Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (61 page)

That night, as the remaining troops lay besieged and starving in a small ruined mud-walled enclosure in Jagdalak, Akbar Khan summoned General Elphinstone and Brigadier Shelton for negotiations. Hugh Johnson accompanied them. ‘We found the Sirdar and his party bivouacked in the open air,’ he wrote. ‘Nothing could exceed the kind and apparently sympathising manner in which we were received by this Chief who immediately on learning that we were hungry and thirsty ordered a cloth to be spread on the ground where we were sitting.’
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He welcomed them to his blazing camp fire, offered them dinner, then refused to allow them to return to their troops. Shelton was furious and demanded the right as an officer and soldier to return to lead his men and die fighting. He was refused.

By nine the following night, after a day under continual fire, and when it was clear that all the remaining leaders had either been captured or killed, most of the survivors, ‘now almost maddened with hunger and especially with thirst having been marching or rather hunted like wild beasts for 24 hours’, decided that their only hope was to press on in the dark. They found however their way blocked by a formidable thorny barrier of ‘prickly holly oak, well twisted together, about six feet high’, which had just been erected across the narrowest part of the pass.
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Those who tried to tear it down with their bare hands or claw their way up it were shot down as they did so. Very few made it over. One who failed to do so was the sepoy Sita Ram. He recorded how,

when the General sahib left, all discipline fell away. As a result, the Afghans were able to annoy us the more . . . A number of sepoys and followers went across to the enemy in an effort to save their lives. My regiment had disappeared and I attached myself to the remnants of a European regiment. I thought that by sticking to them I might have some chance of getting away from that detestable country. But alas! Alas! Who can withstand fate? We went on fighting and losing men every step of the road. We were attacked in front, in the rear, and from the tops of hills. In truth, it was hell itself. I cannot describe the horrors. At last we came to a high wall that blocked the road; in trying to force this, our whole party was destroyed. The men fought like Gods, not men, but numbers prevailed against them. I was struck down by a jezail ball on the side of my head.

Sita Ram was knocked unconscious, and when he came to he found himself:

tied crossways upon a horse which was being led rapidly away from the fighting towards Kabul. I now learned that I was being taken there to be sold as a slave. I begged to be shot, or have my throat cut and abused the Afghans in Pushtu and in my own language . . . but my captor threatened to make me a Muslim on the spot if I did not keep quiet. What dreadful carnage I saw on that road – legs and arms protruding from the snow, Europeans and Hindustanis half buried . . . It was a sight I shall never forget as long as I live.
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One of the very few to make it over the holly barrier was the last surgeon left alive, Dr Brydon. ‘The confusion became terrible,’ he remembered,

and the shouts of ‘Halt, Halt, keep back the cavalry,’ were incessant. Just after getting clear of the Pass – I with great difficulty made my way to the front. We had not gone far in the dark before I found myself surrounded. At this moment my Khidmutgar [table servant] rushed up to me, saying he was wounded, had lost his pony, and begged me to take him up. I had not time to do so before I was pulled off my horse and knocked down by a blow on the head from an Afghan knife, which must have killed me had I not placed a portion of Blackwood’s Magazine in my forage cap. As it was a piece of bone about the size of a wafer was cut from my skull, and I was nearly stunned. I managed to rise upon my knees, and seeing that a second blow was coming I met it with the edge of my sword, and I suppose cut off some of my assailant’s fingers, as the knife fell to the ground. He bolted one way, and I the other, minus my cap. The Khidmutgar was dead; those who had been with me I never saw again. I rejoined our troops, scrambled over a barricade of trees made across the Pass, and I got a severe blow on the shoulder from an Afghan who rushed down the hill and across the road.
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The badly wounded Brydon was saved by clinging to the stirrup of an officer’s horse, and so was dragged clear of the mêlée. Stumbling over more corpses in the moonlight, he then came across a mortally wounded cavalryman. He had been shot through the chest, and was haemorrhaging blood over his scarlet uniform. The man grabbed Brydon by the hand and begged him to take his pony before someone else did. The cavalryman then fell back dead. Grateful to his anonymous benefactor, and desperate to find any other last survivors, Brydon mounted the pony and rode off into the darkness.

There were a few other miraculous escapes. Havildar Moti Ram, one of the last survivors of the Charikar Gurkha garrison, who had been enslaved on arrival in Kabul, heard that the garrison was leaving the Kabul cantonment and managed to effect a further escape from his captors on the night of 6 January.

Pretending to the Afghans who stopped him that he was a camel driver discharged from the service of Shah Shuja, he managed to find the stone under which he had buried his life savings and rejoined his colleagues just in time to be present for the massacre in the Khord Kabul Pass two days later. ‘At Jagdalak,’ he later recorded,

the British force was girded round by Akbar Khan’s horsemen, who killed all they could. In the darkness I extricated myself from this scene of carnage, and sought safety once more in the hilltops. I remained a day high up in the hills. I had tasted no food for twenty-six hours from the time I made my last insufficient meal. I was benumbed by cold . . . I wished for death to release me from sufferings that had now become intolerable. I descended to the roadside determined to declare myself to the first Afghans who approached and court the blow of some pitying sword. I saw a party approach, and concluded the hour of my death had arrived.

But the party proved to be five Hindu Khatris,
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or traders:

These Cutries said, ‘As you are a Hindoo, we will save your life, but you must pay us before doing so.’ They searched me and took the 100 rupees out of my cummerbund, and returned me ten of them – they conducted me to a dharamasala [pilgrims’ resthouse] in which there was a Hindoo Fakir. His protection I also sought, and gave him my remaining ten rupees. He dressed me up in the red dress of a fakir and rubbed wood ashes over my face. I was to pass for his chela [disciple]; and he said I was to accompany him in the character of such on a pilgrimage he proposed making to Hardwar. A party of fruit merchants shortly after arrived. The fakir, the Cutries and myself joined them. We descended the high road considerably to the left of Peshawar. I begged my way until I got to Sir Jasper Nicholls’s Camp, one march this side of Ludhiana.
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The least lucky were those hundreds of sepoys and camp followers who neither escaped nor were enslaved or killed. In the Tezin Pass alone, 1,500 of these were stripped of their goods and their clothes by the Afghans, then left to starve and freeze to death in the snows, abandoned by their British employers and treated with contempt by their Afghan captors.
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Lady Sale and the other prisoners of war saw many such in the days that followed, as they headed back towards Kabul. ‘The road was covered with awful mangled bodies, all naked,’ wrote Lady Sale in her diary.

We passed some 200 dead bodies, many of them Europeans, the whole naked, and covered with large gaping wounds . . . Numbers of camp followers, we found still alive, frostbitten and starving; some perfectly out of their senses and idiotic . . . The sight was dreadful; the smell of blood sickening; and the corpses lay so thick that it was impossible to look upon them as it required care to guide my horse so as not to tread upon the bodies.

They came upon several camp followers who emerged from caves or from behind rocks ‘where they had taken shelter from the murderous knives of the Affghan and the inclemency of the climate’.

They had been stripped of all they possessed, and few could crawl more than a few yards on hands and knees, being frostbitten in the feet. Here Johnson found two of his servants: the one had his hands and feet frostbitten, and had a fearful swordcut across one hand, and a musketball in his stomach: the other had his right arm completely cut through the bone. Both were utterly destitute of covering, and had not tasted food for five days . . . Wounded and starving, they had set fire to the bushes and grass, and huddled all together to impart warmth to each other. Subsequently we heard that scarcely any of these poor wretches escaped from this defile: and that driven to the extreme of hunger they had sustained life by feeding upon their dead comrades.
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Only eighty survivors from the column managed to make it alive over the Jagdalak holly-oak barrier on the night of 12 January.

Most of these – some twenty officers and forty-five privates of Shelton’s 44th Foot, and a couple of artillerymen and sepoys – were exposed and surrounded at dawn as they stood, uncertain of the correct road, at the top of the hill of Gandamak, ten miles further on. Overwhelmingly outnumbered – ‘every hut had poured forth its inhabitants to murder and plunder’ – and with only twenty muskets and two rounds of ammunition each between them, the troops decided to make their last stand. They were offered quarter but refused. Many felt their regiment had been disgraced after running away from the hilltop of Bibi Mahru on the evening  of 23 November, and now they were determined to die fighting and so redeem the regimental honour. They formed a square, and defended themselves, ‘driving the Affghans several times down the hill’ until they had exhausted the last of their rounds, and then fought on with their bayonets.
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Then, one by one, they were slaughtered.
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The Afghans took only nine prisoners. One of these was Captain Thomas Souter, who wrapped the regimental colours of the 44th around his waist and was taken captive by the Ghilzai who assumed that someone so colourfully dressed must be worth holding to ransom. ‘Thinking I was some great man from looking so flash,’ he wrote, ‘I was seized by two fellows after my sword dropped from my hand by a severe cut on the shoulder, and my pistol missing fire. They hurried me from this spot to a distance, took my clothes off me, except my trousers and cap, and led me away to a village.’
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Fifteen more cavalrymen made it as far as Fattehabad, where ten were killed while sitting down to accept breakfast from some villagers. Four were shot down from the rooftops as they attempted to remount and ride out of the village. One more – Eldred Pottinger’s young nephew Thomas – was tracked down, caught and beheaded hiding amid the beautiful cypress trees and water runnels of Shah Jahan’s Nimla Gardens, where Shuja had first been defeated and lost his throne in 1809.

Only one man made it beyond this point. Dr Brydon was still fifteen miles from the safety of Jalalabad. ‘I proceeded alone,’ he wrote later.

Then I saw a party of about twenty men drawn up in my road, who when I came near, began picking up large stones . . . so I with difficulty put my pony into a gallop and, taking the bridle in my mouth, cut right and left with my sword as I went through them. They could not reach me with their knives and I was only hit by one or two stones. A little further on I was met by another similar party who I tried to pass as I did the former, but was obliged to prick the poor pony with the point of my sword before I could get him into a gallop. Of this party, one man on a mound over the road had a gun, which he fired close down upon me, and broke my sword, leaving only about six inches on the handle.

Brydon managed to get clear of these attackers, only to find that ‘the shot had hit the poor pony, wounding him in the loins, and he could now hardly carry me’.

Then I saw some five horsemen dressed in red, and supposing they were some of our irregular cavalry, I made towards them, but, getting near, found they were Afghans, and that they were leading Captain Collyer’s horse. I tried to get away, but my pony could hardly move, and they sent one of their party after me, who made a cut at me, guarding against which with the bit of my sword, it fell from the hilt. He passed me, but turned and rode at me again. This time, just as he was striking, I threw the handle of the sword at his head, in swerving to avoid which he only cut me over the back of the left hand. Feeling it disabled, I stretched down the right to pick up the bridle. I suppose my foe thought it was for a pistol, for he turned at once and made off as quick as he could. I then felt for the pistol I had put in my pocket, but it was gone, and I was unarmed, and on a poor animal I feared could not carry me to Jalalabad.

The surgeon felt suddenly drained of energy: ‘I became nervous and frightened at shadows, and I really think would have fallen from my saddle but for the peak of it?. . .’ He had been spotted, however, by an eagle-eyed staff officer on the top turret of the Jalalabad fort, and rescuers quickly came to his assistance.

Among the first of them was Captain Sinclair, whose servant gave me one of his own shoes to cover my foot. I was taken to the Sappers’ Mess, my wounds dressed by Dr Forsyth, and after a good dinner, with great thankfulness, enjoyed the luxury of a sound sleep . . . On examination I found that I had a slight sword wound on my left knee, besides my head and left hand, and that a ball had gone through my trousers a little higher up, slightly grazing the skin . . . The poor pony, directly it was put into a stable, lay down and never rose again. Immediately on my telling how things were, General Sale despatched a party to scour the plains . . . but they only found the bodies of Captain Hopkins and Collyer, and Dr Harper . . .
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