Yet Ellenborough should not have been surprised. Nott’s stubbornness was legendary, while Sir Jasper Nicolls, Ellenborough’s commander in chief, had warned him weeks before that Pollock was his own man and would “stand alone.”
However, as the weeks passed, Ellenborough began to change his mind. If his generals had withdrawn their troops immediately after Sale’s defeat of Akbar Khan as he had wanted, he could successfully have claimed that the Afghans had been punished. However, to pull out of Afghanistan now, after months of doing nothing, would smack of failure, especially when political and public opinion in India and at home was clamoring for action to rescue the hostages and inflict revenge. On 4 July Ellenborough sent Nott and Pollock revised orders. Though his instructions to withdraw to India still stood, Nott could retreat via Kabul if he wished and—if he did—Pollock could advance to the capital in a joint operation with him. He had not consulted his commander in chief, Sir Jasper Nicolls, who complained in his diary, “[Ellenborough’s] want of decent attention to my position is inexcusable.”
Ellenborough explained his equivocatory reasoning in a letter to the Duke of Wellington, who had been foremost among those urging him to restore Britain’s reputation in the East: “The case is one in which, at this distance, I could not direct an advance, but, at the same time, I should hardly be justified in continuing to prohibit it.” To Sir Robert Peel he wrote an unusually long seven-page letter justifying his action and arguing that if Nott and Pollock succeeded they could reclaim the honor of the British army “in triumph upon the scene of its late disaster.”
Nott, as Ellenborough knew he would, chose to advance on Kabul. Fearing that Nott might already have departed for India instead, Pollock sent letter after letter to Kandahar, sometimes using rice water as “invisible ink.” Then in mid-August he received Nott’s confirmation that he was indeed going to Kabul.
The governor-general still continued to limit his generals’ objectives, instructing Pollock, “The object of the combined march of your army and Major General Nott’s upon Kabul will be to exhibit our strength where we suffered defeat, to inflict just, but not vindictive retribution upon the Afghans, and to recover the guns and colours as well as the prisoners lost by our army.” That done, come what may, Nott and Pollock were “to obey the positive orders of your government to withdraw your army from Afghanistan.” Also they were not to involve themselves in internal politics. Any British commitments or obligations had died with Shah Shuja, and they had to concur with “whatever government or person the Afghans may prefer.”
When Akbar Khan discovered that the British intended to advance, not withdraw, he flew into a rage, threatening to sell all the captives to the slave markets in Turkestan. However, on calmer reflection he realized his best course was to maintain a dialogue with Pollock. Mackenzie was very ill with typhus, so Akbar Khan sent Lawrence and Troup as his new envoys to Jalalabad.
Preoccupied with planning for the advance, Pollock saw no point in further negotiations and gave Lawrence and Troup a noncommittal reply. He was well aware from messages sent by the British agent Mohan Lal of the chaotic political situation in Kabul. Lal had also been intriguing among the chiefs, trying to detach them from Akbar Khan and seeking promises that the hostages would be neither killed nor sold. Realizing Lal was a spy and that he had access to British funds, on 22 June Akbar Khan had seized him and had him tortured in the Balla Hissar. However, Lal was still managing to communicate with Pollock, describing merciless beatings and how Akbar Khan had extracted thousands of rupees from him and was threatening to blind him unless he provided more. Pollock warned Akbar Khan that the British would hold him accountable for Lal’s well-being, and the torture ceased, though Lal remained a prisoner. During his incarceration Lal was comforted by John Conolly, shortly to die of a heart attack not long after hearing that his brother Arthur, still a captive of the psychotic emir of Bokhara, had been publicly beheaded, together with his fellow prisoner Colonel Charles Stoddart. The news that the Afghans had destroyed a British army had convinced the emir that the British were weak and hence keeping the two officers alive any longer was pointless.
On 7 August Nott finally left Kandahar for Kabul, leading what he proudly described as “a compact and well-tried force” of six thousand, having dispatched the remainder of his army to Quetta. Ahead of him lay a difficult three hundred miles. On 20 August Pollock and Sale marched out of Jalalabad with eight thousand men to begin their shorter journey of some ninety miles. Pollock had ordered baggage be kept to a minimum, eliminating the sideboards, dressing tables and trunks of dress uniforms that had so encumbered the Army of the Indus. The troops were, in Private Teer’s words, “eager to march anywhere” to escape Jalalabad’s heat and stench and its clouds of flies. According to the Reverend Gleig, they came “in myriads … The very air became black with them; and they entered into men’s food, and crawled over their persons, polluting whatever they touched. It was a season of intense suffering … and the sufferers from a burning heat sought shelter against it by digging holes in the ground and sleeping in them at the hazard of being buried alive, as in one instance, at least, actually befell.”
Akbar Khan’s reaction to the British advance was to order all his hostages taken north toward Bamiyan with an escort commanded by a deserter from Shah Shuja’s infantry, Saleh Mohammed. The group had recently been joined by five officers given as hostages before the retreat from Kabul and also the officers taken prisoner at Ghazni, whose commanding officer, Colonel Palmer, had been badly tortured because the Afghans had suspected him of having buried treasure in the citadel. The youngest hostage to set out into the mountainous northern wilds was Lady Sale’s granddaughter, born to Alexandrina Sturt just a month earlier. On previous journeys the women had sometimes been insulted by Afghans affronted by their bare faces and heads. This time they wore Afghan dress, “the outer garment of which consists of a large and white sheet completely shrouding the body, to which is attached the bourkha, or veil, of white muslin, with only a small open space of network opposite the eyes to peep through,” as Eyre described.
On 30 August Nott saw his first serious fighting when an army of twelve thousand men, led by the governor of Ghazni, advanced to confront him, but his men routed the Afghans. Ghazni itself fell six days later without a fight. Nott ordered his engineers to destroy the citadel. The flames were still rising as his army marched onward, carrying with them, as explicitly commanded by Ellenborough, the sandalwood gates of the ancient tomb of Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni, supposedly looted from the Indian temple at Somnath centuries earlier. He hoped to gain great kudos by returning them to India. An irritated officer complained that the gates were “an endless trouble to us, as they were very large and heavy, and all our bullocks weak, very sulky and would not work. Consequently the men had in many cases to pull them along.”
By this time Pollock had reached Gandamack to find it “literally covered with skeletons, most of them bleached by exposure to the rain and sun, but many having hair of a colour which enabled us to recognise the remains of our own countrymen.” On 1 September Futteh Jung rode into the British encampment to ask for sanctuary. Having been robbed of his gold, silver and jewels and virtually imprisoned in the Balla Hissar by Akbar Khan, he had managed to escape and gone in search of Pollock’s advancing army. Though Ellenborough had warned Pollock not to take sides, he treated the new arrival with deference, even ordering a salute to be fired in his honor.
By 12 September Pollock was encamped near the entrance to the narrow Tezeen Pass. As an officer recalled, that night Afghan sharpshooters fired on the British from the heights above, “their bullets … flying like hail among our tents,” while their war chant of Huk! Huk! Huk! resounded all night long. The next day the British had advanced barely two miles into the pass “when suddenly a long sheet of flame issued from the heights on each side, and a thousand balls came whizzing and whistling about our heads. The hills were lined with the enemy in great force.”
This “
great force” was perhaps the largest yet to confront the British in Afghanistan: sixteen thousand men, commanded by Akbar Khan himself, in a last desperate bid to hold back the avenging British. Once again, Pollock employed the tactic he had used in forcing the Khyber of denying his attackers the high ground by sending troops to storm the heights. “Up we went, helter, skelter … and in a short time we were up and at them,” wrote an officer. The Afghans roared insults of “dogs, kafirs and the like” at the onrushing British, but at the sight of their bayonets they fled, scrambling yet higher to get away: “The Afghans would stand like statues against firing but the sight of the bristling line of cold steel they could not endure!” Then at a signal from the valley floor, the assault force flung themselves to the ground as Pollock’s howitzers hurled shrapnel shells onto the ridges above them. Looking to the crest, an officer saw an Afghan carrying “a large blood-red standard in a very exposed position … brandishing his tulwar in his right hand and daring the soldiers to come on.” The British rushed forward again, driving the enemy from ridge to ridge. Broadfoot and his Gurkhas were among the pursuers, so that, according to an officer, “far in the distance were to be seen small parties of these diminutive warriors, driving strong bodies of Afghans before them.”
The troops seized Akbar Khan’s camp and burned his tent, where, as so often related in military tales, a feast had apparently already been laid out for him to celebrate his anticipated victory. Akbar Khan himself fled northward, leaving Pollock to pass unopposed through the Khoord Kabul defile, where an officer described an “awful scene of slaughter … the remains of the poor victims of Elphinstone’s imbecility and of Afghan treachery lay in frightful numbers, some on their backs at full length, having evidently met the happiest fate, instantaneous death; others with their limbs contracted … as if they had died in agony … groups of skeletons and bodies were huddled together, near what had evidently been a fire, by which they had endeavoured to postpone the awful fate which overtook them, and hundreds of others lying around—freezing to death! The greatest portion … were mere skeletons, but there were many to which the flesh still clung and whose features were recognisable.”
On 15 September Pollock’s army camped on the Kabul racecourse laid out by the British when they had happily anticipated time for leisure pursuits. Mohan Lal, who had escaped from his prison a week earlier, arrived to tell Pollock what he knew of the hostages’ whereabouts. Pollock dispatched six hundred Kizzilbashi soldiers provided by Lal’s friend and protector Shirin Khan, under his military secretary Richmond Shakespear, to locate them. Unknown to Pollock or Lal, the prisoners, who had reached Bamiyan, in the territory of the Hazaras, on 2 September, were already free, though still in considerable danger.*
Their liberty was the result of their jailer’s greed. Captain Johnson had been trying to convince Saleh Mohammed that the British would reward him well if he released the prisoners. Guessing it would probably be expedient to side with the British once more, Saleh Mohammed had recently taken to dressing in a European officer’s blue frock coat and was showing himself receptive. However, he was also still receiving orders from Akbar Khan. On 11 September he confided in Pottinger he had received two letters. The first, from Akbar Khan, ordered him to take the hostages north into the Hindu Kush and sell them to the Uzbeks. The second, from Mohan Lal, offered him a pension for life if he released his prisoners. Realizing that this was their chance for freedom, Pottinger summoned the other officers, and the men borrowed Lady Sale’s room for a private conference during which they succeeded in convincing Saleh Mohammed that Lal’s letter was genuine. Five officers signed a bond guaranteeing him one thousand rupees a month and twenty thousand rupees subject to the hostages’ safe arrival at Kabul—money that he would never receive—and he gave them back their freedom for the first time in more than eight months.
As yet the former prisoners had no way of knowing what had been happening in the wider world, and their first fear was that they might be attacked, recaptured and even sold into slavery. Johnson wrote they “were determined rather to die at Bamiyan than to perish in a dungeon in Turkestan” and immediately “laid in provisions, dug wells, filled the ditches round the fort with water, and were all prepared for a siege.” Pottinger, meanwhile, with remarkable confidence summoned local Hazara leaders to demand their allegiance. When the governor of the province refused, Johnson described how the former hostages “deposed him and set up another!”
On 15 September they learned that Akbar Khan was in flight from the British and decided to try to reach Kabul. Saleh Mohammed obtained some muskets so they could defend themselves if attacked, but when Lawrence asked for volunteers from the released private soldiers to form a guard, the men were silent, causing Lady Sale to exclaim, “You had better give me [a musket] and I will lead the party.” The next day the group of twenty officers, half of whom were wounded, fifty-one other ranks, twelve women and twenty-two children set out for Kabul, fearful that at any moment they might encounter Akbar Khan’s retreating forces. However, that night a messenger brought word that Shakespear was on his way to find them, and their spirits rose.
The following day, while they were resting, they saw a cloud of dust on the skyline. They hoped it was Shakespear but took up defensive positions until, as Lawrence wrote, the dust indeed “announced the advance of our friends.” An emotional Shakespear, dressed in Afghan clothing, rushed to embrace Lady Sale, only to be rebuked by Shelton, curmudgeonly to the last, for not first paying his respects to him as the senior commanding officer. Knowing that strong bands of Afghans were not far away, Shakespear urged the group to keep going as fast as they could. Three days later, they met Sale at the head of a party of dragoons. Lady Sale wrote with rare emotion of her reunion with her husband: “happiness so long delayed, as to be almost unexpected, was actually painful, and accompanied by a choking sensation which could not obtain the relief of tears.” Pollock had originally intended to dispatch Nott, not Sale, in Shakespear’s wake. However, Nott had reached Kabul on 17 September to find, to his disappointment, that Pollock had beaten him, and objected that his men were tired, adding, in a clear reference to Ellenborough’s previous lack of concern for the hostages, that since the government “had thrown the prisoners overboard, why then should he rescue them?”
On their way to Pollock’s camp, the former captives passed through Kabul, where, as Eyre noted, “the streets were almost empty, and an unnatural silence prevailed … We passed the spot where Sir Alexander Burnes’s house had stood.—It was now a heap of rubbish.—The garden in which he took so much interest and pride, was a desolate waste.” Reaching the camp, they were greeted by a twenty-one-gun salute, and soldiers crowded around congratulating them on their rescue. Captain Warburton was soon united with his Afghan wife and baby son, born in a Ghilzai fort between Jugdulluk and Gandamack eight weeks earlier. His wife had fled their burning house in the city after insurgents had set it alight on the day of Burnes’s murder. Since then well-wishers had concealed her, even though her cousin Akbar Khan had sworn to punish her for marrying an infidel; he had sent his soldiers to raid houses where she was believed to be hiding, “thrusting in all directions with their lances and swords, trying to find out her hiding-place” so that “she had often to run away from one house thus treated to take shelter in another,” as her son later wrote in his memoirs. The other British hostages in and around Kabul had also been rescued, including some two thousand sepoys and camp followers, many crippled through frostbite, found begging in the streets of Kabul.
All that remained was to deliver retribution. Pollock sent troops to seize and sack the fortified town of Istalif, where Amenoolah Khan was believed to have fled. There the soldiers released a further five hundred sepoys being kept captive in terrible conditions and exacted such revenge that a young lieutenant described how the brutality made him feel like a licensed assassin. On 9 October Pollock ordered his engineers to destroy Kabul’s seventeenth-century Grand Bazaar, where Macnaghten’s mutilated
remains had been displayed, though he told them to position the charges in such a way that the surrounding portions of the city would be unharmed. According to one of Pollock’s men, the bazaar was still “a splendid arcade, six hundred feet long, with two thousand shops, all roofed over from end to end with glass,” where mouth-watering fruit and other delicacies were piled. Pollock’s decision to flatten it annoyed Nott, who thought it would have made more military sense to blow up the Balla Hissar. Nevertheless, the bazaar went up in smoke and flames. Despite Pollock’s orders that there was to be no looting, an officer described how when people heard the explosions “the cry went forth that Kabul was given up to plunder. Both camps rushed into the city, and the consequence has been the almost total destruction of all parts of the town.” Lal was deeply upset that the houses and shops of many who had befriended him were destroyed.
On 12 October Pollock and Nott led their forces from Kabul back toward India. Futteh Jung had wisely decided to go with them, leaving young Prince Shapur, another of Shah Shuja’s sons, on the throne. Though the British had nominally recognized Shapur, they left him neither military nor financial support. Akbar Khan soon arrived in Kabul to chase him from the throne, and in early 1843 Dost Mohammed returned from exile to resume his place as emir. About to leave India behind him, Dost Mohammed would tell his British “hosts”: “I have been struck with the magnitude of your resources, your ships, your arsenals; but what I cannot understand is why the rulers of an empire so vast and flourishing should have gone across the Indus to deprive me of my poor and barren country.”
The retreating British force reached Jalalabad safely, transiting passes that were, according to an officer, “strewn with skeletons of men and animals … Our gun-wheels ground to dust the bones of the dead … In some places the Affghans … had placed the skeletons in the arms one of the other, or sometimes sitting or standing against the rocks as if they were holding a conversation!” In Jalalabad they delayed several days to pull down the fortifications Broadfoot and his sappers had so carefully constructed before entering the Khyber Pass. Though the vanguard got through the pass without difficulty, Khyberees fell on the rear, picking off stragglers and carrying off baggage. A young lieutenant and an ensign became the last men to die in action during a conflict that had claimed so many thousands of lives.
The Dark Defile Page 29