Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (72 page)

Hugh Johnson was even more shocked: ‘On passing the corner of the street where I formerly lived I could not forego the desire of looking on the ruins of a house in which I had passed a period of 2 years of happiness,’ he wrote in his journal immediately after his return to Kabul. ‘Although I had expected to see the whole place unroofed I was not prepared for such a scene of desolation. Not one brick was left standing on another in either my house or that of Sir Alexander Burnes adjoining it. They were nothing but a heap of dirt covering the mouldering remains of our unfortunate people. A spot was pointed out to me in Sir Alexander’s garden as that in which his body had been interred. Peace to his ashes!’
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More heartbreaking still was the sight of the maimed and crippled sepoys who had somehow managed to survive the winter by begging in the streets of Kabul. The more conscientious officers now threw their energies into trying to reassemble what was left of their regiments: the most successful was Lieutenant John Haughton, who had escaped from Charikar with Eldred Pottinger, and who now succeeded in finding, and in many cases liberating from slavery, no fewer than 165 of his Gurkhas whom he managed to track down in the fields, streets and slave markets of Kabul. In all, some 2,000 sepoys and camp followers were found to have survived. They were collected together with two officers appointed to provide for them and give them access to medical treatment, including, in some cases, amputations.
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Parties also began to be sent out to begin digging graves for the thousands of British and Indian cadavers still lying scattered around the city, ‘calling out to us to avenge them’, as Mohan Lal put it.
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Soon the troops were pressing Pollock to make some public demonstration to punish the people of Kabul. Pollock needed little encouragement.

On his defeat, Akbar Khan had fled northwards to Khulm and was now well out of reach, but Naib Aminullah Khan Logari and his tribesmen along with the Ghazis of Parwan had decided to fortify themselves in the pleasure resort of Istalif, just thirty-five miles north of Kabul.

Istalif was always renowned as one of the most beautiful places in Afghanistan – the Emperor Babur fell in love with it in the sixteenth century and used to hold wine parties in his summer house and rose garden there; 300 years later Burnes had come here to relax and get away from the diplomatic complexities of Kabul amid the plane and walnut trees, the mountain streams full of fish and ‘the richest orchards and vineyards’. It was here that Pollock decided to concentrate his revenge.

As they marched out of Kabul through the vineyards of the Shomali Plain, Pollock’s troops were also enchanted by the ‘clear streams and green fields’ around the hilltown which had charmed so many travellers before them. But it did not stop them laying waste to the place. The town was surrounded, attacked and then systematically pillaged. When 500 enslaved sepoys were found chained in pitiful conditions in the basements, the Afghan wounded were collected in heaps and ‘the sepoys set fire to the cotton clothing of their victims’, burning them alive. The women of Istalif were then divided among the troops by throws of the dice.
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Neville Chamberlain’s cavalry were part of the rearguard. By the time he got to Istalif, the scene, he wrote, was ‘beyond description . . . Tents, baggage, things of all descriptions lying about the streets, besides the bodies of the unfortunate men who had delayed their departure too long, or were too brave to fly and leave their wives and children to our mercy without first sacrificing their own lives in their defence.’ He went on:

I suppose I need not tell you that no males above fourteen years were spared . . . Several were killed before me. Sometimes they were only wounded and were finished by a second ball . . . Some of the men (brutes except in form) wanted to wreak their revenge on the women . . . The greatest part of the merchandise of Kabul and the harems of the principal chiefs had been removed to Istalif on hearing of our advance on the capital, as it had always been deemed impregnable by the Afghans . . . The scene of plunder was dreadful. Every house filled with soldiers, both European and native, and completely gutted. Furniture, clothes, and merchandise of all sorts flung from windows into the streets . . . Some took arms, some jewels, others books . . . When the soldiers had finished the camp followers were let loose into the place, and they completed the business of spoliation . . . All this day the sappers have been employed in burning the town and the soldiers and camp followers in bringing away anything that had been left worth having.

The plight of the innocent women and children of Istalif made an especially strong impression:

Whilst we were taking the town we saw a poor chubby-faced boy sitting on the side of the road, crying fit to break his heart; the poor little fellow had been deserted or in the hurry left by his parents . . . At one place my eyes were shocked at the sight of a poor woman lying dead, and a little infant of three or four months by her side, but both its little thighs pierced and mangled by a musket ball. The child was conveyed to camp, but death soon put an end to its sufferings. Further on was another women in torture from a wound and she had been exposed to a night without any covering; she clasped a child in her arms, and her affection seemed to be only increased by the agonies she endured . . . Scattered about the streets lay the bodies of old and young, rich and poor . . . As I was returning to camp, sad and disheartened, I saw a poor emaciated old woman who had ventured to leave her hiding place thinking we had left; she was endeavouring to drag herself to a small stream to satisfy her thirst . . . I filled her vessel for her, but all she said was, ‘Curses on the Feringhees!’ I returned home disgusted with myself, the world and above all my cruel profession. In fact we are nothing but licensed assassins.
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From Istalif, the Army of Retribution descended the mountain, and pillaged and burned down the provincial centre of Charikar where Pottinger and Haughton and their Gurkhas had been besieged nearly a year before; as Sultan Mohammad Khan Durrani put it in the
Tarikh-i-Sultani
, ‘they set the entire district on fire’.
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Laden with loot, the Army of Retribution then stumbled back to Kabul.

Here they found that their colleagues had also been hard at work in their absence: Broadfoot’s sappers had placed charges in the spandrels of the great Char Chatta covered bazaar, originally built during the reign of Shah Jahan and renowned not just as one of the supreme wonders of Mughal architecture but as one of the greatest buildings in all Central Asia. The superb structure with its painted wooden vaulting and intricate tilework, said by some to be the single most beautiful building in Afghanistan, had been chosen for destruction by Pollock, for it was here that Macnaghten’s body had been displayed on a butcher’s hook for public humiliation. For Mirza ‘Ata the destruction was but another sign of British duplicity and weakness: ‘After entering Kabul, the English demolished with their cannon all the larger buildings of the city, including the lovely four-roofed market, in revenge for Macnaghten. As the proverb says “When you’re not strong enough to punish the camel, then go and beat the basket carried by the donkey!”’
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It was one of the many ironies of the war that while British interest in promoting commerce between India and Afghanistan had been one of the original motives for sending Burnes on his first trip up the Indus, the final act of the whole catastrophic saga was the vindictive demolition of the main commercial centre of the region.
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The much vaunted Indus Navigation Scheme had of course come to nothing; and now, before the British retired behind the Sutlej, the largest market in Central Asia was to be reduced to rubble.

The dynamiting of the great bazaar unleashed in Kabul a wave of rape, pillage and murder similar to that which had destroyed Istalif. ‘Soldiers and camp-followers from both [Jalalabad and Kandahar] camps are plundering the town,’ wrote Chamberlain on his return on 7 October. ‘Here and there the smoke rising in black clouds showed that the firebrand had been applied to some chief’s house . . . Part of the town also on fire.’
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There was nothing accidental about the blaze. ‘After we had been in Kabul about a fortnight,’ Lieutenant Greenwood recorded in his diary,

[we] were ordered one evening to be in readiness to march the following day into the city. The object was not stated, but we could form a pretty good idea of what we were to do, and our expectations were correct. We proceeded the next morning, and blew up all the principal chowks and bazaars, and set fire to the city in many places. The houses were of course gutted in a very short time, and bales of cloth, muslins, fur cloaks, blankets and wearing apparel of every description were turned out and destroyed . . . Some of the men found a number of English cases of hermetically sealed grouse, and other meats, on which, as may be imagined, they had a fine feast . . .

This work of destruction continued until nightfall and exhaustion set in.

Many of our men looked just like chimney-sweeps from the fire and smoke. On succeeding days other parties were sent, and the city of Kabul, with the exception of the Bala Hisar and the Qizilbash quarter, was utterly destroyed and burned to the ground . . . The houses were all built of light dry wood, and when once a fire was kindled it would have been impossible to stay the ravaging element. The conflagration lasted the whole time we were encamped in the vicinity . . . A large mosque which the Affghans had built in honour of their success over Elphinstone’s army, and called the Feringhees’ Mosque, was also blown up and destroyed.
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What Greenwood’s jaunty narrative does not make clear is that, as well as destroying the empty shops and houses of their supposed enemies, the marauding British troops also committed what today would be classified as war crimes against their Qizilbash and Hindu allies. Indeed the peaceable Kabul Hindu trading community that had for centuries survived arbitrary arrests and torture by a whole variety of Afghan rulers bent on extorting their money was wiped out in just forty-eight hours by the depredations of the British, as an official inquiry later acknowledged. ‘That much violence was committed at Kabul is unfortunately true,’ Augustus Abbott later admitted to Ellenborough.

The Afghans had all deserted the city before we arrived there, and only the Hindus and Persians remained. The Hindus, having fed and sheltered hundreds of our unfortunate soldiers after the destruction of the Kabul Force, naturally expected protection from us, and the Hindu quarter, tho’ much exposed, remained fully occupied by the inhabitants with their families and property. The Persians [i.e. the Qizilbash] assisted in recovering our captive officers and men and were considered as friends. Their quarter, the Chindawol, was however too strong to be in danger for any rabble acting in defiance of orders. Then on the 9th October, 1842, the Engineers went down to destroy the market place, and a general idea seemed to arise in camp that Kabul was to be given up to plunder. Sepoys, many European soldiers and thousands of camp followers, crowded down and had little difficulty in entering the imperfectly walled town. The Troops sent as a covering party to protect the Engineers were assembled at one or two gateways and near the market place and knew nothing of the violence that was committed in the Hindoo quarter, where houses were broken open, women violated, property taken by force and the owners shot like dogs . . .
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Henry Rawlinson, the man whose sighting of Vitkevitch on the Afghan border in 1837 had started the first movements towards war, and who up to this point had just about managed to maintain his belief in the benevolence of British rule, was especially disgusted by the tawdry spectacle of the final days of the British occupation of Kabul. ‘Numbers of people had returned to Kabul, relying on our promises of protection,’ he wrote in his journal that evening.

They had, many of them, reopened their shops. These people have now been reduced to utter ruin. Their goods have been plundered, and their houses burnt over their heads. The Hindoos in particular, whose numbers amount to some 500 families, have lost everything they possess, and they will have to beg their way to India in the rear of our columns. The Chindawol has had a narrow escape. I doubt if our parties of plunderers would not have forced an entrance had not the Gholam Khana [the elite Qizilbash household guard] stood to their arms, and showed and expressed determination to defend their property to the last.
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Nott was equally disillusioned. ‘What we are staying here for I am utterly at a loss to know,’ he wrote on 9 October, ‘unless it be to be laughed at by the Afghans, and the whole world.’
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On the 10th, the British woke to find the first snows of winter dusting the hills around Kabul. Keen to avoid being caught in the sort of blizzards that had helped obliterate Elphinstone’s army, and having now burned down almost all of the town, Pollock issued an order that morning that the British were to withdraw two days later.

That the British were about to march out of Afghanistan had been kept a strict secret, and much of the Kabul nobility had come over to the British camp assuming that the occupation was to continue as before. Mohan Lal, who in many cases had been the go-between, was especially appalled by what he saw as an outright betrayal. ‘I could hardly show my face to them at the time of our departure,’ he wrote later. ‘They all came full of tears, saying that “we deceived and punished our friends, causing them to stand against their own countrymen, then leaving them in the mouth of lions”.’ Mohan Lal realised, as everyone else did too, that Akbar would almost certainly return to Kabul as soon as the British had left and would ‘torture, imprison, extort money from and disgrace all those who had taken our side’.
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Shah Fatteh Jang knew this to be the case too; within a day of Pollock’s announcement he had abdicated the throne and announced he would be returning to India with his blind uncle, Shah Zaman. His younger brother Shahpur, Shuja’s favourite son, volunteered to stay on in his place, but few believed his rule would last more than a few weeks.