The Dark Defile (15 page)

As Dennie’s men pushed on, the main storming party under Brigadier Sale advanced across the bridge. Holdsworth described how it felt to rush toward the still-smoking breach and, as he did so, to try to make himself as small a target as possible: “
The fire on both sides was at its height. The noise was fearful, and the whole scene the grandest and, at the same time, the most awful I ever witnessed … As we got nearer the gate it grew worse and the enemy, from their loopholes began to pepper us
.” They “threw out blue lights in several places which looked beautiful, and the flames of their and our artillery, together with smaller flashes from the matchlock men added to the roar of their big guns … the whizzing of their cannon-balls and ours … the singing of the bullets.” Then, as so often, the fog of war descended. As Brigadier Sale’s men pushed in over the smoking beams and tumbled stones of the great gate, Captain Alexander Peat of the initial explosives party, “
stunned and bewildered by concussion
,” called out, “Don’t go on, it’s a failure!” Sale at once ordered his bugler to sound the retreat. As his men began falling back, another officer told Sale that Peat was wrong and Dennie had got inside the citadel, at which the brigadier ordered the bugler to signal the advance once more, causing his column to turn and again rush across the bridge.

A group of Afghan defenders had in the meantime gathered in the ruins of the gateway and tried valiantly to hold off Sale’s men with their
tulwars.
One young lieutenant recalled how in the vicious hand-to-hand fighting some of the attackers were “
literally
cut to pieces.” Sale himself, although in his late fifties, was in the thick of the fighting. He was wounded twice and escaped death at the hands of his Afghan attacker, who had knocked him to the ground and pinioned him, only by wrenching his sword arm free and cleaving the Afghan’s skull to his eyebrows. However, the sheer force and unexpectedness of the attack had broken the defenders’ resistance. Some trying to flee through the ruins of the gateway tripped over the still-blazing timbers and were burned alive; others were bayoneted by the attackers or trampled beneath the hoofs of terrified Afghan cavalry horses, which the defenders had brought into the city and which were now running loose in the streets. The British took the citadel itself without a fight and captured Hyder Ali Khan. His women, who were in one officer’s view neither “
pretty or interesting,
” were taken into safe custody as the British troops began to loot, finding, as well as fine quilts and ladies’ “inexpressibles,” large quantities of gunpowder, weapons, grain and other food. The whole operation had taken less than two hours with 600 of the enemy killed and 1,600 captured, against British casualties of 182 killed or wounded.

The Army of the Indus had been fortunate. Anticipating that his enemies were most likely to take the shorter route through the Khyber Pass, Dost Mohammed had stationed his best troops under his son Akbar Khan to watch that pass. Even so, as Keane later discovered, Dost Mohammed’s son Mohammed Afzal Khan, at the head of five thousand Ghilzai horsemen, had been only six miles from Ghazni when he had heard the sounds of the attack. Instead of advancing, he had ordered his men to ride as hard as they could for Kabul, leaving many baggage elephants and much of his equipment behind him. Keane lost no time in dashing off a report to Lord Auckland describing the capture of Ghazni: It was “
one of the most brilliant acts it has ever been my lot to witness, during my service of 45 years in the four quarters of the globe
.”

British officers meanwhile went on sightseeing expeditions around Ghazni, admiring the exquisite brick workmanship of two ancient towers, one of which was at least 180 feet high, and visiting the eleventh-century polished white marble tomb of Sultan Mahmud, who had invaded India on ten separate occasions. The tomb lay within a walled garden planted with mulberries. As well as a giant tiger skin and strings of ostrich eggs interwoven with peacock’s feathers, officers inspected the tomb’s massive gates, which were eight feet wide and fourteen feet high. Reputedly plundered by Sultan Mahmud from the Hindu temple of Somnath in Gujarat, these were the gates Ranjit Singh had once demanded as the price for assisting Shah Shuja. The gates were said to be cedar or sandalwood, but one officer, sniffing them hopefully, found “
the smell is entirely gone.
”

News of the fall of the supposedly impregnable Ghazni made a profound impression within Afghanistan. Burnes’s old friend Nawab Jubbar Khan arrived from Kabul bearing Dost Mohammed’s offer to surrender if he were given the post of vizier, held by his murdered brother Futteh Khan and which he regarded as the hereditary right of the Barakzais. Scenting complete victory, Macnaghten rejected Dost Mohammed’s suggestion, offering him instead honorable exile in British India. He also dismissed any idea of releasing the emir’s son, Hyder Ali Khan. For once Nawab Jubbar Khan’s usual good nature deserted him. Dost Mohammed, he said, would rather throw himself on the point of a British bayonet than accept exile. As a parting shot, he demanded of Shah Shuja, with whom he was granted an audience, “
If you are to be king, of what use is the British army here? If the English are to rule over the country, of what use are you here?
”

On 30 July 1839, leaving twelve hundred men behind to garrison Ghazni, the Army of the Indus set out on the final ninety-mile march northeastward to Kabul, climbing in blustering winds and with hands and feet aching with cold up to a rugged defile known as Sheer Dundau (Lion’s Teeth), nine thousand feet above sea level, before descending toward their goal of Kabul, itself at six thousand feet. As the column passed the fortlike villages of mud brick, people crowded the roadsides to watch. Crossing the foaming Kabul River, the army advanced through cultivated valleys with groves of willows, poplars and cypresses. Then came reports that Dost Mohammed had fled Kabul.

In fact, informed by Nawab Jubbar Khan that his proposed peace terms had been rejected, Dost Mohammed had advanced at the head of thirteen thousand troops, including tribal chieftains and mercenaries and accompanied by thirty guns, to the narrow valley of Arghundee. Here he had ridden through the ranks, brandishing a copy of the Koran and exhorting his men to rid the country of the infidel invaders and their puppet king, against whom his clerics had issued a fatwa. However, with the Army of the Indus so close, his chiefs had refused to fight, and the mercenaries he had recruited had slipped away from the camp. That same night, 2 August, accompanied by his son Akbar Khan, whom he had recalled from keeping watch on the Khyber Pass, other family members and a few hundred still-loyal supporters, he rode north for the Hindu Kush, leaving his camp to be looted while those who had once vowed loyalty to him hurried away to declare allegiance to Shah Shuja.

Keane dispatched a combined contingent of British cavalry and Shah Shuja’s levies under Captain James Outram to pursue Dost Mohammed and another force to secure his abandoned guns. Meanwhile, on 6 August the Army of the Indus camped within three miles of Kabul. The soldiers gorged on “
peaches, apples, plums, pears and grapes … all equal to any hot-house fruit in England
,” and Mohan Lal gazed upon “emerald-like gardens … intersected and washed as they are by brooks of crystal-like water,” which had captivated him on his earlier visits to Kabul.

Hearing of the safe arrival of the Army of the Indus at Kabul, Sir Jasper Nicolls, the new commander in chief in India, wrote in his journal, “
We may fairly say that the game is over.
”

Chapter Seven

Be silent, pocket your pay, do nothing but what you are ordered, and you will give high satisfaction. They will sacrifice you and me, or anyone, without caring a straw … I can go a good way, but my conscience has not so much stretch as to approve of this dynasty. But, mum—let that be between ourselves.

—ALEXANDER BURNES, 1839

On the
afternoon of 7 August 1839, mounted on a white charger with saddle and bridle embellished with gold and at the head of his levies and the Army of the Indus, Shah Shuja approached the city he had not seen for thirty years. He was wearing a jeweled coronet. According to Henry Havelock, yet more jewels sparkled on his arms and chest, while around his waist was “a broad and cumbrous girdle of gold in which glittered rubies and emeralds not a few.” Riding close to the king were Keane, Macnaghten and Burnes, the latter pair in the full diplomatic dress of “a cocked hat fringed with ostrich feathers, a blue frock coat with raised buttons, richly embroidered on the collar and cuffs, epaulettes not yielding in splendour to those of a field-marshal, and trousers edged with very broad gold lace.” Mohan Lal, also on horseback, was wearing “a new upper garment of very gay colours” and “a turban of very admirable fold and majestic dimensions.”

As the procession entered Kabul’s narrow streets, Havelock thought that “never was any town seen more closely thronged by men; of women, glimpses only could be caught as they peeped furtively from the tops of houses. The extent of the population and the eagerness of all ranks to behold the spectacle, was as apparent in the few open spaces of the city as in the narrow lanes, the passages of the covered bazaars, and on the bridge of the clear and rapid Kabul River. An ocean of heads was spread in every direction. They were for the most part cleanly and becomingly turbaned. The features of the spectators were generally comely, and all lighted up with the emotion of curiosity.”

However, like many of the British, he was struck by the subdued mood. There was none of the noisy shouting that would have come from a British crowd. He decided it was not only because the Afghans were, like other Muslims, “grave, sedate, and slow in their demeanour” but because “the prevailing feeling was not one of much affection for Shah Shuja, who will probably as a ruler be less popular than the ex-Emir.” The army surgeon Kennedy also found the king’s reception unenthusiastic: “I can honestly say that the Kabulis did not fling him either a crust or a nosegay, or shouted a single welcome that reached my hearing: a sullen surly submission to what could not be helped, and an eager determination to make the most that could be made of existing circumstances, and turn them to account, appeared to be the general feeling.”

The procession ascended toward the Balla Hissar, built on a commanding promontory overlooking the eastern approaches to the city. Henry Havelock described it as both “the royal palace and fortress” of Kabul. The complex was about half a mile long and a quarter of a mile wide; its lower portion housed barracks and stables, while on the highest point sat the citadel itself, overlooking the royal palace amid its spacious gardens. As the cavalcade advanced into the Balla Hissar, Kennedy described how “a tremendous discharge of camel artillery—jinjals [small cannon] fixed on swivels and mounted on camels—saluted our entrance into the citadel, and as they were fired at random, in the very midst of the procession, the helter-skelter and confusion of the horses of the staff officers and the native horsemen was anything but agreeable: most happily no accident occurred.”

Arriving outside his former palace, Shah Shuja could not contain his excitement. Havelock described him rushing up the great staircase and running “with childish eagerness from one small chamber to another,” but weeping at what he took as signs of neglect and damage during the Barakzais’ tenure there, especially the removal of the little pieces of mirror-glass once set into the walls to reflect the flickering candlelight and the sparkle of gems. In fact, the palace was not in good condition, and in forthcoming days Shah Shuja would narrowly escape being crushed to death when the rafters of his audience chamber collapsed shortly after he had left to go to pray. Several weeks later, on 3 September, Shah Shuja was reunited with his son Timur, who arrived with Claude Wade and their army, having marched through the Khyber Pass from Peshawar. This meant that the shorter communication route to India through the Khyber Pass, rather than around through the Bolan Pass, was now open.

The Army of the Indus settled in an encampment connected to the city by a narrow road “
hemmed
in by huge masses of rock on the left hand and dense groves of mulberry-trees on the right bordering the Kabul River.” This road soon thronged with “men from the city hawking about camp, grapes, apples, melons, silks, furs and calling out most vociferously as if determined to compel us to buy,” an officer noted. Many soldiers were curious to venture into the city of which they had heard so much, but “
owing
to instances of irregularities committed by Europeans entering Kabul,” officers were instructed to issue passes only to soldiers “on whose sobriety and steadiness dependence can be placed.” One of the problems was the cheap wine and fiery brandy that were readily available despite the reformed Dost Mohammed’s prohibition of alcohol. The moralistic Baptist and teetotaller Havelock feared the citizens of Kabul would soon learn “the difference between Britons drunk and Britons sober.”

The army surgeon James Atkinson paid his first visit to the city on 10 August, marveling at the magnificent fruit piled up in shops “little better than sheds.” He watched cooks preparing kebabs, confectioners making sweetmeats, gun makers, swordsmiths and farriers making guns,
tulwars
and horseshoes, while the carpet and silk dealers peddled rugs, furs, lace and chintz. It seemed to him that “nothing could exceed the industry that appeared everywhere around us; everybody employed and intent on his calling.” Crossing a bridge over the Kabul River that ran through the city, he saw that, though some thirty yards wide, at this time of year it was only a foot deep. Kabul’s Grand Bazaar, built in the early seventeenth century of burned brick richly painted with images of fruit and trees, was “a gem amidst the edifices of mud” that surrounded it. In fact, the city’s great markets formed the main thoroughfares linking the residential areas with one another.

Kabul reminded Atkinson of Paris because people “[live] a good deal out of doors, and eat their meals constantly at the benches, where the cooks, a numerous class, fry their kebabs, and are as expert and active as a French artist in the subterraneous kitchen of a café. Then there are the ice-shops and
falood
shops, where you see the rugged Afghan regaling on summer dainties, crunching a lump of ice, with the usual quantity of cherries, grapes, or other fruit, and a goodly portion of his brown cake of bread, everything of the kind being what is called dog-cheap.”