The Dark Defile (37 page)

By this time Akbar Khan, still fearing the other chiefs would seize his valuable hostages, had moved them to a fort only three miles from Kabul. The obvious route was through the Khoord Kabul Pass, but finding it “absolutely impassable from the stench of dead bodies,” as Eyre wrote, the escort brought the hostages another way. On their arrival the hostages were shown some cattle sheds and told these were the only accommodation available. A “greatly incensed” Lady Sale objected, and Akbar Khan ordered the fort’s owner to house the captives in his own family’s quarters and took some of the officers to his own house in Kabul. The prisoners were allowed to walk in the fort’s gardens, and the men bathed in a stream running through it. Soon new arrivals swelled their numbers, including the British soldiers, women and children left behind at Budeeabad, who all looked “
miserably thin and weak.
”

Now encamped close to Kabul, Akbar Khan resumed his attacks on Futteh Jung, bombarding the Balla Hissar and detonating a mine beneath one of its great towers. During the truce that followed, in an increasingly farcical situation, the leaders of the various factions occupied different towers within the citadel: Futteh Jung and Amenoolah Khan for the Sadozais, Akbar Khan and Nawab Zaman Khan representing the rival Barakzai factions, Mohammed Shah Khan, Akbar Khan’s father-in-law, for the Ghilzais and Shirin Khan for the Kizzilbashis. By late June, having coaxed the volatile Amenoolah Khan to support him once more and through judicious bribery, Akbar Khan had strengthened his position. He used the opportunity to gain control of as many of the British prisoners in Kabul as he could. They included Captain John Conolly and five other British hostages, whom, realizing their value as bargaining chips, he purchased from Kabul’s chief mullah, as well as the sick and wounded left behind when Elphinstone’s column had begun its retreat in January.

By then Ellenborough was well aware that Nott and Pollock were finding excuses not to withdraw from Afghanistan. In June he wrote to Prime Minister Peel complaining, “
We shall be unable now to bring back the two armies until the cool season
” and railing about the malign influence of political officers who, “poisoned by vain ambition,” needed to learn that they were not free agents and that “there is a government.” He also alleged that Nott and Pollock had “not a grain of military talent” and that had the latter not fallen into the hands of the politicals, “he would otherwise have been before now on the left bank of the Indus, and safe.”

Yet Ellenborough should not have been surprised. Nott’s stubbornness was legendary, while Sir Jasper Nicolls, Ellenborough’s commander in chief, had warned him weeks before that Pollock was his own man and would “
stand alone
.”

However, as the weeks passed, Ellenborough began to change his mind. If his generals had withdrawn their troops immediately after Sale’s defeat of Akbar Khan as he had wanted, he could successfully have claimed that the Afghans had been punished. However, to pull out of Afghanistan now, after months of doing nothing, would smack of failure, especially when political and public opinion in India and at home was clamoring for action to rescue the hostages and inflict revenge. On 4 July Ellenborough sent Nott and Pollock revised orders. Though his instructions to withdraw to India still stood, Nott could retreat via Kabul if he wished and—if he did—Pollock could advance to the capital in a joint operation with him. He had not consulted his commander in chief, Sir Jasper Nicolls, who complained in his diary, “
[Ellenborough’s] want of decent attention to my position is inexcusable.
”

Ellenborough explained his equivocatory reasoning in a letter to the Duke of Wellington, who had been foremost among those urging him to restore Britain’s reputation in the East: “
The case is one in which, at this distance, I could not direct an advance, but, at the same time, I should hardly be justified in continuing to prohibit it.
” To Sir Robert Peel he wrote an unusually long seven-page letter justifying his action and arguing that if Nott and Pollock succeeded they could reclaim the honor of the British army “
in triumph upon the scene of its late disaster.
”

Nott, as Ellenborough knew he would, chose to advance on Kabul. Fearing that Nott might already have departed for India instead, Pollock sent letter after letter to Kandahar, sometimes using rice water as “invisible ink.” Then in mid-August he received Nott’s confirmation that he was indeed going to Kabul.

The governor-general still continued to limit his generals’ objectives, instructing Pollock, “The object of the combined march of your army and Major General Nott’s upon Kabul will be to exhibit our strength where we suffered defeat, to inflict just, but not vindictive retribution upon the Afghans, and to recover the guns and colours as well as the prisoners lost by our army.” That done, come what may, Nott and Pollock were “to obey the positive orders of your government to withdraw your army from Afghanistan.” Also they were not to involve themselves in internal politics. Any British commitments or obligations had died with Shah Shuja, and they had to concur with “whatever government or person the Afghans may prefer.”

When Akbar Khan discovered that the British intended to advance, not withdraw, he flew into a rage, threatening to sell all the captives to the slave markets in Turkestan. However, on calmer reflection he realized his best course was to maintain a dialogue with Pollock. Mackenzie was very ill with typhus, so Akbar Khan sent Lawrence and Troup as his new envoys to Jalalabad.

Preoccupied with planning for the advance, Pollock saw no point in further negotiations and gave Lawrence and Troup a noncommittal reply. He was well aware from messages sent by the British agent Mohan Lal of the chaotic political situation in Kabul. Lal had also been intriguing among the chiefs, trying to detach them from Akbar Khan and seeking promises that the hostages would be neither killed nor sold. Realizing Lal was a spy and that he had access to British funds, on 22 June Akbar Khan had seized him and had him tortured in the Balla Hissar. However, Lal was still managing to communicate with Pollock, describing merciless beatings and how Akbar Khan had extracted thousands of rupees from him and was threatening to blind him unless he provided more. Pollock warned Akbar Khan that the British would hold him accountable for Lal’s well-being, and the torture ceased, though Lal remained a prisoner. During his incarceration Lal was comforted by John Conolly, shortly to die of a heart attack not long after hearing that his brother Arthur, still a captive of the psychotic emir of Bokhara, had been publicly beheaded, together with his fellow prisoner Colonel Charles Stoddart. The news that the Afghans had destroyed a British army had convinced the emir that the British were weak and hence keeping the two officers alive any longer was pointless.

On 7 August Nott finally left Kandahar for Kabul, leading what he proudly described as “a compact and well-tried force” of six thousand, having dispatched the remainder of his army to Quetta. Ahead of him lay a difficult three hundred miles. On 20 August Pollock and Sale marched out of Jalalabad with eight thousand men to begin their shorter journey of some ninety miles. Pollock had ordered baggage be kept to a minimum, eliminating the sideboards, dressing tables and trunks of dress uniforms that had so encumbered the Army of the Indus. The troops were, in Private Teer’s words, “
eager to march anywhere
” to escape Jalalabad’s heat and stench and its clouds of flies. According to the Reverend Gleig, they came “in myriads … The very air became black with them; and they entered into men’s food, and crawled over their persons, polluting whatever they touched. It was a season of intense suffering … and the sufferers from a burning heat sought shelter against it by digging holes in the ground and sleeping in them at the hazard of being buried alive, as in one instance, at least, actually befell.”

Akbar Khan’s reaction to the British advance was to order all his hostages taken north toward Bamiyan with an escort commanded by a deserter from Shah Shuja’s infantry, Saleh Mohammed. The group had recently been joined by five officers given as hostages before the retreat from Kabul and also the officers taken prisoner at Ghazni, whose commanding officer, Colonel Palmer, had been badly tortured because the Afghans had suspected him of having buried treasure in the citadel. The youngest hostage to set out into the mountainous northern wilds was Lady Sale’s granddaughter, born to Alexandrina Sturt just a month earlier. On previous journeys the women had sometimes been insulted by Afghans affronted by their bare faces and heads. This time they wore Afghan dress, “the outer garment of which consists of a large and white sheet completely shrouding the body, to which is attached the
bourkha
, or veil, of white muslin, with only a small open space of network opposite the eyes to peep through,” as Eyre described.

On 30 August Nott saw his first serious fighting when an army of twelve thousand men, led by the governor of Ghazni, advanced to confront him, but his men routed the Afghans. Ghazni itself fell six days later without a fight. Nott ordered his engineers to destroy the citadel. The flames were still rising as his army marched onward, carrying with them, as explicitly commanded by Ellenborough, the sandalwood gates of the ancient tomb of Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni, supposedly looted from the Indian temple at Somnath centuries earlier. He hoped to gain great kudos by returning them to India. An irritated officer complained that the gates were “
an endless trouble to us, as they were very large and heavy, and all our bullocks weak, very sulky and would not work. Consequently the men had in many cases to pull them along.
”

By this time Pollock had reached Gandamack to find it “
literally
covered with skeletons, most of them bleached by exposure to the rain and sun, but many having hair of a colour which enabled us to recognise the remains of our own countrymen.” On 1 September Futteh Jung rode into the British encampment to ask for sanctuary. Having been robbed of his gold, silver and jewels and virtually imprisoned in the Balla Hissar by Akbar Khan, he had managed to escape and gone in search of Pollock’s advancing army. Though Ellenborough had warned Pollock not to take sides, he treated the new arrival with deference, even ordering a salute to be fired in his honor.

By 12 September
Pollock was encamped near the entrance to the narrow Tezeen Pass. As an officer recalled, that night Afghan sharpshooters fired on the British from the heights above, “their bullets … flying like hail among our tents,” while their war chant of
Huk! Huk! Huk!
resounded all night long. The next day the British had advanced barely two miles into the pass “when suddenly a long sheet of flame issued from the heights on each side, and a thousand balls came whizzing and whistling about our heads. The hills were lined with the enemy in great force.”

This “great force” was perhaps the largest yet to confront the British in Afghanistan: sixteen thousand men, commanded by Akbar Khan himself, in a last desperate bid to hold back the avenging British. Once again, Pollock employed the tactic he had used in forcing the Khyber of denying his attackers the high ground by sending troops to storm the heights. “Up we went, helter, skelter … and in a short time we were up and at them,” wrote an officer. The Afghans roared insults of “dogs, kafirs and the like” at the onrushing British, but at the sight of their bayonets they fled, scrambling yet higher to get away: “The Afghans would stand like statues against firing but the sight of the bristling line of cold steel they could not endure!” Then at a signal from the valley floor, the assault force flung themselves to the ground as Pollock’s howitzers hurled shrapnel shells onto the ridges above them. Looking to the crest, an officer saw an Afghan carrying “a large blood-red standard in a very exposed position … brandishing his tulwar in his right hand and daring the soldiers to come on.” The British rushed forward again, driving the enemy from ridge to ridge. Broadfoot and his Gurkhas were among the pursuers, so that, according to an officer, “far in the distance were to be seen small parties of these diminutive warriors, driving strong bodies of Afghans before them.”

The troops seized Akbar Khan’s camp and burned his tent, where, as so often related in military tales, a feast had apparently already been laid out for him to celebrate his anticipated victory. Akbar Khan himself fled northward, leaving Pollock to pass unopposed through the Khoord Kabul defile, where an officer described an “
awful scene of slaughter
… the remains of the poor victims of Elphinstone’s imbecility and of Afghan treachery lay in frightful numbers, some on their backs at full length, having evidently met the happiest fate, instantaneous death; others with their limbs contracted … as if they had died in agony … groups of skeletons and bodies were huddled together, near what had evidently been a fire, by which they had endeavoured to postpone the awful fate which overtook them, and hundreds of others lying around—freezing to death! The greatest portion … were mere skeletons, but there were many to which the flesh still clung and whose features were recognisable.”

On 15 September Pollock’s army camped on the Kabul racecourse laid out by the British when they had happily anticipated time for leisure pursuits. Mohan Lal, who had escaped from his prison a week earlier, arrived to tell Pollock what he knew of the hostages’ whereabouts. Pollock dispatched six hundred Kizzilbashi soldiers provided by Lal’s friend and protector Shirin Khan, under his military secretary Richmond Shakespear, to locate them. Unknown to Pollock or Lal, the prisoners, who had reached Bamiyan, in the territory of the Hazaras, on 2 September, were already free, though still in considerable danger.
*

Their liberty was the result of their jailer’s greed. Captain Johnson had been trying to convince Saleh Mohammed that the British would reward him well if he released the prisoners. Guessing it would probably be expedient to side with the British once more, Saleh Mohammed had recently taken to dressing in a European officer’s blue frock coat and was showing himself receptive. However, he was also still receiving orders from Akbar Khan. On 11 September he confided in Pottinger he had received two letters. The first, from Akbar Khan, ordered him to take the hostages north into the Hindu Kush and sell them to the Uzbeks. The second, from Mohan Lal, offered him a pension for life if he released his prisoners. Realizing that this was their chance for freedom, Pottinger summoned the other officers, and the men borrowed Lady Sale’s room for a private conference during which they succeeded in convincing Saleh Mohammed that Lal’s letter was genuine. Five officers signed a bond guaranteeing him one thousand rupees a month and twenty thousand rupees subject to the hostages’ safe arrival at Kabul—money that he would never receive—and he gave them back their freedom for the first time in more than eight months.