by George Bruce
The outcome reads like a roll of honour. Captains Swayne and Robinson and four men were killed at once; Lieutenants Hallahan, Evans, Fortye and sixteen men wounded in less than 50 yards. It now seemed to the officer upon whom the command fell, noted Vincent Eyre, ‘impracticable to bring off Ensign Warren’s party without risking the annihilation of his own; he therefore returned forthwith to cantonments’.
Elphinstone, it appears, did not believe in night attacks — they did not make them in the Peninsular War, twenty-five years before, and he turned down suggestions that further efforts should be postponed until dark. On his orders, a party of cavalry now galloped out into this withering fire, intending first to sabre the marksmen in the King’s Garden, but they found the gate shut. They had already lost eight troopers killed and fourteen badly wounded so they, too, retreated into the cantonments.
One wonders at the mental state of Elphinstone in deciding to abandon the commissariat fort. Had he forgotten perhaps, that the food was there? Or is it possible that he didn’t know? It must be remembered that logistics before the twentieth century were beneath many generals’ notice — matters for less gentlemanly officers. A likely explanation was that Elphinstone — ‘the most gentleman-like officer in the Household Brigade’ — had hardly bothered himself about the whereabouts of such mundane things as provisions.
Lady Sale seems to support this view. ‘The General appears to be kept in a deplorable state of ignorance,’ she noted. ‘Although reports are sent in daily, he scarcely knows what supplies are in store, or what is our real daily consumption.’
And Elphinstone was at this particular time more sick than usual. He had been helped on to his horse the day before, so that he could inspect and inspire the troops. The animal fell and rolled on him when he was already suffering the agonies of rheumatic gout, weakened by malaria and shattered mentally by the strain of his command. From that moment onwards he seems to have been incapable of taking a rational decision.
Captain Boyd learned that these sorties were not to reinforce the commissariat fort but to help in giving it up. Horrified, he hurried off to try to make the old man realise how disastrous it would be — the fort, he explained, held not only the reserves of wheat but also rum, wine, beer, medicine and hospital stores of all kinds — without which nothing could be done for the wounded — as well as all reserves of uniforms and boots.
General Elphinstone, who now for the first time understood why the fort must be held and that loss of these stores would mean starvation, promised to reinforce it and to send a letter ordering Warren to hold out at all costs. This message Warren later denied ever having received. Certainly no reinforcements were sent, and as night fell Captain Boyd to his bitter disappointment saw that there were no preparations to do this.
Together with Captain Johnson, he again went to see the General, where, says Kaye ‘the two officers, in emphatic language pointed out the terrible results of the sacrifice of our supplies’. The General listened and agreed and was ready to promise all that was asked. Then came another note from Warren saying that the enemy were mining below the walls while his sepoys were climbing over them and running away — that the enemy were also preparing to burn down the gate and that if reinforcements were not sent at once he would not be able to hold out. A message was sent that he would be reinforced by 2 a.m.
At midnight, Elphinstone, two of his staff — Major Thain and Captain Grant — together with the two commissariat officers, Boyd and Johnson, and Lieutenant Vincent Eyre, were still debating what to do, with Boyd, Johnson and Eyre all urging the General to reinforce the commissariat at once.
Macnaghten walked in and said bluntly that unless Mahomed Shereef’s fort were taken that very night, we should ‘lose the commissariat fort or at all events be unable to bring provisions out of it for the troops’. Macnaghten had no idea that Elphinstone had already decided to abandon it.
The General now answered that the disasters of the day made him unwilling to expose his men again. It was patiently explained to him that it would be hard for the Afghan marksmen to hit our men during darkness, and besides, they kept a poor watch at night.
A loyal tribesman employed by Captain Johnson was sent out to reconnoitre. ‘He returned in a few minutes with the intelligence that about twenty men were seated outside the fort near the gate smoking and talking and from what he heard of their conversation he judged the garrison to be very small and unable to resist a sudden onset,’ noted Johnson.
Another hour passed in useless debate, but still the General hesitated. A second spy was sent, whose report tallied with-that of the first. Still vacillating crazily, Elphinstone now sent Lieutenant Eyre to get the opinion of another lieutenant — Sturt, the engineer officer, lying wounded in Lady Sale’s house and hardly able to speak.
Sturt, says Eyre, ‘at first expressed himself in favour of an immediate attack, but on hearing that some of the enemy were on watch at the gate, he judged it prudent to defer the assault till an early hour in the morning…’.
And this young lieutenant’s opinion finally, after hours of debate, enabled the General to make up his mind to attack at dawn. Orders were given for about 100 men to be ready at 4 a.m. Captain Bellew volunteered to blow open the gate of Mahomed Shereef’s fort while another detachment marched to the relief of the commissariat fort. It was well after dawn, however, before the men were under arms, and then it was too late.
Lieutenant Warren, unable to hold out any longer, arrived with his garrison, having tunnelled beneath the fort’s walls and escaped, leaving all the army’s stores and provisions to the Afghans. The attack on Mahomed Shereef’s fort was at once abandoned.
That day, 5 November, Captain Ponsonby, the Assistant Adjutant-General, ordered Warren in a public letter to state the reasons for abandoning his post. Warren responded to this attempt to brand him by coolly saying he was ready to do so before a court of inquiry, which he requested might be set up to investigate his conduct. But the abysmal story of the failure to reinforce him would have reflected upon the General and no inquiry was held.
Thus in three days only, Elphinstone’s fatal leadership had lost the army its entire three months’ reserves of food and medical supplies. Quite apart from the loss of the forts upon which the defence of the cantonments depended, the General had placed his men, the camp-followers and their women and children practically at the mercy of a ferocious and vengeful enemy. Only a miracle could save them now.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
That wintry morning, 5 November 1841, Captain Johnson reported in his Journal: ‘Ere noon thousands and thousands had assembled from far and wide to participate in the booty of the English dogs, each man taking away with him as much as he could carry — and to this we were all eyewitnesses.’
The sight, barely 400 yards distant, of sacks of flour, barrels of beer, great stone jars of rum being manhandled away by the Afghans, caused ‘a universal feeling of indignation to pervade the garrison’ Vincent Eyre noted, and ‘the impatience of the troops, but especially the native portion, to be led out for its recapture’ — could not be ignored even by the defeatist commanders.
Eyre went to the General and ‘strenuously urged’ him to send a party to capture Mahomed Shereef’s fort by blowing open the gate. Against any sudden advance of Afghan cavalry, he volunteered to hold the road with two 9-pounder guns, under cover of whose bombardment the storming party could advance, protected from the fire of the fort by a low wall.
Elphinstone agreed, but in a note to Macnaghten about it showed only confusion and worry about failure. ‘After due consideration,’ he wrote, ‘we have determined on attacking the fort this morning with 50 men of the 44th and 200 Native Infantry. We will first try to breach the place and shell it as well as we can… It seems the centre… is filled with buildings; therefore if we succeed in blowing open the gate, we should only be exposed to a destructive fire from the buildings, which… would no doubt be occupied in force, supported from the garden. Carrying powder-bag
s up under fire would have a chance of failure. Our men have been all night in the works, are tired, and ill-fed; but we must hope for the best and securing our commissariat fort with the stores.’
Then followed the most cowardly suggestion of all: ‘It behoves us to look to the consequences of failure: in this case I know not how we are to subsist, or, from want of provisions to retreat. You should therefore, consider what chance there is of making terms, if we are driven to this extremity.’
After three days’ avoiding attacking the enemy, Elphinstone now talked of surrender. Some contemporary writers on this war, notably Vincent Eyre, shed tears for Elphinstone, when they might better have felt anger. The General clung jealously and needlessly to his command when it must have been clear, even to him, that he was no longer fit for it — when already by his incapacity he had sent many men to their deaths and was now edging the whole army to its doom.
One stroke of his pen under an order appointing either the most senior or the most capable officer in his place could have restored to the force its confidence and skill, so that before it was overcome by starvation, it could have met and defeated the Afghans — which past experience shows it could easily have done.
But the aristocratic self-esteem with which Elphinstone was saturated, tied his hands. He hung on — helped out of bed, across to his desk and back to bed again. His helplessness, his impotence, it will be seen, began to cripple his staff and his commanders and soon some of his junior officers and men.
At noon, the party ordered to storm Mahomed Shereef’s fort under Major Swayne marched out of the western gate of the cantonments, led by Vincent Eyre with two guns of the Horse Artillery. Behind the partial cover of some trees Eyre briskly shelled the fort at 100 yards range. Major Swayne was to have charged forward under cover of the wall to assault the fort, but instead he kept his troops uselessly lying under cover for twenty minutes, while Eyre’s shells screamed overhead.
The General, having limped as far as the rampart to watch, saw that the guns had only a few rounds left there and instead of ordering more he recalled the entire force into the cantonments before it could advance a single pace.
Thus, still another British failure encouraged the Afghans. They now readily believed the words of their moollahs — that into their hands the Prophet had put an enemy whom they could destroy at a blow and thereby reap great riches. The chiefs, on the assumption that the British were suddenly incapable of fighting called into Kabul every warrior in the region.
Macnaghten meantime, had arranged with the chief of the village of Behmaru, a short distance in rear of the cantonment, to sell them grain. The prospect of immediate starvation was thus avoided.
The supplies were necessarily bought at a very high price; and Khojah Mahomed, owner of the village, tried at the same time to be friendly with the insurgents as well. Moreover, the village and its fort, on the Behmaru hill, to the north-west of the cantonments, had only to be occupied by the Afghans to bring the British under jezail fire. It was unlikely therefore that Macnaghten’s efforts would keep supplies flowing for long.
Artillery bombardment by both sides went on in fits and starts by day and night. ‘The enemy saluted our house with six-pound shot,’ Florentia Sale noted, ‘which rattled about and passed us, and several struck the house; one was embedded in the wall under Mrs. Sturt’s window. At night we threw shell as usual into Mahmoud Khan’s fort, and could plainly distinguish the sound of “Ullah ul Alla” as they burst’ — here perhaps imagination carried away this normally accurate scribe.
Another attempt was at last made early on 6 November to occupy Mahomed Shereef’s fort, the one which so effectively dominated the route to the commissariat fort; this the Afghans had still only half emptied of supplies. Lieutenant Sturt, the engineer officer, a realistic and capable one, staggered out of bed in his shirt and pyjamas and — still not fully recovered from his wounds — went to superintend the bombardment of the fort with three 9-pounder guns and two howitzers before an attack by about 200 men under the command of Major Griffiths.
For two hours, the 9-pounders hit the fort’s bastions at short range while Lieutenant Warburton’s howitzers pounded the weaker parts of the walls. ‘In the space of about two hours,’ says Eyre, ‘a practicable breach was effected, during which time a hot fire was poured upon the artillerymen by the enemy’s sharpshooters, stationed in a couple of high towers which completely commanded the battery…’
Major Griffiths then led his men in a rush at the fort and with few casualties speedily occupied it. Eyre now had a 6-pounder gun dragged over to the Shah’s garden opposite and sent several rounds of grape shot whistling through the trees. Colin Mackenzie attacked the enemy there with a few of his jezailchis, but with no support he had to fall back.
Elphinstone, who had persuaded himself that he was short of gunpowder and shell, had refused to follow up this success with an immediate attack upon both the Shah’s Garden and the commissariat fort. And so this and its supplies unfortunately still remained in Afghan hands, even though the British at last held Mahomed Shereef’s fort.
Captains Boyd and Johnson, the commissariat officers, had meantime also been successful in obtaining supplies from surrounding villages. ‘For the last four days,’ Captain Johnson wrote in his Journal on 8 November, ‘I have been busily purchasing grain from Deh Meru; I have established a reasonable rate; and the villagers will sell willingly from the stores which they had laid up for the winter.’
On 6 November Elphinstone wrote Macnaghten another confused and worried letter persuading him to surrender: ‘We have temporarily and I hope permanently got over the difficulty of provisions. Our next consideration is ammunition; a very serious and indeed awful one. We have expended a great quantity; therefore it becomes worthy of thought on your part, how desirable it is that our operations should not be protracted… Do not suppose from this I wish to recommend or am advocating humiliating terms, or such as would reflect disgrace upon us,’ he protested; ‘but this fact of ammunition must not be lost sight of.’ And in a postscript whose feebleness must have disgusted Macnaghten: ‘Our case is not yet desperate; I do not mean to impress that; but it must be borne in mind that it goes fast.’
Elphinstone’s conduct in seeking terms from the enemy — for capitulating — was dishonourable almost to the point of treason. There was no lack of ammunition or gunpowder. The army carried huge amounts from Kandahar; much more was captured at Ghazni and there had been ammunition convoys from India. Elphinstone clearly preferred to surrender rather than fight or to give up his command to an officer who would fight.
Macnaghten, who wished to retrieve the British position at all costs, sought a way out by two different moves.
The first was secretly to commission the British agent Mohan Lal, through Lieutenant John Conolly, to offer rewards for the heads of the Afghan leaders. ‘I promise 10,000 rupees for the heads of each of the principal chiefs,’ Conolly wrote Mohan Lal on 5 November. This scheme went forward while Macnaghten was at the same time trying to bribe the same chiefs to stop the rising. Macnaghten kept the tightest rein over his assistants; he must have planned the scheme himself. Like a boomerang it would swerve back at him with deadly effect.
A week of unbroken failure for the British had thus led to efforts by General Elphinstone to have Macnaghten negotiate with the Afghan leaders; and to Macnaghten offering blood money for their heads — a fantastic anomaly.
As his second move, Macnaghten now persuaded Elphinstone to return the tough, one-armed Brigadier Shelton from the Bala Hissar. Bringing with him only the Shah’s 6th Infantry and a 6-pounder gun, as he had been ordered, Shelton set out.
‘I left the Bala Hissar between six and seven and marched in broad daylight without the enemy attempting to dispute my passage,’ he wrote. ‘I was all prepared for opposition had any been made.’
The garrison — the troops and younger officers especially — received him almost as a deliverer. On his return, Shelton, a small man, ca
lled ‘the little Brig’ by his men, says he ‘read anxiety in every countenance’ and ‘was sorry to find desponding conversations and remarks too generally indulged and was more grieved to find the troops dispirited’.
He strode round the cantonments and ‘found them of frightful extent… with a rampart and ditch an Afghan could run over with the facility of a cat…’
Able and courageous, yet lacking polish and social ease, Shelton clearly suffered from an outsize inferiority complex which he tried to hide behind military perfectionism and over-strict discipline. This discord led him on the one hand to high standards of bravery — he was said to have stood unmoved outside his tent in the Peninsular War while surgeons completed the amputation of an arm lost at the storm of St. Sebastian — and on the other to petulance, vindictiveness and quick anger.
Fortescue in his History of the British Army, suggests that incessant physical pain due to the rough surgery of those days may have been responsible, recalling that in India, General Napier’s intellect was completely unbalanced by the pain of an old wound and that Lord Anglesey, though he never uttered a sound, would lock himself into his room and roll on the floor in agony.
Macnaghten had hoped Shelton would be able to co-operate with the General and tactfully give a lead in taking the fight to the Afghans. But it soon became clear that this was the last thing that would happen. Both men disliked each other from the very beginning. ‘I was put in orders to command cantonments,’ Shelton wrote later, ‘and consequently in course of my inspections, gave such orders and instructions as appeared to me necessary. This, however, Elphinstone soon corrected, by reminding me that he commanded, not I.’