Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (57 page)

As soon as the violence began, Macnaghten’s personal escort of sixteen troopers fled, making no effort to rescue the officers.
123
As they were galloping back to the cantonment, they crossed the path of the delayed cavalry escort, which then also turned tail. ‘Not a man was despatched [from the cantonment],’ wrote Lawrence,

nor a party sent out to reconnoitre; no sortie made, nor even a gun fired, though bodies of the enemy’s horse and foot were seen hurrying from the place of the conference towards Mahomed Khan’s fort, and several officers declared they could see distinctly through their field-glasses two bodies lying on the ground where the meeting took place. No attempt was made to recover them. Thus, almost within musket-shot of our entrenched position, and in broad daylight, a British envoy had been barbarously murdered, and his mangled body allowed to remain for hours where he fell, and finally carried off by a savage mob to be insulted in every possible way, and paraded throughout the city, without an attempt being made to save any of the party, or to avenge this unequalled outrage.
124

Meanwhile, Mackenzie and Lawrence were being abducted. Both men were ‘surrounded by a circle of Ghilzai with drawn swords and cocked jezails, and the cries of “Kill the Kafir” became more vehement?. . .’ But Akbar Khan protected them. He drew his sword ‘and laid about himself right manfully’, as Mackenzie gratefully noted. ‘Pride, however, overcame his sense of courtesy when he thought I was safe; for he then turned around to me, and repeatedly said, in a tone of triumphant derision: “
Shuma mulk-i-ma me-girid! –
You’ll seize my country will you?”’
125
At the same time, Lawrence was also being bundled away at gunpoint through crowds of angry Ghilzais all crying for a ‘Koorban’ [sacrifice] to the Ghilzai headquarters at the fort of Mahmud Khan, where the two captives were shoved into a cell. Just before the door closed, one tribesman took a swipe with his sword at Mackenzie. Mohammad Shah Khan Ghilzai, who was standing close by, put his arm around Mackenzie to protect him, and took the cut on his own shoulder.
126

Shortly afterwards, Aminullah Khan Logari, the supposed victim of Macnaghten’s plot, burst in on the two prisoners and told them that they were soon to be blown from the mouths of cannon. Outside their cell, Ghilzais gathered to taunt the two captive Kafirs. They spat, poked their swords and guns through the bars, and tried to break down the door of the cell. The guards only just managed to stop the crowd murdering the prisoners. A few minutes later there was another commotion and the prisoners looked out to see a human hand impaled on a pole. ‘Look well!’ screamed the Ghilzais; ‘your own will soon suffer a similar plight.’

It was the hand of the Envoy. Macnaghten’s and Trevor’s heads were then paraded on the tips of spears, while their trunks were dragged through the streets, then skinned, and their hides hung from a meat hook in the bazaar.
127
Even Macnaghten’s large blue spectacles were put on display.
128
‘All came to see the remains exposed there,’ remarks Mirza ‘Ata,

and to spit in disgust. The gold coin of honesty and scrupulous respect for one’s engagements is a currency valid everywhere, which will preserve its owner from dishonour even in the most turbulent circumstances. ‘If you are faithful and true, people will love you; deceit will only make people shun and loathe you!’ As it was, Sardar Muhammad Akbar Khan’s fame spread, and everyone repeated how all the English achieved was to drive the famished donkeys of their failed ambition back into India and to force the women of India to wear the weeds of widowhood in mourning for their husbands! It was clear to all that those Englishmen who had boasted of their shrewdness in policy and bravery in battle, were worth nothing compared to the Sardars of Khurasan. They were in fact mere mules stuck in the mud!
129

8

The Wail of Bugles

The retreat from Kabul began soon after 9 a.m. on the morning of 6 January 1842.

The night before, the now almost recovered Lieutenant Sturt had mined a portion of the walls to the left of the rear gate so as to create a wide breach through which the 3,800 remaining sepoys, 700 European cavalry and footsoldiers and 14,000 camp followers could march. At dawn the mine was sprung, and the walls blown outwards so as to create a bridge over the ditch.

Seen through the jagged new gap in the curtain wall, the sun rising over the ring of dazzling white mountains around Kabul revealed a day that was ‘beautifully clear and frosty, with the snow nearly a foot deep on the ground’.
1
Yet the troops waiting to march out of the relative safety of the cantonment walls to an uncertain fate in the Afghan mountains were a less inspiring sight. ‘A crouching, drooping, dispirited army, so different from the smart light-hearted body of men they appeared some time ago,’ thought a depressed George Lawrence, who had been released, along with Colin Mackenzie, to help supervise the retreat. On marching out into the virgin snow ‘the men were [soon] sinking a foot deep each step . . . My heart sunk within me under the conviction that we were a doomed force.’
2

A fortnight had now passed since the British had heard for sure that their political leader, Sir William Hay Macnaghten, had been murdered by Akbar Khan. After two days of anxious waiting amid contradictory rumours, the army’s worst fears were vindicated: the British had indeed lost their leader and Lady Macnaghten had lost her husband.

Among the Afghans, there was jubilation at the astonishing thoroughness of the reversals suffered by the arrogant Firangi invaders, but there was also some chivalrous sympathy for Lady Macnaghten, at least among the poets. In the
Akbarnama
, Maulana Hamid Kashmiri places in her mouth a pained lament that she utters when she is told that her husband will not be returning:

. . . The wife of
Laat-Hay Jangi
,
Lord Hay of War, tore at her collar

Her grief raged, and out poured her song of bereavement?. . .

She cried: ‘O Prince in the Land of Firang!

You were honoured in
Rum
[Rome/Europe] and famed in Ethiopia!

But in this land you were doomed

Here your death was certain

Come back! With you, I am happy in poverty

Beggary would be better than such lordship . . .

. . . Today, street urchins and alley rats

Play with your rolling head as though it were a ball?. . .

. . . Come back, O proud conqueror!

You exalted the very crown and throne that were yours

But in Kabul today, upon the dust of the road

Lies your body without a head, and your head without a crown’
3

Yet any sympathy expressed by the Maulana was tempered by a certainty that the extraordinary speed of the fall of the once powerful British was due above all to divine displeasure: the lying, deceitful Kafirs had got their just deserts. The final proofs of this, as far as Maulana Kashmiri was concerned, were the unprecedented blizzards which then fell on Kabul to further discomfit the accursed disbelievers:

Despite suffering such grief and sorrow, such pain and misery

Heaven did not desist from tormenting them yet again

It girded its loins, bent upon desolation

Gripping Kabul in the coldest of winters

From the sky descended a scourge so great

That courtyard and roof became one from snow?. . .

In the flowing river, there was no more water

In the shining sun, there was no more heat

The cattle outside, whined and howled

Torn to shreds by the wind’s murderous blade

For the Firangi horde, already battered by misfortune

The howling of the blizzard and the falling of the snows were a calamity

The soldiers were many and their food was little

Judgement lay behind and death stood before them

To remain was unwise, to escape impossible

No hope of peace, no chance of war
4

By this stage, the British were also beginning to feel as though they were labouring under the curse of heaven. Even indomitable and ever resolute Lady Sale accepted that things now looked very bad for the besieged troops, writing in her diary with characteristic understatement,

A dismal Christmas Day, our situation far from cheerful. Lawrence has come in, looking haggard and ten years older from anxiety . . . Naib Sharif paid for the interment of Sir A Burnes’s body, but it was never buried; and part of it, cut into many pieces, is still hanging on the trees in his garden. [Now] the Envoy’s head is kept in a
bhoosa
bag in the chouk: and Akbar says he will send it to Bokhara to show the King there how he has seized the Firangis here, and what he means to do with them . . . Whether we go by treaty or not, I fear but few of us will live to reach the provinces . . .
5

She added that while selecting what property she should carry with her on the retreat, she had found a copy of Thomas Campbell’s
Poems
,

which opened at
Hohenlinden
; one verse of which haunted me day and night:

Few, few shall part where many meet,

The snow shall be their winding sheet;

And every turf beneath their feet

Shall be a soldier’s sepulchre.
6

To make matters worse, the British troops now learned that Macnaghten had been killed while trying to break the terms of the treaty he had signed with the Afghan chiefs. Not only were the British starving, outmanoeuvred and cut off, they knew now that in addition they had lost any remaining moral high ground. Moreover the Afghans who had outsoldiered and outwitted them turned out not to be the crack troops from the mountains they had imagined them to be, but – in part at least – merely the ‘tradesmen and artisans of Kabul, so that we had not even the melancholy satisfaction of knowing that we had been contending with the soldier tribes of the country’.
7

After the death of Macnaghten, the badly wounded Eldred Pottinger was now the most senior British political officer left alive. Despite his telling Elphinstone and Shelton not to trust Akbar and urging that the only hope lay in heading for the Bala Hisar, Shelton continued to push hard for a withdrawal and Pottinger was put on a litter and sent out to negotiate the surrender and the terms of the retreat. ‘I was hauled out of my sick room,’ he wrote afterwards, ‘and obliged to negotiate for the safety of a parcel of fools who were doing all they could to ensure their own destruction.’
8
In return for supplies and a safe passage, Akbar now demanded the surrender of all their remaining artillery as well as their treasure.

While waiting for food and baggage animals to be delivered, the British continued to be harassed. The worst offenders were the growing number of ghazis who increasingly clustered around the cantonment gates to bait, abuse and rob the now helpless invaders and those Afghans still friendly with them. ‘Much annoyance was daily experienced from these people,’ wrote Vincent Eyre.

They were in the habit of plundering the peaceable dealers who flocked in from the city with grain and forage, the moment they issued from the cantonments. They even committed frequent assaults on our Sepoys, and orders to fire on them on such occasions were repeatedly solicited in vain, although it was well known that the chiefs themselves advised us to do so . . . The consequence was that our soldiers were daily constrained to endure the most insulting and contemptuous taunts and treatment from fellows whom a single charge of the bayonet would have scattered like chaff, but who were emboldened by the apparent tameness of our troops, which they doubtless attributed to the want of common pluck.
9