Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (32 page)

The 200-mile march from Kandahar to Ghazni initially took the troops through the rich and fertile Arghandab Valley, with its brown waters and silvery willows, its mud-walled orchards of pomegranates and vines and deep red mulberries lining the irrigation ditches. But beyond that, the further the troops marched from the banks of the Arghandab and the network of bubbling irrigation runnels which extended the cultivation to the melon beds at the edge of the valley, the drier the land became. White grasslands blowing in the wind around Qalat e-Ghilzai slowly gave way to a rockier, hillier, more marginal landscape of quartz and shale-scrub, dotted with white opium poppies and purple thistles. The army was now passing into the territories of the Ghilzais: it was barren, ‘wild and mountainous country’, wrote William Taylor,

over roads extremely difficult and at times almost impassable. The Ghilzies fled at our approach to the numerous mud forts with which these hills abound, and seldom ventured on our track. In the dwellings they had abandoned we found only a few old crones and hungry dogs, both of whom received us with a sort of howling welcome . . . We were lucky enough to discover the stores of corn and
bussorah
[fodder] which the natives had buried at the first news of our approach. We were also well supplied with water, the country being traversed in all directions by rivers and streams. To counterbalance these advantages we were annoyed with shoals of locusts, which literally darkened the skies and kept up a perpetual buzzing and humming in our ears. The locust appears to be a favourite article of food with the Afghans, who roast it on a slow fire and devour it with eagerness. We could not bring ourselves to relish this equivocal dainty, even though our rations were not of the best or most varied description.
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On 18 July, Keane received two pieces of intelligence. Firstly, the Popalzai plot to open the city gates had been discovered, and Shuja’s loyalists had been replaced with Ghilzai tribesmen loyal to the Barakzais. Secondly, it was learned that the Barakzais were preparing to make a strong resistance around Ghazni. The cautious Keane decided to pause to let the centre column led by Shah Shuja and Willshire’s rearguard catch him up.
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Having collected his forces, he then marched forward in close formation. By sunrise on the 20th, the minarets of Ghazni were seen rising over the scrub, and beyond them the massive fortress, one of the largest and most impregnable in Central Asia. ‘Instead of finding it, as the accounts had suggested, very weak and incapable of resistance,’ wrote Keane, ‘a second Gibraltar appeared before us: a high rampart in good repair built on a scarped mound, flanked by numerous towers and surrounded by a well constructed [escalade] and a wide wet ditch. In short, we were astounded.’
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The existence of such impregnable fortifications represented a major intelligence failure on the part of the British, and it was unclear what could now be done as the siege guns had been left 200 miles away with Nott in Kandahar. It was not possible for the invaders to move on, leaving the Ghazni garrison behind them to threaten their communications. Nor did they have the supplies for either a retreat or a long siege.

As had been feared, the garrison put up stiff resistance as soon as the British closed in. They harassed the advancing lines of sepoys with their cavalry and outgunned them with heavy fire from the ramparts as the invaders attempted to take up positions around the fortress. ‘The enemy came out in great force,’ remembered Sita Ram, ‘and sharp firing took place. The Afghans felt confident in the strength of this place. The walls were too high to scale and our light horse artillery guns were of no use against them. This was the first time we had any fighting since we entered Afghanistan.’
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This was also the first time the Afghans showed the accuracy of their long-barrelled jezails, the sniper-rifle of the nineteenth century, as their marksmen found their range and began to bring down large numbers of exposed sepoys. ‘Every bullet fired from the Ghazni Fort struck the English troops like a Divine punishment,’ wrote Mirza ‘Ata. ‘The soldiers remained hungry and the animals stood exhausted from the long march, still carrying their loads till evening, when the camp was finally prepared behind temporary fortifications and entrenchments. A massive cannon called Zuber Zun, the Hard Hitter, was fired from the fort and camels, soldiers and horses were blown into the air like paper-kites.’
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That night the British could see signalling with blue lights from the ramparts. The signals were answered by other lights on the mountains to the east. The purpose of these signals did not become apparent until early the following morning when the army was attacked from the rear by a party of 2,000 wild-eyed ghazis [holy warriors] on horseback. Soon after dawn they appeared on the heights behind the camp carrying the green flags of jihad. As bugles sounded the alarm, the foremost of the jihadis managed to ride over the defensive ditches straight into the middle of Shah Shuja’s part of the camp screaming ‘Allah hu-Akbar!’ and fighting with suicidal bravery until they were surrounded.

Only fifty eventually agreed to surrender, and even they, when hauled before Shuja, insulted him as ‘an infidel at heart and a friend of infidels’.
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As the Shah stood there fuming, one of the ghazis produced a hidden dagger and tried to lunge at him. As soon as the man was overpowered and killed, Shuja’s bodyguards beheaded the entire group of prisoners, much to the horror of Macnaghten. It was reported that Shuja’s executioners were laughing and joking as they set about their work, ‘hacking and maiming the poor wretches indiscriminately with their long swords and knives’, as the prisoners lay pinioned with their hands tied behind their backs. ‘The execution of numerous persons in the vicinity of the British camp threw a very unpleasant light on our proceedings,’ wrote  Mohan Lal. ‘Surely no country will admit and approve of the butchery of fifty men in the most cruel and barbarous way for the offence of one individual?’
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In the hours that followed, it was Mohan Lal who played the most crucial role in saving the British from the mess they had created for themselves. The previous day, as the invading army had been approaching the fortress, a senior Barakzai prince and rival of Dost Mohammad, Abdul Rashid Khan, had crossed the lines and surrendered himself to Mohan Lal, whom he knew from the munshi’s days as an ‘intelligencer’ in Kandahar working for Wade in the mid-1830s. Debriefing him in his tent, Mohan Lal discovered that according to the Prince the fortress had one major weak point. Most of the fortress gates had been bricked up as the British approached, but the Kabul Gate had been left open so as to allow continued communication with Dost Mohammad. When Burnes passed the information to Keane, the Commander-in-Chief decided he had no option but to attack that very night and hope that surprise would make up for the lack of intelligence and planning.

A plan was quickly put together. An artillery barrage and a diversionary attack to the south would provide cover for a party of engineers to creep up and lay the charges to blow the Kabul Gate. This would be followed by a mass assault with fixed bayonets. ‘Such an operation was full of risk,’ wrote Henry Durand, who volunteered to lead the explosives party. ‘Even success could only be anticipated at the cost of a heavy loss of men.’ When Durand raised these risks with Keane, the Commander-in-Chief replied that there was simply no alternative, as there was only two or three days of food left in the commissariat.
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The rest of the day was spent in reconnaissance as Keane and the engineers rode around the outer walls of the fort, using the shelter of the belt of walled gardens of apricots and walnuts at its foot to avoid the bullets of the jezail-snipers on the battlements. Just before midnight, orders were sent out that the troops should assemble at 4 a.m., and should remove the white covers of their caps so as to be less visible from the ramparts. At 2 a.m. Shuja was taken to the hill immediately above the Kabul Gate by Macnaghten. According to his biographer, Mohammad Husain Herati, ‘William Macnaghten was honoured to enter the royal presence and to invite His Majesty to proceed to the hill of the shrine of the wise Sufi saint Bahlul, from where he would be able to observe the storming of Ghazni fort. As soon as His Majesty had taken up his position, the blazing fire of cannons started.’
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In his exposed position Shuja came under heavy fire from the ramparts, but remained there with icy courage, impressing his British minders who had been told misleading stories about his previous premature exits from the field of battle.

Sita Ram was part of the diversionary force. ‘Orders were given to keep up a hot fire to deceive and distract the attention of the ghazis,’ he wrote. ‘The wind blew hard on that night and the clouds of dust which were flying about made everything darker than usual. When the guns opened fire we saw the ghazis running with torches, which suddenly made the place look like Diwali puja.’
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In contrast to the noise of the barrage on the south, the northern side of the fortress was completely silent as Durand and the other engineers began creeping up towards the walls in the darkness. They were anxious as Macnaghten had divulged the whole plan to Shuja’s staff ‘and the scheme of attack, success in which depended on secrecy, had become generally known in the Shah’s camp’. But the plan had not reached the ears of the defenders. In the pre-dawn glimmer, Durand crept up to within 150 yards of the gate before being challenged by a sentry. ‘A shot, and a shout, told that the party had been discovered,’ he wrote later. ‘Instantly the garrison were on alert; their musketry rang free and quick from the ramparts, and blue lights suddenly glared on the top of the battlements, brilliantly illuminating the approach to the gate. A raking fire from the lower outer works, which swept the bridge at half-pistol shot, would have annihilated the engineers and their men, but strange to say, though the ramparts flashed fire from every loophole, the bridge passed without a shot from the lower works.’

The powder bags were deposited and the fuse lit, ‘while the defenders, impatient at the restraint of the loopholes, jumped up onto the tops of their parapets, and poured their fire at the foot of the wall, hurling down stones and bricks’. Running back to cover, the engineers dived into the moat-ditch as a massive explosion rang out, and a bugle sounded the advance.
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The troops were led into the breach by William Dennie, followed after a pause by a column led by General Robert Sale, known to his men as ‘Fighting Bob’ as he refused to stay at the back and always threw himself into the fiercest hand-to-hand fighting.

Mohammad Husain Herati was watching from the top of the hill near Shah Shuja. ‘The gates of the fortress were blown up,’ he recorded, ‘and the English rushed in fighting hand to hand till the cries of submission rose to the skies “al-Aman! Spare us!” as the Afghan soldiers threw down their arms. Those whose allotted span had reached the limit were killed; others, men and women, were taken off prisoner while all their wealth and possessions and livestock were given over to plunder.’
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Mirza ‘Ata felt a deep and growing sympathy for the defenders. ‘When they set the fuses alight,’ he wrote,

the gate was reduced to a lattice of holes and collapsed to the ground, while the explosion filled the air with a storm of dust making everything invisible in all six directions. The Shah’s troops rushed to storm the fort, and faced 300 ghazis, fighters for the faith, who drew their swords to defend their religion and three times drove back the British beyond the gates. The troops were forced to fall back and fired from a range of beyond 1,000 feet. But General Sale and the Commander-in-Chief rallied the men who entered the Fort and cut down the ghazis. The Bengal army once again charged and the Commander of the fortress Nawab Ghulam Haidar Khan [Dost Mohammad’s son, who had escorted Burnes out of Kabul a year previously] was treacherously abandoned by his companions who hoped to save themselves and earn filthy English gold. They accepted English bribes, their faces blackened by treachery, and fled without fighting. The remaining ghazis fought till they drank the cup of martyrdom from the heavenly streams and were taken to the gardens of Paradise ‘beneath which rivers flow’, may God have mercy on their souls! Only after the death of the ghazis, did the English gain possession of the Ghazni Fort, and sound victory.
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As looting was raging in the lower wards of the fortress, a last doomed resistance was still continuing bravely at the very top. ‘The Affghans fought gallantly with their swords, and succeeded in wounding several of our men even when themselves transfixed with a bayonet,’ wrote George Lawrence.
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His friend Neville Chamberlain was less impressed by the behaviour of the British troops. Atrocities were now taking place all around with ‘soldiers breaking into the houses to look for plunder, and in this way many were killed . . . I shall not describe the cruelties and actions I saw that day as I am sure it would only disgust you with mankind; but I am happy to say very few women and children were killed, and that was a wonder, as when any person was heard moving in a room ten or twelve muskets were fired into it immediately, and thus many an innocent person was killed.’
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By dawn, the flight of the defenders had become a rout. ‘Numbers of the enemy were seen dropping down from the ramparts with the aid of ropes,’ remarked Thomas Gaisford.