the side of the former. A succession of excuses – the weather, shortages of supplies, money, and so on – was found for delaying the departure of the two garrisons, while pressure grew on Ellenborough to change his mind. The hawks had a valuable ally at home in the Duke of Wellington, who still held a seat in the Cabinet. ‘It is impossible to impress upon you too strongly’, the India veteran warned Ellen-borough, ‘the notion of the importance of the restoration of reputation in the East.’ Even Sir Robert Peel, the Prime Minister, who had from the start urged extreme caution on the Governor-General, began to waver under the pressure of public opinio
n, and wrote to him suggesting that sterner measures might be called for.
Feeling increasingly isolated, Ellenborough finally gave way. He realised that he would either have to admit that he had previously been wrong, or risk being accused of throwing away the opportunity of freeing the hostages and salvaging Britain’s military reputation and pride. Without altering his order to evacuate Afghanistan, he told Pollock and Nott that they might, if they judged it militarily expedient, retire by way of Kabul. ‘No change had come over the views of Lord Ellenborough’, observed Kaye, ‘but a change had come over the meaning of certain words of the English language.’ Although Ellenborough was criticised for thus shifting the responsibility on to the shoulders of Pollock and Nott, neither complained. They had got their way, and a race began between the two to be the first into Kabul, although Nott’s men in Kandahar had by far the furthest to march – some 300 miles against Pollock’s 100.
As they fought their way back along the same route by which, only seven months earlier, Elphinstone’s ill-fated columns had left Kabul, Pollock’s troops soon came across harrowing evidence of the disaster. Everywhere there were skeletons. ‘They lay in heaps of fifties and hundreds,’ wrote one officer, ‘our gun-wheels passing over and crushing the skulls of our late comrades at almost every yard.’ Some even recognised the remains and possessions of former friends. Despite Ellen-borough’s orders to show restraint towards the populace, the growing fury of the troops led to numerous excesses being committed against those who resisted their advance. In one village, it is said, every male over the age of puberty was slaughtered, women were raped, and some even killed. ‘Tears, supplications, were of no avail,’ one young officer recalled. ‘Fierce oaths were the only answer. The musket was deliberately raised, the trigger pulled, and happy was he who fell dead.’ Shocked at what he saw, he described many of the troops as little better than ‘hired assassins’. An army chaplain, who was present at the sacking of one village which fired on them after it had surrendered, declared that seldom had a clergyman been called upon to witness such a scene. But these painful things, he added, were almost impossible to prevent ‘under such circumstances’, and regrettably were common to all wars.
The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia Page 30
