The Dark Defile (26 page)

The broken British ranks fell back under the ferocious onslaught but managed to re-form. As the British guns under the command of Lieutenant Eyre began to fire, providing them with cover, their own cavalry galloped into action, scattering the Afghans and capturing their 4-pounder gun. Eyre would have liked to seize the other gun as well but had to content himself with spiking it before obeying the order to withdraw to the cantonments because night was falling. The action had been a success but only a temporary one. Though both guns had been dealt with, the enemy almost immediately reoccupied the Bemaru Hills, shutting off the supply of grain from the villagers who lived there. Eyre wrote: “This was the last success our arms were destined to experience. Henceforward it becomes my weary task to relate a catalogue of errors, disasters and difficulties, which, following close upon each other, disgusted our officers, disheartened our soldiers, and finally sunk us all into irretrievable ruin, as though heaven itself … had planned our downfall.”

On 15 November the seriously wounded Eldred Pottinger and his three companions reached the cantonments to confirm the rumors that the garrison at Charikar had been overrun and to be welcomed, in Eyre’s words, as “men risen from the dead.” While they recovered from their wounds, the increasing cold and the fatigue of constantly manning the large perimeter of the cantonments took their toll on the garrison.

On 22 November the British tried to retake the Bemaru Hills from the enemy, whose morale had been boosted by the news that Akbar Khan, at the head of six thousand Uzbeks, was advancing on Kabul from Bamiyan in the north. However, the detachment of men sent out was too small, and their commander, Major Stephen Swayne, too indecisive. Eyre, who was again commanding the artillery, described with some bitterness how Swayne, “whose orders were to storm the village, would neither go forward nor retire; but concealing his men under the cover of some low wall, he all day long maintained an useless fire on the houses of Bemaru village, without the slightest satisfactory result.”

The British cavalry were drawn up behind Eyre’s guns, “where as there was nothing for them to do, they accordingly did nothing” except provide sitting targets for the Afghan sharpshooters, who picked off both men and horses. Eyre found his artillery also “exposed to the deliberate aim of the numerous marksmen who occupied the village and its immediate vicinity, whose bullets continually sang in our ears, often striking the gun, and grazing the ground on which we stood.” Two of his six gunners were wounded, and later a bullet shattered Eyre’s left hand and put him out of action. Shelton arrived with some reinforcements, but judging the forces available too few to dislodge the Afghans, he ordered them back to the cantonments.

That evening Macnaghten and Elphinstone convened a council of war, at which the envoy argued hard for a further attempt to drive the enemy from the Bemaru Hills. This time Shelton was to command the assault from the start and to deploy a much larger force. At two A.M. on 23 November, taking advantage of the darkness of a moonless night, the brigadier led his men silently out of the cantonments toward Bemaru once more. He was taking with him only a single field gun in contravention of standing orders stipulating that at least two were always to be deployed. He had wanted to take a smaller mountain gun as well, but this had been damaged and could not be repaired in time. Among Shelton’s officers was the brave but corpulent and gloomy Colonel Thomas Oliver, whose customary response to inquiries about his well-being was to mutter, “
Dust to dust!
”

Initially, the assault force did well. Before the first light crept over the hills, Shelton had managed to get his men and their single gun up the steep rugged slopes to hills above the village. He ordered his gunners to fire grapeshot down on their surprised enemy, who dashed for cover inside the village’s towers and houses before returning fire with their jezails. However, though several officers suggested that, with the benefit of darkness and the enemy in disarray and few in number, this was the moment to storm the village, Shelton delayed too long. Dawn was breaking by the time he sent a detachment under Major Swayne to take the village. This time the hapless Swayne unaccountably lost his way and instead of reaching the main gate—open and unguarded—led his men to a small barricaded wicket gate that he had no means of forcing. They were caught in a storm of jezail fire, and Swayne was shot in the neck. After half an hour, with full daylight approaching, Shelton recalled them.

By now all surprise had been lost. Those in the city could see and hear what was happening, and armed men—many again artisans—ran and rode from Kabul to aid the insurgents. Before long, the British were facing at least ten thousand men who occupied the village and surged up a neighboring hill separated by only a narrow gorge from the high ground occupied by Shelton. Meanwhile, on the plains below, “
swarms of their cavalry
” were deploying. As the Afghans opened a galling fire on his men, Shelton rejected the suggestion by some of his officers that the hundred engineers who had accompanied the force for this purpose should throw up a
sangar
—or stone breastwork—to provide protection and firing positions. Instead he ordered his infantry to stand and to form two squares, two hundred yards apart and with the cavalry between them but slightly to their rear. Eyre thought that forming squares—a tactic by which the British army had successfully repelled Napoleon’s cavalry—was wholly inappropriate against “the distant fire of infantry” with their long-range muskets. The British troops simply presented “a solid mass against the aim of perhaps the best marksmen in the world.”

By nine A.M. Shelton’s single artillery piece had become too hot from repeated firing to be operated. Unless the gunners could cover the touch hole—or “serve the vent,” as it was known—with their thumb as they rammed the charge home down the barrel, the backdraft they created was likely to ignite smoldering particles from previous firings and cause a premature discharge. With the metal red-hot, serving the vent was impossible. In any case, ammunition was short, and the gunners were exhausted.

The Afghans had by now advanced so close to the British troops that one of them defiantly planted a flag in the ground a mere thirty yards from the front square. Shelton offered one hundred rupees to any man who could seize it, but no one moved. Seeing the straits the British were in, the attackers, whose ranks included fearless and fanatical
ghazis
(holy warriors), rushed, yelling wildly, toward the British gun and seized it despite the fierce resistance of the artillerymen. Shelton ordered his cavalry to charge them, but the demoralized troopers would not follow their officers. Also, the infantrymen in the first square began falling back without orders on the second square, and it took all their officers’ forcefulness to rally them.

But at this critical moment, the Afghan onrush suddenly faltered as news spread through their ranks that Macnaghten’s bête noire, the Achakzai leader Abdullah Khan, had been wounded. Some began to fall back in great confusion, abandoning the British gun, though others had already made off with the horses and limber. This precipitate and unexpected retreat heartened the British, who recaptured their gun. By now it had cooled sufficiently for them to load it with fresh ammunition that had arrived from the cantonments and begin firing once more. Down in the cantonments, Macnaghten and Elphinstone had observed the sudden flight of the Afghans, and the envoy was eager to profit from it. Lady Sale overheard him ask Elphinstone to send troops to pursue the enemy, but the general dismissed the idea as “a wild scheme and not feasible.”

In the hills the British seemed paralyzed. The cavalry still refused the orders of the officers to advance, while the infantry seemed too exhausted to move forward. Noting that the British were not following up their advantage, the Afghans paused in their flight and rallied. The consequence, as Eyre described, was that “not only did the whole force of the enemy come on with renewed vigour and spirits, maintaining at the same time the fatal jezail fire which had already so grievously thinned our ranks, but fresh numbers poured out of the city, and from the surrounding villages, until the hill occupied by them scarcely afforded room for them to stand.” Before long, the front ranks of the first British square “had been literally mowed down,” and a few minutes later another rush by
ghazi
fighters completely broke the square.

Shelton still would not signal the retreat. Standing there seemingly impervious to death or serious injury, he shouted to his men to hold firm, even though, as he later described, he was struck by no less than five balls, “
none of which did much harm; one spent ball hit me on the head and nearly knocked me down; another made my arm a little stiff.
” Colonel Oliver, though, had had enough. Shouting that he was too fat to run, he began, rather than retreat, to walk doggedly toward the enemy, who duly shot him dead. When the British later recovered his body, his head had been cut off, together with the finger on which he had habitually worn a handsome diamond ring.

A panic-stricken retreat by the British infantry and cavalry followed, captured graphically by Eyre: “All order was at an end; the entreaties and commands of the officers, endeavouring to rally the men, were not even listened to, and an utter rout ensued down the hill in the direction of cantonments.” The Afghan cavalry galloped after them, slashing and firing until ordered to desist by their commander, Osman Khan, another of Dost Mohammed’s numerous nephews. Lady Sale, peering from her rooftop, was surprised to see him circling around clusters of British soldiers, waving his sword above his head but for some reason not attempting to kill them. As the exhausted troops ran back toward the cantonments, Elphinstone tottered outside the gates to attempt to rally them, but to no avail. Lady Sale overheard him complain later to Macnaghten, “Why Lord, Sir, when I said to them ‘Eyes right,’ they all looked the other way.”

The battle for Bemaru had been an unqualified disaster, exposing British ineptitude and low morale to the Afghans and to the British themselves. Three hundred British troops had been killed or left lying in the field, to be killed and mutilated by the Afghans. Those still living felt themselves, in Captain Lawrence’s words, to be “doomed men.” To Eyre, 23 November was the day that finally “decided the fate of the Kabul force” when “even such of the officers as had hitherto indulged the hope of a favourable turn in our affairs began at last reluctantly to entertain gloomy forebodings as to our future fate.”

That fate rested in the hands of three men who could not agree and none of whom was “the able pilot” Eyre thought essential to steer them from disaster. Elphinstone wished to negotiate as he had been advocating almost from the start of the rising. Macnaghten, however, was determined to wait a little longer before taking a humiliating step that would, in his eyes, be mere capitulation. Shelton, who had amply demonstrated what Eyre called his “dauntless” personal bravery at Bemaru, still wanted to march immediately from Kabul to Jalalabad, an idea from which, according to Captain Lawrence, Macnaghten recoiled as both disastrous and dishonorable and “to be contemplated solely in the very last extremity.” It would mean abandoning vast amounts of British property and Britain’s ally Shah Shuja, “to support whom was the main object of our original entrance into Afghanistan.” Also, the troops would suffer immensely from the bitter cold, while the thousands of camp followers would “inevitably be destroyed.”

Shah Shuja, watching from the Balla Hissar the rapidly declining fortunes of the allies on whom his life and fortunes depended, and alarmed by evidence that the insurgents were bribing some of his own men to desert their posts, added his opinion to the debate. Overcoming his earlier objections, he sensibly suggested that the British garrison should withdraw from the cantonments and join him in the Balla Hissar. As Henry Havelock had observed in happier times, the citadel was “the key to Kabul. The troops who hold it ought not to suffer themselves to be dislodged but by a siege; and they must awe its populace with their mortars and howitzers; for, in a land where every male has in his house, or about his person, a musket …, a sword and shield, a dagger … a contest in crooked lanes of flat-roofed houses with a population estimated at sixty thousand souls, would be unequal, excepting for very numerous forces indeed; in any case injudicious.”

Elphinstone objected that the troops would never survive the two-and-a-half-mile contested march to the fortress, despite Shelton and his much smaller contingent having successfully made it in reverse two weeks before. Shelton himself argued that such a move would be pointless since they should quickly depart to India. Macnaghten, though, was torn. According to Lawrence, he thought “it might be the wisest ultimate course” but fretted that it “might also be to some extent disastrous.” Again it would mean abandoning large amounts of British and East India Company property—an issue that evidently loomed large in Macnaghten’s bureaucratic mind. He also feared the British would have to abandon their heavy artillery since it would be nearly impossible to drag it under fire to the citadel. Furthermore, in the Balla Hissar there would not be sufficient food or firewood to sustain so many. Macnaghten therefore decided to hang on in the cantonments in the hope that “
something may turn up in our favour
” and argued for remaining there a further eight to ten days.

Macnaghten still hoped Sale might answer his call. Even after learning that the brigadier had marched from Gandamack for Jalalabad, he had sent a message to Captain George Macgregor, Sale’s political adviser, asking again for help. He complained that both he and Elphinstone had repeatedly written asking for the return of Sale’s brigade, to no avail: “
We learn to our dismay, that you have proceeded to Jalalabad. Our situation is a desperate one if you do not immediately return to our relief, and I beg you will do so without a moment’s delay.
” Though he could not know it, this letter would cross with one from Macgregor finally dashing any hopes that Sale’s men would return. The bearers of these messages were again the native messengers, the
cossids
, traveling on horseback or on foot. The risk of being intercepted was great, and their methods for concealing messages were ingenious. They bound the notes into their hair or hid them in lumps of wax they could swallow if captured. Captain Mackenzie wrote of “many a poor wretch” found lying by the roadside “with his throat cut from ear to ear and his body otherwise mutilated.”