Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (62 page)

That night, lamps were raised on the gates of Jalalabad and bugles blown to guide in any last stragglers, but none limped in. ‘A strong wind was blowing from the south, which sent the sound of the bugles all over the town,’ remembered Captain Thomas Seaton. ‘The terrible wailing sound of those bugles I will never forget. It was a dirge for our slaughtered soldiers and, heard all through the night, it had an inexpressibly mournful and depressing effect. Dr Brydon’s tale struck horror into the hearts of all who heard it . . . The whole army had been destroyed, one man alone escaping to tell the fearful tale.’
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In the days that followed, a few other survivors limped in, including Dr Brydon’s friend Mr Banness, the Greek merchant, and several hardy Gurkhas. In time the legend grew that the entire British army in Afghanistan had been wiped out. This of course was not the case: large garrisons survived in Kandahar and Jalalabad, and even of the Kabul army there were 2,000 sepoys who ultimately came home along with thirty-five British officers, fifty-one private soldiers, twelve wives and twenty-two children, all of whom were either taken hostage (in the case of the Europeans) or managed to stumble back to Kabul to beg on the streets (in the case of the Hindustanis). It was nonetheless an extraordinary defeat for the British and an almost miraculous victory for the Afghan resistance. At the very height of the British Empire, at a point when the British controlled more of the world economy than they would ever do again, and at a time when traditional forces were everywhere being massacred by industrialised colonial armies, it was a rare moment of complete colonial humiliation.

The story was immediately retold by Afghan poets and singers, the numbers of casualties and the scale of the victory growing with each retelling. ‘It is said that 60,000 English troops – half from Bengal, half from other provinces, without counting servants and camp-followers – went to Afghanistan,’ wrote Mirza ‘Ata,

and only a handful came back alive, wounded and destitute. The rest fell with neither grave nor shroud to cover them, and lay scattered in that land like rotting donkeys. The English love gold and money so much that they cannot stop themselves from laying their hands on any area productive of wealth. But what prize did they find in Afghanistan except, on the one hand, the exhausting of their treasury and, on the other, the disgracing of their army? It is said that of the 40,000 English troops who had been in Kabul, many were taken captive en route, many remained as cripples and beggars in Kabul, and the rest perished in the mountains, like a ship sunk without trace; for it is no easy thing to invade or govern the Kingdom of Khurasan.
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The Death of a King

The news of the massacre of an entire British army spread quickly around the region.

In Bukhara, the Amir celebrated the good tidings by ordering the murder of his two British prisoners, Charles Conolly and Arthur Stoddart. In Herat, the Wazir Yar Mohammad took the opportunity of throttling his monarch, Kamran Shah Sadozai, knowing that neither the British nor Shah Shuja would now be in any position to stop him. The news caused more excitement still in India. In Delhi, the bankers of the Chandni Chowk bazaars heard the news a full two days before the colonial authorities: the letter-writing systems of traditional trade working far faster and more efficiently than the creaking colonial system of harkara runners.
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By the time the news reached Calcutta, it had already given hope and encouragement to the many opponents of Company rule across the length and breadth of Hindustan: it was no accident that when the Great Rebellion did break out in 1857, it did so in sepoy regiments which had been deserted by their British officers in the snows of the Khord Kabul, and in civilian centres such as Lucknow, Agra and Kanpur where the Persian presses had eagerly reprinted the Afghan epic poems and prose accounts of the British defeat.
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Lord Auckland was almost the last to hear about the catastrophe. It took a full two weeks for the express bearing Dr Brydon’s tale finally to reach Government House on 30 January 1842. The news, as Emily Eden noted, aged ‘poor George’ ten years in as many hours: he screamed and raged, then took to his bed. He emerged partially paralysed, and was believed to have suffered some kind of stroke.
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In the days that followed, his sisters became more and more anxious, watching helplessly as their brother paced pale-faced up and down the veranda by day and lay prostrate on the lawns at night, pressing his face against the cool turf for comfort. Only a few weeks earlier, his trusted adviser Macnaghten had been writing to him from Kabul, telling him not to believe the nay-sayers and assuring him that all was well. Now his entire Imperial strategy and all his ‘plans for public good and public security upon which I had staked so much have all broken under circumstances of horror and disaster of which history has few parallels’.
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Indeed the entire catastrophe was to Auckland himself ‘as inexplicable as it is appalling’. Worse still was the news that followed, that Akbar and the other leaders of the resistance were now moving to finish off the three remaining British garrisons in Jalalabad, Ghazni and Kandahar. Around India, rumours spread that, with much of the Indian army still absent in China fighting Auckland’s Opium War, the Afghans would soon be pouring down the Khyber Pass to loot the plains of Hindustan as they had done so often in the past.

It was one week more before London heard what had happened.
The
Times
broke the news to the nation: ‘We regret to announce that the intelligence which this express has brought us is of the most disastrous and melancholy nature.’ In a typically Russophobic leading article published a few days later it hinted heavily – and quite inaccurately – at a Russian hand in the events, pointing out that the first to be targeted for assassination was none other than Sir Alexander Burnes, the great rival of Vitkevitch and ‘the keenest antagonist of the Russian agents’.
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The new Tory government of Sir Robert Peel had been all set to withdraw from Afghanistan and wash its hands of the mess created by its Whig predecessors. Now, however, it was agreed by the Cabinet that the nation’s military reputation had first to be salvaged. Lord Ellenborough, the founding ideologue of the Indus policy and the man the Tories had already sent out to replace Auckland as governor general, heard of the disaster when his ship docked off Madras on 21 February. From the Governor’s House he wrote immediately to Peel declaring that he intended to teach the Afghans a lesson they would never forget: ‘the honour of our arms must be re-established in Afghanistan . . . Every difficulty should be encountered and overcome for the preservation of India.’
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By the time Ellenborough reached Calcutta on the 28th – addressing barely a word to his disgraced and beleaguered predecessor or his sisters – the news had arrived that Ghazni too had fallen to the Ghilzai, and its garrison, like that of Kabul, had been either captured, slaughtered or enslaved.

By this time, a heavily armed relief force, six regiments strong, with the ominous title of the Army of Retribution had already been despatched from the cantonments of Meerut and Ferozepur with orders to cross the Sutlej and head to Peshawar, ready to wreak revenge. Auckland’s first choice of general had been another elderly veteran like Elphinstone, but luckily for the troops the frail and doddering Sir Harry Lumley was ruled out on medical advice. So the command went instead to Major-General George Pollock, who received his orders while smoking his breakfast cheroot on the veranda of his bungalow in Agra. Pollock was a precise, sensible and doggedly efficient Londoner who had been a Company officer in India more than thirty years. A veteran of the Nepal and Burmese Wars, he was, as George Lawrence’s younger brother Henry put it, ‘as good as any commander that could be sent’. When George Broadfoot heard the news inside the besieged walls of Jalalabad, he also approved. Though no Napoleon, he wrote, Pollock was ‘superior to any officer I have yet chanced to meet in these regions’.
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At the same time as Pollock received his appointment, orders were sent to Dost Mohammad’s keeper, Captain Nicholson, that their prisoner was to be moved from the Afghan frontier and placed in isolation and under surveillance. ‘You will be pleased to lose no time on receipt of this letter in adopting the most strict system for the custody of Dost Mohammad Khan,’ Nicholson was instructed by George Clerk, the agent for the North West Frontier, ‘making him a close prisoner and preventing all communication with him or his retinue by Afghans or Hindoostanis, except with your permission.’
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Within a few days, Dost Mohammad had been moved to an isolated property high in the hills beyond Mussoorie. Nicholson’s measures to secure his prisoner reveal the extreme fear and paranoia that overtook the British in India at this time. The small sepoy guard was replaced with no fewer than 110 Englishmen from a newly arrived Queen’s Regiment. Even Skinner’s Horse, one of whose battalions had just been wiped out – along with Skinner’s own son James – on the retreat from Kabul, was sent away from the area as ‘the proportion of Mohammadans in the Rissalah was so great that it seemed more prudent not to employ men whose religion (however well inclined to us the men may be)
might
be employed as a means to seduce them from their duty’.

Elaborate measures were taken to make sure that Dost Mohammad did not escape or enter into correspondence with the Afghan rebels. ‘The Ameer’s premises are guarded day and night by sentries,’ wrote Nicholson, ‘and the roads leading to it from Landour, as also from Rajpoor, are constantly watched by sentries. None of the Ameer’s followers will be allowed to pass out beyond the sentries, no strangers whatsoever admitted within them, except by my pass, which will only be granted when necessary, and the individuals going out will be accompanied by a European guard.’ Further precautions were taken to prevent correspondence:

. . . I am establishing a small thannah [police post] at the foot of the hills which will watch the advent of all strangers from the Westward, especially Afghans or Kashmiris, and give me instant notice of the arrival of any suspicious characters . . . At the head of this I propose placing an individual of my present establishment who speaks all the languages of the trans-Indus countries, and with him will be associated a Hindu chupprussie and four hillmen. Their orders are to accompany secretly any suspected individual up the hill, till he reaches the nearest sentry, and then to hand him over to the guard, which is to be posted close to the Ameer’s house.

As an additional measure, Nicholson recommended that all Kashmiris be banned from the Mussoorie hills, unless they had a special pass,

[because] an Afghan messenger would not be likely personally to attempt communicating with the prisoner so closely watched as Dost Mohammad Khan, but would have recourse to one less liable to suspicion; in all probability to a Kashmiri.

Their character as Cossids [messengers] is too well known to need mention and of them I am especially apprehensive. Hence I would suggest that orders be given at Ludhiana and Amballah, that no Kashmiri should be permitted to visit the Dhoon [Valley] or the hills without a pass from yourself. It would probably too aid my efforts if a note of any Kashmiri traveller were to be sent to me by dak by the police officers of the Amballah district, and this would be a check on my own thanna people.

Clerk approved of all Nicholson’s measures and in addition gave Nicholson special authority to ‘arrest and most closely search any suspicious individual’.
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In the meantime, everyone turned their fire on Auckland. In Jalalabad, the night Brydon rode in, Thomas Seaton had written in his diary: ‘That Elphinstone’s imbecility was the immediate cause of this disgrace and of these terrible disasters is beyond all doubt; but the real author was he who selected for a post of such difficulty and responsibility a man crippled by gout in his hands and feet, whose nerves had succumbed to bodily suffering, and who was in no way remarkable for capacity.’
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Soon everyone else, including the British press and many Members of Parliament, came to the same conclusion, especially a bright young Tory MP named Benjamin Disraeli, who began a sustained campaign against Auckland in Parliament.

On arrival in Calcutta, Ellenborough was so rude to his predecessor that George wrote to his friend Hobhouse in London wondering if Ellenborough were entirely sane.
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Auckland was left with little choice but to take most of the responsibility and return home in disgrace. His letters at this time were, understandably, full of despair. ‘I have been greatly depressed,’ he wrote to Hobhouse. ‘I look upon our affairs in Affghanistan as irretrievable, but we must encounter further risks in the endeavour to save what may be saved from the wreck . . . I fear that we are destined to hear of more horror and disaster.’
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