Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (47 page)

On the morning of 23 October, the beleaguered column advanced again, through an especially narrow part of the pass just before Tezin. Turning a corner around two huge rocks, ‘the hills which bounded the valley on all sides were suddenly seen to swarm with Afghans’. By a combination of sniping from cover and well-timed rushes on the baggage train and rearguard, ‘they again slew this day a great many more of our men, and carried off no inconsiderable portion of booty; of which it would be hard to say whether our people grudged them most the nine new hospital tents, which with all the furniture they appropriated, or certain kegs containing not fewer than thirty thousand rounds of musket ammunition’.
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That ammunition would later be used on the rest of the Kabul army with deadly effect.

The following day the British again found themselves surrounded; but this time in addition their passage forwards was blocked by an immense force of cavalry obstructing their advance on Tezin. After a brief stand-off, Sale agreed to admit to his camp a delegation which arrived under flag of truce. Negotiations were resumed in the Ghilzai camp, from where George MacGregor, the Political Officer attached to the column, reported ‘that the chiefs received him with great politeness, and were pleased at the confidence reposed in them by his going to meet them attended only by one suwar [cavalryman]. They appeared to be unanimous, and many in number, mustering 700 followers, who were daily increasing.’
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MacGregor eventually agreed to pay the tribe all they asked. ‘They are to get the Rs 40,000 the quarrel began about,’ reported Lady Sale, ‘and they promise to return any property they can find of ours: so that we can leave off where we set out, barring our killed and wounded, expence, loss of ammunition and baggage, and the annoyance of the detention, if not the loss, of all our daks [post].’
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But it was more serious than Lady Sale realised. Few now believed the negotiations would do more than buy time, while some such as Henry Durand thought it a huge mistake. ‘It was a time for action,’ he wrote. ‘Fighting Bob’, he believed, should have been ‘striking not talking’.
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But the payment did allow Sale to send the wounded back to Kabul with an armed escort in order to warn the authorities there of the scale of the uprising, and for the rest of the column to head on down towards Jalalabad at speed. Moreover, as John Magrath, the morose surgeon of the force, wrote, ‘I am glad we are to have no more fighting, for everything Sale and Dennie have a hand in is sure to be bungled.’
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Ominously, after a two-day lull, the attacks began again. ‘The rear guard has been attacked daily,’ reported Sale at the end of the week, ‘and the bivouack fired at each night.’
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Each morning, ‘as soon as the bugle called in the pickets, numbers of Afghans started up as if by magic from behind every rock, boulder, hillock, bush or tuft of grass within half a mile of the camp, forming a vast semicircle of enemies’.
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The numbers of Afghans continued to grow. As Lady Sale noted from the cantonment, ‘All the forts about Kabul are empty, and the Juwans [young men] have gone (it is said) to aid the fight against us at Tezin.’ Only on 2 November did Sale’s brigade finally emerge from the pass into the plain and reach the small fertile village of Gandamak, near Shah Jahan’s Nimla Gardens, where Shah Shuja’s Contingent maintained a small barracks.

Here Sale and his officers paused to rest and recover for ten days – though, as the chaplain was quick to emphasise, it was a sober moment and ‘nobody indulged to excess in the use of spirituous liquors’. It was here that what remained of Macnaghten’s new Afghan regiment, the Janbaz, ‘broke out in open mutiny and tried to kill the English officers . . . It was now evident that the whole country had risen against us, and it was not a mere rising of the Ghilzai chiefs to get their subsidies restored.’
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The brigade had so far lost over 250 men in only a few days, and their position was clearly worsening fast. Rumours were beginning to arrive of heavy fighting in the passes behind them and around Kabul itself. So a Council of War was convened to decide the best course of action. Rather than keep going on to India, or return to Kabul, Sale and his officers decided to continue the remaining thirty-five miles downhill to Jalalabad, refortify the town and wait to see what happened next. Though no one was yet aware of it, this decision would change the course of the war.

Sale’s brigade arrived in Jalalabad on 12 November and managed to seize the town without serious opposition. The low mud walls were crumbling and the troops found Jalalabad ‘a dirty little town’, but it was at least fertile and well watered on one side, by the Kabul River, which the hungry troops found to be full of delicious trout and the local
shir maheh
that they barbecued on charcoal. As Gleig commented, ‘uninviting to the eyes of the ordinary traveller as this dilapidated city might have appeared, to the eyes of the brave but sorely harassed troops . . . it offered many and great attractions’.
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Broadfoot got to work rebuilding the fortifications on the afternoon of their arrival. Breaches in the curtain were filled, parapets and loopholes constructed, and ten artillery pieces were raised on to the bastions and prepared for firing. Foraging parties were sent out to gather food and fodder, and obstacles blocking the line of fire from the walls began to be demolished. The repairs were made just in time. The following morning a large mixed force of Ghilzai and Shinwari tribesmen appeared ‘on the low hills to the south of the town and as the day advanced they came swarming up the rocky heights’.
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The city gates were closed, but just before that Sale sent a last express messenger out in the hope that he could get safely down the Khyber and reach the British Residency at Peshawar. ‘Be pleased to acquaint the Com in Chief’, he scribbled on a scrap of paper,

that we are surrounded on every side by the insurgents. Two regts and a corps of sappers do not more than suffice to man these extensive walls and great efforts are demanded of us. We want treasure immediately as well as 20,000 rounds of musquet ammunition. In fact we need succour in every way, troops, treasure, provision and ammunition, and now. Measures must be prompt to be useful to us. The troops are placed on half rations, and we have only six days rice and no atta.
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The siege of Jalalabad had begun.

Across southern Afghanistan, a mass uprising was now clearly imminent.

In Kandahar, Rawlinson believed that ‘the feeling against us is daily on the increase and I apprehend a succession of disturbances . . . Their mullahs are preaching against us from one end of the country to the other.’
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His military counterpart, General Nott, was in agreement, writing to his daughters in despair that ‘this country is in a sad state . . . Sir Wm Macnaghten’s mistakes and weak system begin to tell most woefully; it must be changed or we must walk out of this part of the world . . . It may take many years to undo what that man, Macnaghten, has done. How could Lord Auckland allow such a man to remain in authority here, bringing into contempt everything connected with the name of Englishmen?’
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In Ghazni, the commander of the garrison there, Colonel Thomas Palmer, was equally anxious, writing to Nott that ‘the country here is getting more disturbed every day . . . I see not how General Sale’s Brigade is to leave the country. Of course they might force their way through, but the enemy would close on their rear, and cut off our communications with India as completely as it has been done for the past fortnight.’
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Most alarmed of all was Eldred Pottinger in Charikar, who was now so certain that his small garrison of Gurkhas was about to be massacred that he rode back to Kabul to reason with Elphinstone and Macnaghten in person. Elphinstone sat looking panicked, then dithered and fussed, but failed to send him any concrete help, least of all the cavalry and artillery Pottinger had desperately requested, saying that all the troops were needed in Kabul. Macnaghten meanwhile said he did not have time to see Pottinger, and mocked his written report: ‘Pottinger writes as if he is about to be invaded by [Mir Masjidi’s] Nijrowees, but I can imagine there is little ground for this alarm and the fellows will sneak into their holes again when they hear that the Ghilzais are quiet again.’
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Macnaghten seemed by now doggedly determined not to allow any news, however dire, to ruffle his complacency. This was all the more remarkable as the trouble was clearly spreading to Kabul, where the British were now being openly insulted by shopkeepers in the street, ‘and the whole demeanour of the people’, as Colin Mackenzie noted, ‘was that of anticipated triumph in the destruction of the English’. There were several murders: one trooper was pistolled by an Afghan as he slept in his tent; a private soldier was found in a ditch with his throat cut; Captain Waller was wounded by an assassin, and a swordsman slashed at Dr Metcalfe as he rode from the town to the cantonment. Lady Sale was appalled. ‘The general impression is that the Envoy is trying to deceive himself into an assurance that the country is in a quiescent state,’ she noted in her diary. ‘He has a difficult part to play, without sufficient moral courage to stem the current singly.’
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Part of the reason for this obstinacy was that he had just received the news that Lord Auckland had rewarded him for his Afghan labours with the most agreeable post the East India Company could offer a civil servant: the governorship of Bombay, complete with its beautiful Palladian Residence on Malabar Hill. It was therefore in his interests to get out as soon as possible, leaving an impression of a job well done; what followed could then be blamed on any successor. ‘This is an unlooked for honor,’ he wrote ingratiatingly to Lord Auckland, ‘and its coming now is the more welcome when I can conscientiously say that I shall leave this country in a state of tranquillity and rapid progress towards improvement.’
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The man who was most likely to be appointed to pick up the reins after Macnaghten’s departure was Alexander Burnes. For months he had being increasingly sidelined by the Envoy, with little to do but to mug up on his favourite authors. ‘This is assuredly one of the idle stages of my life,’ he had written home in August. ‘I do nothing for the public, except giving advice, but as I have no duties to perform, unless it be to receive my 3500 rupees a month . . . [in the meantime] to study Tacitus is as pleasant as to write despatches.’
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Hearing of the Envoy’s new appointment, he wrote that ‘his hopes were up’ that he would succeed Macnaghten; and yet, now that the prize he had sought so long was almost within his grasp, he found himself wondering how much he really wanted it. ‘I seem hourly to lose my anxiety for power and place,’ he told his brother James in his last letter. ‘I have been asking myself if I am altogether so well fitted for the supreme control here as I am supposed to believe. I sometimes think not, but I have never found myself fail in power when unshackled . . . I wish this doubt were solved, for anxiety is painful. One trait of my character is thorough seriousness; I am indifferent about nothing I undertake – in fact if I undertake a thing I cannot be indifferent.’
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Yet the truth was that Burnes’s many talents had largely been wasted during the occupation. He knew Afghanistan better than any other British official or traveller with the single exception of Masson, he loved and understood the country, and his political instincts were as shrewd as his judgement was usually impeccable. His Achilles heel was his ambition, which had led him to get involved with an entirely unnecessary invasion and a mishandled occupation, both run by a foolish martinet who neither listened to nor respected his ideas. Like his rival Vitkevitch, Burnes was a brave and resourceful young man. Like Vitkevitch, he was an outsider who by dint of hard work moved himself centre-stage in the greatest geopolitical struggle of his age; but both had found, in different ways, that in the end they remained pawns in the wider imperial game. When Vitkevitch realised that his life’s work had been ignored and wasted, he had shot himself in a fit of depression and disgust. Burnes’s response was instead to throw himself into the pursuit of pleasure. In this way he made himself the hate figure he remains to this day in Afghanistan; and it was this, according to the Afghan accounts, that sparked the final fatal explosion in Kabul. It is Mirza ‘Ata who gives the best Afghan account of how Burnes provoked that detonation.

The nobles in Kabul, he wrote, had been getting progressively more irritated with the British occupation, and in particular the way they had cut the allowances of the Ghilzai chiefs, sidelined Shah Shuja and sacked his Wazir, Mullah Shakur. It was Shuja’s complaints about his own impotence that finally ‘roused the Royalist Sardars to a furious pitch of offended honour and religious faith’ against the occupying army, according to Mirza ‘Ata, ‘so each went to his own home, and at dusk when the sun had set in the west and the moon arose in all her splendour, they gathered together to consult and swear unity on the Qur’an’. Maulana Hamid Kashmiri has some of the leaders urge rapid action while Sale’s force was still absent in the Khord Kabul:

The King has no army, and
Laat Hay Jangi
[Macnaghten] is drunk

Carousing and singing, flask ever in hand