Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (68 page)

It was all over by 7 a.m. The beaten and wounded Afghan besiegers were soon streaming back towards Gandamak, and by midday the British commissariat staff were already busy moving large quantities of captured grain, powder, shells and shot into the city, as well as ‘a lot of fowls which were flying about loose’. ‘Never was a victory so complete,’ wrote a gleeful Gleig. ‘Akbar and the wreck of his army fled towards Kabul, and all the chiefs of the districts in the other direction sent in their submission.’
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When Pollock’s relief force finally marched into sight, nine days later, the garrison was able to ride out to escort them in. The Army of Retribution, expecting to see ‘long beards, haggard faces and tattered garments’ found instead the defenders ‘all fat and rosy, in the highest health, scrupulously clean shaven and dressed as neatly as if quartered in the best regulated cantonment in India. We on the contrary, the relieving army, presented the strongest contrast to all this . . . Our coats and trousers were torn and dirty, our lips and faces blistered by the sun.’
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As Pollock’s force streamed into the city, they were pointedly piped in to the strains of the old Jacobite air, ‘Oh, But Ye’ve Been Lang a’Coming’.

General Pollock, as ever, was not to be rushed. His progress was as methodical, and as ruthlessly violent, as ever.

While he was consolidating his hold on the Khyber, Pollock’s sepoys had begun the process of taking revenge for earlier Afghan atrocities by decapitating the dead Afridis they had killed and carrying ‘the heads into camp in triumph, stuck on the points of their bayonets’. There were also a number of Afridi women among the dead.
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When one of Pollock’s officers, Lieutenant Greenwood, remonstrated with the sepoys responsible, one of them replied simply, ‘Sahib I have lost twelve brethren in this accursed pass, and I would happily bayonet a Kyberee a month old at his mother’s breast.’
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Pollock showed little sign of wishing to restrain such tendencies and, as his force headed on towards Jalalabad, villages deemed hostile were torched as the Army of Retribution passed by. In one hamlet, where some plundered British property and the uniforms of some murdered soldiers had been discovered, the entire village was methodically reduced to rubble. ‘The destruction of Ali Boghan’, explained Pollock nonchalantly in his next despatch, ‘was caused by one of those sudden bursts of feeling against which, being wholly unexpected, no precautions were considered necessary.’
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On arrival at Jalalabad, Pollock paused again. While there were many in the garrison who wished him to pursue the fleeing Akbar Khan to Kabul without delay, Pollock was determined to leave nothing to chance. He felt that since the garrison had already eaten all their camels he did not have enough baggage animals to carry adequate supplies forward; in his view at least 9,000 new camels needed to be found before he could move forward to retake Kabul.
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Moreover, it was still unclear how far the new Governor General would authorise him to proceed, and there were increasing signs that the once hawkish Ellenborough was getting cold feet. Anxious about the empty treasury in Calcutta, Ellenborough began sending messages to Pollock and Nott maintaining that, now Jalalabad had been relieved and Akbar Khan defeated, they must begin winding-up operations and prepare to return to India, if necessary leaving the hostages and prisoners of war to their fate. The garrisons of Jalalabad and Kandahar could not believe that they were being forbidden to retake Kabul now that they had Akbar on the run.  ‘There seems to be some falability [sic] attending us in this country,’ wrote Broadfoot when he heard the news. ‘A vigorous advance on the Capital
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would be certainly victorious and would almost as certainly lead to the entire submission of the Country . . . [But] the General has not instructions of any kind whatever from the government, and even if he could go on must halt from ignorance of the wishes of the Supreme authorities.’
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In Kandahar, Rawlinson – who was still agitating to have the whole of Afghanistan annexed to British India – was aghast when he read that Kandahar was now to be abandoned, along with the rest of the country. ‘The peremptory order to retire has come upon us like a thunderclap,’ he wrote. General Nott was even more frustrated that his moment of triumph was to be taken from him. ‘The people in power are all mad,’ he wrote to his daughters.

Either that, or Providence hath blinded them for some wise purpose. I am very, very tired of working, tired of this country, and quite tired of the folly of my countrymen . . . My soldiers are four months in arrears; there is not one rupee in the Kandahar treasury, and no money can be borrowed. I have no medicine for the sick and wounded, I have no carriage cattle for the troops, nor money to buy or hire, and but little ammunition. I have been calling for all these for six months and not the least aid has been given to me . . . How I do long to be in some nice spot in Australia!
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Unwilling to retreat, Generals Pollock and Nott both dragged their feet and sent to Ellenborough a long succession of excuses why they could not withdraw – the weather, lack of transport, money and so on – while they got the hawks in India and at home to lobby Ellenborough to change his mind. ‘It is impossible to press upon you too strongly’, wrote an all-too-willing Duke of Wellington to the Governor General, ‘the notion of the importance of the restoration of reputation in the East.’
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Pollock made the same point in a succession of letters to Calcutta, emphasising that ‘with regard to our withdrawal at the present moment, I fear it would have the very worst effect; it would be construed into a defeat, and our character as a powerful nation would be entirely lost in this part of the world’.
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Realising that he would be accused of throwing away an opportunity of freeing Akbar Khan’s hostages and salvaging Britain’s military reputation, Ellenborough began looking for a way to reverse his position.

While he waited for Ellenborough to let him off his leash, Pollock kept himself busy revenging himself on those Afghans within his reach. He sent out punitive parties to cow the tribes of the Jalalabad valley, ‘unroofing a few villages . . . and burning everything combustible’.
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One brigade was sent south into the Shinwari country, to burn all the forts and villages and fell the trees. One day alone, thirty-five forts were set ablaze. Another brigade under the artilleryman Augustus Abbott was sent towards Gandamak to punish the villagers who had massacred the last survivors of the 44th Foot. ‘We destroyed all the vineyards,’ he later recorded, ‘and cut deep rings around trees of two centuries’ growth.
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Their forts and houses were destroyed; their walls blown up and their beautiful trees left to perish. The retribution was thorough and enduring in its effects. It is lamentable to see the mischief done, but the example was quite necessary.’
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MacGregor, the Political Officer with the force, also wrote approvingly of the brutality and destruction, saying that while demolished walls could soon be repaired, the destruction of trees – ‘a measure which might at first seem barbarous to the civilised mind’ – was the only way for the Afghans to be made to ‘feel the weight of our power, for they delight in the shade of their trees’. In any village believed to have aided Akbar Khan, orders were given ‘at once to commence the work of destruction so that neither fort, house, tree, grain nor boosa [fodder] should be spared them’.
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Meanwhile, the onset of the summer heat, and with it disease, added to the frustration of the troops left waiting in Jalalabad. ‘Great was the disappointment among the officers,’ wrote Lieutenant Greenwood,

and loud the murmurings among the men, when at first days then weeks passed away while we remained inactive . . . The camels and baggage animals were dying in numbers daily, and the stench of their dead bodies and the filth of the immense camp was insupportable. Millions of flies were bred in the masses of corruption that lay on every side. The very air was black with them, and such torments they became, that it was almost impossible to get a minute’s rest. Provisions were bad and scarce. Sickness began to rage among the men, who bitterly complained that they were brought there to die like cowards in that pest house, instead of being led at once against the enemy.
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Temperatures soon rose to forty-three degrees Celsius, and many of the officers disappeared into the underground cool houses, or tykhanas, that they found in the basements of the old houses.

Within the fort, one man seemed especially miserable. Every evening when the troops were at dinner, General Sale would slip off ‘ostensibly to have a quiet look around at the progress of our work’, wrote Thomas Seaton, ‘but in reality to ponder on the desperate situation of his wife and daughter, and to debate with himself the possibility of effecting their rescue’. Seaton realised that, now that the siege was over and its anxieties passed, Sale’s thoughts were dwelling more and more on the fate of his family, especially now that Ellenborough seemed to be contemplating withdrawing from Afghanistan and leaving the prisoners of war and the hostages in captivity. There were also the rumours which had been circulating during the siege that Akbar might bring Lady Sale before the walls of the city and torture her within Sale’s sight, so compelling him to surrender. One evening Seaton found himself on guard duty as Sale did his lonely rounds, and he plucked up the courage to ask the General what he would do had such a report proved true: ‘Turning towards me, his face pale and stern, but quivering with deep emotion, he replied, “I-I will have every gun turned on her; my old bones shall be buried beneath the ruins of the fort here; but I shall never surrender.”’
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Sale’s defeat of Akbar Khan turned out to be a very mixed blessing for Lady Sale and her fellow hostages.

Like the Jalalabad garrison before them, they had heard the false rumours of Pollock’s defeat, and had been plunged into depression at the thought of their ever-lengthening captivity. But when news came through of Sale’s victory and Pollock’s successful passage through the Khyber it brought with it a period of renewed uncertainty. After eleven weeks of stability, they were ordered back on to their horses and sent off northwards, away from any attempts that the British might make to rescue them. They later learned that after the Battle of Jalalabad many of the chiefs – especially those of the eastern Ghilzai – had demanded that they be put to death. Only Akbar Khan’s personal intervention had saved them.
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Before they left on their wanderings, the pick of their goods were plundered by their jailer, Akbar’s father-in-law Mohammad Shah Khan, chief of the Babrkhel Ghilzai of Laghmanat. Lady Sale reported that he ‘has taken away all of Lady Macnaghten’s jewels to the value of above a lakh of rupees; and her shawls, valued at between 30 and 40,000 rupees’. But Lady Sale was not planning to be so easily robbed: ‘My chest of drawers they took possession of with great glee – I left some rubbish in them, and some small bottles, that were useless to me. I hope the Afghans will try their contents as medicine, and find them efficacious; one bottle contained nitric acid, another a strong solution of lunar caustic.’
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Several days later the caravan containing the prisoners crossed with that taking the wounded Akbar Khan back to Kabul. George Lawrence saw him pass in his palanquin. ‘He looked pale and ill,’ he wrote,

and he carried his wounded arm in a sling; he returned our salutations very courteously. He smiled as I passed him, and beckoning me to join him, spoke in a free and soldierly manner of Sale’s victory and his own defeat, praising the gallant bearing of our men, with Sale conspicuous on his white charger at their head. He admitted that his force had fled precipitately, he himself having to get out of his palanquin and escape on horseback. Had our troops only followed up a few miles further to the bank of the river, he must have been captured, as he had to remain some hours until a raft could be prepared to take him across.
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Waving goodbye, Akbar Khan headed on towards Kabul, while the prisoners were escorted by a different route to a fortress at the top of the Tezin Pass. On the road they crossed again the route of the January retreat, passing frequent macabre reminders of its horrors. ‘Many of the bodies, from being imbedded in the snow, were little altered, but most were reduced to skeletons,’ noted Lawrence.
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More tragic still were the feral remains of the sepoy army, some of whom were still hiding out in the caves of the high passes. Lady Sale saw one cave in front of which lay a huge pile of human bones, ‘and from the blood close to its entrance, there is reason to believe that the inhabitants were supporting nature by devouring each other. I saw three spectral figures crawling on hands and knees just within the cave and heard them calling out for help as we passed.’
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The next few days of the hostages’ forced march took place in pouring rain and through thick mud. It was a particularly violent downpour near Sarobi that finally finished off the ailing General Elphinstone; as he had long predicted, he would never make it back to his beloved Borders grouse moors. Yet it was a measure of his personal charm that despite being almost single-handedly responsible for the catastrophe that had led to the prisoners’ current situation, he was faithfully tended by the other hostages to the end. Mackenzie and Lawrence were particularly solicitous and shared shifts with Moore, his batman, to look after the old General as he faded away, and, though without any medicine, Mackenzie ‘was able to sooth in some degree his last sufferings by a tonic prepared from pomegranate rinds’.
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‘He told me repeatedly he wished and even prayed for death,’ wrote Lawrence. ‘He said, sleeping and waking, the horrors of that dreadful retreat were always before his eyes. We all felt deeply for him and tried to soothe and comfort the old man, but it was of no avail, as he was worn out in body and mind, and evidently heart-broken by what had occurred. His wound remained unhealed, but he heeded it not; his anguish of mind was too intense to be distracted even by bodily suffering?. . .’
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