Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (51 page)

British eyewitnesses within the cantonment also recorded the degree to which Macnaghten misread the seriousness of what was going on, despite the shocking murder of his deputy. ‘Macnaghten at first made light of the insurrection,’ recorded Vincent Eyre, ‘and by his representations as to the general feelings of the people towards us, not only deluded himself, but misled the General. The unwelcome truth was however soon forced on us.’
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Indeed, by early afternoon, rather than counter-attacking, Macnaghten had instead decided to retreat, abandoning his outlying Mission Compound and withdrawing his civil headquarters into the cantonment. Elphinstone meanwhile had ordered the guard along the cantonment walls to be doubled. Beyond that, no action was taken by the British commanders despite having 5,000 armed soldiers, ample horse artillery and a year’s store of ammunition at their disposal. ‘We must see what the morning brings,’ Elphinstone wrote to Macnaghten, ‘and then think what can be done.’
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The formidable Lady Sale was appalled. ‘All was confusion and indecision,’ she wrote. ‘The Envoy mounted his horse and rode to the gateway, and then rode back again?. . .’

Soon, however, Lady Sale had other matters to occupy her. Lieutenant Sturt, her new son-in-law, was brought on a stretcher from the Bala Hisar ‘covered with blood, and unable to articulate. From the wounds in the face and shoulder, the nerves were affected; the mouth would not open, the tongue was swollen and paralysed, and he was ghastly and faint from loss of blood. He could not lie down from the blood choking him. With some difficulty and great pain he was supported upstairs, and laid on a bed, when Dr Harcourt dressed his wounds, which having been inflicted about ten o’clock, now at one were cold and stiff with clotted blood.’
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While this was going on in the cantonment, Brigadier Shelton had belatedly marched his troops around the back of the city and into the Bala Hisar, but had been unsure what to do once he got there. Around 3 p.m. George Lawrence arrived back at Shah Shuja’s durbar and reported finding the unimaginative Shelton:

directing a desultory fire on the city from two of his guns. Brig Shelton’s conduct at this crisis astonished me beyond expression . . . [He was] almost beside himself, not knowing how to act, and with incapacity stamped on every feature of his face. He immediately asked me what he should do, and on my replying ‘Enter the city at once,’ he sharply rebuked me, saying, ‘My force is inadequate, and you do not appear to know what street fighting is?. . .’ The King at this time asked me more than once why the troops did not act, and seemed to be, as well he might, deeply annoyed that we did nothing. Shelton well knew the King’s anxiety that he should take active measures for quelling the disturbance, but he was in fact quite paralysed . . .
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It was this paralysis which allowed a spontaneous protest by some disgruntled chiefs – one they imagined would be a hopeless gesture of anger, not the beginnings of a major revolution – to unite the people under the banner of Islam and grow quickly into one of the most dangerous challenges the British would face anywhere in their Empire in the nineteenth century. ‘Vacillation and incapacity ruled in our military counsels and paralysed the hearts of those who should have acted with energy and decision,’ concluded Lawrence. ‘By their deplorable pusillanimity an accidental emeute, which could have been quelled on the moment by the prompt employment of a small force, became a formidable insurrection, which ultimately involved the ruin of a gallant army.’
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By evening, seeing his allies sinking into ever greater despondency, Shah Shuja tried to cheer up the depressed officers by proposing to throw a dinner. The response was glum. How could a dinner be thrown, replied the officers, when they had left their dress uniforms in the cantonment?
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Even as Kabul burned, and with their position weakening by the minute, the British were determined that proper regimental etiquette should be observed to the end.

On the morning of 3 November, Eldred Pottinger was becoming nervous. With only one hundred troops, he was stationed in a small fortified enclosure – actually a converted caravanserai – at Laghmani, on a hilltop sixty miles north of Kabul and a short distance above the British barracks in Charikar, where the administration for Kohistan was housed. Now ever larger numbers of heavily armed Kohistanis were gathering around his tower house. Ostensibly the tribesmen were there to reconcile Pottinger’s administration with some disaffected chiefs from the Nijrao district who had been driven into rebellion in 1840, and who had suffered badly in Sale’s punitive expeditions that autumn; but Pottinger had a strong sense that something was amiss. ‘I grew greatly alarmed at their increasing numbers,’ he wrote later,

and at their refusal to attack the Castles of the [insurgent] Chiefs who composed [the Kohistan rebel leader] Mir Masjidi’s army. This feeling led to my taking sundry precautions for the security of my position against surprise. However as it appeared impolitic to shew any suspicion I was confined to half measures . . . On the 3rd the increase of armed men round my residence was most alarmingly thick and induced me to man the towers [of the fort]. In the morning the Chiefs who brought the Nijraoees were very anxious that I should receive their friends; and those Nijraoees who had come previously demanded presents and were indignant at not getting them. I sent several messages to these latter that if they would perform the services I had pointed out, I would not only give them presents, but procure for them dresses of honour from the King.

Pottinger’s assistant, Lieutenant Charles Rattray,
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then went to greet the new arrivals who were sitting in the adjoining stubble field, about thirty yards distant. According to the account of the Gurkha havildar [NCO] Moti Ram, ‘Mr Rattray, who commanded one of the Affghan corps, was lured out to look, he said, at some new recruits which he had brought with him for service. They were mounted men. As Lt Rattray was examining them drawn up in a line, they wheeled up from the left and right, and enclosed Mr Rattray, who was shot with a pistol.’
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Pottinger meanwhile was talking to some of the Nijrao chiefs when one of his Afghan recruits ‘had run up to apprize me of treachery’.

He had scarcely made me comprehend his meaning, as he spoke by hints, when the sounds of shots alarmed us. The Chiefs with me rose and fled, and I escaped into the Castle through the Postern gate, which having secured I ran onto the top of the rampart. From there I saw Mr. Rattray lying badly wounded about three hundred yards distant, and the late tenderers of service making off in all directions with the plunder of the Camp of the detachment of Hazirbash. A party of the enemy crossing the field observed Mr. Rattray and running up to him one put his gun to his head and dispatched him, while several others fired their pieces into different parts of the body. The Guard having by this time got on the alert and loaded their musquets commenced a fire and speedily cleared the open spaces. But we continued closely pressed by the enemy from under shelter of the numerous water courses and walls.
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The following night, running short of ammunition as they had marched up from their main base at Charikar with little ‘beyond the supply in the men’s pouches’, Pottinger and his Gurkha escort broke out of their encircled position under cover of darkness. Leaving behind his armoury and treasury, plus all the Afghan hostages he had taken from the Kohistan chiefs, Pottinger and his force managed to fight their way through to the main British barracks in the valley bottom, where were stationed a full detachment of 750 Gurkhas plus around 200 women and children from their families. There were also three guns, but no cavalry. Here Pottinger faced a new problem. The half-finished and still gateless barracks had not yet had a well built, and before long the besieged garrison was running short of water.
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Each time a party was sent out at night to fetch it from the nearby canal, the volunteers were shot dead on its banks or else captured alive. What little water was brought in was ‘at once seized and drunk by whoever could get hold of it’.

‘The men used to steal out at night’, remembered Havildar Moti Ram,

to a nearby spring which the Affghans had diverted to another direction. Those who had canteens filled them; those who had lotas only, took them with them covered in clothes, lest the glitter of the metal should lead to detection. Those who had neither lotas nor canteens resorted to the use of cloths which they dipped in the fountain and brought back saturated with moisture. When any of these adventurous spirits returned to the fort all struggled around them to procure one precious drop. The Affghans, however, found out about this practice, and shot down all those who approached the spring. There was not a drop of water within the walls of the fort, and the men went mad with thirst.
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Meanwhile, the Kohistani tribesmen were pouring in; within forty-eight hours, some 20,000 Tajiks had gathered to besiege Pottinger and his Gurkhas in their unfinished barracks. ‘It seemed indeed as though the whole male population of the country had assembled against us,’ wrote Pottinger’s Dublin-born colleague Lieutenant John Haughton.
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The following day, the besiegers took the neighbouring fort, which overlooked the barracks, ‘and shots began to drop into the interior of our square’. Before long Pottinger had been badly wounded with a musket ball in his thigh and his military commander, Captain Christopher Codrington, had been mortally wounded in the chest.

In the days that followed, the defenders grew desperate. ‘[The last of our] water was served out to the fighting men only,’ reported Haughton, ‘about half a tea cup full to each man, and much of this was mere mud . . . Many sucked raw [sheep’s] flesh to assuage their thirst. Fighting is at all times dry work, but fighting without water is nearly impossible. The misery was great . . . Soon, our voices were hoarse, our lips were cracked, our faces begrimed with dust and smoke, and our eyes bloodshot.’ By the end of the week, the whole garrison was beginning to hallucinate. ‘About midday,’ wrote Haughton,

it was announced to me that a body of men were visible coming from the direction of Kabul. I at once went out to look, and saw them sure enough; but were they the relief long expected or enemies? Relief certainly. I could make them out distinctly with a telescope. The foremost were horsemen, our own 5th Cavalry, a fact rendered certain by their white headdresses. We congratulated one another, and tears of joy streamed from my eyes; but alas! It soon appeared we were deceived. The fantastic play of mirage had so acted on a herd of cattle grazing, as entirely to deceive us.
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It was a similar story all over eastern Afghanistan. Overnight, every village turned hostile.

In the Khyber Pass, the British picket at Peshbulaq was attacked and the troops forced to fall back to Peshawar.
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South of Kabul, on 3 November, a small party of sepoys under Captain Crawford was marching a group of captured Afghan rebel chiefs from Kandahar to Ghazni. ‘We marched all night, and by daybreak we reached Mooshky,’ remembered one of the sepoys, Himat Baniah, when questioned during his subsequent court martial.

About 8 a.m. the people of Mooshky and the adjacent villages assembled and suddenly came upon us with about 500 men. Armed with matchlocks and swords they came on making much noise and killed many of us. The remainder fled. We were all separated one in one fort and one in another. I heard that Lieutenant Crawford got on as far as Monee. When the 500 men came upon us I was stripped of everything, even to my clothes. After this I escaped to a short distance. About 5 p.m., two horsemen discovered my retreat and seized me and carried me off captive to a fort called Ghardeh.
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Soon after, Ghazni was surrounded and besieged by a large force of Ghilzais. Only Kandahar, under the watchful eye of General Nott, continued to remain peaceful. ‘I am not to be caught sleeping as my Kabul friends were,’ wrote Nott. ‘I have made every preparation for the safety of this part of the country.’
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In Kabul, meanwhile, the siege of the two vital commissariat forts was intensifying. On 3 November, Captain Trevor’s tower house opposite the Shah’s commissariat fort was stormed by the rebels soon after he and his family had escaped out of the back gate in the dark. Yet although the forts contained all the British food supplies that had been gathered for the long Afghan winter, neither Elphinstone nor Macnaghten sent any troops, or even further supplies of ammunition, to aid the defenders of either outpost, although both centres of resistance were less than a mile and a half from the cantonment where 5,000 armed sepoys were idly waiting for orders. ‘No military steps have yet been taken to protect our only means of subsistence in the event of a siege,’ wrote an increasingly frustrated Lady Sale in her diary. ‘This fort (an old crazy one, undermined by rats) contains the whole of the Bengal Commissariat stores. Should the Commissariat fort be captured, we shall lose not only all our provisions, but our communication with the city shall be cut off. The envoy and general still appear perfectly paralysed.’
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