Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (58 page)

Most harrowing of all was the knowledge that all the Afghans who still had any contact with the British were completely certain that the garrison were walking into a trap. On 29 December 1841, Hugh Johnson recorded in his diary:

Several of my native friends in the city come daily to see me, and all agree without one dissenting voice that we have brought the whole of our misfortunes upon ourselves, through the apathy & imbecility displayed at the commencement of the outbreak.

They also tell me that our safety in the retreat depends solely upon ourselves, that no dependence is to be placed in the promises of any of the Chiefs, every one of whom knows that they are in a measure paid beforehand to do their utmost to destroy us.
10

Mohan Lal, who had unrivalled contacts throughout Kabul, sent a whole succession of warnings that the British were heading straight into an ambush, and passed on explicit intelligence from the Qizilbash chiefs that the British would all be massacred; but he was ignored.
11
Macabre rumours began to circulate that the Afghans would seize all the British women and kill all the British men with the single exception of one who would be taken to the entrance of the Khyber Pass, where he would be left, legless and armless, with a note pinned to his chest to warn the British never again to attempt to enter Afghanistan. Lady Sale, always willing to stare the truth in the face, wrote bleakly in her diary the night before the retreat that ‘the Affghans tell us we are doomed’.
12

No one did more to warn the British of the fate that awaited them in the passes than Shah Shuja himself. Mohammad Husain Herati recorded that ‘His Majesty wrote to Pottinger: “To leave the cantonment in the depths of this harsh winter is an act of extreme folly, beware, do not think of going to Jalalabad! If you must leave the cantonment, then come and spend the winter with us in the Bala Hisar fort, where we will await the end of winter together, and if supplies run out, we will make sorties to plunder round about for our survival.” But this offer was not accepted?. . .’
13

As Mohan Lal pointed out, the decision of the British to abandon Shuja was of course a major breach of faith. ‘No regard was shown to the articles of the Tripartite Treaty,’ he wrote, ‘and Shah Shuja ul-Mulk was left at the mercy of his enemies, to whom we had given shelter during his government of the last two years. Had it not been for us, he, acting as an independent sovereign, would have destroyed the Barakzais, and thus have freed us and himself from these fatal consequences.’
14

Shuja himself seemed less upset and resentful of the British betrayal than simply baffled by the amazing stupidity of his allies. Over his years in Ludhiana, despite his frequent differences with his British hosts, he had come to admire the smooth efficiency of the Company’s administration, but what he had seen over the previous six weeks defied belief: how could the British, and especially the once-masterful Macnaghten, have behaved so idiotically? ‘Sir William Macnaghten did not listen to me,’ a despairing Shuja wrote to Auckland, saying how over and again he had explained to the Envoy that:

unless by slaying or enchaining these people nothing is to be done; I know them well; but my speaking was useless . . .

Often I said I would leave the country as there would certainly be an insurrection; but the envoy told me to be comforted and that he would settle the country with a few regiments. Again I said, ‘beware you are deceived; I will withdraw from the land,’ but I was tied down by my family, the winter came and I did not go; and then the affair came to a head. What dogs are these people! I had hoped to have settled all the country between Khorasan and Persia; who were the men to oppose me? But they made it an affair between Kafirs and Islam; on which account all the people turned from me.
15

Particularly galling for Shuja was the way Macnaghten in his final negotiations had handed over such huge sums to Akbar Khan after so long trimming Shuja’s own budget, thus leaving him without any resources to mount a proper defence:

Mahomed Akbar and others were dying of hunger – you by your money have set them on foot. You gave money to your enemy, you armed him to slay yourself; what he is doing is with your money; but for it he could not have maintained himself for ten days.

I did not even drink water without Sir William Macnaghten’s sanction and often I said to him: we will be wrecked. Captain Lawrence is alive, before him I often said this. Captain Burnes is now dead, he followed his own heart, and he was deceived by men’s words. I told him men are dissatisfied with you and intend you evil, do not be deceived; but it was of no use . . . Until now by one device or another I have carried on, but now they send men to me and say that the Shah is sinking Islam, men say that I am with you [British] and on this account they have left me.

He ended, characteristically: ‘Whatever may be the will of God, that will happen.’
16

As George Lawrence was the one officer left alive with whom Shuja still had a close relationship, it was to him that Shuja sent a last urgent message begging him once more to warn the General not to leave the cantonment, and emphasising that no trust whatsoever could be placed in the promises of Akbar Khan. ‘As long as we held our position, the king urged, they could not hurt us; but if we once abandoned it we were dead men,’ wrote Lawrence. ‘Of these warnings I duly informed Pottinger, who took me to General Elphinstone, to whom I repeated them . . . but we were told that it would not now do to remain where we were, and that march we must.’
17

Having failed to convince the authorities in the cantonment about the impossibility of a safe retreat, Shuja did his best to save his few remaining acquaintances. As Vincent Eyre recorded,

[he] used his utmost endeavours to persuade Lady Macnaghten and as many ladies as would accompany her to withdraw from the army, which he said would all be destroyed, and to take advantage of his protection in the Bala Hisar. He also appealed to Brigadier Anquetil, who commanded the Shah’s force, ‘if it were well to forsake him in the hour of his need, and to deprive him of the aid of that force, which he had hitherto been taught to consider his own?’ All was, however, unavailing. The general and his council of war had determined that go we must, and go we accordingly did.
18

According to Lady Sale, late on the night of 5 January, Shuja sent one final appeal to his British allies, scribbling ‘a message to ask if not even one officer of his force will stand by him?’
19

But, having deserted him and ignored all his advice, Shuja’s officers were now too busy packing for their imminent departure even to bother sending a reply.

At 9 a.m. on the morning of 6 January, to the sound of bugles and drums, the first British troops marched out of the cantonment and trudged off through the knee-high snow towards the Khord Kabul Pass on the Jalalabad road. Despite the bright morning sun, Lady Sale’s thermometer registered a temperature ‘considerably below zero point’.
20

There were some optimistic signs: while around one hundred Afghans had gathered to witness the departure of the would-be conquerors, the ghazis who had haunted the gates of the cantonment had mysteriously disappeared, and the advance guard of the column marched out without encountering the slightest resistance. Even the noose of surrounding forts which had peppered the cantonment with shot for the previous six weeks were completely silent, ‘with not a man to be seen on the walls’, as a relieved Hugh Johnson noted.

For this reason, the advance guard was in high spirits:

After having been cooped up in Cantonments for the last 2 months and 3 days, during which time we had lost in several engagements a great portion of our officers and men, and the latter had also suffered very severely from want of necessary food, cold and over-work, great was the delight of the sepoys at the prospect of being freed from so inclement a climate as is Kabul at this season, and the more especially as the whole of the firewood that had been laid in for the winter’s consumption was already expended, and almost the whole of the fruit trees in Cantonments had also been cut and burnt.
21

Lady Sale’s final breakfast was cooked using the wood of her dining-room table. She then donned the turban and Afghan sheepskin
pustin
that her Afghan friends had advised her to wear, and, taking her twenty-year-old pregnant daughter with her, declined Captain Lawrence’s offer of protection and chose to travel instead mixed up with the brightly dressed troopers of Skinner’s Horse who made up the advance guard.

There was no sign of the escort that the chiefs had promised to send with the British. Nor was the hastily constructed pontoon bridge over the icy Kabul River ready in time to receive the troops, and they had to queue for an hour to make the crossing, despite Lady Sale’s wounded son-in-law Lieutenant Sturt having spent the entire night ‘up to his hips in water’ sinking gun carriages in the river and topping them with planks. But to begin with, for all the delay at the bridge, and the confusion created by the thousands of frightened, starving and benumbed camp followers who for their own safety had deliberately mixed themselves up with the marching sepoys, it still looked as if the snow would be more of a danger to the retreating troops than the swords of the Afghans. ‘It was bitterly cold, freezing hard,’ noted George Lawrence, ‘and I pitied from my soul the poor native soldiers and camp followers, walking up to their knees in snow and slush. It was no easy task to keep all my charges together, some of the bearers hurrying on, others lagging behind with the palanquins and doolies containing the women and children.’
22

The first problem occurred just after eleven, when word came from Nawab Zaman Khan Barakzai that the British should halt their advance as he had not yet completed the necessary arrangements for their safety. By this time, the advance had at last begun crossing Sturt’s makeshift bridge and a long and vulnerable line of troops were standing waiting in the cold snow between the river and the cantonment. Elphinstone, indecisive as ever, ordered a halt, then dithered on what to do next. Around the same time, a swarm of Afghans, including the absent ghazis, began to descend from the village of Bibi Mahru, ‘rending the air with their exulting cries’ and set about looting and burning the now deserted Mission Compound immediately to the north of the main cantonment. The noise of shooting and the plumes of smoke so close by made everyone nervous, and some of the porters and camp followers now began to break out of line and run out of the gate, leaving the baggage they were meant to be carrying and ‘mixing themselves up with the troops to the utter confusion of the whole column’.
23

An hour later, around noon, the ghazis mounted the walls of the Mission Compound and began to fire down into the waiting troops, while the rearguard returned fire from the wallwalks of the cantonment. By one o’clock, fifty of the European infantry were lying dead or wounded in the snow. Colin Mackenzie could see that a massacre was about to take place, with the troops half in and half out of the cantonment, and, watching Elphinstone still hesitate, he galloped off in defiance of his orders – the General shouting weakly after him, ‘Mackenzie don’t do it,’ and rode to the bridge where he told Shelton to resume his march. Despite Mackenzie’s decisive action, thanks to the delay the light was fading and it was nearly five o’clock before the last sepoys of the rearguard finally left the cantonment, having manned the icy walls for eleven hours without food.
24
As they did so, the ghazis rushed straight into the empty cantonment, mounted the wallwalks and immediately began to shoot at the column from the battlements with their long jezails.

At this stage, while most of the troops were now well on their way to Bagramee, the place designated as the camp site for the first night, most of the baggage and all the ammunition of the force was still waiting to cross the bridge. As the ghazis’ jezails found their range, the camp followers and the last troops of the rearguard began to fall where they stood, first jostling then fighting in panic for their turn to cross. Amid this scene of fear,

[Colin] Mackenzie always remembered as one of the most heart-rending sights of that humiliating day, fixing his eyes by chance on a little Hindustani child, perfectly naked, sitting on the snow, with no mother or father near it. It was a beautiful little girl about two years old, just strong enough to sit upright with her little legs doubled under her, hair curling in waving locks around the soft little throat, and her great black eyes, dilated to twice their normal size, fixed on the armed men, the passing cavalry, and all the strange sights that met her gaze . . . Many other children as young and innocent he saw slain on the road, and women with their long dark hair wet with their own blood . . . [Soon] Afghans were seen [milling in the snow, finishing off the dying and] stabbing with their knives the wounded grenadiers.
25

Although Sturt had pointed out to the General that the river was perfectly fordable by camels and horses just upstream from the bridge, this vital piece of intelligence did not seem to have been shared and, despite the ever increasing strafing from the cantonment walls, the terrified remains of the sepoy column battled with the women and children of the camp followers to cross by the new gun-carriage bridge. As a result, by late afternoon, as the sun was sinking behind the mountains and the shadows fast lengthening, the bank of the river had turned into ‘a swamp encrusted with ice’, and was so slippery as to be impossible for the baggage camels even to get close. As the fire from the ramparts increased in accuracy and intensity, tents, barrels of gunpowder, boxes of musket balls, packs of clothing and food were all abandoned in great piles on the banks of the Kabul River, the discarded sacks and saddlebags illuminated by the light of the now blazing cantonment. The rearguard was also forced to spike two of the nine guns the British had been allowed to take away with them, finding it impossible to drag the heavy cannon through the snow. In the end, such was the panic that almost none of the baggage made it over the bridge. So was repeated for a second time the biggest mistake made by Elphinstone at the start of the siege: failing to safeguard his commissariat.