The Dark Defile Read online

  Macnaghten stubbornly dismissed repeated warnings from Mohan Lal and his network of spies that the Ghilzai rising was not an isolated event but the forerunner of a more widespread and concerted insurrection. Increasingly, Shah Shuja’s writ scarcely extended beyond Kabul and its immediate hinterland.22 He also ignored the advice of Eldred Pottinger, the new political officer in Kohistan, who was convinced that the Douranee, Ghilzai and Kohistani chiefs had formed an alliance, and predicted a “coming tempest.” Just as he had dismissed the Douranees as “children,” Macnaghten assured Auckland that the eastern Ghilzais were rascals who would be easily trounced. Brigadier Sale was the man ordered to do the trouncing and to secure the vital route through the Khyber Pass before escorting his charges safely to Peshawar as previously planned.

  On 9 October a vanguard of eight hundred men under Colonel Thomas Monteith set out from Kabul to secure the Khoord Kabul Pass, a narrow defile hemmed in by high rock walls some ten miles east of the city. Among this advance guard was Captain George Broadfoot, who commanded a regiment of Indian, Gurkha and Afghan sappers among Shah Shuja’s levies. His orders were to accompany Monteith with a hundred of his men, but worried by the vagueness of his instructions, he wanted to know whether the column was likely to be opposed and whether there would be forts to be assaulted so he could decide what equipment his sappers should bring.

  Broadfoot went first to Monteith, who told him that he had received no specific orders himself and was in no position to give advice. Broadfoot then went back and forth between Macnaghten and Elphinstone, discovering nothing except that he would get no help from either. The envoy and the major general each referred him repeatedly back to the other and declined to take any responsibility. Their attitudes betrayed their mutual lack of trust and understanding. A peevish Macnaghten complained that Elphinstone seemed to expect him “to turn prophet”—it was impossible for him to predict whether there would be any hostilities or not—while the increasingly agitated major general appeared exhausted and unable to concentrate, claiming he was being “reduced to a mere cipher” and that Macnaghten had tormented him from the very start. At their fifth and final meeting Elphinstone, who by then had taken to his bed, abrogated his responsibilities entirely and told Broadfoot to use his own judgment while imploring him, “For God’s sake clear the passes quickly, that I may get away. For, if anything were to turn up … I am unfit for it, done up body and mind, and I have told Lord Auckland so.”

  According to Reverend Gleig, Sale was also worried about his men’s equipment and asked Elphinstone for new muskets since their “old flint and steel muskets had become, through much use, so imperfect in their hands, that numbers were in the habit of missing fire continually, and the best and most serviceable in the whole brigade was just as likely to carry its ball wide of the mark as in a straight line towards it.” Although four thousand new muskets were in storage in Kabul, Elphinstone turned Sale down.

  In fact, Ghilzais attacked Monteith and the advance guard in their camp at Boothak near the entrance to the Khoord Kabul Pass on the very first night of their march. The sounds of gunfire were heard in the city, and the following day Sale marched to their relief. He then advanced into the five-mile-long pass under constant fire from Ghilzai tribesmen, concealed behind rocks high above, who, out of range of the obsolete British muskets, astutely appeared to be picking off the officers. Reverend Gleig described their skill at squatting behind rocks, “showing nothing above the crag except the long barrels of their fusils and the tops of their turbans.” Sometimes they were so well concealed that “except by the flashes which their matchlocks emitted, it was impossible to tell where the marksmen lay.” Though their “every step was disputed,” Sale doggedly pushed on, clearing the Ghilzais from the heights and reaching the end of the pass after five hours’ fighting, with nearly seventy wounded or killed. Broadfoot thought the fighting had been far more serious than anyone anticipated. Sale himself was among the first to be wounded, shot in the left ankle as he rode through the pass. Hamlet Wade, who was beside him, recalled how Sale turned to him and said coolly, “Wade, I have got it.” Luckily the wound, though painful, was not serious.

  After sending his sick and wounded back to Kabul, Sale—traveling in a litter because of his ankle—pursued the Ghilzais through bleak, barren terrain overhung by soaring rocks to a fort at Tezeen, east of the town of Khoord Kabul, where they had taken refuge. He was about to give the order to attack when the Ghilzais’ leader, Khoda Bakhsh, offered to parley. On the advice of his political officer George Macgregor, Sale called off the assault. Macgregor then negotiated a peace under which Khoda Bakhsh was not only allowed to retain his fort but promised payment of the full subsidy once more if the Ghilzais would guarantee free passage through the passes. However, Khoda Bakhsh’s offer of peace had only been intended to prevent the imminent destruction of his fort by a vastly superior force, and he had no intention of giving up the fight and observing their agreement. To him and the other watching tribal chiefs, the generous terms offered by Macgregor on his own initiative and without reference to Kabul were a sign not of British moderation but of weakness. Thus, as Sale resumed his march eastward toward Gandamack in late October, the Ghilzais repeatedly attacked his force. Only his decision to avoid the narrow, dangerously tortuous Pass of the Fairy, where, as he suspected, the Ghilzais had planned to launch a mass attack, saved him and his men from annihilation.

  Sale pressed on while ordering the Thirty-seventh Infantry, a Queen’s regiment, back to Kabul to fetch Elphinstone, the Macnaghtens, Lady Sale, the sick and wounded and bring them to his column so that he could escort them, as originally planned, through the Khyber Pass to Peshawar. Once again, though, the futility of the treaty with Khoda Bakhsh was proved when Ghilzais ambushed the troops in the Khoord Kabul Pass. Only with great difficulty did they manage to reach Boothak at the mouth of the pass before continuing back to Kabul.

  In the Kabul cantonments those who mistakenly thought they were about to depart had been making their final preparations despite evidence of unusual activity in and around the city. One officer told Macnaghten that “a number of Ghilzai chiefs had left Kabul for hostile purposes.” A constant stream of horsemen was seen riding off in the direction of the Khoord Kabul Pass, while others were observed moving about in the Bemaru Hills overlooking Kabul. In the city itself British officers were being insulted on the streets, and some narrowly escaped attempts to assassinate them—one officer evaded death only because of the speed of his horse. A sentry on guard duty was killed. When his belt and other belongings were discovered in the possession of three Afghans and Elphinstone demanded the culprits’ execution, Macnaghten argued that this would only incite trouble and they were released.23

  Macnaghten himself was warned not to ride for leisure “so early in the morning or so late in the evening as was his wont” and that three men had sworn on the Koran to take his life. Shopkeepers were refusing to sell their goods to the foreigners, claiming that if they did so they would be murdered by the rebels as collaborators. However, a sign of the general confidence still felt in the cantonments was that auctions of the personal possessions that Elphinstone and Macnaghten intended leaving behind fetched high prices.

  Anticipating being able to leave Kabul in early November, Macnaghten predicted on 21 October, “The storm will speedily subside,” although “there will be a heaving of the billows for some time, and I should like to see everything right and tight before I quit the helm.” Lady Sale thought he was out of his depth in the face of what she perceived as a growing and very real crisis. On 26 October she wrote in her journal that “the general impression is that the Envoy is trying to deceive himself into an assurance that the country is in a quiescent state. He has a difficult part to play, without sufficient moral courage to stem the current singly.” He was refusing to believe reports from one of his political officers that Dost Mohammed’s son Akbar Khan had been sighted near Bamiyan, where he had joined forces with the Douranee rebel chi
ef, Aktur Khan, and apparently saw no significance in the fact that Akbar Khan’s father-in-law was among the foremost leaders of the eastern Ghilzai rebels.

  A few days later, on 1 November, Burnes called on Macnaghten and, according to Lady Sale, congratulated him “on leaving Kabul in a perfect state of tranquillity” and wished him Godspeed back to India. Soon after Burnes returned to his own house in the Kizzilbashi area of the city, an agitated Mohan Lal arrived to warn him that a group of influential chiefs led by Abdullah Khan, leader of the Achakzais, was plotting to kill him. Abdullah Khan was the chief whom Burnes had offended by refusing to intervene over the seduction of his favorite concubine by a British officer. More recently, learning that Abdullah Khan had encouraged the rebellion of the eastern Ghilzais, Burnes had called him to his face a traitorous dog and threatened to ask Shah Shuja to slice off his ears.

  Burnes shrugged the warning off. Perhaps he was distracted by his hopes of succeeding Macnaghten—hopes that in recent weeks had muted his criticisms of the envoy’s rose-tinted depiction of a tranquil Afghanistan. A week earlier Lawrence had found Burnes “in high spirits at the prospect of … exercising at last the supreme authority in Afghanistan.” An entry in Burnes’s diary on 31 October reads: “Ay! What will this day bring forth … It will make or mar me, I suppose. Before the sun sets I shall know whether I … succeed Macnaghten.” In fact, the sun had set that night, and he still had not heard. Lady Sale later wrote that the hopes of the man who had once insisted “aut Caesar aut nullus” were futile since another man was said to have been nominated for the post.

  Like Caesar before the Ides of March, Burnes continued to ignore repeated warnings. His servants told him “there was a stir in the city and that if he remained in it, his life would be in danger; they told him he had better go to the cantonments; this he declined doing, giving as his reason, that the Afghans never received any injury from him, but on the contrary, he had done much for them, and that he was quite sure they would never injure him.” An Afghan friend called to tell him that if he did not take shelter in the cantonments he would not live to see the sun rise, while another friend, Nawab Mohammed Sharif, sent word that Burnes’s house was about to be attacked and offered the services of his son and a hundred of his retainers to defend it. Shortly before dawn, and with crowds of people already milling in the streets outside, Shah Shuja’s chief minister, who had replaced the corrupt Mullah Shakur, arrived to beseech Burnes, his brother Charles and his secretary William Broadfoot, George Broadfoot’s brother, who were also in the house, to seek safety in the Balla Hissar.

  Burnes still refused to leave, though he wrote belatedly to Macnaghten requesting troops. He also sent a messenger to Abdullah Khan offering to reconsider his complaints. Unknown to Burnes, the Achakzai chief had the messenger killed instantly. During his first visit to Kabul as a younger man Burnes had called the Afghans children, asserting that they were incapable of concealing their feelings or managing an intrigue. But during those final hours he at last seems to have realized his error, and his confidence wavered. Mohan Lal was again trying to convince him an attack was imminent, describing how one of the conspirators had predicted Burnes’s house would soon go up in flames, when yet another warning letter, this time anonymous and written in Persian, arrived. According to Lal, Burnes rose from his chair, sighed and said that “the time is not far when we must leave this country.”

  Chapter Eleven

  We must see what the morning brings, and then think what can be done.

  —MAJOR GENERAL WILLIAM ELPHINSTONE, 2 NOVEMBER 1841

  On the night of 1 November 1841, just as Mohan Lal had warned Burnes, a small group of rebel chiefs met secretly in Kabul. The ringleaders included Abdullah Khan, leader of the Achakzais, and Amenoolah Khan, the son of a camel driver who had become one of the country’s leading landowners, with ten thousand fighters loyal to him. He was sufficiently ruthless to have, as a younger man, rid himself of a brother he feared as a rival by having him buried up to his chin in sand, one end of a rope tied around his neck and the other to a wild horse, which he had then ordered to be driven round and round until his brother’s head had been twisted off. Following the reinstatement of Shah Shuja, Amenoolah had maintained the pretense of supporting him, but privately he despised the king he saw as a puppet and hated the foreigners who tweaked his strings. To encourage others to join the conspiracy, Abdullah Khan had written to warn them that the British were about to seize them and send them as prisoners to London. To add to the confusion, the rebel leaders circulated a letter they had forged bearing Shah Shuja’s seal, from which it appeared that the king was calling on his people to rise up and destroy the infidels.

  The rebels sensed Kabul was ripe for insurrection. They knew that for the present they lacked the strength to attack the British in their cantonments, but other more vulnerable targets were nearer at hand. Abdullah Khan, smarting from Burnes’s insults, suggested that their first move should be to attack his residence in the city. Such an attack would have the added benefit that in the same street was the equally lightly guarded house of Captain Johnson, paymaster of Shah Shuja’s troops, where there would be much coin to loot.

  Thus, as the pale light of a chilly dawn rose on 2 November—the third Tuesday of the Muslim holy fasting month of Ramadan—crowds began to gather around Burnes’s house. Mohan Lal, whose own dwelling was also close by and who was woken early by his servant shouting, “You are asleep and the city is upset,” at first counted no more than about thirty men milling about. However, as rumors of plunder spread throughout the city, the numbers grew. Captain Johnson, who had wisely spent the night in the cantonments, believed, “The plunder of my treasury, my private property and that of Sir Alexander … was too great a temptation to the inhabitants of Kabul.”

  Before long, peering from an upstairs window of his mansion, Burnes saw nearly three hundred men. They were growing louder, angrier and more excited by the moment while he had only twenty-nine guards to defend him. Trusting in his ability to calm the crowds, he ordered his men not to fire and went out on a balcony overlooking the street to address the mob with his brother Charles and friend William Broadfoot beside him. However, the rioters would not listen, and the first shots rang out from within the crowd. Burnes’s guards returned fire, as did Broadfoot, who killed six Afghans before falling back, shot through the heart. By then the mob had set fire to the stables and servants’ quarters, and smoke was billowing from them. Rioters were surging over walls and fences into the gardens below, screaming at the foreigners to come down. A desperate Burnes shouted offers of money if they would spare the lives of himself and his brother, but the only and repeated response was that he should come outside.

  According to an Indian servant who later escaped, someone told Burnes that soldiers were on their way to help him. Hurrying up the stairs to the flat roof to see for himself, Burnes met a man descending who assured him “that there was not the least sign of a regiment.” Disappointed, he turned back. At this point, a Kashmiri man who had somehow managed to get into the house stepped forward to proffer his help. He swore on the Koran that if Burnes and his brother would disguise themselves, he would smuggle them outside and through the garden to safety. Hastily, Burnes and his brother donned native dress and during a lull in the firing followed their protector out of the house. They had taken only a few steps when the man suddenly called out, “This is Sikunder Burnes,” and the mob fell on them. According to one eyewitness, a mullah lunged at Alexander Burnes before killing his brother Charles. The mob then turned on Alexander again to finish him off. Mohan Lal, watching in horror from the roof of his house, gave a more colorful account of Burnes’s last moments, claiming that “he opened up his black neckcloth and tied it on his eyes, that he should not see from whom the death blows struck him.” What is certain is that within barely a minute the mob had hacked both brothers to pieces with their knives. An old Kizzilbashi friend of Burnes later retrieved the bloody remnants of their bodies at some perso
nal risk and buried them.

  The mob thoroughly looted Burnes’s mansion before turning its attention to Paymaster Johnson’s residence, carrying off seventeen thousand pounds in coin intended for Shah Shuja’s troops and burning Johnson’s meticulous accounts for the previous three years. The mob also attacked Mohan Lal’s house. He escaped only by hacking a hole through an interior wall and scrambling into the adjoining house. He ran from there out into the street full of rioters. Several of them grabbed him and were about to kill him when one of his friends, Nawab Zaman Khan, recognized him and came to his aid. Pulling him beneath his voluminous garments, he somehow smuggled Mohan Lal into his own house. Here the women of his harem served their traumatized guest a sumptuous pulao which, having just witnessed the hacking to death of his old friend Burnes, he found impossible to eat.

  The first reports of disturbances in the city reached the cantonments shortly after seven A.M. Macnaghten’s political assistant, Lieutenant John Conolly, was with the envoy helping him prepare for what he still hoped would be his imminent departure to Bombay when an Afghan brought news that rioting had broken out. Dashing outside, Conolly heard the sound of firing from the direction of the city, and a few minutes later Burnes’s note requesting military assistance arrived. He had written that there was uproar in the city, particularly in the vicinity of his residence, but had added that it would be easily quelled.