The Dark Defile (24 page)

Captain Boyd, the chief commissariat officer, pleaded with Elphinstone not to contemplate evacuating the fort but instead to renew his efforts to reinforce it. Lady Sale agreed with Boyd, writing in her journal that if the fort—“an old crazy one undermined with rats”—were abandoned, they would lose all their provisions. With only three days’ food supplies left in the cantonments, this move could prove fatal. Elphinstone at first agreed with Boyd but then changed his mind. Boyd tried a second time, and Elphinstone again agreed with him, only to be swayed by the arguments of others that reinforcing the commissariat fort was impossible until the British took the Mohammed Sheriff Fort.

While Elphinstone asked the advice of anyone he could find—even junior officers—a further message came from Warren. He reported that the enemy were so close to breaking into the fort that some of his men were deserting their positions and fleeing over the walls, and that unless reinforced at once he would have no option but to abandon the commissariat. Elphinstone promised that soon after midnight he would send troops both to take the Mohammed Sheriff Fort and to reinforce Warren. But having issued the orders, on the advice of others he postponed the action until the following morning. According to Lieutenant Eyre, who had been among those pressing Elphinstone to act, the general had “an insuperable repugnance to nocturnal expeditions, and could tell of numberless instances where they had failed in Europe. It was an inconceivable trial to one’s patience to be doomed to listen to such stories … when every moment was of infinite value.”

The next morning, as Eyre had feared, was indeed too late. It was daylight before the troops were ready, by which time Warren and what was left of his beleaguered garrison had escaped from the commissariat fort by digging a hole through its wall and had struggled back to the cantonments, leaving the stores to looters. Very soon, according to Captain Johnson, the fort resembled “a large ant’s nest. Ere noon, thousands and thousands had assembled from far and wide, to participate in the booty of the English dogs, each man taking away with him as much as he could carry—and to this we were all eye-witnesses.” According to an officer in the Balla Hissar, Shah Shuja was watching from the rooftop of his palace “
from where with the naked eye, the melancholy and heart-rending sight was distinctly visible. Grain, wine, hermetically sealed provisions and stores of every kind were being thrown over the walls in one common mass, and seized and carried away by the Afghans below. The King was dreadfully agitated, and turning to his Vizier said, ‘The English are mad.
’ ” Shah Shuja was so despondent that he was asking the advice of even the most junior officers, permitting them to sit by him and sending them warm quilts to keep out the extreme cold because, pride and dignity for the moment pushed aside, he “had forgot for the time that he was a king,” just as Elphinstone in the cantonments seemed to have forgotten he was a general.

Also on 4 November supplies for Shah Shuja’s troops, including a large quantity of grain, were lost. In the early days of the occupation the British had sensibly planned to store the grain in specially erected warehouses in the Balla Hissar, but Shah Shuja had objected. Instead, the grain sacks had been stacked in a ramshackle fort, partly consisting of converted camel sheds, about a mile and a half from the cantonments on the outskirts of Kabul. Two days before, on the morning of 2 November, Captain Colin Mackenzie, who was living at the fort, had been about to ride to the cantonments when he was told that riots had broken out in the town. He had immediately ordered his troops to stand to arms but, as he later wrote, “
suddenly a naked man stood before me, covered with blood, from two deep sabre-cuts in the head and five musket-shots in the arm and body.
” He proved to be a messenger sent by Macnaghten to another officer, Captain Robert Trevor, living with his extensive young family in a fort nearby.

Taking this as “
rather a strong hint as to how matters were going,
” Mackenzie had immediately ordered the gates of his fort to be secured and prepared to resist an attack. He had also managed to get a message to the cantonments asking urgently for reinforcements or at least for some more ammunition. Lawrence, who was with Elphinstone when Mackenzie’s message arrived, volunteered to lead a relief force, but his proposal was, he later complained, universally condemned by the other officers present as imprudent because “they feared exposing their men to street fighting.” Mackenzie and his men had strained their eyes in vain “looking for the glittering bayonets through the trees.” However, what they could see—and it brought them no comfort—was smoke rising from the direction of Burnes’s house. They realized that the rumors of his murder that had begun reaching them must be true.

Mackenzie succeeded gamely in hanging on for the next thirty-six hours. The defenders numbered 160, including 90 Afghan mercenary musketrymen—
jezailchis
—handpicked by Mackenzie, to whom they were devoted. He in turn admired how they fought unflinchingly against their own countrymen, only occasionally breaking off “to refresh themselves with a pipe” or sometimes drowning out the sounds of battle and of women wailing over the dead and dying by twanging “a sort of rude guitar, as an accompaniment to some martial song which, mingling with the above notes of war, sounded very strangely.”

When some of Mackenzie’s other soldiers began dismantling parts of the fort’s defenses so that they could make off, he seized a double-barreled gun and threatened to shoot the first man who disobeyed the order to return to his post. However, when on 3 November the leader of his
jezailchis
came to him and said, “I think we have done our duty; if you consider it necessary that we should die here, we will die, but
I
think we have done enough,” even Mackenzie was forced to admit that if they stayed, they would all be massacred. Waiting until dark, with the
jezailchis
in the lead, a crowd of women and children in the center, and Mackenzie in the rearguard, they moved stealthily out into the darkness to try to find their way through to the cantonments. When a woman abandoned her child by the roadside in preference to leaving her pots and pans, Mackenzie drew his sword and thumped her with the flat of it until she again picked up her child.

This action may have saved his life because it meant he had his sword in his hand when moments later he was attacked by a party of Afghans crying out, “
Feringhee hust
” (Here is a European). Spurring his horse, Mackenzie wheeled around, cutting from right to left with his sword and severing the hand of the boldest assailant. After a bitter struggle during which Mackenzie received two saber slashes, he extricated himself from the mélee and galloping on found himself in the midst of another group of Afghans. It took him a moment to realize they were his own
jezailchis
, and it seemed to him his life had been preserved by a miracle. Soon afterward he reached the cantonments. Miracle or not, it had been a remarkable achievement. George Broadfoot noted admiringly that Mackenzie had fought for two days “
and then cut his way to the large force, who did not seem able to cut their way to him.
”

Captain Trevor, commander of Shah Shuja’s Life Guards, had also been besieged in his fort five hundred yards to the east of Mackenzie, together with his wife and seven children. At midday on 3 November Mackenzie had seen “the enemy enter Captain Trevor’s tower and a report was brought by two of his servants that he and his family had all been killed.” In fact the Trevors, together with a small sepoy escort, had managed to flee and eventually reached the cantonments, fording a river to get there. When an Afghan attempted to cut Mrs. Trevor with his sword, a mounted sepoy riding next to her put out his arm to protect her and lost his hand. Though weak from loss of blood, he remained by her side all the way to the cantonments.

Such instances of bravery, selflessness and resourcefulness contrasted sadly with the timid behavior of the British leadership. Their continued inaction convinced many chiefs who had been watching the insurrection and trying to divine the outcome to join it. They would have been amazed, if heartened, to learn that within just seventy-two hours of the start of the rebellion, General Elphinstone was already contemplating negotiating terms with the enemy. When on 5 November Lieutenant Eyre urged him to send a force to capture the Mohammed Sheriff Fort by blowing in the gate as a prelude to trying to regain the commissariat fort, the general wrote to Macnaghten that he had agreed, but added: “
It behoves us to look to the consequences of failure: in this case I know not how we are to subsist, or, from want of provisions to retreat. You should, therefore, consider what chance there is of making terms.
”

An initial attack on the Mohammed Sheriff Fort failed. The following day the British at last had some reason for optimism when a party succeeded in storming it and driving out the occupiers, who fled into the hills pursued by British cavalry. However, though the cantonments were now a little more secure, the commissariat fort in which some supplies still remained could not be retaken. The bare facts were that the troops had lost most of their supplies and faced starvation. Yet, greatly to their surprise, the commissariat officers were able to purchase grain from the inhabitants of the nearby village of Bemaru at reasonable prices—a sign that these people at least did not consider that the British were finished. With these extra supplies and with the troops put on half rations, the immediate danger of being starved out of the cantonments had been averted, though men, especially the Indian sepoys, were starting to fall ill because of the intense cold. Sita Ram described how as the temperature dropped some of his fellow sepoys “became helpless. Men lost the use of their fingers and toes which fell off after great suffering.” Lady Sale pitied the troops, who were being constantly harassed by the enemy but “had no cover night or day, all being on the ramparts.” The defenders of the Balla Hissar, led by Brigadier Shelton, were also suffering: Sixty sepoys had contracted pneumonia, and “
there was hardly a grain of medicine, or a single case of amputating instruments in the whole fort! And this with gun-shot wounds occurring almost hourly,
” an officer lamented.

Elphinstone was yet again in despair. On 6 November he wrote to Macnaghten that even though the immediate problem of finding enough provisions had been overcome, a further “
very serious and indeed awful
” problem loomed: lack of ammunition. He urged Macnaghten not to tarry in seeking terms. “Do not suppose from this I wish to recommend or am advocating humiliating terms, or such as would reflect disgrace on us,” he tried to justify himself, but his postscript revealed his acute anxiety: “Our case is not yet desperate … but it must be born in mind that it goes very fast.”

Elphinstone’s concern about ammunition was misplaced—there was, in fact, enough within the cantonments to last for twelve months, as even Lady Sale knew—and Macnaghten was not inclined to open negotiations with the rebel chiefs anyway. Instead the envoy was hoping that he might be able to bribe them and used Mohan Lal as his agent. Lal had, by then, taken refuge with a friend of Burnes’s, the Kizzilbashi leader Shirin Khan, and had been sending intelligence reports to the envoy in the cantonments. Macnaghten’s first targets included the Ghilzai leader Mohammed Hamza, to whom he instructed Lal to offer large sums if he could persuade the Ghilzais to withdraw from the insurrection. Macnaghten also told Lal to promise money to the Kizzilbashis and to a rival of the rebel leader Amenoolah Khan in return for exerting their influence in favor of the British.

However, a more permanent and reliable solution than bribery soon occurred to Macnaghten: political assassination. Perhaps what drove him to this was his acceptance at last of reports that Dost Mohammed’s son Akbar Khan had appeared at Bamiyan in the north and was raising troops. Macnaghten instructed Lal to offer rewards for the killing of the principal leaders of the rebellion. In a letter of 5 November to Mohan Lal, Macnaghten’s political assistant, Lieutenant John Conolly, promised “10,000 rupees for the head of each of the principal rebel chiefs.” A few days later Conolly wrote to Lal that “there is a man called Haji Ali who might be induced by a bribe to try and bring in the heads of one or two of the
mufsids
[rebels]. Endeavour to let him know that 10,000 will be given for each head—or even 15,000 rupees.”

As these plans developed, the British forces unlucky enough to have been sent to remote outposts were fighting for their lives. Two lieutenants commanding at Dardurrah, twenty miles north of Kabul, were murdered by Kohistani tribesmen while their soldiers fled. Also in Kohistan, insurgents occupied the plains between Kabul and the British post at Charikar, which was garrisoned by a regiment of Gurkhas. Eldred Pottinger, the political officer for Kohistan whose residence, an old castle, was only two miles from Charikar, had been warning Macnaghten for some time that trouble was imminent. He had requested reinforcements but received none. In desperation, Pottinger had tried to buy the support of the local chiefs but soon understood that, far from being potential allies, the chiefs were hostile. Pottinger’s assistant, Lieutenant Charles Rattray, unwise enough to agree to join a group of petty Afghan chiefs who had gathered in a field adjoining the castle to discuss what they would be required to do in return for the proffered subsidies, was shot and wounded. As his attackers fled, a horrified Pottinger, looking out from the ramparts to see what had happened, watched helpless as other horsemen galloped up and dispatched the wounded Rattray. They then attacked his residence. A force from Charikar under Captain Codrington arrived in time to beat the attackers off, but only with heavy losses.

With no signs of any help arriving from Kabul, Pottinger had no option but to abandon the castle under cover of darkness and fall back on Charikar. However, here the position of the defenders quickly became untenable. Thousands of insurgents besieged the flimsy barracks, which were still in the process of being fortified and which had very limited supplies of water. Codrington commanded the troops while Pottinger took over the artillery until he was hit in the leg by a musket ball, but it was futile. A Gurkha soldier later wrote of the “
beegahs
[acres] of gleaming swords” moving toward them. Codrington was mortally wounded and spent his final hours composing a letter to his wife, which he entrusted, together with a portrait of her, to Pottinger, lying in the next bed, for safekeeping.