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

by George Bruce

  A forlorn hope indeed was this and Macnaghten now sent General Elphinstone a letter in which for the first time he objectively summed up their plight and how they might possibly survive. He himself thought it their imperative duty to hold on as long as possible. He thought they might even struggle through the whole winter by making the Mahommedans and Christians live chiefly upon horse and camel meat, supposing their supplies of grain to fall, by which means, as the essentials of wood and water were abundant, he considered their position might be rendered impregnable.

  A retreat towards Jellalabad he went on, would teem not only with disaster but also dishonour, and ought not to be contemplated until the very last extremity. They should in such a case have to sacrifice Shah Shuja, to support whose authority they were employed by Government; and even were they to make good their retreat to Jellalabad, they should have no shelter for their troops in the march through the bitter winter snows, while the thousands of camp-followers would all be killed.

  He had frequently thought of negotiating, but, he remarked with notable realism, there was no party with enough power and influence over the tribesmen to protect them. Another alternative would be to throw themselves into the Bala Hissar; but he feared that would also be disastrous. ‘We would probably not succeed in getting our heavy guns and they would be turned with effect by the enemy against the citadel.’ Food and firewood might be scarce, for a further supply of which they might be dependent upon sorties into the city, in which, if beaten, they might of course be ruined.

  On the whole he was decidedly of the opinion that they should hold out; it was still possible that reinforcements might arrive from General Nott at Kandahar, or something might turn up in their favour; there were hopes, too, that on the setting in of winter the enemy might disperse. In eight or ten days, he concluded, it would remain for the military authorities to determine whether there was any chance of improving their position, and to decide whether it would be more prudent to attempt a retreat to Jellalabad, or to the Bala Hissar. If provision sufficient for the winter could be procured, on no account would he leave the cantonment, he ended, in contradictory fashion.

  Macnaghten was playing for time, but events were now to move fast in another direction. Akbar Khan, Dost Mahommed’s fiery and uncompromising son, was drawn to Kabul by news of the insurrection on 22 November. His hatred of the British, his powers of leadership, his blood relationship to the former king and the prestige born out of his refusal to surrender, at once combined to make him the leader the Afghans needed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Three thousand Afghan cavalry and infantry under Akbar Khan’s command moved out of Kabul on 22 November and occupied the village and hills of Behmaru — the name meant husbandless — so-called after a beautiful virgin who was buried there. A crisis was now at hand for the British, for the next day they were to fight a decisive battle.

  The Afghans had made frequent moves out on to the hill, often descending into the village below, where, lamented the commissariat officer, Captain Johnson, ‘they destroyed the houses and plundered the inhabitants, and have expelled them from their homes on account of their aid to us in bringing in grain… I am up daily long before gunfire and as soon as there is sufficient light commence purchasing as it is only in the morning that the villagers can venture to bring their stores for sale.’

  Shelton decided to occupy the hill and on the morning of 22 November a weak force under Major Swayne, an officer who persistently avoided action in a crisis, marched out with a small body of cavalry. ‘Major Swayne, whose orders were to storm the village, would neither go forward nor retire,’ wrote Vincent Eyre, who was in charge of the single gun that Elphinstone allowed to support the force. ‘But, concealing his men under the cover of some low wall, he all day long maintained a useless fire on the houses of Beymaru, without the slightest satisfactory result… Thus we remained for five or six hours, during which the artillery stood exposed to the deliberate aim of the numerous marksmen who occupied the village and its immediate vicinity, whose bullets continually sang in our ears, often striking the gun and grazing the ground on which we stood.’

  It was an absurd situation; the cavalry had many casualties and two gunners were wounded; Eyre’s left hand was almost shattered by a bullet. Later in the day Swayne’s troops were withdrawn, having accomplished nothing.

  Again, at Macnaghten’s insistence, before daybreak next day a force of about 1,200 infantry, 400 cavalry, 100 sappers and again only one gun, a 9-pounder, marched out and occupied the north-east corner of the hills, overlooking the village.

  One gun, upon which Elphinstone had insisted as a result of his imaginary shortage of ammunition, was a direct breach of time-honoured artillery standing orders born of the experience that it invariably became too hot to fire.

  From a commanding position, the gun fired grape-shot down on to an Afghan camp in the village, revealed by flickering fires. The enemy fired back from the houses and towers until their ammunition was exhausted and Shelton then sent the fainthearted Major Swayne to carry the village by assault at bayonet point. In his mole-like way the Major again went to ground. He was recalled half an hour later having done nothing but lose several men and receive a slight wound in the neck himself.

  At sunrise sounded the deep beat of drums — a stream of several thousand Afghan cavalry and infantry surged out occupying a nearby hill and part of the village. Leaving five companies under Major Kershaw at the foot of the hill, immediately above the village, Shelton now took the remainder of his force to an exposed position on the brow of the hill where it was overlooked from the hill beyond just occupied by the Afghans.

  Here, as he had learned to do with Wellington in the entirely different conditions of the Peninsular War, Shelton formed his infantry into two squares and massed his cavalry between them. It was an invitation to the enemy. A rain of fire from the Afghan jezails struck this massed blue-and red-coated target and men fell by the score.

  Sergeant Mulhall fired the one 9-pounder as fast as it could be loaded, killing many of the enemy in return until the barrel became too hot to handle and he had to order his gunners to cease fire.

  Undismayed by the sound and the fury, the intrepid Lady Sale carefully noted all that went on. ‘I had taken up my post of observation, as usual, on top of the house,’ she says, ‘whence I had a fine view of the field of action, and where, by keeping behind the chimneys, I escaped the bullets that continually whizzed past me. The number of the enemy’s foot men must have been upwards of 10,000 (some say 15,000) and, the plain, on the north-west of the hills, was swept by not less than 3,000 or 4,000 Afghan cavalry…’

  Taking advantage of a dip in the ground which hid them, a party of Afghans crawled up and hurled themselves in a furious hand-to-hand attack upon the British infantry, who, strangely, lost their nerve, wavered, turned and fled. The Afghans captured the gun and with shouts of triumph manhandled it towards their own position.

  In the thick of the fire the stubborn Shelton now stood alone and vainly called his men to turn about and charge. ‘… My own clothes were riddled, having been struck by no less than five balls, none of which did much harm; one spent ball hit me on the head and nearly knocked me down; another made my arm a little stiff,’ he related.

  At his command the bugles shrilled the halt and stopped the tearaway infantry in their tracks; the officers re-formed them and with a shout they again faced the attackers with levelled bayonets. The cavalry came to their rescue with a timely charge, scattering most of the Afghans, who abandoned the gun and rode off with its horses and limber.

  At this moment one of Macnaghten’s schemes for assassination of the chiefs bore fruit. Abdoollah Khan, one of the leaders of the rising, whose head Macnaghten had sought to buy through the efforts of Lieutenant Conolly and Mohan Lal, was in the thick of the fighting at the head of a party of Afghan horsemen. Suddenly he fell badly wounded — shot from behind a wall, it later transpired, by Abdool Aziz, one of Mohan Lal’s assass
ins. Seeing their chief carried off, apparently dead, his men turned and rode in panic and confusion behind him towards the city, with the Afghan infantry following them, streaming back across the plain towards the city walls.

  Macnaghten, unaware that his hand had pulled the trigger, was watching the battle with Elphinstone on the cantonment rampart. Out of this Afghan confusion a fresh force from the cantonment could now seize victory, with a rigorous attack upon this disorderly rout. Macnaghten tried strongly to persuade the General to do this, but Elphinstone shook his head sagely and refused — ‘it’s a wild scheme — it’s not possible’, he said. And so while the Afghans were in flight both from the Behmaru hill and the plain the chance was lost.

  The British infantry moved forward to their former position on the brow of the hill, a fresh supply of ammunition was sent out for the gun and Sergeant Mulhall was soon firing grape-shot and shrapnel at the diminished Afghan lines, still two or three thousand strong. But again the British muskets were outranged by the jezailchis, who mowed down both infantrymen and gunners.

  Colonel Oliver, the fat and pessimistic commander of six companies of the 5th Native Infantry, ordered a party of his men down the brow of the hill with him to attack a number of Afghan sharpshooters in a small ravine. Not a man would follow him. Oliver said: ‘Although my men desert me I myself will do my duty.’ He turned his back on them, walked some paces into the thick of the fire and fell dead.

  Still held in squares by the brave but stupid Shelton, the British were falling on all sides — four of the gun-team of six were dead. Finally Shelton ordered a retreat to the reserve, in position down near the village. The Afghans now attacked with fresh vigour, a party of Ghazees, the religious fanatics, leading a furious charge at the leading square. The square broke, all order and discipline vanished and in a moment first infantry then cavalry were running in a terrified rout back down the hill towards the cantonment.

  The Afghan horsemen dashed among them with whirling tulwars and took a bloody toll. Major Kershaw, in the village, seeing that he would be cut off, ordered a retreat, but he was too late, his small force was surrounded and only a few escaped. If Captain Trevor with some sepoys on the ramparts of the cantonment had not opened a heavy fire on the Afghans, and a troop of the 5th Cavalry under Lieutenant Hardyman had not emerged and charged them, the pursuit might have continued over the ramparts and into the cantonment.

  Soon the enemy were so intermingled with the British that the cantonment guns could no longer fire. General Elphinstone stood up swaying on the ramparts trying to rally the men whom his failure in the past few days had so demoralised, but it was useless. ‘Why, Lord, sir,’ he said to Macnaghten, ‘when I said to them “Eyes right,” they all looked the other way.’

  It seemed for a moment that the entire British force might be slaughtered, but one of the chiefs, said to be Osman Khan, suddenly ordered off his followers. In a short time they withdrew, ‘astonished at their own success’, says Lieutenant Melville, ‘and after mutilating in a dreadful manner the many bodies left on the hill, they retired with exulting shouts to the city’.

  The British had lost over 300 men. But for the action of Osman Khan these losses would have been greater. Of this Lady Sale noted: ‘Osman Khan was heard by our sepoys to order his men not to fire on those who ran, but to spare them. A chief, probably the same, rode round Kershaw three times, when he was compelled to run with his men; he waved the sword over his head, but never attempted to kill him; and Captain Trevor says his life was also several times in the power of the enemy, but he also was spared.’

  Most contemporary writers have blamed Shelton for this defeat, but the best military authority, Fortescue, points out that he was sent with a weak and demoralised force and one gun to a position where he could be surrounded, and that when as a result he was surrounded, no effort was made by Elphinstone, who had plenty of men near by, to rescue him. ‘It would seem that the Afghan tactics were well conceived, and skilfully and persistently executed; but Nott, in the place of Elphinstone, would have turned the day’s fighting into a great and crushing victory.’

  But Nott was 290 miles south, over the snow-blocked mountain passes in Kandahar and with the demented Elphinstone and the brave but foolish Shelton at its head the demoralisation of the army was now complete. Physically exhausted, under-fed, lacking the discipline, self-esteem and cohesion that make an army out of a mass of men, it was hardly fit for combat. One thinks of the ashamed, wretched soldiers in the cantonment that night, without a pot of beer or a dram of rum to console them, knowing above all that with the present leadership they were at the enemy’s mercy. ‘Who can depict the horror of that night and our consternation, for we felt ourselves doomed men,’ lamented Lawrence.

  The Shah, who had observed the rout through a telescope in the fortress, now wrote in alarm to Macnaghten, urging an immediate retreat into the Bala Hissar, as the only move that could ensure the safety and honour of the British. Both the General and Shelton objected and Macnaghten unhappily fell in with their views.

  The next day came a letter from Osman Khan, the chief who had called off his cavalry. He recalled this service, and now suggested that the time had come for the British quietly to leave the country. This letter and the fact of the military leaders having left him no other way out than negotiations for a retreat now made Macnaghten — doubtless with an eye on the record — ask the General whether in fact his army could maintain its position in the country.

  Elphinstone replied hopelessly that it was no longer feasible to do so and that Macnaghten should avail himself of the offer to negotiate. The Envoy wrote that day to Sultan Mahommed Khan, saying he was ready to talk.

  The next day, 25 November, Mahomed Khan and Meerza Ahmed Ali, envoys of the chiefs, both in unassuming dress, riding dismal horses and attended only by their grooms, were met at the bridge over the Kabul River and taken into a guard-room at the cantonments to meet Macnaghten.

  Here, their unpretentious manners ended. Mahomed Khan, suddenly arrogant and offensive, declared that beaten in battle, the British should surrender unconditionally, giving themselves up with their arms, ammunition and money as prisoners of war.

  Macnaghten rejected the terms out of hand. While the talks went on, crowds of Afghans armed with sword and jezail swarmed round the ramparts and with friendly smiles called out to the British that all was settled and the war was over.

  Some of the troops went out unarmed among them, shaking hands, accepting presents of vegetables. Senior officers suspected that the cabbages might contain bottles of drugged spirits so that the garrison, flat on their backs, would be unable to ward off an intended attack. The cabbages were carefully examined, but found to be quite harmless vegetables.

  Macnaghten now sent the chiefs a letter giving the conditions under which he was prepared to negotiate. ‘I proposed to them,' he wrote, ‘the only terms which could be accepted with honour; but… they returned me a letter of defiance the next morning to the effect that unless I consented to surrender our arms and leave his Majesty to his fate, we must prepare for immediate hostilities. To this I replied that we preferred death to dishonour and,’ he ended piously, ‘that it would remain with a higher power to decide between us.’

  Little had been heard of the supreme Being so far in this campaign, though the British had no doubt that he was on their side against this heathen horde, but now while the Afghans waved sacred banners and swore on the Koran to put infidels to the sword, Macnaghten had introduced Him as the silent watcher of the British downfall.

  On 25 November Shelton made a pretence at hostilities by again shelling the Behmaru Hills, to give cover to Captain Johnson, then in the village trying to buy supplies — a task which daily became harder and harder.

  Akbar Khan had soon realised that if he could stop supplies reaching the cantonments he would have the British at his mercy. He threatened death to all the tribesmen within several miles of Kabul who were making small fortunes selling grain at fabulous
prices to the commissariat.

  Captain Johnson went daily during the last week of November to try to buy from the chief of Behmaru, but, he wrote in his Journal on 1 December — ‘notwithstanding my offers of the most handsome rewards to him, I cannot now prevail upon him or his people to give further aid. On going to his fort this morning I found merely two or three people inside who told me that Mahomed Khan had yesterday come with a party and destroyed every house in it, and threatened death to the Khoja (who had fled) and his family, in the event of his giving us further aid.’

  Told of this, and that there were only eight days’ provisions at half-rations in hand, Macnaghten refused to be downcast, insisting that they should ‘wait two days longer’, before deciding what to do ‘as something may turn up’. Still hoping that the brigade from Kandahar would come to the rescue, he was also, through Mohan Lal, bribing any chief willing to sow discord or plant the seeds of treachery among the leaders of the insurrection.

  Thus, while Elphinstone insisted that ‘our position was becoming more and more critical’, Macnaghten was declaring that ‘our prospects were brightening’. In this vein he wrote to Mohan Lal on 29 November: ‘The enemy appeared today in considerable numbers, but they did nothing and I am sure they will never venture to attack our cantonment. If we had only provisions, which, with due exertions ought to be obtained, we should be able to defy the whole of Afghanistan for the period,’ Elphinstone now pressed him almost daily to negotiate, but the realistic Macnaghten probably guessed unhappily that whatever terms were obtained they would amount to nothing. Once the force left the cantonments the chiefs would be unable to restrain their tribesmen. He still clutched therefore at any chance of hanging on.