Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (59 page)

‘Night had now closed around,’ remembered Eyre, ‘but the ghazis, having fired the Residency, and almost every building in the cantonment, the conflagration illuminated the surrounding countryside for several miles about, presenting a spectacle of fearful sublimity.’
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As the temperature dropped ever lower after sunset, the main body of troops were by now waiting in vain for the arrival of their food, wood and tents at the camping place of Bagramee, seven miles further on. As the hours passed, and the night grew darker and colder, word began to spread that the baggage and food were lost. Within a few hours of the retreat beginning the force had yet again lost all its supplies.

At Bagramee that night, chaos ruled. The last of the rearguard did not make it in until 2 a.m., having ‘had to fight the whole way, and pass through literally a continuous line of poor wretches, men, women and children, dead or dying from the cold and wounds, who, unable to move, entreated their comrades to kill them and put an end to their misery’.
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Right up until the entrance to the camp the rearguard found ‘scores of worn out sepoys and camp followers lining the way, having sat down in despair to perish in the snow’.

Only a lucky few had anything to eat that night. George Lawrence succeeded in finding ‘a little cold meat and sherry’, which he was given by Lady Macnaghten, who had brought her own supplies. Almost everyone else went hungry, ‘obliged to lie down on the bare snow, without either shelter, fire or food . . . The silence of the men betrayed their despair and torpor, not a voice being heard.’
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Lady Sale was luckier than most: though she had now lost all her possessions and had nothing to eat, she had given her bedding to her daughter’s ayah to ride upon, so unusually she and her household did have some covering that first night. A few others were lucky too: the irritable Dr Magrath for example found an empty dhooly to sleep in. But as now became clear, the Bengali sepoys had no idea how to cope in the snow, a sharp contrast to Mackenzie’s loyal Afghan jezailchis who showed how it could be done. ‘Their first step on reaching the [camping] ground was to clear a small space from the snow,’ recalled an impressed Eyre. ‘They then laid themselves down in a circle, closely packed together, with their feet meeting in the centre; all the warm clothing they could muster among them being spread equally over the whole. By these simple means sufficient animal warmth was generated to preserve them from being frost bitten; and Captain Mackenzie, who himself shared their homely bed, declared that he had felt scarcely any inconvenience from the cold.’
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Just how necessary such techniques were became clear the following morning. Many of the troops had simply frozen to death in the night. ‘I found lying close to my tent, stiff, cold, and quite dead, an old grey haired conductor named Macgregor, who, utterly exhausted, had lain down there silently to die,’ remembered George Lawrence.
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Many sought out the reticent Scottish assistant surgeon of Shah Shuja’s Contingent, the thirty-year-old William Brydon. He had spent the night warmly wrapped in his sheepskin coat and now rushed around the camp at dawn, trying to encourage those still living to jump up and down and warm themselves up. ‘I called to the natives who had been lying near to me to get up,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘which only a few were able to do. Some of them actually laughed at me for urging them, and pointed to their feet, which looked like charred logs of wood. Poor fellows they were frostbitten, and had to be left behind.’
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The second day of the retreat proved even more chaotic than the first.

‘Less than half of the sepoys were by this stage fit for duty,’ wrote Vincent Eyre. ‘The cold had so nipped the hands and feet of even the strongest men, as to completely prostrate their powers and incapacitate them for service.’ Even the cavalry were ‘obliged to be lifted on their horses . . . Large clods of hardened snow adhered so firmly to the hoofs of our horses, that a chisel and hammer would have been requisite to dislodge them. The very air we breathed froze in its passage out of the mouth and nostrils, forming a coating of small icicles on our moustaches and beards . . . Already only a few hundred serviceable fighting-men remained.’
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If the bodies of the soldiers were severely weakened, their resolve and self-control was even more badly affected. ‘About ½ past 7 a.m. the advance guard moved off without any order given or bugle being sounded,’ recorded Hugh Johnson in his diary. ‘Discipline is at an end.’
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The remaining baggage had not even been lifted on to the camels and oxen before large numbers of Afghans began to dart down the mountain slopes, plundering all that they could lay their hands on. Three cannon being dragged by mules were passing a small mudbrick fort close to the camp ground when a party of Afghans sallied straight out and captured them. The sepoys supposed to guard the artillery immediately ran off. As the troops advanced on their road, the number of mounted Afghans around them steadily increased. They travelled parallel to the British, on both flanks of the column, firing randomly into the jostling rabble of refugees they were now driving between them, like shepherds expertly controlling a flock of panicked sheep, the terrified sepoys having already lost all will to fight back.

One entire Hindustani regiment – Shah Shuja’s 29th – went over en masse to Akbar Khan that morning. Many other sepoys, already too frostbitten to continue, now threw down their weapons and fled back to Kabul, hoping that their injuries would preserve them from the attention of the town’s slavers, and anyway ‘preferring to become prisoners there to the certain death which they saw clearly must result from continuing any longer with the main body’. Months later, several hundred maimed former sepoys were still to be seen hobbling on their stumps, begging around the Kabul bazaars.

Although there was now hardly any food or ammunition left to see the main force through to Jalalabad, Elphinstone still called a halt in the middle of the second afternoon at Butkhak, at the mouth of the great Khord Kabul Pass, after the army had made barely five miles’ progress, ‘thereby losing one more day’, as Johnson noted.

We had left Kabul with only 5 days ¼ rations to take us to Jellalabad, and no forage for cattle, and with no prospect of getting any.

In this way he subjected our unfortunate troops, already nearly paralysed with cold, to another night in the snow with no shelter. No ground being again marked out for the troops, the whole was one mass of confusion. Three fourths of the Sepoys were mixed up with the camp followers and knew not where to find the HQs of their Corps.
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Lady Sale was equally scornful of the General’s leadership, and became more certain than ever that a wholesale massacre was now imminent. She wrote:

By these unnecessary halts we diminished our provisions, and having no cover for officers or men, all are perfectly paralysed with cold . . .

The snow still lies more than a foot deep. No food for man or beast; and even water from the river close at hand difficult to obtain, as our people are fired on in fetching it; yet so bigoted are our rulers that we are still told that the sirdars are faithful, that Akbar Khan is our friend &c &c &c; and that the reason they wish us to delay is that they may send their troops to clear the passes for us! They will send them there can be in no doubt; but everything is occurring just as was foretold before we set out.
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So it was that for a second night the troops again went to bed hungry in the thick snow.
dd
This time, however, Afghans filled the slopes on all sides, shooting down through the darkness, and rumours spread that Akbar Khan was personally directing their fire. ‘A night of starvation, cold, exhaustion, death,’ wrote Eyre, ‘and of all deaths I can imagine none more agonising than where a nipping frost tortures every sensitive limb, until the tenacious spirit itself sinks under the exquisite extreme of human suffering.’
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But the sufferings of the first two days were nothing compared with what would follow the next morning.

Butkhak lies a short distance beyond the towering cliffs of the Khord Kabul Pass.
ee
It was in the mouth of the pass, near here, more than two months earlier, that ‘Fighting Bob’ Sale’s brigade had first been attacked as they were retiring for the night. Now the same cliffs were witness to a far more bloody dawn ambush. As before, the killing was preceded by the eerie ringing of unseen jezails loading.
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Just before sunrise, large numbers of Afghans had massed in the darkness to the rear of the British camp. As the sepoys were rising to find yet more frozen corpses littering the ground around the few remaining tents, it was there that the fighting began: ‘The scene at sunrise was fearful,’ wrote Hugh Johnson.

The Force was perfectly disorganised. Every man appeared to be so paralysed with cold as to be scarcely able to hold his musquet or move a step. Some of the enemy having appeared on the rear of the bivouack, the whole of the camp followers rushed to the front in one huge mass: men, women and children . . . The ground was strewn with boxes of ammunition, and property of various kinds. The enemy soon assembled in great numbers. Had they made a dash among us we could have offered no resistance and every one of us would have been slaughtered.
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Instead, the frontmost troops and followers were skilfully herded into the mouth of the Khord Kabul Pass,the women led by Lady Sale – ‘I felt very grateful for a tumbler of sherry which at any other time would have made me feel most unladylike.’ At the same time General Elphinstone’s staff spotted a group of Afghan horsemen standing at some distance to the rear under a banner, clearly directing proceedings. It was correctly assumed that this was Akbar Khan, and Mackenzie and Lawrence were sent off to renegotiate the safe passage they had been promised in Kabul. Akbar Khan agreed that if his friends Mackenzie and Lawrence were again to be surrendered as hostages, he would send his most influential men ahead ‘to clear the pass from the Ghilzais who occupied it’.
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The terms were accepted.

‘We proceeded’, wrote Lawrence afterwards, ‘escorted by two of Akbar’s dependents, through crowds of the enemy, until we reached the Sirdar. We found [Akbar] seated on the side of a hill at breakfast, which he civilly asked us to partake of, ordering at the same time his men to take away our firearms . . . We then sat down, not without a shudder at eating from the same dish as the man who had been so lately the murderer of the Envoy.’
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Shortly afterwards, while Akbar gently chided the two young officers for leaving Kabul before he could arrange for their protection, the two heard great fusillades of musketry from within the pass. The advance guard had just been shepherded into a perfectly executed ambush.

For days, so it became clear afterwards, the Ghilzais had been preparing for this moment. Embankments, shallow trenches and rubble sangars had been carefully erected out of the range of the British muskets but sufficiently close to the valley bottom to be well within the range of the Afghans’ jezails. Now, once the front of the British column had entered far within the towering cliffs of the pass – making no attempt to send up flankers to crown the heights as should by now have been automatic drill for the infantry – the ambush was sprung. ‘We had not proceeded half a mile when we were heavily fired upon,’ wrote Lady Sale that night. ‘The Chiefs who rode with the advance desired us to keep close to them. They certainly desired their followers to shout to the people on the heights not to fire; but they did so quite ineffectually. These Chiefs certainly ran the same risks we did; but I verily believe many of these persons would individually sacrifice themselves to rid their country of us.’
ff
She continued:

After passing through some very sharp firing, we came upon Major Thain’s horse, which had been shot through the loins. When we were supposed to be in comparative safety, poor Sturt rode back, to see after Major Thain: his horse was shot from under him, and before he could rise from the ground, he received a severe wound in the abdomen. It was with great difficulty that he was held upon a pony by two people, and brought into camp at Khoord Kabul.

The pony Mrs Sturt rode was wounded in the ear and neck. I had fortunately only one ball in my arm; three others passed through my
poshteen
[posting – ‘long skin’, i.e. sheepskin coat] near the shoulder without doing me injury. The party that fired on us were not fifty yards from us, and we owed our escape to urging our horses on as fast as they could go over the road where, at any other time, we would have walked our horses very carefully
?.
. .?

The pass quickly became jammed, and ‘for a considerable period we were stationary under heavy fire . . . The 37th [Regiment] continued moving slowly forward without firing a shot, being paralysed with cold to such a degree that no persuasion of their officers could induce them to make any effort to dislodge the enemy, who took from some of them not only their firelocks but even the clothes from their person; several men of the 44th supplied themselves with ammunition from the pouches of their
sipahees
[sepoys]
. . . All this time our men were dropping fast from a flanking fire from the heights . . . [At least] 500 of our regular troops, and about 2,500 of our camp followers, are killed?. . .’
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