Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (13 page)

It is probable that Akhbar himself shot Macnaghten in the confusion, and that the maddened Ghazis then cut him to pieces with their knives. Later that day the imprisoned officers saw a dismembered hand bobbing up and down outside the bars of their window, and learnt that it was Macnaghten’s. ‘Look well,’ the Ghazis screamed at them, ‘yours will soon be the same!’ Though they did not know it, the Envoy’s head, deprived at last of top hat and spectacles, was already being paraded through the streets of the capital, while the rest of his corpse was suspended from a meat-hook in the great bazaar.

Even now the Afghans expected reprisals, but the British had lost all fight. All they wanted was escape. Far from unleashing his troops furiously upon the city, General Elphinstone, now further debilitated by a wound in the buttock, merely re-opened negotiations, as though Her Majesty’s Envoy and Plenipotentiary had never been murdered at all. This time there was no subterfuge. The Afghans dictated the terms, the British accepted them. The Army was to leave immediately, handing over hostages for the return of the Dost, together with all its treasure and almost all its guns. The Afghans in return promised to provide ‘an escort of trustworthy persons’ to see the British Army, 26 years after Waterloo, safely through the passes to the Indian frontier. Nobody believed them. It was Christmas Day, but the signing of the agreement gave no comfort to the British, who were now terrified, bitterly cold and very hungry—the only food the private soldiers got that day was a little flour with melted ghee. As the shivering army packed up its possessions, rumours of treachery haunted the camp. The eighteen chiefs who had signed the agreement, it was said, had secretly sworn to destroy the whole force, and all its followers. Lady Sale, diligently writing up her diary on Boxing Day, said she had been told that the chiefs meant to capture all the women and kill every man except one: and opening by chance a copy of Campbell’s poems, she found the stanza:

On January 6, 1842, the army began its retreat, the most terrible in the history of British arms, and the completion of a tragedy whose ‘awful completeness’, as the historian Sir John Kaye was to write, was unexampled in the history of the world. To reach the safety of the British garrison at Jalalabad, the force had to travel through ninety miles of desolate mountain country, deep in snow, held in fief by the predatory Ghilzais, and now additionally infested with Ghazis too. The cold was terrible, and the march began in confusion. In all some 16,500 souls struggled out of the cantonment: about 700 Europeans, 3,800 Indian soldiers, the rest camp-followers and their families. More than a thousand horses went with them, together with bullocks to pull the carts, camels, mules and ponies. Most of the European women and children travelled in camel-panniers: the camp-followers straggled along behind as best they could, frightened, bewildered, littered with babies, and cooking-pots, and all the voluminous half-fastened baskets, boxes and bundles that poor Indians carried on the march.

The moment the last soldiers of the rearguard left the cantonment gates, the mob poured in to plunder and destroy: and hovering always on the fringe of the column, sometimes sending peremptory messages to the general, sometimes coming close, sometimes disappearing, the chiefs of the Afghans predatorily rode. The retreat was a misery from the first step. As the troops marched in tolerable order along the snow-covered track across the plain, the camp followers in their thousands milled all about the column, turning the march into a muddled rout, pushing their way frantically towards the front, shouting and jostling, separating platoon from platoon, soldiers from their officers. Sometimes troops of Ghazi horsemen dashed among them, slashing with their sabres and galloping off with loot: the rearguard lost fifty men almost before it had left the lines.

So it was obvious from the start that the Afghan assurances meant
nothing. If the escort of chiefs was capable of keeping off the Ghazis and Ghalzais, it had no intention of doing so: this would be cat and mouse to the end. Within an hour or two many of the soldiers were frost-bitten, while hundreds of the Indian bearers threw down their loads in despair and ran away into the wilderness. Before it had left the valley the army was virtually without food, fuel, shelter or ammunition, and behind it left a trail of dead and dying people, like a track of litter after a grisly holiday—some wide-eyed and insensible, some pleading to be put out of their misery, some stabbed about with knives, for the fun of it, by the Afghan children who swarmed through the mêlée. When the British camped for the first night, only six miles from the city, they looked back to see the night sky red and flickering with the flames of the burning cantonment: and when the rearguard arrived in the small hours, exhausted from its running day-long battle, and its soldiers shouted in the darkness, ‘Where’s the 54th? Where’s the 6th?’, they found the camp in a state of nightmare chaos, men and women dying all around from hunger and exposure, and were told everywhere, as they looked for their units, that ‘no one knew anything about it’.

The retreat lasted just a week. During the first three days the way led through a series of precipitous passes, most of them 5,000 feet high and all deep in snow, and day by day the struggling mass of the British and their dependents grew smaller and weaker. They were never left at peace. Now and then they saw their escort chiefs, cloaked upon their horses upon distant knolls, or awaiting their arrival at the head of a pass, and sometimes Akhbar himself appeared with a demand for hostages, a gloating recrimination, or ever less convincing assurances of goodwill. Every day the harassment grew more brazen, until every gully seemed to hide an ambush of horsemen, and there were marksmen on every ridge.

Terrible scenes were enacted in the snows. We see Lieutenant Melville of the 54th Native Infantry, speared and stabbed in back and head, crawling after the column on his hands and knees. We see Dr Cardew of the medical service, fearfully wounded, tied to the last
gun and left beside the road to die, while his soldiers mumble their goodbyes to him. We see Mrs Boyd and her son Hugh, aged four, tumbled out of their panniers as the camel that carries them is hit by a bullet and crumples slowly, groaning, to its knees in the snow. In the middle of the carnage, the hunger, the cold, the terror, we see an Indian deserter from the Mission guard, blindfold and ragged, shot on the spot by a firing squad.

On the fourth day Akhbar sent a message to Elphinstone suggesting that the English women should be handed over to his care. Eleven women and their children, including Lady Sale and Lady Macnaghten, were handed over to the care of the Afghans, together oddly enough with several of their husbands: they were taken away to a little fort in the hills, and fed that night on mutton and rice. By then the fighting strength of the army was down to 300 British infantry, about 480 sepoys, and 170 cavalrymen, most of them frostbitten, many snow-blind, many more without weapons or ammunition. They had passed through the first of the great passes, and there were seventy miles to go.

By the end of the fifth day the last of the sepoys were dead or missing, and no baggage was left at all. For miles the track was thick with the corpses of the camp-followers. Perhaps 12,000 people had died since they left Kabul, only a few thousand Indians survived, and the only people fighting back were the men of the 44th Regiment and the 5th Light Cavalry. They had passed through the second and third of the passes, and were fifty miles from Jalalabad.

On the sixth and seventh days the survivors struggled through the worst of all the ravines, the Jugdulluk, an allegorically gloomy defile, where the winding track passed between immense impending crags, and only a few scraggly holly oaks broke through the snow. Here the Afghans had blocked the way with a barrier of prickly ilex, six feet high. The soldiers fell upon it with their bare hands, while a fury of fire was poured at them from the ridges on either side, and Ghilzai horsemen galloped mercilessly among them—scrabbling frantically away with their frost-bitten fingers, dying in their hundreds, until at last a gap was made in the barricade and there was a mad rush of horsemen and foot-soldiers through it, the horses rearing, the shots flying, crazed soldiers sometimes shooting at their
friends, and into the confusion the Afghans falling with their knives and long swords to leave the snow stained with blood, mashed about with footfalls, and littered with red-coat bodies.

By the eighth day the army had no commander. Summoned to a conference at Akhbar’s camp, Elphinstone had been held there as a hostage, and his soldiers never saw him again. But by now there was virtually no army either: only some twenty officers and forty-five British soldiers had survived the slaughter in the Jugdulluk. At a hamlet called Gandamack they found themselves surrounded by Afghans and called to a parley—a handful of emaciated, exhausted and mostly unarmed Britons, with Captain Souter of the 44th wearing the regimental colours wound about his waist. It was a trick. The soldiers were slaughtered, only half a dozen being taken prisoner. The only survivors of the army now, apart from a few wandering sepoys, were fourteen horsemen, who, by-passing Gandamack, had galloped desperately towards Jalalabad—twenty miles away.

By the ninth day only six survived—three captains, a lieutenant and two army doctors, one of whom, Dr Brydon, had already lost his horse, and had been given a pony by a wounded subahdar of the native infantry—‘take my horse’, the Indian had said, ‘and God send you may get to Jalalabad in safety’. At Futtehabad, sixteen miles from Jalalabad, the officers found themselves kindly welcomed by the villagers, who offered them food, and urged them to rest for a while: two of them were murdered there and then, three more were killed as they fled the place.

So there remained, on January 13, 1842, only one survivor of the Kabul army—Surgeon Brydon, Army Medical Corps, galloping desperately over the last few miles to Jalalabad, Afghans all around him like flies, throwing stones at him, swinging sabres, reducing him in the end to the hilt of his broken sword, which he threw in a horseman’s face. And quite suddenly, in the early afternoon, Brydon found himself all alone. The Afghans had faded away. There was nobody to be seen. Not a sound broke the cold air. He plodded on through the snow exhausted, leaning on the pony’s neck, and
presently he saw in the distance the high mud walls of Jalalabad, with the Union Jack flying above. He took his forage cap from his head and feebly waved. The fortress gates opened; a group of officers ran out to greet him; and so the retreat from Kabul, and the first of Queen Victoria’s imperial wars, came to its grand and terrible end.

‘Did I not say so?’ said Colonel Dennie, who was watching from the walls. ‘Here comes the messenger’.
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