The Dark Defile Read online

  When some of Mackenzie’s other soldiers began dismantling parts of the fort’s defenses so that they could make off, he seized a double-barreled gun and threatened to shoot the first man who disobeyed the order to return to his post. However, when on 3 November the leader of his jezailchis came to him and said, “I think we have done our duty; if you consider it necessary that we should die here, we will die, but I think we have done enough,” even Mackenzie was forced to admit that if they stayed, they would all be massacred. Waiting until dark, with the jezailchis in the lead, a crowd of women and children in the center, and Mackenzie in the rearguard, they moved stealthily out into the darkness to try to find their way through to the cantonments. When a woman abandoned her child by the roadside in preference to leaving her pots and pans, Mackenzie drew his sword and thumped her with the flat of it until she again picked up her child.

  This action may have saved his life because it meant he had his sword in his hand when moments later he was attacked by a party of Afghans crying out, “Feringhee hust” (Here is a European). Spurring his horse, Mackenzie wheeled around, cutting from right to left with his sword and severing the hand of the boldest assailant. After a bitter struggle during which Mackenzie received two saber slashes, he extricated himself from the mélee and galloping on found himself in the midst of another group of Afghans. It took him a moment to realize they were his own jezailchis, and it seemed to him his life had been preserved by a miracle. Soon afterward he reached the cantonments. Miracle or not, it had been a remarkable achievement. George Broadfoot noted admiringly that Mackenzie had fought for two days “and then cut his way to the large force, who did not seem able to cut their way to him.”

  Captain Trevor, commander of Shah Shuja’s Life Guards, had also been besieged in his fort five hundred yards to the east of Mackenzie, together with his wife and seven children. At midday on 3 November Mackenzie had seen “the enemy enter Captain Trevor’s tower and a report was brought by two of his servants that he and his family had all been killed.” In fact the Trevors, together with a small sepoy escort, had managed to flee and eventually reached the cantonments, fording a river to get there. When an Afghan attempted to cut Mrs. Trevor with his sword, a mounted sepoy riding next to her put out his arm to protect her and lost his hand. Though weak from loss of blood, he remained by her side all the way to the cantonments.

  Such instances of bravery, selflessness and resourcefulness contrasted sadly with the timid behavior of the British leadership. Their continued inaction convinced many chiefs who had been watching the insurrection and trying to divine the outcome to join it. They would have been amazed, if heartened, to learn that within just seventy-two hours of the start of the rebellion, General Elphinstone was already contemplating negotiating terms with the enemy. When on 5 November Lieutenant Eyre urged him to send a force to capture the Mohammed Sheriff Fort by blowing in the gate as a prelude to trying to regain the commissariat fort, the general wrote to Macnaghten that he had agreed, but added: “It behoves us to look to the consequences of failure: in this case I know not how we are to subsist, or, from want of provisions to retreat. You should, therefore, consider what chance there is of making terms.”

  An initial attack on the Mohammed Sheriff Fort failed. The following day the British at last had some reason for optimism when a party succeeded in storming it and driving out the occupiers, who fled into the hills pursued by British cavalry. However, though the cantonments were now a little more secure, the commissariat fort in which some supplies still remained could not be retaken. The bare facts were that the troops had lost most of their supplies and faced starvation. Yet, greatly to their surprise, the commissariat officers were able to purchase grain from the inhabitants of the nearby village of Bemaru at reasonable prices—a sign that these people at least did not consider that the British were finished. With these extra supplies and with the troops put on half rations, the immediate danger of being starved out of the cantonments had been averted, though men, especially the Indian sepoys, were starting to fall ill because of the intense cold. Sita Ram described how as the temperature dropped some of his fellow sepoys “became helpless. Men lost the use of their fingers and toes which fell off after great suffering.” Lady Sale pitied the troops, who were being constantly harassed by the enemy but “had no cover night or day, all being on the ramparts.” The defenders of the Balla Hissar, led by Brigadier Shelton, were also suffering: Sixty sepoys had contracted pneumonia, and “there was hardly a grain of medicine, or a single case of amputating instruments in the whole fort! And this with gun-shot wounds occurring almost hourly,” an officer lamented.

  Elphinstone was yet again in despair. On 6 November he wrote to Macnaghten that even though the immediate problem of finding enough provisions had been overcome, a further “very serious and indeed awful” problem loomed: lack of ammunition. He urged Macnaghten not to tarry in seeking terms. “Do not suppose from this I wish to recommend or am advocating humiliating terms, or such as would reflect disgrace on us,” he tried to justify himself, but his postscript revealed his acute anxiety: “Our case is not yet desperate … but it must be born in mind that it goes very fast.”

  Elphinstone’s concern about ammunition was misplaced—there was, in fact, enough within the cantonments to last for twelve months, as even Lady Sale knew—and Macnaghten was not inclined to open negotiations with the rebel chiefs anyway. Instead the envoy was hoping that he might be able to bribe them and used Mohan Lal as his agent. Lal had, by then, taken refuge with a friend of Burnes’s, the Kizzilbashi leader Shirin Khan, and had been sending intelligence reports to the envoy in the cantonments. Macnaghten’s first targets included the Ghilzai leader Mohammed Hamza, to whom he instructed Lal to offer large sums if he could persuade the Ghilzais to withdraw from the insurrection. Macnaghten also told Lal to promise money to the Kizzilbashis and to a rival of the rebel leader Amenoolah Khan in return for exerting their influence in favor of the British.

  However, a more permanent and reliable solution than bribery soon occurred to Macnaghten: political assassination. Perhaps what drove him to this was his acceptance at last of reports that Dost Mohammed’s son Akbar Khan had appeared at Bamiyan in the north and was raising troops. Macnaghten instructed Lal to offer rewards for the killing of the principal leaders of the rebellion. In a letter of 5 November to Mohan Lal, Macnaghten’s political assistant, Lieutenant John Conolly, promised “10,000 rupees for the head of each of the principal rebel chiefs.” A few days later Conolly wrote to Lal that “there is a man called Haji Ali who might be induced by a bribe to try and bring in the heads of one or two of the mufsids [rebels]. Endeavour to let him know that 10,000 will be given for each head—or even 15,000 rupees.”

  As these plans developed, the British forces unlucky enough to have been sent to remote outposts were fighting for their lives. Two lieutenants commanding at Dardurrah, twenty miles north of Kabul, were murdered by Kohistani tribesmen while their soldiers fled. Also in Kohistan, insurgents occupied the plains between Kabul and the British post at Charikar, which was garrisoned by a regiment of Gurkhas. Eldred Pottinger, the political officer for Kohistan whose residence, an old castle, was only two miles from Charikar, had been warning Macnaghten for some time that trouble was imminent. He had requested reinforcements but received none. In desperation, Pottinger had tried to buy the support of the local chiefs but soon understood that, far from being potential allies, the chiefs were hostile. Pottinger’s assistant, Lieutenant Charles Rattray, unwise enough to agree to join a group of petty Afghan chiefs who had gathered in a field adjoining the castle to discuss what they would be required to do in return for the proffered subsidies, was shot and wounded. As his attackers fled, a horrified Pottinger, looking out from the ramparts to see what had happened, watched helpless as other horsemen galloped up and dispatched the wounded Rattray. They then attacked his residence. A force from Charikar under Captain Codrington arrived in time to beat the attackers off, but only with heavy losses.r />
  With no signs of any help arriving from Kabul, Pottinger had no option but to abandon the castle under cover of darkness and fall back on Charikar. However, here the position of the defenders quickly became untenable. Thousands of insurgents besieged the flimsy barracks, which were still in the process of being fortified and which had very limited supplies of water. Codrington commanded the troops while Pottinger took over the artillery until he was hit in the leg by a musket ball, but it was futile. A Gurkha soldier later wrote of the “beegahs [acres] of gleaming swords” moving toward them. Codrington was mortally wounded and spent his final hours composing a letter to his wife, which he entrusted, together with a portrait of her, to Pottinger, lying in the next bed, for safekeeping.

  On 8 November the attackers, who had brushed off several gallant and determined sorties by the Gurkhas, offered terms provided the defenders agreed to become Muslims. Pottinger refused, saying, “We came to this country to aid a Mohammedan sovereign in the recovery of his rights. We are therefore within the pale of Islam, and exempt from coercion on the score of religion.” The siege resumed with lack of water now as great a danger as the attackers. On 10 November each fighting man received only half a glass, and the following day many had to go without. Some men sucked pieces of raw mutton to deaden their thirst, while others stole out after dark in a bid to reach a nearby spring but returned empty-handed.

  With over half the officers dead, only two hundred fighting men left and barely thirty rounds of ammunition apiece for their muskets, the wounded Pottinger knew they had to leave. On the night of 13 November, weak and dazed with thirst, the garrison left Charikar. As one survivor recalled, “Most of the wounded who were unable to move out … with us were slaughtered next day.” Those who did get away owed their lives to a brave Gurkha bugler. Because of him, “the enemy either did not discover our retreat or were afraid to venture near, till long after daylight. We had all throughout the siege sounded our bugles with the regularity of peaceful times, by way of a hint to the enemy that we were all right. On this last fatal morning the Bugle Major … who was too severely wounded to leave with us, crawled up to a bastion and sounded the customary bugle at dawn.”

  As it turned out, Pottinger would be one of only four members of the garrison to make it safely back to Kabul, but when he arrived there two days later with his tales of hardship and massacre, he found little comfort.

  Chapter Twelve

  It is not feasible any longer to maintain our position in this country.

  —MAJOR GENERAL WILLIAM ELPHINSTONE, NOVEMBER 1841

  As the insurrection entered its second week, the mood in the Kabul cantonments grew bleaker. Elphinstone’s precarious physical condition had been worsened by a bad fall from his horse, and he was no longer able to ride around the cantonments to inspect the defenses. On 9 November he reluctantly recalled his second-in-command, Brigadier Shelton, from the Balla Hissar to take charge of the cantonments. The Afghans made no attempt to oppose Shelton, who brought his men in safely, though there was some momentary alarm when Shelton, who had ridden ahead, spied in the distance what he thought was a group of jezail-toting Afghans. It turned out to be only a pack of pariah dogs.

  Many welcomed Shelton’s arrival, expecting “wonders from his prowess and military judgement,” as Lady Sale wrote. However, as she also observed, the new arrangement was not a happy one. Shelton was openly contemptuous of Elphinstone and “often refused to give any opinion when asked for it by the general.” He brought his bedroll to councils of war so that when he became bored he could simply curl up and go to sleep. Elphinstone, who found Shelton “contumacious” and “actuated by ill feelings” toward him, often interfered with or countermanded his orders, leaving more junior officers confused as to their instructions.

  The brigadier was not a man who bothered to hide his feelings. Having decided that the British could never survive the winter in Kabul, he told everyone so, further lowering the morale that his arrival in the cantonments had been expected to enhance. Shelton was also openly rude to Macnaghten. When Mackenzie took him to task about it, Shelton replied, “Damn it, Mackenzie, I will sneer at him, I like to sneer at him!” Lady Sale quickly grew to dislike Shelton and was irritated by his determination to get out of Afghanistan and back to India at the earliest opportunity, writing: “It may be remarked that, from the first of his arrival in the country, he appears to have greatly disliked it, and his disgust has now considerably increased. His mind is set on getting back to Hindustan.” She likened his presence to “a dark cloud shadowing us.” Eyre wrote that, “from the very first, [Shelton] seemed to despair of the force being able to hold out the winter in Kabul and strenuously advocated an immediate retreat to Jalalabad. This sort of despondency proved unhappily very infectious. It soon spread its baneful influence among the officers and was by them communicated to the soldiery. The number of croakers in garrison became perfectly frightful, lugubrious looks and dismal prophesies being encountered everywhere.”

  Shah Shuja, abandoned by Shelton and besieged in the Balla Hissar, knew that if the British indeed departed Afghanistan, either death or exile would be his likely fate. Mohan Lal, in one of his stream of intelligence reports from his hiding place in the city, reported that Shah Shuja had told the 860 women of his haram that he would poison every one of them if the insurgents captured the cantonments. The king’s gloom only deepened when he learned that the insurgent chiefs—a confederacy including Barakzais, Ghilzais and Sadozais—had elected Nawab Zaman Khan—the cousin of Dost Mohammed who had spirited Mohan Lal to safety beneath his bulky apparel—as their new king. It was obvious the nawab was a caretaker, warming the throne for the eventual return of Dost Mohammed himself. Abdullah Khan was appointed the nawab’s commander in chief and Amenoolah Khan his vizier.

  Within the cantonments the British debated how they could best preserve not only their lives but their honor. Unlike Shelton, Elphinstone and Macnaghten were for the moment convinced the British should remain where they were. They still hoped for the arrival of reinforcements from General Nott or indeed for the return to Kabul of Brigadier Sale’s brigade. The envoy had sent yet further messages to Sale, sometimes writing in French or Latin in case the message fell into enemy hands. He had also persuaded Elphinstone to write as well, though a critical Lady Sale thought the general’s instructions highly ambiguous: “From the very cautious wording of the order, it appears doubtful whether [Sale] can take such responsibility upon himself as it implies. He is, if he can leave his sick, wounded and baggage in perfect safety, to return to Kabul, if he can do so without endangering the forces under his command. Now, in obeying an order of this kind, if Sale succeeds, and all is right, he will doubtless be a very fine fellow; but if he meets with a reverse, he will be told, ‘you were not to come up unless you could do so safely!’ ”

  On 10 November the British had a much needed success when Shelton led two thousand soldiers to assault the Rikabashi Fort, a small tower lying a mere three hundred yards from the northeast corner of the cantonments. Afghan marksmen had occupied it and were picking off unwary troops within the cantonments. Many of these sharpshooters were not soldiers but ordinary tradesmen from the city. Lady Sale noted that two of the most accurate were a barber and a blacksmith: “They completely commanded the loopholes with their long rifles; and although the distance is probably 300 yards, yet they seldom fail to put a ball through the body or into the clothes of anyone passing them … and it became an amusement to place a cap on the end of a pole above the walls, which was sure to be quickly perforated by many balls.”

  The attack on the Rikabashi Fort nearly failed when a captain, who had volunteered to blast open the main gate, in error blew in a small wicket gate wide enough to allow only one man at a time to crawl inside. A few did so, but they were left isolated when a sudden cry went up among those troops still outside that Afghan cavalry were coming, causing them to flee in panic. Shelton on this occasion, in Lady Sale’s words, “proved a trump,” coolly r
allying his men and leading them back to capture the fort with its ample store of grain and to rescue their colleagues trapped within.

  For some of these men it was too late. Also according to Lady Sale, Shelton’s troops found an elderly officer who had struggled back outside severely hacked about the body by Afghans with their sharp tulwars. The officer’s attackers had even pulled off his boots and severed two toes. “This is not battle,” he groaned, “it is murder.” He died after surgeons amputated both his arms in a futile bid to save him. Among the enemy corpses the British found sprawled on the ground was the headless body of a man who by his rich dress they identified as a chief. The unsqueamish Lady Sale was intrigued to observe that when it was too dangerous or difficult for the Afghans to carry away their dead from the battlefield, they contented themselves with cutting off the heads so that they could bury at least that part of the body with the due religious rites.

  Emboldened by their success, the British captured, ransacked and destroyed four further nearby forts and brought a large amount of grain back to the cantonments. Though two hundred men had been killed or wounded, their confidence began to return, and many felt a turning point had been reached. For three days the Afghans hung back and allowed long lines of commissariat camels to tramp unmolested through the countryside close to the cantonments as the officers of the commissariat gathered up more food. There was jubilation when two dogs known to belong to officers who had marched with Sale trotted into the cantonments. Rumors flew that Sale and his column were coming. Yet, as day followed day, those looking toward the eastern passes saw no sign of the returning column, and on closer inspection, it was clear that the dogs had been running wild for quite a time—one had rabies.