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

by George Bruce

  In another of the passes a detachment of sepoys was cut to pieces.

  Nusseer Khan, son of Mehrab Khan, the ruler who was killed in the fall of Kelat, then attacked Quetta, 300 miles south of Kabul. He was repulsed — only to assemble a force of some 12,000 men and attack his kingdom of Kelat, another 100 miles farther south. Held by Lieutenant Loveday and a garrison of 700 it soon fell. Loveday was captured, Nusseer Khan had him shackled and tortured. Some weeks later Loveday was found with his throat cut.

  In late November General Nott marched to reoccupy Kelat, 300 miles south, which it was thought essential to keep in British hands. When he was within two days’ march of it this veteran campaigner sent in proclamations assuring the inhabitants that if they remained quietly in their homes, they and their property would be protected and no violence would occur.

  The city’s dignitaries came to his camp the next night — ‘trembling and supplicating to know whether this could be true… I assured them,’ he related in a letter to his family, ‘told them that nothing could resist the force I had and said: “Go back to your city, and let me find the gates open on my arrival, and rest assured of complete protection.”’

  They believed him and thus Nott obtained possession of Kelat without firing a shot. This, he called ‘military management’. He put guards on the gates with orders to let no one enter — ‘absolutely necessary to quiet the fears of the people’. One of Macnaghten’s political officers was excluded — he protested rudely to Nott, who threatened him with arrest if he did not go at once to his tent.

  ‘He said no more, but went to his tent; but I dare say he will write a long story to the Envoy, and he will inform the Governor-General that he is horrified at my conduct… and I shall in due time hear something very wise from his Lordship, which I shall not care so much about, as my old grandmother would for a brass farthing. I have a sweet consolation — the devoted gratitude of an oppressed people.’

  Leaving a strong garrison, the magnanimous Nott then marched back to Kandahar, uneasy and sad about the directions things were taking. ‘All goes wrong here,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘we are become hated by the people and the English name and character, which two years ago stood so high and so fair, is become a bye-word.’

  Whatever hopes for a respite Macnaghten may have had at this juncture were now destroyed with the sudden appearance of Dost Mahommed between Saighan and Bamian, where the political officer Dr. Lord was conducting his operations about 100 miles north-west of Kabul.

  Alarmed at the reports of the large army that had flocked to the deposed ruler’s standard, Lord wrote to Macnaghten pleading for the immediate dispatch of a brigade of troops, about 1,000 men.

  Macnaghten had no wish to scatter his meagre army even more, but seeing danger in this possible attack from Dost Mahommed at his back he sent the able Lieutenant-Colonel Dennie, with cavalry, a battery of horse-artillery and the 35th Regiment of Native Infantry — all told about 1,200 men. Dennie arrived on 14 September 1840 and took command.

  Four days later he heard report of the enemy. He rode out to meet them in a valley with 500 infantry supported by 300 cavalry and two 9-pounders. Overwhelming the enemy outposts, he rounded a bend — and came face to face with Dost Mahommed — at the head of a glittering army of several thousand.

  Dennie attacked without hesitation. The guns boomed, cutting down scores of the assembled tribesmen, who turned and fled even before the Gurkha infantry could get to grips. The cavalry went after them with slashing sabres. Somehow the wily Dost Mahommed escaped in the confusion, but lost his tents, his horses and his personal equipment.

  Joyful news for the worried Macnaghten and frightened Shah Shuja, was Dennie’s victory and the peace it brought for the time being to this troubled region. It seemed that the main threat to the kingdom was overcome now that Dost Mahommed was again a fugitive without an army. But this elation alas, was short-lived. Macnaghten was soon fuming and Shah Shuja soon sighing again.

  For Dost Mahommed reappeared in Kohistan, north of Kabul, where he was aware that the discontent that racked the country was most rife and where the chiefs most strongly opposed the Shah’s persistent tax demands. Dost Mahommed’s own rule had been weakest in Kohistan. He had executed rebellious chiefs and imposed heavy taxation himself there.

  These self-same chiefs had as a result cautiously welcomed Shuja on his arrival fourteen months ago, but now the injustice of his rule, the presence of foreign troops to support it and the parsimony of his reward for their loyalty to him had made them so furious that they willingly supported their old oppressor.

  Macnaghten next heard of plots by Dost Mahommed under his very nose in the city of Kabul. Alarmed, he recalled the stalwart Dennie with his artillery and infantry and at the same time summoned the Kohistan chiefs to Kabul. Willingly enough the chiefs swore allegiance in a flurry of swollen turbans and ballooning cotton trousers made deep obeissance to the Shah, who hiding behind his dyed beard, stared at them with a curious mixture of fear and hauteur.

  But Macnaghten, the astute orientalist, had not been taken in by their submissive assurances; nor perhaps had Shah Shuja. But neither guessed that the chiefs, observing how small was the garrison at Kabul, had returned to their mountain forts bound by solemn agreements to overthrow the Shah. These secret plans were now revealed in letters between them that Macnaghten intercepted.

  Macnaghten decided then not to wait for precise news of Dost Mahommed’s whereabouts and sent Sir Alexander Burnes with a force under the command of General Sale to attack the Kohistan chiefs in their own strongholds before the Amir could organise a large-scale rising.

  For the next three weeks Sale marched his small force of infantry, cavalry and five guns from fort to fort in the parched and stony landscape, losing officers and men in frequent skirmishes, subjected to night attacks, but never managing to track down the Amir himself.

  Dost Mahommed threaded defiles, descended gorges only to scale them again, hovered on the outskirts of various towns and came near enough to the British camp to put the troops on the alert for a battle. Having the entire region with him he successfully baffled every attempt at surprise and even had followers among the Shah’s own troops.

  But General Sale never relaxed his efforts and finally at the end of October ran the Amir to earth in a valley dotted with orchards and small forts. Dost Mahommed had again been warned and as the British cavalry rode up a party of two or three hundred Afghan horsemen led by the Amir rode away up the nearby hills. Captain Fraser led two squadrons of Bengal cavalry to head them off at the top of the valley. The Afghan horsemen now wheeled to face Fraser and his cavalry down in the valley below.

  Dost Mahommed is reported then to have doffed his huge turban — a religious act — pointed to his green-and-white banner, called on his men in the name of the Prophet to follow him against the unbelievers and led a charge down the hillside.

  Fraser had formed up his troopers, but a distant bugle suddenly sounded the ‘retire’. Instead, Fraser gave the word to charge and spurred his horse as the Afghans thundered down. The British officers all charged, but whether the bugle had confused the sepoy troops or the charging Afghans had unnerved them, was never known.

  They broke and fled. Five British officers and Dr. Lord hurled themselves alone at the several hundred Afghans in a crazily brave but disastrous do-or-die attempt.

  Lieutenants Broadfoot and Crispin and Dr. Lord were hacked to pieces within seconds. Lieutenant Ponsonby, wounded in the arm and slashed from forehead to chin, hardly able to see through his own blood, and with his reins cut, was miraculously carried out of the hurly-burly by his horse, whose ears were hacked off.

  Wounded in the back, Fraser fought his way clear and, only half-conscious, with his right hand nearly cut off, rode back to Sale to tell of the disaster.

  Dost Mahommed and his men escaped over the hills.

  Burnes at once wrote to Macnaghten, without consulting General Sale, to say that there was no choice but to fall
back on Kabul, where, he advised, all the troops in the northern command should be concentrated — an absurd decision, it turned out.

  At Kabul meanwhile, Macnaghten, already aware that an uprising was only too likely, had mounted cannon on the Bala Hissar to frighten the city — and was even considering whether he ought not concentrate all troops in the fortress, so gloomy were his expectations.

  He is reported to have received Burnes’s letter on 3 November, the day after the clash with Dost Mahommed, while taking his afternoon ride on the Kabul plain. There, not much more than a year before, he had seen himself as monarch supreme. Its contents must have sunk him into even deeper dejection.

  But at that moment occurred a strange reversal of fortune. An Afghan horseman rode up to him and announced that the Amir was present.

  ‘What Amir?’ asked Macnaghten.

  ‘Dost Mahommed,’ was the answer.

  The Amir presented himself, dismounted before the astonished Macnaghten, presented his sword and said that he wished to surrender. Macnaghten, despite all his vilification of the Amir in the past, returned it to him and the two rode together into the cantonments.

  The only explanation of Dost Mahommed’s surrender — especially after a minor but encouraging victory — can be that after fifteen months he was weary of the life of a fugitive — that he had little confidence in the loyalty of the Afghans towards him — and that he wished to be reunited with his family, who were then under house arrest in Ghazni.

  His voluntary surrender at once changed the outlook from a critical to a reasonably hopeful one. Shah Shuja’s authority might be established fairly easily now that Dost Mahommed, the main encouragement to rebellion, would soon be exiled far off in India.

  Macnaghten was overjoyed. Some weeks earlier he had written to Auckland: ‘No mercy should be shown to the man who is the author of all the evils that are now distracting the country; but, should we be so fortunate as to secure the person of Dost Mahommed, I shall request his Majesty not to execute him until I can ascertain his Lordship’s sentiments.’

  A ruthless enough letter, beneath the obsequious phrases, but now Macnaghten wrote: ‘I trust that the Dost will be treated with liberality. His case has been compared to that of Shah Shuja; and I have seen it argued that he should not be treated more handsomely than his Majesty was; but surely the cases are not parallel. The Shah had no claim on us. We had no hand in depriving him of his kingdom; whereas we ejected the Dost, who never offended us, in support of our policy of which he was the victim.’

  Macnaghten was the chief of those who plotted to depose Dost Mahommed on the grounds that he was a danger to British India. Now he admitted that the Amir had ‘never offended us’ and that he was the victim of our policy. Macnaghten’s extraordinary vanity and ambition did much to blunt his capacities. But these handicaps could surely not have blinded him to the logic of his observations about Dost Mahommed as they affected the entire invasion. He could hardly have shut his eyes to the fact that with its ruinous cost in blood, reputation and treasure it was nothing more than a monstrous sham and should never have been launched.

  The Amir’s surrender brought a short lull — the restive chieftains may have paused to take stock of the new situation — but no real return to calm or to acceptance of the Shah and his British masters. And by the end of 1840 a new stage in the government of the country had arrived — Macnaghten had decided that interference in the internal affairs of the country — for example, in the control of revenue — had become vital for the establishment of tranquillity. Other realistic appraisals followed.

  Geneal Cotton resigned his command on the grounds of ill-health and his need to return to England, but before leaving he put on record his view that without the support of British troops the Shah had not the slightest chance of keeping his throne.

  Then Sir Jasper Nichols, Command-in-Chief India, a wise and experienced old commander, argued, in a long analysis for the Governor-General, that Shah Shuja could neither survive alone, be replaced nor simply be withdrawn. The British would be obliged to continue to rule in his name and pay his personal, civil and military costs. Afghanistan could not be held with less than three British and ten native regiments. As this was likely to become permanent, in view of our other needs an increase in the army was necessary.

  Auckland was shaken by the document. He put it aside for some weeks, then in January 1841 it was rejected by the Governor-General in Council. The army in India had already between 1838 and 1841 been increased by about 50,000 men.

  The cost of Afghanistan was now officially estimated at the colossal sum of £8 million. In fact, it was even more, and the Bombay Times, using information from the Government Gazette and the Army List, accurately put it at a total of £12 million.

  It had become a matter of the utmost gravity for India. Early in 1841 the Accountant-General wrote to Lord Auckland advising the unprecedented step of the total prohibition for the time being of all further cash remittances to England. The treasuries were bare. Yet the war began with a £10 million cash surplus in India.

  In April 1841 Auckland was obliged to launch a loan at five per cent interest — it was a high rate, the British bank rate was only two and a half per cent — but the response was so poor that he had to increase the interest considerably to offset the lack of public confidence.

  There were other repercussions. Taxation was increased to help meet the ceaseless demands for money. Measures to develop cotton production and plans for steam navigation in India were shelved indefinitely, through lack of funds. And all this was to retard the progress of the peoples of India upon which the more enlightened men in the government had set their hopes.

  In England when these facts began to penetrate informed opinion, there was, to say the least, some disappointment. Even at the start of the war most of the East India Company Court of Directors were hostile to it. The chairman, Sir John Hobhouse, was said not to have risked asking his colleagues for their approval.

  But when Ghazni fell and Kabul was occupied the whole country was carried away by shouts of triumph. It was looked upon as the bitterest party rancour even slightly to criticise the campaign. Auckland was made an earl: Sir John Keane was raised to the peerage and a pension of £2,000 a year given to him and the next two generations of his descendants.

  The general impression under these circumstances was of the acquisition of much territory and huge additions to the revenue. Hardly anyone expected that the laurels reaped had cost India £10 million and that England’s new ally Shah Shuja could only be kept on his throne by 10,000 British bayonets and an expenditure of £3 million a year, and that the return for all this was less than nothing.

  In parliament, the opposition were silenced both by the great victories and by deliberate deception, for while all Afghanistan simmered with plans for rebellion, Lord Palmerston, the Foreign Secretary, was assuring the nation that tranquillity and prosperity reigned and that our policy would soon prove to have been one of the miracles of modern statesmanship. A general election approached and Palmerston travelled the country saying that Englishmen could ride from one end of Afghanistan to the other unarmed and in perfect safety.

  ‘The progress of British arms in Asia,’ he assured the electorate in Tiverton, ‘has been marked by a scrupulous reference to justice, an inviolable respect for property, an abstinence from anything which could tend to wound the feelings and prejudices of the people…’

  Palmerston must have had details of the reports from Lord Auckland to Sir John Hobhouse which showed on the contrary, that the initial invasion and the attempt at pacification had given way to a defensive war on the part of the British and that they were then engaged in no less than five separate military actions.

  But in the deception of the British public over the war this was relatively nothing. The summit of deceit was reached with the publication of a government Blue Book allegedly reporting the early negotiations leading up to the war. In it Burnes’s letters describing Dost Mahommed
’s wish for an alliance with the British were doctored — in effect forged — to give an opposite meaning. Letters which could not be fixed in this way were deliberately left out. The very opposite of the truth was thus foisted on the public in England. And Auckland made no protest whatsoever over what was then as wicked an example of political villainy as any in history. It saved his face, for the truth did not come out until years later.

  In Afghanistan the military situation meantime continued to deteriorate. The health of the troops had been seriously affected by the unceasing marching, riding and fighting without rest or let-up. The Bombay Times in May 1841 reported an officially corrected list of thirty-three actions during the previous twelve months. The British had won only thirteen of them. At Kabul almost every battalion needed relief. Colonel Shelton had been ordered to lead a relief brigade through the Khyber Pass to Kabul, but it would take him at least four months.

  Moreover, the domination of the military by the political officers was by the start of 1841 beginning to demoralise the army and about this General Cotton protested strongly before his departure for India: ‘Some check must be imposed, or the whole system must be altered as regards young political officers sent to accompany regular troops. Much disgust has arisen from this and it is absurd that old experienced military men should be under the orders of lieutenants merely because they place after their names “Acting Assistant Political Agent”.’

  General Nott had a few weeks earlier used somewhat blunter language in a prophetic letter home: ‘The conduct of the one thousand and one politicals has ruined our cause and bared the throat of every European in this country to the sword and knife of the revengeful Afghan… and unless several regiments be quickly sent not a man will be left to note the fall of his comrades. Nothing but force will ever make them submit to the hated Shah Shuja, who is most certainly as great a scoundrel as ever lived.’

  Several of Shuja’s sons of his numerous wives had been given official posts. With the possible exception of Prince Timour they were even less suited to responsibility than their father. One of them, Sufter Jung, made governor of Kandahar province with a salary of £140 a month, swiftly increased it to the very princely sum of £10,000 a month through the crudest extortion — the arrest of prosperous merchants and their torture until relatives paid £500 or more for their release.