The Afghan Wars 1839 42 and 1878 80 by Archibald Forbes

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The escort brought back into cantonments tidings that the Envoy had been
seized. The garrison got under arms, and remained passive throughout the
day. The defences were manned at night, in the apprehension that the
noise and disturbance in the city portended an assault; but that clamour
was caused by the mustering of the Afghans in expectation that the
British would attack the city, bent on vengeance on the murderers of the
Envoy. Action of that nature was, however, wholly absent from the
prostrate minds of the military chiefs. On the following afternoon
Captain Lawrence transmitted certain overtures from the chiefs, as the
result of a conference held by them, when, notwithstanding severe
comments on the conduct of the Envoy, professions were made of sincere
regret for his death. With certain alterations and additions, the treaty
drawn up by Macnaghten was taken by the chiefs as the basis for the
negotiations which they desired to renew. Major Pottinger, as now the
senior 'political' with the force, was called on by General Elphinstone
to undertake the task of conducting negotiations with the Afghan leaders.
The high-souled Pottinger rose at the summons from the sickbed to which
he had been confined ever since his wonderful escape from Charikar, and
accepted the thankless and distasteful duty. It is not necessary to
recount the details of negotiations, every article and every stage of
which display the arrogance of the men who knew themselves masters of the
situation, and reveal not less the degrading humiliation to which was
submitting itself a strong brigade of British troops, whose arms were
still in the soldiers' hands, and over whose ranks hung banners blazoned
with victories that shall be memorable down the ages. On the sombre and
cheerless Christmas Day Pottinger rose in the council of men who wore
swords, and remonstrated with soldierly vigour and powerful argument
against the degrading terms which the chiefs had contumeliously thrown to
them. He produced letters from Jellalabad and Peshawur giving information
of reinforcements on the way from India, and urging the maintenance of
resistance. He argued that to conclude a treaty with the Afghans would be
a fatal error, and suggested two alternative courses which offered a
prospect of saving their honour and part of the army--the occupation of
the Balla Hissar, which was the preferable measure, or the abandonment of
camp, baggage, and encumbrances, and forcing a retreat down the passes.
The council--Pottinger must have written sarcastically when he termed it
a 'council of war'--unanimously decided that to remain in Cabul and to
force a retreat were alike impracticable, and that nothing remained but
the endeavour to release the army by agreeing to the conditions offered
by the enemy. 'Under these circumstances,' in the words of Pottinger, 'as
the Major-General coincided with the officers of the council, and refused
to attempt occupying the Balla Hissar, and as his second in command
declared that impracticable, I considered it my duty, notwithstanding my
repugnance to and disapproval of the measure, to yield, and attempt to
carry on a negotiation.'

This Pottinger accordingly did. The first demand with which he had to
comply was to give bills for the great sums promised by the Envoy to the
chiefs for their services in furthering and supporting his treaty. This
imposition had to be submitted to, since the Afghans stopped the supplies
until the extortion was complied with. The next concession required was
the surrender of the artillery of the force, with the exception of six
field and three mule guns; and the military chiefs endured this
humiliation, against which even the demoralised soldiery chafed. Then the
demand for hostages had to be complied with, and four officers were sent
on to join the two hostages already in Afghan hands. The chiefs had
demanded four married hostages, with their wives and children, and a
circular was sent round offering to volunteers the inducement of a large
stipend; but the sentiment of repulsion was too strong to be overcome by
the bribe. The sick and wounded who could not bear the march were sent
into the city in accordance with an article of the treaty, two surgeons
accompanying their patients.

The treaty, ratified by the leading chiefs and sent into cantonments on
New Year's Day 1842, provided that the British troops, within twenty-four
hours after receiving transport, and under the protection of certain
chiefs and an adequate escort, should begin their march of evacuation,
the Jellalabad garrison moving down to Peshawur in advance; that the six
hostages left in Cabul should be well treated, and liberated on the
arrival at Peshawur of Dost Mahomed; the sick and wounded left behind to
be at liberty to return to India on their recovery; all small arms and
ordnance stores in the cantonment magazine to be made over to the Afghans
'as a token of friendship,' on which account also, they were to have all
the British cannon except as above mentioned; the Afghans to escort the
Ghuznee garrison in safety to Peshawur; and a further stipulation was
that the British troops in Candahar and Western Afghanistan were to
resign the territories occupied by them and start quickly for India,
provisioned and protected from molestation by the way.

Severe and humiliating as were those terms, they were not obtained
without difficulty. The terms put forward in the earlier drafts of the
treaty were yet more exacting, and the tone of the demands was abrupt,
contemptuous, and insulting. Pottinger had to plead, to entreat, to be
abject; to beg the masterful Afghans 'not to overpower the weak with
sufferings'; 'to be good enough to excuse the women from the suffering'
of remaining as hostages; and to entreat them 'not to forget kindness'
shown by us in former days. One blushes not for but with the gallant
Pottinger, loyally carrying out the miserable duty put upon him. The
shame was not his; it lay on the council of superior officers, who
overruled his remonstrances, and ground his face into the dust.

Our people were made to pass under the yoke every hour of their wretched
lives during those last winter days in the Cabul cantonments. The
fanatics and the common folk of the city and its environs swarmed around
our petty ramparts, with their foul sneers and their blackguard taunts,
hurled with impunity from where they stood at the muzzles of the loaded
guns which the gunners were forbidden to fire. Officers and rank and file
were in a condition of smouldering fury, but no act of reprisal or
retribution was permitted. If the present was one continuous misery, the
future lowered yet more gloomily. It was of common knowledge as well in
the cantonments as in the city, that the engagements made by the chiefs
were not worth the paper on which they had been written, and that
treachery was being concerted against the force on its impending travail
through the passes. It was told by a chief to one of the officers who was
his friend, that Akbar Khan had sworn to have in his possession the
British ladies as security for the safe restoration of his own family and
relatives, and, strange forecast to be fulfilled almost to the very
letter, had vowed to annihilate every soldier of the British army with
the exception of one man, who should reach Jellalabad to tell the story
of the massacre of all his comrades. Pottinger was well aware how
desperate was the situation of the hapless people on whose behalf he had
bent so low his proud soul. Mohun Lal warned him of the treachery the
chiefs were plotting, and assured him that unless their sons should
accompany the army as hostages, it would be attacked on the march. Day
after day the departure was delayed, on the pretext that the chiefs had
not completed their preparations for the safe conduct of the force and
its encumbrances. Day after day the snow was falling with a quiet,
ruthless persistency. The bitter night frosts were destroying the sepoys
and the camp followers, their vitality weakened by semi-starvation and by
the lack of firewood which had long distressed them. At length on January
5th, Sturt the engineer officer got his instructions to throw down into
the ditch a section of the eastern rampart, and so furnish a freer exit
than the gates could afford. The supply of transport was inadequate,
provisions were scant, and the escort promised by the chiefs was not
forthcoming. Pottinger advised waiting yet a little longer, until
supplies and escort should arrive; but for once the military chiefs were
set against the policy of delay, and firm orders were issued that the
cantonments should be evacuated on the following day.

Shah Soojah remained in Cabul. The resolution became him better than
anything else we know of the unfortunate man. It may be he reasoned that
he had a chance for life by remaining in the Balla Hissar, and that from
what he knew, there was no chance of life for anyone participating in the
fateful march. He behaved fairly by the British authorities, sending more
than one solemn warning pressing on them the occupation of the Balla
Hissar. And there was some dignity in his appeal to Brigadier Anquetil,
who commanded his own contingent, 'if it were well to forsake him in the
hour of need, and to deprive him of the aid of that force which he had
hitherto been taught to regard as his own?'

CHAPTER VII: THE CATASTROPHE

The ill-omened evacuation by our doomed people of the cantonments wherein
for two months they had undergone every extremity of humiliation and
contumely, was begun on the dreary winter morning of January 6th, 1842.
Snow lay deep on plain and hill-side; the cruel cold, penetrating through
the warmest clothing, bit fiercely into the debilitated and thinly clad
frames of the sepoys and the great horde of camp followers. The military
force which marched out of cantonments consisted of about 4500 armed men,
of whom about 690 were Europeans, 2840 native soldiers on foot, and 970
native cavalrymen. The gallant troop of Company's Horse-Artillery marched
out with its full complement of six guns, to which, with three pieces of
the mountain train, the artillery arm of the departing force was
restricted by the degrading terms imposed by the Afghan chiefs. In good
heart and resolutely commanded, a body of disciplined troops thus
constituted, and of a fighting strength so respectable, might have been
trusted not only to hold its own against Afghan onslaught, but if
necessary to take the offensive with success. But alas, the heart of the
hapless force had gone to water, its discipline was a wreck, its chiefs
were feeble and apathetic; its steps were dogged by the incubus of some
12,000 camp followers, with a great company of women and children. The
awful fate brooded over its forlorn banners of expiating by its utter
annihilation, the wretched folly and sinister prosecution of the
enterprise whose deserved failure was to be branded yet deeper on the
gloomiest page of our national history, by the impending catastrophe of
which the dark shadow already lay upon the blighted column.

The advance began to move out from cantonments at nine A.M. The march was
delayed at the river by the non-completion of the temporary bridge, and
the whole of the advance was not across until after noon. The main body
under Shelton, which was accompanied by the ladies, invalids, and sick,
slowly followed. It as well as the advance was disorganised from the
first by the throngs of camp followers with the baggage, who could not be
prevented from mixing themselves up with the troops. The Afghans occupied
the cantonments as portion after portion was evacuated by our people,
rending the air with their exulting cries, and committing every kind of
atrocity. It was late in the afternoon before the long train of camels
following the main body had cleared the cantonments; and meanwhile the
rear-guard was massed outside, in the space between the rampart and the
canal, among the chaos of already abandoned baggage. It was exposed there
to a vicious jezail fire poured into it by the Afghans, who abandoned the
pleasures of plunder and arson for the yet greater joy of slaughtering
the Feringhees. When the rear-guard moved away in the twilight, an
officer and fifty men were left dead in the snow, the victims of the
Afghan fire from the rampart of the cantonment; and owing to casualties
in the gun teams it had been found necessary to spike and abandon two of
the horse-artillery guns.

The rear-guard, cut into from behind by the pestilent ghazees, found its
route encumbered with heaps of abandoned baggage around which swarmed
Afghan plunderers. Other Afghans, greedier for blood than for booty, were
hacking and slaying among the numberless sepoys and camp followers who
had dropped out of the column, and were lying or sitting on the wayside
in apathetic despair, waiting for death and careless whether it came to
them by knife or by cold. Babes lay on the snow abandoned by their
mothers, themselves prostrate and dying a few hundred yards further on.
It was not until two o'clock of the following morning that the rear-guard
reached the straggling and chaotic bivouac in which its comrades lay in
the snow at the end of the first short march of six miles. Its weary
progress had been illuminated by the conflagration raging in the
cantonments, which had been fired by the Afghan fanatics, rabid to erase
every relic of the detested unbelievers.

It was a night of bitter cold. Out in the open among the snow, soldiers
and camp followers, foodless, fireless, and shelterless, froze to death
in numbers, and numbers more were frost-bitten. The cheery morning noise
of ordinary camp life was unheard in the mournful bivouac. Captain
Lawrence outlines a melancholy picture. 'The silence of the men betrayed
their despair and torpor. In the morning I found lying close to me,
stiff, cold, and quite dead, in full regimentals, with his sword drawn in
his hand, an old grey-haired conductor named Macgregor, who, utterly
exhausted, had lain down there silently to die.' Already defection had
set in. One of the Shah's infantry regiments and his detachment of
sappers and miners had deserted bodily, partly during the march of the
previous day, partly in the course of the night.

No orders were given out, no bugle sounded the march, on the morning of
the 7th. The column heaved itself forward sluggishly, a mere mob of
soldiers, camp followers and cattle, destitute of any semblance of order
or discipline. Quite half the sepoys were already unfit for duty; in
hundreds they drifted in among the non-combatants and increased the
confusion. The advance of the previous day was now the rear-guard. After
plundering the abandoned baggage, the Afghans set to harassing the
rear-guard, whose progress was delayed by the disorderly multitude
blocking the road in front. The three mountain guns, temporarily
separated from the infantry, were captured by a sudden Afghan rush. In
vain Anquetil strove to rouse the 44th to make an effort for their
recapture. Green was more successful with his handful of artillerymen,
who followed him and the Brigadier and spiked the pieces, but being
unsupported were compelled a second time to abandon them. On this march
it became necessary also, from the exhaustion of their teams, to spike
and abandon two more of the horse-artillery guns; so that there now
remained with the force only a couple of six-pounders. While the
rear-guard was in action, a body of Afghan horse charged on the flank,
right into the heart of the baggage column, swept away much plunder, and
spread confusion and dismay far and wide. The rear of the column would
probably have been entirely cut off, but that reinforcements from the
advance under Shelton pushed back the enemy, and by crowning the lateral
heights kept open the thoroughfare. At Bootkhak was found Akbar Khan, who
professed to have been commissioned to escort the force to Jellalabad,
and who blamed our people for having marched out prematurely from the
cantonments. He insisted on the halt of the column at Bootkhak until the
following morning, when he would provide supplies, but he demanded an
immediate subsidy of 15,000 rupees, and that Pottinger, Lawrence and
Mackenzie should be given up to him as hostages that the force would not
march beyond Tezeen until tidings should arrive that Sale had evacuated
Jellalabad. Those officers by the General's instructions joined the
Afghan chief on the following morning, and Akbar's financial requisition
was obsequiously fulfilled. After two days' marching our people, who had
brought out with them provisions for but five and a half days, expecting
within that time to reach Jellalabad, were only ten miles forward on
their march.

Another night passed, with its train of horrors--starvation, cold,
exhaustion, death. Lady Sale relates that scarcely any of the baggage now
remained; that there was no food for man or beast; that snow lay a foot
deep on the ground; that even water from the adjacent stream was
difficult to obtain, as the carriers were fired on in fetching it; and
that she thought herself fortunate in being sheltered in a small tent in
which 'we slept nine, all touching each other.' Daylight brought merely a
more bitter realisation of utter misery. Eyre expresses his wonderment at
the effect of two nights' exposure to the frost in disorganising the
force. 'It had so nipped even the strongest men as to completely
prostrate their powers and incapacitate them for service; even the
cavalry, who suffered less than the rest, were obliged to be lifted on
their horses.' In fact, only a few hundred serviceable men remained. At
the sound of hostile fire the living struggled to their feet from their
lairs in the snow, stiffened with cold, all but unable to move or hold a
weapon, leaving many of their more fortunate comrades stark in death. A
turmoil of confusion reigned. The Afghans were firing into the rear of
the mass, and there was a wild rush of camp followers to the front, who
stripped the baggage cattle of their loads and carried the animals off,
leaving the ground strewn with ammunition, treasure, plate, and other
property. The ladies were no longer carried in litters and palanquins,
for their bearers were mostly dead; they sat in the bullet fire packed
into panniers slung on camels, invalids as some of them were--one poor
lady with her baby only five days old. Mess stores were being recklessly
distributed, and Lady Sale honestly acknowledges that, as she sat on her
horse in the cold, she felt very grateful for a tumbler of sherry, which
at any other time would have made her 'very unladylike,' but which now
merely warmed her. Cups full of sherry were drunk by young children
without in the least affecting their heads, so strong on them was the
hold of the cold.

It was not until noon that the living mass of men and animals was once
more in motion. The troops were in utter disorganisation; the baggage was
mixed up with the advance guard; the camp followers were pushing ahead in
precipitate panic. The task before the wretched congeries of people was
to thread the stupendous gorge of the Khoord Cabul pass--a defile about
five miles long, hemmed in on either hand by steeply scarped hills. Down
the bottom of the ravine dashed a mountain torrent, whose edges were
lined with thick layers of ice, on which had formed glacier-like masses
of snow. The 'Jaws of Death' were barely entered when the slaughter
began. With the advance rode several Afghan chiefs, whose followers, by
their command, shouted to the Ghilzais lining the heights to hold their
fire, but the tribesmen gave no heed to the mandate. Lady Sale rode with
the chiefs. The Ghilzai fire at fifty yards was close and deadly. The men
of the advance fell fast. Lady Sale had a bullet in her arm, and three
more through her dress. But the weight of the hostile fire fell on the
main column, the baggage escort, and the rear-guard. Some of the ladies,
who mostly were on camels which were led with the column, had strange
adventures. On one camel was quite a group. In one of its panniers were
Mrs Boyd and her little son, in the other Mrs Mainwaring, with her own
infant and Mrs Anderson's eldest child. The camel fell, shot. A
Hindustanee trooper took up Mrs Boyd _en croupe_, and carried her through
in safety; another horseman behind whom her son rode, was killed, and the
boy fell into Afghan hands. The Anderson girl shared the same fate. Mrs
Mainwaring, with her baby in her arms, attempted to mount a baggage pony,
but the load upset, and she pursued her way on foot. An Afghan horseman
rode at her, threatened her with his sword, and tried to drag away the
shawl in which she carried her child. She was rescued by a sepoy
grenadier, who shot the Afghan dead, and then conducted the poor lady
along the pass through the dead and dying, through, also, the close fire
which struck down people near to her, almost to the exit of the pass,
when a bullet killed the chivalrous sepoy, and Mrs Mainwaring had to
continue her tramp to the bivouac alone.

A very fierce attack was made on the rear-guard, consisting of the 44th.
In the narrow throat of the pass the regiment was compelled to halt by a
block in front, and in this stationary position suffered severely. A
flanking fire told heavily on the handful of European infantry. The
belated stragglers masked their fire, and at length the soldiers fell
back, firing volleys indiscriminately into the stragglers and the
Afghans. Near the exit of the pass a commanding position was maintained
by some detachments which still held together, strengthened by the only
gun now remaining, the last but one having been abandoned in the gorge.
Under cover of this stand the rear of the mass gradually drifted forward
while the Afghan pursuit was checked, and at length all the surviving
force reached the camping ground. There had been left dead in the pass
about 500 soldiers and over 2500 camp followers.

Akbar and the chiefs, taking the hostages with them, rode forward on the
track of the retreating force. Akbar professed that his object was to
stop the firing, but Mackenzie writes that Pottinger said to him:
'Mackenzie, remember if I am killed that I heard Akbar Khan shout "Slay
them!" in Pushtoo, although in Persian he called out to stop the firing.'
The hostages had to be hidden away from the ferocious ghazees among rocks
in the ravine until near evening, when in passing through the region of
the heaviest slaughter they 'came upon one sight of horror after another.
All the bodies were stripped. There were children cut in two. Hindustanee
women as well as men--some frozen to death, some literally chopped to
pieces, many with their throats cut from ear to ear.'

Snow fell all night on the unfortunates gathered tentless on the Khoord
Cabul camping ground. On the morning of the 9th the confused and
disorderly march was resumed, but after a mile had been traversed a halt
for the day was ordered at the instance of Akbar Khan, who sent into camp
by Captain Skinner a proposal that the ladies and children, with whose
deplorable condition he professed with apparent sincerity to sympathise,
should be made over to his protection, and that the married officers
should accompany their wives; he pledging himself to preserve the party
from further hardships and dangers, and afford its members safe escort
through the passes in rear of the force. The General had little faith in
the Sirdar, but he was fain to give his consent to an arrangement which
promised alleviation to the wretchedness of the ladies, scarce any of
whom had tasted a meal since leaving Cabul. Some, still weak from
childbirth, were nursing infants only a few days old; other poor
creatures were momentarily apprehending the pangs of motherhood. There
were invalids whose only attire, as they rode in the camel panniers or
shivered on the snow, was the nightdresses they wore when leaving the
cantonments in their palanquins, and none possessed anything save the
clothes on their backs. It is not surprising, then, that dark and
doubtful as was the future to which they were consigning themselves, the
ladies preferred its risks and chances to the awful certainties which lay
before the doomed column. The Afghan chief had cunningly made it a
condition of his proffer that the husbands should accompany their wives,
and if there was a struggle in the breasts of the former between public
and private duties, the General humanely decided the issue by ordering
them to share the fortunes of their families.

Akbar Khan sent in no supplies, and the march was resumed on the morning
of the both by a force attenuated by starvation, cold, and despair,
diminished further by extensive desertion. After much exertion the
advance, consisting of all that remained of the 44th, the solitary gun,
and a detachment of cavalry, forced a passage to the front through the
rabble of camp followers, and marched unmolested for about two miles
until the Tunghee Tariki was reached, a deep gorge not more than ten feet
wide. Men fell fast in the horrid defile, struck down by the Afghan fire
from the heights; but the pass, if narrow, was short, and the advance
having struggled through it moved on to the halting-place at
Kubbar-i-Jubbar, and waited there for the arrival of the main body. But
that body was never to emerge from out the shambles in the narrow throat
of the Tunghee Tariki. The advance was to learn from the few stragglers
who reached it the ghastly truth that it now was all that remained of the
strong brigade which four days before had marched out from the Cabul
cantonments. The slaughter from the Afghan fire had blocked the gorge
with dead and dying. The Ghilzai tribesmen, at the turn into the pen at
the other end of which was the blocked gorge, had closed up fiercely.
Then the steep slopes suddenly swarmed with Afghans rushing sword in hand
down to the work of butchery, and the massacre stinted not while living
victims remained. The rear-guard regiment of sepoys was exterminated,
save for two or three desperately wounded officers who contrived to reach
the advance.

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