Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (70 page)

Eleven days later, Pollock marched out of Jalalabad with a slightly larger army of 8,000 troops. His was a much more harrowing passage. The further the Army of Retribution went, the more corpses they passed and the more macabre their journey became. First they saw ‘the sixty skeletons scattered on the hill’ of Gandamak, ‘the officers plainly distinguishable by the long hair which still remained attached to their skulls’. By the time the army came to Jagdalak ‘the pass was choked with corpses, and they had to be removed before our guns could pass’, wrote Thomas Seaton. ‘It was a terrible sight, and we felt it the more deeply from the thought that we could not sufficiently avenge such a disaster . . . All along the road, in every ravine and nook, bodies and skeletons of the Kabul fugitives were found lying as they had been cut down, or had sunk from fatigue and had perished in the intense cold.’
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‘Some were mere skeletons,’ noted Lieutenant Greenwood,

while others were in better preservation. Their features were perfect, although discoloured. Their eyes had evidently been picked out by birds of prey, which wheeling in endless gyrations above my head seemed to consider me an intruder in their domain. On turning the corner of a large rock, where five or six bodies were lying in a heap together, a vulture which had been banqueting on them, hopped carelessly away to a little distance, lazily flapping its huge wings, but too indolent to fly. I turned away from the sickening sight with a sad heart, but with a stern determination to lend my best efforts to paying the Affghans the debt of revenge we owed them.
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Worse was to come. At the holly barrier near Jagdalak, they came across hundreds of corpses impaled on the hedge, still slumped where they were shot down as they tried to claw their way over the thorns in the darkness. Just beyond that, within the low mud walls of the Jagdalak mud fort, they saw ‘skeletons thrown into heaps of eighty to one hundred’ where the column had halted for a day and two nights, exposed to the fire from the Ghilzais’ jezails on two sides, waiting in vain for Shelton and Elphinstone to return from their negotiations with Akbar Khan. ‘They were killed in ranks,’ wrote Seaton, ‘and in ranks we found them, the flesh still on their bodies, and every face perfectly recognisable to those by whom they were known.’ Near by, at the top of the valley, was a small round watchtower. Here they found the massed bodies of the hundreds of sepoys and camp followers whom the Afghans had captured, stripped of their clothes and driven out into the snow to die.

The whole of the room was filled with skeletons and decaying bodies, up to the very roof; and there was a mound of them outside, half way up to the door, extending to a distance of twenty-seven feet from the wall, completely covering the steps. It was a ghastly sight. The poor fugitives appear to have crept in here for shelter, the last comers treading on and suffocating those who had preceded them, and then throwing out their bodies, only to be themselves served in the same way – trampled on, suffocated and thrown out by those that followed.

War carries in its train one pre-eminently dreadful evil – it engenders and nurses the spirit of revenge, stirs up all the malignant passions that lie dormant in man’s breast, and urges him to acts that are more suitable to a demon than to a being created in God’s image . . . Now the sepoys took vengeance wherever they could on the living, and if not on the living then on the dead.
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Any place believed to be associated with Akbar Khan came in for especially harsh treatment. One lovely village surrounded by orchards and gardens was thought by the troops to be one of the Wazir’s favourite summer residences, and despite surrendering without a fight, ‘every house was destroyed, every tree barked or cut down; after which the detatchment having collected a considerable spoil of bullocks, sheep, and goats, marched back to camp’.
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Nott’s progress was initially more disciplined and less violent than that of Pollock. But after several troops were killed in one village after the Ghilzai elders had formally surrendered, a full-scale massacre ensued: all males over puberty were bayoneted, the women were raped and their goods plundered. ‘Tears, supplications, were of no avail,’ wrote Neville Chamberlain. ‘The musket was deliberately raised, the trigger pulled, and happy was he who fell dead. These horrible murders (for such alone must they be in the eyes of God) were truly wicked . . . This is one of the most beautiful valleys in Affghanistan, but we left it a scene of desolation; the Hindustanis being so exasperated against the Affghans, they can never spare anything they can destroy, and all the forts and places within reach were soon on fire.’
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Nott’s chaplain, the Rev. I. N. Allen, was even more shocked and wrote that rarely had a clergyman had to witness such scenes. ‘Every door was forced,’ he wrote, ‘every man that could be found was slaughtered, they were pursued from yard to yard, from tower to tower, and very few escaped . . . One door, which they refused to open upon summons, was blown in by a six pounder, and every soul bayoneted.’
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One soldier who visited the village fort the following day described seeing ‘about 100 dead bodies lying about, and six or eight children were found roasted to a cinder. They had been concealed beneath heaps of chaff which had burned. One woman was the only live thing in the fort. She was sitting, the picture of despair, with her father, brother, husband and children lying dead around her. She had dragged all their bodies to one spot, and seated herself in the midst.’
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On arrival outside Ghazni, Nott fought a brief but fierce battle with 12,000 Durranis under the Barakzai Governor of the Province. After the defenders had retired within the walls, Nott then camped just outside the range of the artillery. The following morning the British found the city entirely deserted: the Ghilzai ‘had lost heart’, despite having recently received reinforcements from Kabul under Sultan Jan, and had evacuated during the night. At dawn, Nott blew down the city gates and, as he put it tersely in his official report, ‘I directed the City of Ghuznee, with its citadel and the whole of its work, to be destroyed.’
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Only one last ritual remained. Through his reading of James Mill’s
History of India
– a book which Mill famously wrote without ever bothering to visit India, knowing any Indians or learning any Indian languages – Ellenborough had absorbed the entirely false idea that the doors of the tomb of Mahmud of Ghazni (998–1030) were the legendary sandalwood gates that the Sultan had allegedly stolen while looting the great Hindu temple of Somnath in Gujarat. In reality the gates were of a piece with the tomb itself – Seljuk work of the eleventh century – as Rawlinson could immediately see from the Arabic inscriptions on the woodwork which were contained in notably Islamic-looking six-pointed stars and surrounded by intricate arabesques. It made no difference – Ellenborough had asked for the gates, and the gates he would get.

A proclamation was duly issued by Ellenborough, addressed to the chiefs and princes of northern and western India, in which the Governor General spoke of how an insult of 800 years was finally avenged and centuries of Indian subjugation to Afghans in pre-colonial times had been reversed: thanks to the British, the gates that were once a memorial of Hindu humiliation had become instead a record of Indian superiority in arms over the nations beyond the Indus. The gates were duly paraded around India, accompanied by an imposing escort, where they were ceremoniously displayed to bewildered bystanders in an attempt to impress upon the people of India the undiminished power and benevolence of British rule. There was, however, no reaction from the Indian princes, and still less from the Hindus, neither of whom had been aware that they were missing any gates.
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As Rawlinson observed while supervising the removal of the beautiful Seljuk woodwork: the gates could hardly be restored because they were not from Somnath; the temple had been in ruins for a thousand years; and the Hindus were anyway totally indifferent to the whole farce.
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Nor were the Afghans particularly upset to see the gates go. According to Rawlinson, the custodian of the shrine merely shrugged his shoulders and said: ‘Of what use can these old timbers be to you?’
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Mirza ‘Ata was more cutting: ‘Ellenborough ordered the gates to be sent to India, where they could be used to publicize the re-conquest of Khorasan and justify the huge expense of operations in a country which produced so little revenue. As the saying goes, real power does not need tawdry propaganda! A more lasting monument until today is the quantity of rotting corpses of the English troops that still block the highways and byways of Khorasan.’
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Throughout July there were several attempts at negotiating an exchange of prisoners. First Mackenzie then Lawrence was despatched to Jalalabad to try to make a deal with Pollock; but in the end the talks came to nothing, and both men honourably returned to their captivity having given Akbar Khan their word that they would do so.

Pottinger in particular wrote a letter cautioning Pollock against making a deal which freed all the British officers and their women while leaving large numbers of helpless sepoys stranded in Afghanistan. ‘The name and character of the British must suffer in the opinion of our own subjects and soldiers in India if we were to pay for the release of a few Europeans,’ he wrote,

while so many thousands of our native soldiery & camp followers are reduced to the condition of slavery throughout this country. Many other poor wretches who are deprived of their hands and feet or otherwise mutilated or diseased are supporting their precarious existence by begging. If these latter persons be not released many if not all must die in the coming winter, and it appears to me that the Government will lay itself open to the odium and charge of undue partiality if it release us alone by ransom.
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There was, moreover, some urgency to the situation of the stranded Indians. A slave trader who visited the fortress where the hostages were being kept told Lady Sale that ‘400 Hindoostanees have been entrapped at Kabul, under an assurance of safe conduct to Jalalabad . . . Men sell for forty-six rupees; and women for twenty-two, each.’ Uzbek slave traders who dominated the Afghan market were especially feared for the merciless brutality they habitually displayed to their captives. When Josiah Harlan had passed through Khulm he described the ‘diabolical contrivance’ by which the Uzbeks literally sewed their captives to their saddles. ‘To oblige the prisoner to keep up, a strand of course horsehair is passed by means of a long crooked needle, under and around the collar bone, a few inches from its junction at the sternum; with the hair a loop is formed to which they attach a rope that may be fastened to the saddle. The captive is constrained to keep near the retreating horseman, and with his hands tied behind his person, is altogether helpless.’
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When Akbar warned Pollock that, if he attempted to retake Kabul, all the British prisoners of war would immediately be sent north to be sold as slaves in the Bukhara slave markets, the hostages had good reason to be apprehensive.

The British prisoners were staying in relative comfort in a fort just outside Kabul when Akbar Khan heard that the armies of Pollock and Nott had begun advancing on his capital from two different directions. His closest ally, Mohammad Shah Khan Ghilzai, encouraged him to prepare for a final life-or-death struggle with the Kafirs. ‘War they want,’ he told his son-in-law. ‘Let them have it – war to the knife. Let us destroy them all.’
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That Friday the Wazir rode to the Pul-i-Khishti Masjid and from the pulpit made a passionate appeal for a last and conclusive jihad against the British.

On the night of 25 August, just as the hostages were preparing to retire for the night, they received the ominous order that they were immediately to be moved northwards into the Hindu Kush. By the light of the moon they were made to load their few remaining goods on to the ponies and camels that had been sent for them by Akbar Khan. The women were told for the first time to wear full-length Afghan burkhas. Mackenzie, who had gone down with a severe fever and believed he was dying, was placed in a wicker basket called a
kajawah
slung from the side of a camel.
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Off they set, past the outskirts of Kabul and the walls of Babur’s Tomb, and out on to the Kohistan road. Their initial destination, they learned, was to be Akbar Khan’s northernmost fortress which commanded the old Buddhist valley of Bamiyan, famous for its monumental Buddhas.
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The head of their escort of 400 irregular horse was a Qizilbash cavalry officer named Saleh Mohammad Khan. He had been in the service of Shah Shuja until he went over to Dost Mohammad on the latter’s return from Bukhara in 1840. George Lawrence and Hugh Johnson both knew him a little from this time, while Eldred Pottinger discovered that ten of the guards were his former troopers who had assisted him during the siege of Herat in 1838. There were even two of Mackenzie’s jezailchis who had fought by his side during the cantonment siege.
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Pottinger, Lawrence, Johnson and Mackenzie all quickly realised the opportunity and opened communications to see if any of their guards would be receptive to bribery. At first they all demurred. But as the party headed north on the steep and precipitous caravan route over the wild mountains of Kulu and hence through the high-altitude faultlines of the Hazara country, and as reports began coming in of the crushing victories of Pollock and Nott, the attitude of the guards began to change.