The Dark Defile Read online

  However, these concerns seemed to evaporate with the successful 1839 springtime visit of the Czarevitch to London and the opening of promising discussions between Russia and Britain about the vexed “Eastern question” of the two countries’ relations with Ottoman Turkey, as well as initial positive reports of the military campaign in Afghanistan. Few questioned whether, with a seeming new diplomatic détente having been reached with Russia, the Afghan intervention remained necessary. Yet when catastrophe struck, what one critic called “the garbled,” and others “the mutilated” and “eviscerated,” nature of the disclosures would return to haunt the government.

  Chapter Six

  We may fairly say that the game is over.

  —SIR JASPER NICOLLS, COMMANDER IN CHIEF IN INDIA, 1839

  The army of the Indus stayed for nearly two months in Kandahar, where crops ripening in the surrounding fields and meadows provided food for the near-starving men and animals. This puzzled Dost Mohammed, who wondered whether the British were intending to defer their advance on Kabul until the following year, perhaps while they went westward to Herat. However, in late June his doubts about British immediate intentions ended when he learned that the replenished Army of the Indus had set out northeast toward the fortified city of Ghazni, ninety miles south of Kabul. Ironically, the day the army marched out, 27 June, was the very day when—unbeknownst to them—Ranjit Singh died in his capital of Lahore, where his diminutive body was cremated on a sandalwood pyre shared with four wives and seven slave girls who committed suttee for him.16

  Army commander Keane left behind at Kandahar his only siege guns—four 18-pounders weighing sixty hundredweight—and their almost one thousand shells that had been dragged through the passes with such agonizing effort, taking with him only his 6- and 9-pounder guns. Assured by Macnaghten that the defenders of Ghazni would surrender without a fight and by an officer of engineers that the fortress walls were weak anyway, he had bowed to the arguments of his artillery commander that the bullocks were still too exhausted to drag the heavy guns any farther. That decision—wrong as it would prove—was one of choice. However, Keane had no option but to leave behind three thousand camel-loads of grain. Despite all his threats and protestations, the camel drivers refused to move beyond Kandahar because they feared Dost Mohammed’s retribution.

  A further setback had occurred two weeks earlier when Shah Shuja had sent a copy of the Koran and ten thousand rupees to the Ghilzais, who controlled the country through which the Army of the Indus would shortly pass. The Ghilzais were feared by the British as “a numerous and warlike tribe” whose chiefs, according to the Reverend Gleig, inhabited “towers or castles that lie scattered in great numbers through the valleys, while the hills which overlook them abound with glens and deep recesses, whence sudden outbursts might easily be made on a line of march conducted otherwise than cautiously.” The Ghilzai chiefs had returned the Koran but kept the money, a sign that they rejected Shah Shuja’s request for safe passage. Mohan Lal thought one reason for their contemptuous refusal was that they knew the British had already broken faith with other tribal leaders by failing to reward them for their help. Soon after the army had left Kandahar, Ghilzai horsemen were observed stalking the column, and Keane posted additional cavalrymen as pickets around it in case of attack.

  Daytime temperatures of 120 degrees Fahrenheit, a hot searing wind and clouds of choking dust became as great a trial as the Ghilzais. So too did the perennial problem of insufficient supplies. On 20 July, with three days’ supply of food left, the force was a day’s march from Ghazni. Keane dispatched a reconnaissance party ahead, which reached within half a mile of Ghazni but saw only a few horsemen moving about in the surrounding hills. On their return they fell in with an Afghan rider, who told them he had visited the British camp and not been impressed and added what was becoming a familiar warning: “You are an army of tents and camels; our army is one of men and horses. What could induce you to squander crores [tens of millions] of rupees in coming to a poor rocky country like ours, without wood or water and all in order to force upon us a kumbukht (unlucky person), as a king, who, the moment you turn your backs, will be upset by Dost Mohammed, our own king?”

  The next morning Keane himself rode ahead with some of his officers to take a closer look at Ghazni and its great citadel, but as they drew near, marksmen in the surrounding orchards forced them back. Keane ordered infantry forward to dislodge them and some of his artillerymen to bring up their 9-pounder guns within range of the fortress to test its defenses with their shrapnel shells—hollow balls filled with shot surrounding a fused powder charge.17 Ghazni’s Afghan defenders responded by firing back solid shot, and Keane ordered his own gunners to retreat. In contradiction to what Macnaghten and others had told him, Ghazni would not fall without a fight. What’s more, Ghazni’s walls stood on a mound 120 feet high surrounded by a moat and themselves rose to a height of seventy feet and looked strong. In fact, they were twenty feet thick in places. Through his telescope, Keane also saw signs of recent attempts to reinforce the defenses. These were the work of one of Dost Mohammed’s sons, Hyder Ali Khan. Sent by his father to organize the defense of Ghazni, he had ordered the moat to be dug around the fortress and screening walls thrown up to protect its gates. He had also brought in enough supplies to enable Ghazni to withstand a six-month siege if necessary. Dost Mohammed had also sent another son, Mohammed Afzal Khan, with a force of cavalry and orders to deploy in the vicinity of Ghazni. According to intelligence reports reaching Keane, he was less than a two days’ ride away.

  With his supplies almost exhausted, Keane had little time to decide what to do. The arrival in his camp of Dost Mohammed’s nephew Abdul Rashid Khan, whom Mohan Lal had met many years earlier and to whom he had written coaxing him to come over to the British, decided him. Abdul Rashid Khan assured Keane that while three of Ghazni’s four gates—all of which were constructed as strongpoints and through which the path turned at a right angle to impede onrushing forces—had been bricked up, the Kabul Gate on the north side was only lightly barricaded in anticipation of the arrival of reinforcements from Kabul. After Keane’s chief sapper, Major George Thomson, had taken a good look at the Kabul Gate through his telescope and agreed that it might well be possible to blow it open, Keane decided to risk all by storming it without delay and on the afternoon of 21 July moved his army up to Ghazni.

  Just before dawn on 22 July, however, a force of some three thousand ghazis—fundamentalist Islamic holy warriors determined to drive out the infidels and if necessary ready to martyr themselves in the process and thereby win their place in paradise—came galloping in from the east and fell on Shah Shuja’s camp. Their attack was supported by artillery fire from within Ghazni, including rounds from a giant brass 48-pounder that the Afghans called Zubur-Zun (Hard-Hitter) and that the British quickly nicknamed “Long-Tom.” Eventually, after some heavy fighting the ghazis were driven off and about fifty captured and dragged before Shah Shuja. According to Burnes, one ghazi yelled at Shah Shuja that he was an infidel and had brought infidels into the country and pulling out a knife stabbed one of his attendants. Shah Shuja’s response was to order all but two prisoners, whom for some reason he pardoned, to be beheaded. A horrified British officer stumbled upon the scene. The prisoners “were huddled together pinioned, some sitting, some lying on the ground, some standing, and four or five executioners, armed with heavy Afghan knives [tulwars]—a something betwixt a sword and a dagger, the shape of a carving knife, two feet long in the blade, broad and heavy—were very coolly, and in no sort of hurry, hacking and hewing at their necks, one after the other, till all were beheaded.”

  Keane meanwhile was making final plans for his assault on Ghazni. An explosives party consisting of three officers, three sergeants and eighteen Indian sappers was to cross the bridge over the moat to the Kabul Gate and place twelve leather bags containing three hundred pounds of gunpowder at its foot. The men were then to detonate the explosives with a seventy-two-f
oot-long fuse. As soon as the gate was blown in, a storming party of 240 handpicked men under Colonel William Dennie was to charge in, supported by further troops under Brigadier “Fighting Bob” Sale, a disciplinarian no-nonsense officer, loved by his men, who would emerge as one of the most unlikely heroes of the First Afghan War. Sale was to command the whole assault force, with Cotton commanding the reserve. Meanwhile, three infantry companies of the Thirty-fifth Bengal Native Infantry were to circle around to Ghazni’s Kandahar Gate on the south side and feign an attack to divert the defenders’ attention from what was happening at the Kabul Gate. Keane had also deployed a detachment of cavalry to watch for the return of the ghazis or for any sudden advance on Ghazni by Dost Mohammed’s forces, and to cut off anyone trying to flee the town.

  As the time for the attack approached, the atmosphere in the camp was nervous. Tom Holdsworth, writing to his father afterward, caught the mood: “There was a nervous irritability and excitement about us the whole day; constantly looking at the place through spy-glasses, etc.; and then fellows began to make their wills and tell each other what they wished to have done in case they fell; altogether it was not at all pleasant and everyone longed most heartily for the morrow, and to have it over.” In the moonless, windy early hours of 23 July, the explosives party was waiting a few hundred yards from the Kabul Gate with its bags of gunpowder. Artillery had earlier been moved into position on rocky heights overlooking the Kabul Gate to provide covering fire to the assault forces, the gunners grateful for the sound of the high winds to mask the creaking of the gun carriages.

  Just after three o’clock, “when the morning star was high in the heavens and the first red streak of approaching morning was on the horizon,” the demolition party crept across the bridge over the moat. When the group was still fifty yards from the walls, a shout from the ramparts ahead was followed by a shot from a jezail. The men had been spotted. At almost the same moment the diversionary attack on the Kandahar Gate began, and Keane’s artillery opened fire. The explosives party continued its approach, managing to deposit all the bags of gunpowder against the Kabul Gate and to position and light the long fuse. However, in the high wind, at first it failed to ignite properly. One of the officers, Lieutenant Henry Durand, blew on the guttering flame and scraped at the fuse with his nails to make it easier to spark fully. Finally, at the third attempt it caught.

  The demolition party dashed back the way they had come before flinging themselves to the ground as a tremendous explosion reverberated around them. Certain that the gate had been breached, Durand looked around for his bugler to signal for the storming party to advance, only to find the man had been shot through the head. Luckily Colonel Dennie took the initiative. Without waiting for the signal, he charged at the head of his men over the bridge and into the fallen debris of the shattered gateway. In the still-choking smoke the fighting was fierce and hand-to-hand as Dennie’s men pressed onward into the town. Hyder Ali Khan, who had been discussing with his counselors where best to place the women for their protection, had been taken completely unawares. By the time he heard the explosions and musket fire, it was too late to organize effective resistance.

  As Dennie’s men pushed on, the main storming party under Brigadier Sale advanced across the bridge. Holdsworth described how it felt to rush toward the still-smoking breach and, as he did so, to try to make himself as small a target as possible: “The fire on both sides was at its height. The noise was fearful, and the whole scene the grandest and, at the same time, the most awful I ever witnessed … As we got nearer the gate it grew worse and the enemy, from their loopholes began to pepper us.” They “threw out blue lights in several places which looked beautiful, and the flames of their and our artillery, together with smaller flashes from the matchlock men added to the roar of their big guns … the whizzing of their cannon-balls and ours … the singing of the bullets.” Then, as so often, the fog of war descended. As Brigadier Sale’s men pushed in over the smoking beams and tumbled stones of the great gate, Captain Alexander Peat of the initial explosives party, “stunned and bewildered by concussion,” called out, “Don’t go on, it’s a failure!” Sale at once ordered his bugler to sound the retreat. As his men began falling back, another officer told Sale that Peat was wrong and Dennie had got inside the citadel, at which the brigadier ordered the bugler to signal the advance once more, causing his column to turn and again rush across the bridge.

  A group of Afghan defenders had in the meantime gathered in the ruins of the gateway and tried valiantly to hold off Sale’s men with their tulwars. One young lieutenant recalled how in the vicious hand-to-hand fighting some of the attackers were “literally cut to pieces.” Sale himself, although in his late fifties, was in the thick of the fighting. He was wounded twice and escaped death at the hands of his Afghan attacker, who had knocked him to the ground and pinioned him, only by wrenching his sword arm free and cleaving the Afghan’s skull to his eyebrows. However, the sheer force and unexpectedness of the attack had broken the defenders’ resistance. Some trying to flee through the ruins of the gateway tripped over the still-blazing timbers and were burned alive; others were bayoneted by the attackers or trampled beneath the hoofs of terrified Afghan cavalry horses, which the defenders had brought into the city and which were now running loose in the streets. The British took the citadel itself without a fight and captured Hyder Ali Khan. His women, who were in one officer’s view neither “pretty or interesting,” were taken into safe custody as the British troops began to loot, finding, as well as fine quilts and ladies’ “inexpressibles,” large quantities of gunpowder, weapons, grain and other food. The whole operation had taken less than two hours with 600 of the enemy killed and 1,600 captured, against British casualties of 182 killed or wounded.

  The Army of the Indus had been fortunate. Anticipating that his enemies were most likely to take the shorter route through the Khyber Pass, Dost Mohammed had stationed his best troops under his son Akbar Khan to watch that pass. Even so, as Keane later discovered, Dost Mohammed’s son Mohammed Afzal Khan, at the head of five thousand Ghilzai horsemen, had been only six miles from Ghazni when he had heard the sounds of the attack. Instead of advancing, he had ordered his men to ride as hard as they could for Kabul, leaving many baggage elephants and much of his equipment behind him. Keane lost no time in dashing off a report to Lord Auckland describing the capture of Ghazni: It was “one of the most brilliant acts it has ever been my lot to witness, during my service of 45 years in the four quarters of the globe.”

  British officers meanwhile went on sightseeing expeditions around Ghazni, admiring the exquisite brick workmanship of two ancient towers, one of which was at least 180 feet high, and visiting the eleventh-century polished white marble tomb of Sultan Mahmud, who had invaded India on ten separate occasions. The tomb lay within a walled garden planted with mulberries. As well as a giant tiger skin and strings of ostrich eggs interwoven with peacock’s feathers, officers inspected the tomb’s massive gates, which were eight feet wide and fourteen feet high. Reputedly plundered by Sultan Mahmud from the Hindu temple of Somnath in Gujarat, these were the gates Ranjit Singh had once demanded as the price for assisting Shah Shuja. The gates were said to be cedar or sandalwood, but one officer, sniffing them hopefully, found “the smell is entirely gone.”

  News of the fall of the supposedly impregnable Ghazni made a profound impression within Afghanistan. Burnes’s old friend Nawab Jubbar Khan arrived from Kabul bearing Dost Mohammed’s offer to surrender if he were given the post of vizier, held by his murdered brother Futteh Khan and which he regarded as the hereditary right of the Barakzais. Scenting complete victory, Macnaghten rejected Dost Mohammed’s suggestion, offering him instead honorable exile in British India. He also dismissed any idea of releasing the emir’s son, Hyder Ali Khan. For once Nawab Jubbar Khan’s usual good nature deserted him. Dost Mohammed, he said, would rather throw himself on the point of a British bayonet than accept exile. As a parting shot, he demanded of Shah Shuja, w
ith whom he was granted an audience, “If you are to be king, of what use is the British army here? If the English are to rule over the country, of what use are you here?”

  On 30 July 1839, leaving twelve hundred men behind to garrison Ghazni, the Army of the Indus set out on the final ninety-mile march northeastward to Kabul, climbing in blustering winds and with hands and feet aching with cold up to a rugged defile known as Sheer Dundau (Lion’s Teeth), nine thousand feet above sea level, before descending toward their goal of Kabul, itself at six thousand feet. As the column passed the fortlike villages of mud brick, people crowded the roadsides to watch. Crossing the foaming Kabul River, the army advanced through cultivated valleys with groves of willows, poplars and cypresses. Then came reports that Dost Mohammed had fled Kabul.