The Dark Defile Page 18

  Although the sanguine tone of Burnes’s note convinced Macnaghten that nothing serious was amiss, he nevertheless went to consult Elphinstone. Macnaghten’s military secretary, Captain George Lawrence, soon joined them to report that his servant had just returned from the city breathless “and in the greatest excitement” with news that the shops were all closed and that crowds of armed men were filling the streets and surrounding Burnes’s and Johnson’s houses. Lawrence urged the envoy to send troops to Burnes’s aid at once and also to arrest Abdullah Khan and Amenoolah Khan—a suggestion that Macnaghten immediately denounced as “pure insanity and under the circumstances utterly unfeasible.” However, Macnaghten and Elphinstone did agree to order Brigadier Shelton, who was camped in the nearby Siah Sung Hills, to lead a force at once to the Balla Hissar to act “as circumstances required” and to send the rest of his troops back to the cantonments. Lady Sale’s son-in-law, Lieutenant John Sturt, set out with the orders for Shelton, while Lawrence was told to ride at once to Shah Shuja to inform him what had been agreed. As Lawrence spurred his horse toward the city an Afghan brandishing a huge tulwar leaped at him out of a ditch, but he rode him down and galloped on toward the Balla Hissar on its high promontory with musket balls hissing past his head fired by other insurgents who had run from the city’s Lahore Gate to try and head him off.

  With the commotion within the city growing ever louder and smoke from burning shops and houses billowing into the sky, Shah Shuja tried to make out from his vantage point in the Balla Hissar what was happening in the narrow winding streets below. What he saw so alarmed him that he ordered one of his sons to take a regiment and some artillery into the city—the only prompt and timely military action taken that day to suppress the rising. When a breathless Lawrence reached the Balla Hissar, he found the king angrily pacing about and exclaiming, “Is it not just what I always told the Envoy would happen if he would not follow my advice?” by which he meant his frequent urgings to lock up or preferably execute the chiefs suspected of disloyalty. When Lawrence told him the action the British proposed to take, Shah Shuja replied that he had already sent troops led by his son into the city and had no doubt they would suppress the revolt. He also told Lawrence that he had been informed that Burnes had escaped.

  Reassured, Lawrence sent a message to Shelton telling him to delay his march to the Balla Hissar. Annoyed by the confusing and contradictory orders reaching him, Shelton dispatched Lieutenant Sturt to the Balla Hissar to find out exactly what was going on. Just as Sturt was dismounting in the fortress within Shah Shuja’s palace’s precincts, a well-dressed young Afghan leaped at him, stabbing him several times in the shoulder, side and face before escaping with the aid of some confederates among the palace staff. Pouring blood and “crying out that he was being murdered,” the lieutenant stumbled into the palace, where Lawrence set to work staunching his wounds and then arranged for him to be returned to the cantonments with a strong escort in one of the king’s palanquins. Those in the Balla Hissar learned that, despite earlier optimistic reports, the king’s troops were faltering in their advance into the city. They had found it almost impossible to drag their guns through the crooked, winding streets and were pinned down under heavy fire. Shah Shuja’s advisers pleaded with him not to risk further the life of his son and his soldiers and to recall them. Despite Lawrence’s arguments to the contrary, he did so. However, Shah Shuja at last agreed to allow Lawrence to ride personally to Shelton’s camp with orders for him to march at once to the Balla Hissar.

  At Lawrence’s urging, Shelton set off, but his mood was not improved when he reached the Balla Hissar, where to his surprise Shah Shuja demanded to know “who sent me, and what I came there for” but did ask him to cover the retreat of his own troops from the city. Shelton did so, preventing further casualties and saving their guns. He then set up two cannon on the walls of the Balla Hissar and began firing somewhat indiscriminately down on the city. When Lawrence, who had been back to the cantonments to report on events, arrived, the two men had a furious argument. Lawrence later wrote of a nonplussed Shelton who “seemed almost beside himself, not knowing how to act and with incapacity stamped on every feature of his face.” He asked Lawrence what he should do, but when the latter replied, “Enter the city at once,” snapped back with “my force is inadequate, and you don’t appear to know what street fighting is.” Shelton refused to take any further action to quell the disturbances beyond repositioning his guns to fire more accurately at the area where the disturbances had broken out and seemed “in fact quite paralysed.” In disgust, Lawrence returned to the cantonments once more, skirting the city, which was now fully in the hands of the rebels.

  By this time Shah Shuja was repeatedly demanding why the British were not taking action and shouting that if they did not crush the insurrection, he would burn the city down. Yet angry though he was, Shah Shuja knew his best hopes of survival still rested with the British, especially as some of his own guards had taken advantage of the commotion to desert him.

  As darkness fell on the cantonments Elphinstone and Macnaghten had accepted that the fate of Burnes, his brother and his friend was beyond doubt, but had still done nothing. Lady Sale and her daughter were busy nursing Sturt, taking turns to wipe away the congealing blood from his wounds. He could not open his mouth because of damage to the nerves in his face. His tongue was so swollen he could not swallow, and if he tried to lie flat, blood threatened to choke him. Writing that day, Lady Sale thought it “a very strange circumstance that troops were not immediately sent into the city to quell the affair in the commencement; but we seem to sit quietly with our hands folded and look on … The state of supineness and fancied security of those in power in cantonments is the result of deference to the opinions of Lord Auckland whose sovereign will and pleasure it is that tranquillity do reign in Afghanistan … Most dutifully do we appear to shut our eyes on our probable fate.”

  However, if Lady Sale and others in the cantonments were surprised by British inertia, the leaders of the insurrection were amazed. One of the chiefs present at the meeting of 1 November later told a British officer that they had been so fearful of the revenge the British would exact that they had taken no personal part in the murdering and pillaging but throughout 2 November had remained quietly in their houses, horses saddled and waiting should they need to flee.

  From his hiding place in the town that day, Mohan Lal sensed people’s fear and apprehension as every minute they waited for British troops to arrive and “blow up the town to revenge the murder of Sir Alexander Burnes.” Captain Johnson later wrote in his journal that though he had spoken to many Afghans, their unanimous view was that “the slightest exhibition of energy on our part” during the revolt’s early stages would have snuffed it out. However, as a result of the paralysis that seized the British, though “300 men would have been sufficient in the morning to have quelled the disturbance, 3,000 would not have been adequate in the afternoon.” Lady Sale blamed the influence of some of Macnaghten’s Afghan informants, who, as she complained in her journal “flatter him into the belief that the tumult is bash (nothing) and will shortly subside.”

  The conspirators’ confidence grew as that of the British diminished, and they lost little time spreading the news of their success. Their letter to the tribes of the Khyber Pass boasted that “stirring like lions, we carried by storm the house of Sekundur Burnes. By the grace of the most holy and omnipotent God the brave warriors, having rushed right and left from their ambush, slew Sekundur Burnes with various other Feringees of consideration … putting them utterly to the sword, and consigning them to perdition.” The British were permitting what had started as perhaps little more than a violent demonstration to turn into something far more serious. Remarkably in this time of crisis and although the Macnaghtens had moved from their vulnerable residence into the cantonments, General Elphinstone and Macnaghten were still communicating principally by means of notes. “Since you left I have been considering what can be done to
morrow,” Elphinstone wrote to the envoy that first night of the rising. “Our dilemma is a difficult one. Shelton, if reinforced tomorrow, might, [advancing from the Balla Hissar] no doubt, force in two columns on his way towards the Lahore gate [of the city], and we might from hence force that gate and meet them. But if this were accomplished what shall we gain? It can be done, not without very great loss, as our people will be exposed to the fire from the houses the whole way … but to march into the town, it seems, we should only have to come back again; and as to setting the city on fire, I fear, from its construction, that it is almost impossible. We must see what the morning brings, and then think what can be done.”

  The following morning brought panic when in the dawn light clouds of dust on the skyline and the crack of muskets suggested an attack on the cantonments was imminent. Drums were beaten to call the men to arms as a large body of horsemen approached. But as it drew nearer, those watching anxiously from behind the cantonments’ flimsy defenses recognized the colors of the Thirty-seventh Regiment, which Sale had ordered back to the cantonments the previous day. Though three thousand Ghilzais had pursued and harassed them all the way to Kabul, their commanding officer had managed to bring his column and all its baggage safely in.

  The arrival was a fillip to British morale, and Elphinstone agreed with Macnaghten that troops should be readied for an assault on the insurgents, but it was too late. As the news of Burnes’s murder and of the looting of the treasury had spread to the surrounding villages, in Mohan Lal’s words it had brought “thousands of men under the standard of the rebels.” The area between the British camp and the city teemed with insurgents, and enemy horsemen were observed massing in the hills, among them Nawab Jubbar Khan, once Burnes’s friend and the most steadfast supporter of the British in Kabul who, according to Mohan Lal, had also been seen in the city “beating a drum and haranguing the faithful to stand up to us.” Three companies dispatched by Elphinstone to Kabul in midafternoon on 3 November met heavy opposition and were forced to fall back on the cantonments without even entering the city.

  In the cantonments themselves, belated attempts were being made to improve the defenses. Lieutenant Eyre positioned the only available guns—six 9-pounders, four howitzers and three 5 ¼-inch mortars—as best he could, but clearly the British had insufficient artillery to protect themselves. Neither did they have enough artillerymen. According to Eyre there were only eighty, all Shah Shuja’s men and, to make matters worse, “very insufficiently instructed, and of doubtful fidelity.” Alive at last to the danger, Macnaghten sent letters imploring Brigadier Sale, by then well on the way to Jalalabad, to return forthwith to Kabul. He also wrote to General Nott at Kandahar asking him to send troops under his command, who were on the point of returning to India, to his aid as fast as possible.

  Not only men and artillery were in short supply. The folly of placing all the commissariat stores in a fort four hundred yards beyond the southwest corner of the cantonments was finally apparent to all. Elphinstone increased the number of commissariat guards to eighty, but this was still not enough to defend it against a determined and numerous enemy to whom its cornucopia of everything from grain and hospital stores to spirits, wine, rum and beer was irresistible, and who had already occupied the orchards and gardens that lay between it and the camp. By 4 November four hundred Afghans had also taken over another nearby tower—the Mohammed Sheriff Fort—lying between the cantonments and the commissariat fort. Its forty-foot-high sunbaked mud walls pierced with loopholes provided excellent cover for Afghan marksmen. Elphinstone had suggested occupying the fort while it was still empty, but Macnaghten had argued against garrisoning it with British troops on the grounds that such a move might cause offense and hence “be impolitic.”

  On 4 November the Afghans besieged the commissariat fort in earnest and began mining beneath its walls. The officer in command there was Lieutenant Warren, a calm, taciturn young man who liked to go about with a pair of bulldogs at his heels. Realizing he was on the brink of being overwhelmed, Warren warned Elphinstone that unless he was reinforced at once he would have to abandon the fort. Elphinstone sent out two companies, whose somewhat ambiguous orders were to reinforce the fort’s defenders or—if that proved impossible—to help them to evacuate it safely. The relief party at once came under heavy fire from marksmen concealed in the Mohammed Sheriff Fort and the surrounding gardens; they shot the two company commanders dead and forced the remaining troops to retreat back to the cantonments without reaching the commissariat fort. Later that day Elphinstone tried again, this time sending out a detachment composed principally of cavalry and with orders to help Warren evacuate the fort. However, as one eyewitness recorded: “From the loopholes of Mohammed Sheriff’s fort—from every tree in the Shah’s garden—from whatever cover of wood or masonry was to be found—the Afghan marksmen poured, with unerring aim, their deadly fire upon our advancing troops.” They too were forced back.

  Captain Boyd, the chief commissariat officer, pleaded with Elphinstone not to contemplate evacuating the fort but instead to renew his efforts to reinforce it. Lady Sale agreed with Boyd, writing in her journal that if the fort—“an old crazy one undermined with rats”—were abandoned, they would lose all their provisions. With only three days’ food supplies left in the cantonments, this move could prove fatal. Elphinstone at first agreed with Boyd but then changed his mind. Boyd tried a second time, and Elphinstone again agreed with him, only to be swayed by the arguments of others that reinforcing the commissariat fort was impossible until the British took the Mohammed Sheriff Fort.

  While Elphinstone asked the advice of anyone he could find—even junior officers—a further message came from Warren. He reported that the enemy were so close to breaking into the fort that some of his men were deserting their positions and fleeing over the walls, and that unless reinforced at once he would have no option but to abandon the commissariat. Elphinstone promised that soon after midnight he would send troops both to take the Mohammed Sheriff Fort and to reinforce Warren. But having issued the orders, on the advice of others he postponed the action until the following morning. According to Lieutenant Eyre, who had been among those pressing Elphinstone to act, the general had “an insuperable repugnance to nocturnal expeditions, and could tell of numberless instances where they had failed in Europe. It was an inconceivable trial to one’s patience to be doomed to listen to such stories … when every moment was of infinite value.”

  The next morning, as Eyre had feared, was indeed too late. It was daylight before the troops were ready, by which time Warren and what was left of his beleaguered garrison had escaped from the commissariat fort by digging a hole through its wall and had struggled back to the cantonments, leaving the stores to looters. Very soon, according to Captain Johnson, the fort resembled “a large ant’s nest. Ere noon, thousands and thousands had assembled from far and wide, to participate in the booty of the English dogs, each man taking away with him as much as he could carry—and to this we were all eye-witnesses.” According to an officer in the Balla Hissar, Shah Shuja was watching from the rooftop of his palace “from where with the naked eye, the melancholy and heart-rending sight was distinctly visible. Grain, wine, hermetically sealed provisions and stores of every kind were being thrown over the walls in one common mass, and seized and carried away by the Afghans below. The King was dreadfully agitated, and turning to his Vizier said, ‘The English are mad.’ ” Shah Shuja was so despondent that he was asking the advice of even the most junior officers, permitting them to sit by him and sending them warm quilts to keep out the extreme cold because, pride and dignity for the moment pushed aside, he “had forgot for the time that he was a king,” just as Elphinstone in the cantonments seemed to have forgotten he was a general.

  Also on 4 November supplies for Shah Shuja’s troops, including a large quantity of grain, were lost. In the early days of the occupation the British had sensibly planned to store the grain in specially erected warehouses in the Balla Hissar, b
ut Shah Shuja had objected. Instead, the grain sacks had been stacked in a ramshackle fort, partly consisting of converted camel sheds, about a mile and a half from the cantonments on the outskirts of Kabul. Two days before, on the morning of 2 November, Captain Colin Mackenzie, who was living at the fort, had been about to ride to the cantonments when he was told that riots had broken out in the town. He had immediately ordered his troops to stand to arms but, as he later wrote, “suddenly a naked man stood before me, covered with blood, from two deep sabre-cuts in the head and five musket-shots in the arm and body.” He proved to be a messenger sent by Macnaghten to another officer, Captain Robert Trevor, living with his extensive young family in a fort nearby.

  Taking this as “rather a strong hint as to how matters were going,” Mackenzie had immediately ordered the gates of his fort to be secured and prepared to resist an attack. He had also managed to get a message to the cantonments asking urgently for reinforcements or at least for some more ammunition. Lawrence, who was with Elphinstone when Mackenzie’s message arrived, volunteered to lead a relief force, but his proposal was, he later complained, universally condemned by the other officers present as imprudent because “they feared exposing their men to street fighting.” Mackenzie and his men had strained their eyes in vain “looking for the glittering bayonets through the trees.” However, what they could see—and it brought them no comfort—was smoke rising from the direction of Burnes’s house. They realized that the rumors of his murder that had begun reaching them must be true.

  Mackenzie succeeded gamely in hanging on for the next thirty-six hours. The defenders numbered 160, including 90 Afghan mercenary musketrymen—jezailchis—handpicked by Mackenzie, to whom they were devoted. He in turn admired how they fought unflinchingly against their own countrymen, only occasionally breaking off “to refresh themselves with a pipe” or sometimes drowning out the sounds of battle and of women wailing over the dead and dying by twanging “a sort of rude guitar, as an accompaniment to some martial song which, mingling with the above notes of war, sounded very strangely.”