Akbar Khan’s father-in-law, the Ghilzai chief Mohammed Shah Khan, who seems to have been trying to assist him in reaching an accommodation with his fellow chiefs, suggested the British should pay them two hundred thousand rupees to guarantee their safe passage through the remaining passes to Jalalabad. Elphinstone readily agreed, but the chiefs were harder to convince. Meanwhile, Akbar Khan, who was denouncing the chiefs privately to the Britons as “dogs” who could not be trusted, proposed to Elphinstone and Shelton that toward dusk he and his own men should ride to the rescue of the surviving British troops and mounting them a man apiece behind them, bring them to safety. He claimed the Ghilzais would not dare attack for fear of hitting him or his men. Elphinstone and Shelton rejected the offer as dishonorable and—knowing how hard it would be to extract the soldiers from among the camp followers—impracticable.
Dusk was falling before Mohammed Shah Khan returned to tell Elphinstone that the chiefs had finally agreed, in return for payment, to allow his force to continue to Jalalabad unmolested. Akbar Khan said that he himself would ride with them, though somewhat ominously he advised Captain Johnson to summon any friends of his to join him in captivity rather than allow them to march on and face death—an offer Johnson refused. Elphinstone meanwhile wrote a letter to Brigadier Antequil ordering him to have the troops ready to march on at eight A.M. the next morning. At around seven P.M. that evening, before the letter had been sent, the sound of firing was plainly heard from the direction of the pass. In fact, Brigadier Antequil had already ordered the men to move out toward the Jugdulluk Pass. A dismayed Akbar Khan suggested “that he and the officers should follow them,” to which Elphinstone agreed. However, almost at once Akbar Khan changed his mind, saying that “he feared their doing so would injure the troops by bringing after them the whole horde of Ghilzais then assembled in the valley.”
Elphinstone and Shelton could not know what had been happening during their absence of more than twenty-four hours. Earlier that day, Captain Skinner, on his way to Akbar Khan’s camp, had been shot in the face by a Ghilzai and subsequently died in agony. Meanwhile, Ghilzai marksmen had been firing almost constantly on the British troops, picking off man after man. Antequil had decided he could wait no longer for news of Elphinstone and had given the order to advance under cover of darkness. Again the sick and wounded were abandoned. Sergeant Major Lissant found it “heartrending to hear the poor fellows calling on their comrades to bring them on and not leave them to be cut to pieces by the enemy.”
As Antequil and the depleted column of only some 145 men—about 120 men of the Forty-fourth and 25 cavalrymen—entered the two-mile-long Jugdulluk Pass, they suffered only the occasional volley of jezail fire. However, climbing in the darkness toward the head of the pass, they found two six-foot-high barricades of holly-oak blocking their way. According to Sergeant Major Lissant, all was immediately confusion, “horse and foot and camp followers all got into a heap, no one could move for some time … Numbers were trod to death, and the enemy getting among the rear slaughtering away at pleasure, the cries and screeches of the poor fellows were terrible.” Desperate men tore at the prickly branches with bare, cold and bloodied hands as the fighting toward the rear intensified. Though the men “fought like gods, not men,” in Sita Ram’s words, twelve officers, including Brigadier Antequil, were killed as they struggled to hold the Afghans off. Among them was the one-legged Captain Dodgin, who killed five Afghans before succumbing. Sita Ram himself was knocked unconscious by a jezail ball that grazed his head. He later came round to find himself slung across a horse and on the way to Kabul to be sold as a slave. “What dreadful carnage I saw along the road—legs and arms protruding from the snow, Europeans and Hindustanis half-buried, horse and camels all dead!” he later wrote.
Only a few—a party of fifteen mounted officers who, as soon as there was a gap wide enough, abandoned their fellows, riding over them in their haste to get away, and subsequently a larger group of fifty to sixty officers and European soldiers—got through the barrier. Captain Lawrence was later told that some men, angered by the selfishness and cowardice of the fleeing officers, had fired at them. Sergeant Major Lissant described how, with all discipline lost, “every man was acting for himself.” He and four others took refuge in a cave rather than march on.
The main body of fifty or sixty survivors hurried out of the pass toward Gandamack, several miles away, which they reached as dawn was rising. Among them was Captain Souter of the Forty-fourth, who had wrapped the regimental colors—thirty-six square feet of embroidered yellow silk—around his waist in a bid to preserve them. Ten years earlier, Burnes had admired the daisy-filled meadows of the Gandamack Valley and the surrounding pine-clad mountains, and only two years before, Captain Havelock had been captivated by its setting “in a delightful and well-watered valley, fertile, and planted with spreading mulberry trees.” However, to desperate starving men on the run in deepest winter, it was no haven. Afghans poured from their dwellings to surround the soldiers, who had barely two rounds of ammunition apiece and only twenty muskets between them.
Forced from the road, the troops climbed a nearby hill. A local chief offered to negotiate, and Major Griffiths, the senior surviving officer, rode off to see him. Meanwhile, tribesmen pressed yet closer around the troops, jostling them. Captain Souter described how, ostensibly friendly at first, the Afghans then “commenced snatching swords and pistols from the officers; this we could not stand but drove them from the hill, and the fight commenced again. After two hours, during which we drove the Afghans several times down the hill, our little band (with the exception of about twenty men and a few officers of different regiments) being either killed or wounded, the enemy suddenly rushed upon us with their knives and an awful scene took place and ended in the massacre of all except myself, Sergeant Fair, (our mess sergeant) and seven men, that the more than usual humanity displayed by Afghans were induced to spare.
“In the conflict my poshteen flew upon and exposed the Colour; Thinking I was some great man from looking so flash, I was seized by two fellows (after my sword dropped from my hand by a severe cut on the shoulder and my pistol missing fire) who hurried me from this spot to a distance, took my clothes from off me except my trousers and cap, led me away to a village, by command of some horsemen that were on the road, and I was made over to the head man of the village who treated me well, and had my wound attended to.” Major Griffiths and the civilian clerk he had taken with him as his interpreter were also saved.
The mounted group that had ridden ahead, abandoning their comrades, had been faring badly. Nine had been killed along the way, leaving six officers including two army doctors who managed to reach Futtehabad, only sixteen miles from Jalalabad. However, here the exhausted men made the mistake of pausing to eat bread offered them by the villagers. This allowed time for a party of Afghans to fetch their weapons and attack them. They cut two of the officers down at once. The remaining men fled, but, only four miles from Jalalabad, pursuing horsemen caught and killed three of them. The fourth man, the thirty-year-old Dr. William Brydon, had hidden behind some rocks during the pursuit and rode on alone. An assistant surgeon who had been seconded to Shah Shuja’s army, he was a resourceful man. On leaving Kabul, he had “followed the Afghan custom of carrying a bag of parched grain mixed with raisins at their saddlebow” to provide nourishment as he rode. Along the way, he had searched for wild liquorice roots to chew to lessen his thirst.
Suddenly, as Brydon described in a letter to his brother, “I saw a great many people running towards me in all directions. I waited until they got pretty close and then pushed my horse into a gallop and ran the gauntlet for about two miles under a shower of large stones, sticks, and a few shots, in which I had my sword broken by a stone, my horse shot in the spine close to the tail and my body bruised all over by the stones.” He was next attacked by an Afghan horseman, who, as Brydon flung his sword hilt at him, slashed at him with his tulwar, wounding him in the left hand and knee. “[
I] stretched down the right [hand] to pick up the bridle. I suppose my foe thought it was for a pistol for he turned at once and made off as quick as he could.” The bleeding Brydon continued on his way. But “suddenly all my energy seemed to forsake me, I became nervous and frightened at shadows, and I really think I would have fallen from my saddle but for the peak of it.” Jalalabad at last came in sight, but, fearing that Sale and his force might have departed and it was in Afghan hands, Brydon dismounted and, crouching behind some fallen masonry, watched anxiously for a sign.
Sale and his garrison were indeed still there, though the past weeks had been testing ones. Since occupying Jalalabad in mid-November, they had been living in a state of constant watchfulness, sallying out to drive off groups of mounted Afghans when they pressed too close, strengthening their defenses and receiving a stream of disquieting information—some in letters, some merely rumors—about what was happening in Kabul. On 2 January a letter from Pottinger, dated a week earlier, had told them of Macnaghten’s murder and also that negotiations with the chiefs were continuing and that the Kabul force intended to fall back on Jalalabad shortly. A few days later a further letter from Pottinger, written in French for greater security, had warned that the chiefs were proving faithless and that Sale should stand firm until he received further instructions. Also at this time Sale and his men had learned from an intercepted message from Akbar Khan to a local chief that “a holy war was proclaimed; and that all believers were adjured, in the name of the Prophet, to rise against the infidels” and inciting him to “slay the chief of the Feringhees in Jalalabad.”
On 9 January a small band of Afghans had ridden up to the fort under a flag of truce and handed over a letter written in English, dated eleven days earlier and signed by both Elphinstone and Pottinger. It told Sale that it had been agreed with Akbar Khan that the British would depart from Afghanistan. Sale and his men were to march immediately for Peshawar since Elphinstone had undertaken that the Kabul force would not begin its own retreat until assured by Sale that his troops were beyond Afghanistan’s borders. “Everything has been done in good faith. You will not be molested on your way; and to the safe-conduct which Akbar Khan has given, I trust for the passage of the troops under my immediate orders through the passes,” Elphinstone had added.
Sale had called a council of war to help him decide how to respond to orders that Reverend Gleig called “as peremptory as ever came from the head-quarters of an army.” Though the letter was obviously genuine, Sale and his officers decided that it must have been written under duress. In view of this and the clear evidence that Akbar Khan was inciting the tribes to attack Jalalabad, it would, they decided, be highly imprudent to act upon it. George Broadfoot wholeheartedly supported the decision, writing in his diary, “Our duty in every case is clear—to stand fast to the last.” A few days earlier he had predicted the fate that would overtake the Kabul force if they were unwise enough to trust the Afghans, who would “probably inveigle them into the passes and attack them, and heavy indeed would be their loss without cattle, fuel or food, assailed night and day amidst the snow.”
Therefore, instead of preparing to withdraw, Sale wrote to the commander in chief in India, Sir Jasper Nicolls, that in the absence of orders from India he saw no reason to obey the instruction from Kabul, which had been forced upon the British “with the knives at their throat.” He asked for reinforcements from Peshawar before his ammunition and provisions ran out, and sensibly put his men to strengthening Jalalabad’s defenses further. On 12 January a message arrived reporting that the Kabul force had left the cantonments but been delayed at Boothak and that, though Akbar Khan was escorting the column, they feared he was trying to rouse the tribes against them. It was the last letter Sale would receive from an army that by then had ceased to exist.
The following day, 13 January, as Brydon was cautiously approaching, some of Sale’s men were digging a ditch around the northwestern bastion. Private Edward Teer, posted on sentry duty above the Kabul Gate on the west wall facing toward Gandamack, “suddenly descried a dark speck” and gave the alarm. Men grabbed their field glasses. According to the Reverend Gleig, they saw “leaning rather than sitting upon a miserable pony, a European, faint, as it seemed, from travel, if not sick, or perhaps wounded. It is impossible to describe the sort of thrill which ran through men’s veins as they watched the movements of the stranger.” The chaplain heard Colonel Dennie, who had been warning that “not a soul will escape from Kabul except one man; and he will come to tell us that the rest are destroyed,” exclaim, “Did I not say so? here comes the messenger.”
Cavalrymen galloped out to the slumped, swaying figure and, supporting him in the saddle, brought him in. Those gathering eagerly around learned that he was Dr. Brydon, “who at the moment believed himself to be,” wrote Gleig, “the sole survivor of General Elphinstone’s once magnificent little army.” Havelock described how “his first few hasty sentences extinguished all hope in the hearts of the listeners regarding the fortune of the Kabul force. It was evident that it was annihilated.” Brydon’s physical state shocked them. His body was a mass of cuts and abrasions, and his feet were so swollen with frostbite he could scarcely stand. Two days earlier he had lost a boot, and the freezing metal of the stirrup had burned his foot despite the twine he had wound around the stirrup. As for his pony, its legs were collapsing beneath it, and it died soon after.
Sale, whose thoughts must have flown instantly to his wife and daughter, at once dispatched cavalry to look for any other survivors, but “not a straggler, however—not a living soul, man, woman or child—appeared,” Reverend Gleig reported. They found only the mutilated corpses of Dr. Harpur and two of the officers who had been Brydon’s companions. That night and for several thereafter, Sale ordered night lanterns to be hung from poles around the ramparts, while “from time to time,” according to Gleig, “the bugles sounded the advance, in the hope that one or other of these beacons might guide some wanderer” through the darkness. No other Europeans came, but eventually about twenty sepoys reached Jalalabad. The bugle call, in the words of one of Sale’s captains, was only “a dirge for our slaughtered soldiers.”
Chapter Seventeen
This is the work of God that has come to pass … so that the whole of Islam united with one heart have engaged in a war against the infidels.
—AKBAR KHAN TO THE CHIEFS, FEBRUARY 1842
The main group of captives spent the nights of 9 and 10 January crammed into five dark rooms in the Khoord Kabul Fort, but compared to “the cold and misery [they] had been suffering in camp on the bare snow,” it was, Eyre thought, “heaven.” On 11 January their captors brought them toward Tezeen in the wake of the retreating British force. Though they could not know the full extent of the disaster overtaking the remnants of the Kabul force, they must have suspected the worst. “The snow was absolutely dyed with streaks and patches of blood for whole miles, and at every step we encountered the mangled bodies of British and Hindustani soldiers and helpless camp-followers, lying side by side … the red stream of life still trickling from many a gaping wound inflicted by the merciless Afghan knife,” wrote Eyre. Lady Sale described the “sickening” smell of blood and guiding her horse “so as not to tread on the bodies.”
Reaching the fort at Tezeen, the captives found Lieutenant Melville, who had surrendered to the Afghans the previous day having, Eyre noted unsympathetically, “received some slight sword cuts,” as well as some four hundred sepoy cavalry who had deserted to the enemy and were camped outside the fort. The next day at Seh-Baba—where the Kabul force had been attacked during its night-time flight toward the Jugdulluk Pass—gun carriages were still smoldering amid piles of bodies, including that of Dr. Duff, the surgeon whose hand had been amputated with a penknife. Camp followers sheltering among the rocks begged for food and clothing the captives could not provide. However, recognizing a wounded private, Mackenzie took him up behind him on his horse and when the horse tired, himself dismounted to walk thr
ough the snow even though one of his feet was badly frostbitten. They passed the night sixteen miles beyond Tezeen, crammed into one room and supplied with chapattis by an old woman who trebled her price when she saw how hungry the travelers were.
On 13 January—the day Dr. Brydon reached Jalalabad—they reached the village of Jugdulluk. Among the stone ruins where the British troops had crouched for shelter while Elphinstone and Shelton sought to negotiate with Akbar Khan, they discovered “a spectacle more terrible than any we had previously witnessed, the whole interior space being one crowded mass of bloody corpses,” as Eyre wrote. In some ragged tents the prisoners found Elphinstone, Shelton and Johnson, whom Akbar Khan had left there under guard after seizing them, and learned for the first time that they were also captives. The next morning, joined by Akbar Khan himself, the entire party was taken northward into hills, where “long glittering icicles” hung from the rocks.
IN JALALABAD, DEEPLY shocked by Dr. Brydon’s story, Sale feared that the triumphant Akbar Khan would soon attack the city. Indeed, he was so worried that he decided the best course was to attempt to negotiate the safe withdrawal of his garrison to India. Shah Shuja, in a bid to strengthen his position with the chiefs, had sent messengers with demands that Sale abide by the treaty between the British and the Afghans and depart. At a stormy council of war conducted over several days, Sale presented these as the justification for retreating. The majority of his officers initially supported him, but during the debate, in which “strong language” and “high words” flew, George Broadfoot argued passionately that retreat meant dishonor and managed to sway his fellow officers. Sale still disagreed but, finding himself outnumbered, gave in.
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