Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (60 page)

Yet according to those who followed, the first wave of troops in which Lady Sale was travelling got off comparatively lightly. ‘The advance, altho’ they suffered considerably, was by comparison with the rear very fortunate,’ wrote Hugh Johnson.

There the scene of slaughter was dreadful. We had to run the gauntlet of the whole length of this fearful defile, a distance of about 5 miles. All baggage was abandoned. The enemy not only poured in a murderous fire from every rock and cave in the heights on each side, but descended into the Pass and slew man, woman and child. The whole road for a distance of 5 miles was covered with dead and dying. The 37th Native Infantry lost more than half its men, and other Corps in proportion. Even those who remained could scarcely move from their feet and hands being frost-bitten, and to add to our misery, snow began to fall on our arrival at Khoord Cabul.
42

All morning, Lawrence and Mackenzie had to sit with Akbar and make small talk, listening as the waves of musketry echoed down the pass. Mackenzie, who was a good linguist, heard Akbar shouting to his men in Dari – a language known to many of the British – to ‘spare’ the British, while telling them to ‘slay them all’ in Pashtu, the language of the tribes, which only Mackenzie and very few others on the British side understood. In the late afternoon the two hostages were allowed to follow, captives again as they had been on the day of Macnaghten’s murder, but this time protected by Akbar’s cousin, Sultan Jan Barakzai. The scene the party passed was one of unparalleled horror. As Lawrence described it:

sepoys and camp followers were being stripped and plundered on all sides, and such as refused to give up their money and valuables were instantly stabbed or cut down . . . On seeing us, the poor creatures cried out for help, many of them recognising me and calling me by name. But what could we do . . . The Ghilzais had now tasted blood, and clearly showed their tigerish nature, becoming very savage and fierce in their demeanour towards ourselves, demanding that we should be given up to them for a sacrifice, brandishing their long blood-stained knives in our faces, and telling us ‘to look on the heaps of the carcasses around us, as we should soon be ourselves among them.’ ‘You came to Kabul for fruit, did you? How do you like it now?’ they cried.

When he saw the body of an Englishman stretched out by the road, Lawrence rode over and found that the soldier was alive:

the poor fellow raising his head and recognising me, cried out, ‘For God sake, Captain Lawrence, don’t leave me here!’ I jumped off my horse, and going up to the man raised him up, with the assistance of two of Sultan Jan’s men, who had dismounted by his orders. He was a sergeant of the 44th, and at first appeared only to have lost his left hand; but to my grief and horror, on raising him, I saw that from the nape of his neck to his backbone, he had been cut in pieces. ‘What use is there lifting him up?’ cried the Affghans, ‘he cannot live many minutes.’ I reluctantly assented, and on telling the poor fellow we could do nothing for him, he said, ‘Then for God sake shoot me.’ ‘Even this I cannot do,’ I mournfully replied. ‘Then leave me to die,’ he said, and this we were forced to do . . .

As we proceeded we met numbers of the enemy’s horse and foot returning to Kabul, laden with plunder of all kinds. One miscreant had a little Indian girl seated on his horse behind him . . .
43

That night, having ascended to the top of the pass, the British found themselves in an even colder camp site than the night before. Snow began to fall towards evening, developing into a full-scale blizzard by nine at night. For the entire army, only four tents remained, one of which was assigned to Lady Sale and her daughter. There was no fuel or food, but at least some of the doctors still had their medicine bags. Dr Brydon’s friend and Scottish compatriot Dr Alexander Bryce ‘came and examined Sturt’s wound’, wrote Lady Sale. ‘He dressed it; but I saw by the countenance in his expression that there was no hope. He afterwards kindly cut the ball out of my wrist; and dressed both my wounds . . . [That night] the sipahees and camp followers, half frozen, tried to force their way not only into our tent but into our beds . . . Many poor wretches died round the tent in the night . . . Many women and children abducted.’
44

‘The snow was the only bed for all,’ wrote Eyre, ‘and for many, ere morning, it proved the winding sheet. It was only marvellous that any of us at all should have survived that fearful night!’ Maulana Hamid Kashmiri echoed the thought in his
Akbarnama
:

The winter, with its very heartlessness

Showered love upon the brave people of Kabul

For if the Kafirs did not die of the snow

Or by the swords of the plundering looters

To hyenas, wolves and jackals, from every side

The fox called out, bidding them to a feast of meat

Kites circled above and cried out far

A generous invitation to all beasts of prey

Upon that road how many escaped alive?

All were thrown down, and laid low in the snow
45

On the fourth morning of the retreat, 9 January, in the middle of a high-altitude sub-zero blizzard, desperation finally gave way to complete despair. ‘The flesh from men’s feet was peeling off in flakes,’ recorded Captain William Anderson, one of the last survivors of Shah Shuja’s Contingent. ‘Scores had been frozen to death in the night.’
46

As the blizzard continued to rage with greater intensity than ever, only one mile of progress was made in the entire day. ‘The sky on all sides filled with snow,’ recorded Munshi Abdul Karim,

the horizon became invisible, and a fierce wind arose, uprooting trees. Thick dark clouds blew in with terrifying thunder-claps and flashes of lightning. As more snow fell, the frost bit hard and all was covered in white powder like camphor. The English troops froze, their finger-tips fell off by segments, the soft tissue fell off their bones, even their feet separated from their ankles; living and dead were indistinguishable, motionless in the frozen wastes. The Afghan tribes who were used to such harsh conditions, crowded the hills and rushed down to plunder the helpless English troops. They found them half dead, or frozen solid like stones, no longer caring about their weapons, their gold, their possessions, barely conscious at all, each only just aware of his own dire condition.
47

That evening, Elphinstone effectively acknowledged that his troops were doomed and gave over all the British women – or at least those of officer class – into the hands of Akbar Khan.
gg
Throughout the day, Akbar had hovered on the tail of the column insisting that he was doing everything he could to restrain the Ghilzai, but claiming that even their chiefs could not restrain them now they had tasted blood. Instead he offered to save the women and children and any wounded officers who wanted to give themselves up. In the end nineteen of them – two men, eight women and nine children – were escorted away. Lady Sale and her daughter Alexandrina had just watched Sturt die, strapped to the back of a shivering pony. ‘The rough motion increased his suffering and accelerated his death,’ wrote Lady Sale, ‘but he was still conscious that his wife and I were with him; and we had the sorrowful satisfaction of giving him a Christian burial?. . .’ Later, as she recounted,

overwhelmed by domestic affliction, neither Mrs Sturt nor I were in a fit state to decide for ourselves whether we would accept the Sirdar’s protection or not. There was but faint hope of our ever getting safe to Jalalabad; and we followed the stream . . . We were taken by a very circuitous route to the Khoord Kabul forts where we found Mahomed Akbar Khan, and the other hostages. Three rooms were cleared out for us, having no outlets except a small door to each; and, of course, they are dark and dirty . . . At midnight, some mutton bones and greasy rice were brought to us. All that Mrs Sturt and I possess are the clothes on our backs in which we quitted Kabul . . .
48

For the British, this surrender of their women into the hands of men they had come to regard as brutal savages was the moment of their greatest humiliation. For the Afghans, in contrast, the protection offered to the British memsahibs was seen as a mark of their own chivalry. ‘Commander Akbar Khan, though taken up with ruthless fighting, saw the dreadful condition of the women and children, and pitied them,’ wrote Munshi Abdul Karim.

Out of love of God and common decency, he ordered the living to be separated from the dead, and for them to be taken to warm places and covered with sheepskins and sable pelisses. He placed them next to braziers to revive them, after the extreme cold had all but stopped the blood circulating in their veins. Such is Afghan hospitality! Even after the fiercest battle, they will succour the weak in extreme distress, as if they were their own family. For if God wills it, even a Kafir can be a cause for good.
49

For those still on the retreat, however, the horrors continued. By the following morning, 10 January, after a second night on the exposed heights of the Khord Kabul, Hugh Johnson recorded succinctly that ‘we had now not a single sepoy remaining of the whole of the Kabul Force. Every particle of our baggage was gone. We all gave ourselves up for lost . . . Every man among us thought that ere many hours should pass he was doomed to die, either by cold or hunger or butchered by our enemies . . . My eyes have become so inflamed from the reflection from the snow that I am nearly blind, and the pain is intense. Several officers are quite sightless.’
50

Dr Brydon was lucky that morning to find the hoard of food left behind by Lady Macnaghten when she was handed over to Akbar Khan. The meat and sherry she had shared with George Lawrence were now long gone, but there were still ‘some eggs and a bottle of wine . . . The eggs were not boiled but frozen quite hard, and the wine also, to the consistency of honey?. . .’ It was as well for Brydon that he had some sustenance, for there followed the worst day of the retreat yet, as the snow-blinded and frostbitten troops stumbled through the narrows of the Tezin Pass where a second meticulously laid ambush awaited them. ‘This was a terrible march,’ Brydon recorded in his diary that night,

the fire of the enemy incessant, and great numbers of officers and men, not knowing where they were going from snow-blindness, were cut up. I led Mr Banness, the Greek merchant, a great part of the way over the high ground, and often felt so blind myself that from time to time I applied a handful of snow to my eyes, and recommended others to do so, as it gave great relief. Descending towards Tezin, the whiteness was not so intense, and as the sun got low, the blindness went off; but the fire of the enemy increased, and as they were able to get very close to us in the Pass, which we now again entered, it was very destructive.

The enemy all the way pressed hard on our flanks and rear, and, on arriving at the valley of Tezin towards evening, a mere handful remained of the native regiments which had left Cabul . . . Dr Bryce, just on entering the pass, was shot through the chest, and when dying handed his will to Captain Marshall.
51

‘Little or no resistance was made by the sepoys,’ noted Elphinstone in his official memorandum to the government, ‘most of whom had lost their fingers or toes, and their muskets covered with frozen snow would have been little use even if the men could have handled them. The slaughter was frightful and when we reached Kubber Jubber [actually Khak-i-Jabar] fighting men were with difficulty distinguished from camp followers. Most had thrown away their arms and accoutrements; and fell an easy prey to our barbarous and bloodthirsty foe.’
52
As ever, the orders given by Elphinstone only made things worse. ‘Our military authorities, who proved themselves as incapable of conducting a retreat as they had previously shown themselves in the operations preceding it, had with the most strange perversity ordered our men on no account to return the fire,’ wrote Lawrence. ‘The consequence was that their ranks were forced in, and an indiscriminate slaughter of unresisting men followed all the way to Tezin?. . .’
53
‘We were in so thick a mass,’ wrote an exhausted and despairing Johnson, ‘that every shot told on some part or other of the column.’
54

By the evening of 11 January, after yet another day-long massacre, as the ever diminishing column stumbled out of the Tezin Pass towards the fertile valley-bottom village of Jagdalak, the number of casualties passed 12,000. There were only 200 troops still left to stumble forward. The small rearguard was under the command of Shelton, who now for the first time showed his steel as he stood at the back of the column holding the Afghans at bay. ‘Nothing could exceed the bravery of Shelton,’ wrote Johnson. ‘He was like a bulldog assaulted on all sides by a lot of curs trying to snap at his head, tail and sides. Shelton’s small band was attacked by horse and foot, and although the latter were fifty to one, not a man dared to come close . . . We cheered him in true English fashion as he descended into the valley, notwithstanding we, at the time, were acting as targets for the marksmen of the enemy on the hills.’