The Dark Defile Read online

  In the cantonments many listened to the debate about withdrawing to the Balla Hissar with anger and incredulity. Eyre thought it the most sensible course, and Lieutenant Sturt, recovering remarkably well from his stab wounds, urged “the absolute necessity of our now withdrawing our forces from the cantonments into the Balla Hissar” but, according to his mother-in-law, Lady Sale, was met by the cry of “How can we abandon the good buildings and property?” Mohan Lal also thought it bizarre that anyone should think it too dangerous to march to the Balla Hissar while believing that “to travel eight to ten days to Jalalabad through the frozen passes … occupied by the ferocious and plundering Ghilzais was … far from dangerous.” He had also grown convinced that the British would have no option but to negotiate their departure from Kabul unless “a portion of the people or chiefs wished [them] to remain.”

  Mohan Lal himself had been busy trying to buy support for the British, as Macnaghten had ordered. His attempts to encourage the Kizzilbashi community, under its leader Shirin Khan, to declare for the British had faltered in the face of the obvious inability of the British to suppress the rising. However, he had evidently fared better with his plans to purchase the assassination of some of the insurrection’s ringleaders. By the end of November both Abdullah Khan and another leading conspirator, Mir Misjidi, were dead. Abdullah Khan had died of those injuries sustained during the battle for the Bemaru Hills which had caused the insurgents temporarily to fall back. Mir Misjidi had simply vanished. One Afghan employed by Mohan Lal claimed to have shot Abdullah Khan with a poisoned musket ball from behind a wall during the fighting, while another asserted he had strangled Mir Misjidi while he slept and then disposed of his body. Both demanded the promised blood money. Mohan Lal refused to pay up—in Abdullah Khan’s case because he doubted the truth of the supposed killer’s story and in the case of Mir Misjidi because the assassin could not produce the head as proof.

  Whatever his precise role in engineering what were clearly political killings, Mohan Lal rightly assessed that the fate of the British depended on the wishes of the Afghan people and their chiefs. On 24 November Osman Khan sent an envoy to the cantonments offering terms. As Lady Sale wrote that day, “They say they do not wish to harm us, if we will only go away; but that go we must and give them back the Dost; that Mohammed Akbar Khan (his son) will be here tomorrow with 6,000 men; and that if we do not come to terms, they will carry the cantonment; and that they are ready to sacrifice 6,000 men to do so.”

  Despite the bellicose undertones, the offer was a relief to Elphinstone at least. Macnaghten asked him for his formal opinion in writing, presumably to produce in any future inquiry, on whether the British could maintain a military presence in Afghanistan any longer. Elphinstone for once was utterly decisive: “I beg to state that, after having held our position here for upwards of three weeks in a state of siege, from the want of provisions and forage, the reduced state of our troops, the large number of wounded and sick, the difficulty of defending the extensive and ill-situated cantonment we occupy, the near approach of winter, our communications cut off, no prospect of relief, and the whole country in arms against us, I am of the opinion that it is not feasible any longer to maintain our position in this country, and that you ought to avail yourself of the offer to negotiate which has been made to you.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  We shall part with the Afghans as friends, and I feel satisfied that any government which may be established hereafter will always be disposed to cultivate a good understanding with us.

  —SIR WILLIAM MACNAGHTEN, DECEMBER 1841

  The speed with which Macnaghten followed up their offer of talks must have gratified Osman Khan and the Afghan chiefs and perhaps encouraged them to take a tough line when, on 25 November, they met in a gatehouse to the cantonments. During a tense and ill-tempered encounter, they asserted that the British were prisoners of war. As such they must surrender unconditionally and hand over all their arms, ammunition and treasure. The astonished envoy refused, and when the chiefs threatened him with meeting again on the field of battle, he retorted, “At all events we shall meet at the day of judgment.” After the meeting broke up, Macnaghten wrote to the chiefs making clear the conditions he would consider acceptable, but their response was again to threaten hostilities, to which, according to Lady Sale, he replied grandly “that death was preferable to dishonour,—and that we put our trust in the God of battles.”

  At the same time, unaware that negotiations were stalling, Afghan fighters and their British opponents—both Europeans and sepoys—were socializing as if their differences were forgotten and the British would soon be on the road to India. Afghans even offered cabbages to the hungry British until a British officer stopped them in case they had some sinister motive like concealing bottles of alcohol among the leaves to intoxicate and thereby incapacitate the garrison. Even when the inhabitants of the cantonments discovered the talks had failed, they continued to believe that something would be settled. On 30 November Lady Sale wrote, “The politicals are again very mysterious, and deny that any negotiations are going on etc; but letters come in constantly; and we know they are treating with the Ghilzais.”

  Yet beyond the cantonments’ insubstantial walls things were changing. Dost Mohammed’s able, charismatic son Akbar Khan had just entered Kabul to scenes of rejoicing and a celebratory storm of jezail fire. With a kingdom to reclaim for his father he was not in a conciliatory mood and would from then on be a major force in directing the Afghans’ policy toward the detested army of occupation.

  With the air growing ever chillier, conditions in the cantonments were deteriorating. Soldiers on guard duty in exposed positions found their clothes became stiff with frost. Though there was plenty of wood within the cantonments, Elphinstone, who seems to have been confused about many things including how much ammunition and how many stores remained, would not, for fear of scarcity, even permit fires to be lit at night for warmth. The soldiers were to use wood only for cooking their food. With scarcely any forage left, starving horses began eating their own dung, the bark of trees, even gnawing tent pegs and cart wheels. According to Lady Sale, one artillery horse ate another’s tail. However, the horses could at least provide food for humans. On 3 December she noted that a committee was being set up “to value all useless horses … which are to be destroyed; so there will be plenty of cheap meat, as tattoos [ponies] and camels have for some time past been eaten; even some of the gentlemen ate camel’s flesh, particularly the heart, which was esteemed equal to that of the bullock.” As always, the camp followers suffered worst and were soon existing on the carcasses of camels that had themselves died of starvation.

  All the time the cantonments buzzed with rumors: that an all-out attack was imminent, that Akbar Khan had fallen gravely ill, that the alliance between the chiefs was fracturing beneath the strain of their age-old rivalries, that British reinforcements were advancing on Kabul. Meanwhile, the Afghans had occupied the hills and villages around the cantonments from which the British had on occasion still been able to obtain supplies. However hard they tried, the artillerymen could not dislodge them. With starvation a real and immediate threat and the intentions of the Afghan chiefs unclear, the so-called British councils of war were acrimonious sessions filled with mutual recriminations. Brigadier Shelton was often rolled up in his bedding on the floor, either genuinely asleep or simulating it to annoy Elphinstone, and few decisions were made. Lady Sale thought that “the General, unsettled in his purposes, delegates his power to the Brigadier, and the Brigadier tries to throw off all responsibility on the General’s or any body’s shoulders except his own.”

  Every day seemed to bring some further crisis. On 5 December the Afghans destroyed the one and only bridge over the Kabul River. It had been built out of wood by the British to speed communication between the cantonments and the Balla Hissar and was less than a quarter of a mile from the cantonments. Nevertheless, “our imbecile military leaders,” as Lawrence called his superior
s, did nothing to prevent the Afghans setting fire to it. On the following day a small party of Afghans placed makeshift ladders against the mud-brick walls of the nearby Mohammed Sheriff Fort, now occupied by the British, and clambered inside. Lady Sale thought “a child with a stick” could have repulsed them, but the terrified garrison bolted back to the cantonments, abandoning everything. There exaggerated reports of the attack on the fort caused such panic that sentries from Shelton’s all-European regiment—the Forty-fourth—fled their posts. They were replaced by sepoys whose nerves, it seems, were stronger.

  Macnaghten complained, “Our troops are behaving like a pack of despicable cowards, and there is no spirit or enterprise left amongst us.” Confronted by the disastrous collapse in morale and the ever-dwindling supplies—by this time barely three days’ provisions remained—he found it increasingly hard to withstand Elphinstone’s pleas to seek a solution through negotiation. On 8 December, clearly still anxious to preserve a paper trail of responsibility for contentious decisions, he asked Elphinstone, “[Will you] be so good as to state, for my information, whether or no I am right in considering it as your opinion that any further attempt to hold out against the enemy would merely have the effect of sacrificing both His Majesty [Shah Shuja] and ourselves, and that the only alternative left is to negotiate for our safe retreat out of the country on the most favourable terms possible.”

  Elphinstone replied that the envoy understood his views perfectly: “The present situation of the troops here is such, from the want of provisions and the impracticability of procuring more, that no time ought to be lost in entering into negotiations for a safe retreat from the country.” As far as Shah Shuja was concerned, Elphinstone insisted that his responsibility extended only to “the honour or welfare” of his troops—in other words, Shah Shuja was the envoy’s problem. His note, which ended with a further plea to Macnaghten to “lose no time in entering into negotiations,” was also signed by Elphinstone’s three senior officers: Brigadiers Shelton and Thomas Antequil and Colonel Robert Chambers, commander of the cavalry.

  Macnaghten, though, had not given up and later that day persuaded a reluctant Elphinstone to mount a final sortie to attempt to bring back grain from a village four miles away. Troops were readied, but a few hours later the general abandoned the plan as too risky. Still Macnaghten resisted, writing to his brother-in-law on 9 December, “The military authorities have strongly urged me to capitulate. This I will not do till the last moment.” However, his final justification for delaying talks—the hope that reinforcements might yet get through from Kandahar—was destroyed when, on 10 December, a messenger brought news that thick snows were delaying Brigadier Maclaren’s advance.

  The following day, 11 December, Macnaghten accepted the inevitable. Accompanied by his three staff officers—Captains Lawrence, Mackenzie and Trevor—he rode out to a meeting with Akbar Khan and the other leading chiefs on the plain southeast of the cantonments, taking with him a draft treaty that he had crafted carefully in Persian. After a brief exchange of courtesies, Macnaghten began reading the text of the treaty aloud to the assembled chiefs. It opened by acknowledging that the continued presence of the British army in Kabul in support of Shah Shuja was “displeasing to the great majority of the Afghan nation.” It declared that the British government had only sent troops to Afghanistan to secure “the integrity, happiness and welfare of the Afghans” and that the British had no wish to stay if their presence was defeating that object.

  Macnaghten then moved on to his detailed proposals. The British garrison in Kabul would withdraw “with all practical expedition” to Peshawar and thence to India. For their part, the chiefs would guarantee that the British should be “unmolested in their journey” and given “all possible assistance in carriage and provisions.” At this point Akbar Khan demanded to know why the Afghans should give the British anything when they could depart the very next day. However, other chiefs rebuked him for so rudely interrupting, and Macnaghten continued. His treaty promised that the British garrisons at Jalalabad, Kandahar and Ghazni would also leave Afghanistan and that as soon as they had withdrawn in safety, the British would make immediate arrangements for the return of Dost Mohammed and his family to their homeland. As for Shah Shuja, he could choose whether to stay or to leave with the British. There was to be a general amnesty and eternal friendship between the Afghan and British nations “so much so that the Afghans will contract no alliance with any other foreign power without the consent of the English, for whose assistance they will look in the hour of need.” As soon as the treaty was signed, the Afghans were to provide the British with all the provisions they needed for which the British would pay.

  After two hours of haggling, the chiefs accepted Macnaghten’s main proposals. The British would depart in three days, and meanwhile the Afghans would send into the cantonments everything the British needed. In addition, an exchange of hostages was agreed: The British would surrender Captain Trevor in return for an Afghan chief. As Macnaghten and his party rode the one mile back to the cantonments, a random bullet whizzed over their heads.

  Macnaghten had done what Elphinstone wanted. Although he knew it was capitulation, that chilly day he must have believed that at least he had saved the lives of the 4,500 British troops, both European and Indian, and 12,000 camp followers in Kabul. In a long and never completed note justifying his actions he wrote: “The whole country … had risen in rebellion; our communications on all sides were cut off … We had been fighting forty days against very superior numbers, under most disadvantageous circumstances, with a deplorable loss of valuable lives, and in a day or two we must have perished from hunger, to say nothing of the advanced season of the year and the extreme cold … I had been repeatedly apprised by the military authorities that nothing could be done with our troops … The terms I secured were the best obtainable, and the destruction of fifteen thousand human beings [sic] would little have benefited our country, whilst the government would have been almost compelled to avenge our fate at whatever cost. We shall part with the Afghans as friends, and I feel satisfied that any government which may be established hereafter will always be disposed to cultivate a good understanding with us.”

  The next day the chiefs approached Shah Shuja with a proposition: He could remain as king provided he gave several of his daughters as wives to the leading chiefs and dispensed with some of the cumbersome ceremonials that they so much resented but that he so enjoyed. Shah Shuja, after some thought, accepted. However, Macnaghten’s couleur de rose confidence that all would be well was challenged almost at once when, on the “exceedingly dark and freezingly cold” evening of 13 December, the six hundred British troops who still remained in the Balla Hissar departed for the cantonments to prepare for what they believed would be their imminent departure from Kabul. As the tail of the British column was passing through the gates of the citadel, some of Akbar Khan’s men tried to rush through them. Shah Shuja’s own soldiers only closed the gates against them with difficulty and in so doing stranded a number of British troops inside, as well as some much needed supplies of wheat and flour intended for the cantonments.

  Outside the citadel, British soldiers were caught in the crossfire. Akbar Khan, who had promised to provide a safe escort for them, suddenly announced that with the surrounding area teeming with bandits, he could not guarantee their safety. They must halt for the night while he negotiated their safe passage with the local chiefs. Several officers walked up to the gates of the Balla Hissar to demand that the troops be allowed to reenter, but Shah Shuja’s soldiers immediately fired on them. When they demanded to know on whose authority they were being thus attacked, the answer came that the king had ordered the gates to be held whatever the cost.

  The troops had no option but to bed down beneath the walls of the citadel without food, fuel or tents on ground that was white with hoarfrost. When morning finally came, the numb and frozen men at last set out for the cantonments. Although Akbar Khan kept up some semblance of hono
ring his promise to protect the troops, threatening to cut down any man who molested them, Afghans still attacked the rear of the column. Lieutenant Eyre recorded the fate of “a poor sick European artillery-man who, for want of a more suitable conveyance, had been lashed to the gun, [but] was unmercifully butchered.” However, by ten A.M., the starving and exhausted force finally reached the cantonments. By then Shah Shuja, terrified by Akbar Khan’s assault on the Balla Hissar, had changed his mind about the wisdom of accepting the chiefs’ offer.

  As yet, Akbar Khan and the other Afghan leaders had produced none of the promised supplies. When the British protested that this was delaying their preparations for departure, they claimed it was not their fault—that every time they collected food and animals to bring to the cantonments, the uncontrollable ghazis stole them. Lady Sale, sharper witted than many of her male colleagues, understood what was behind the shrugging off of responsibility: “Our allies, as they are now called, will be very magnanimous if they let us escape, now that they have fairly got us in their net.”