Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (55 page)

The last messenger to make it through the Khord Kabul Pass, however, carried the news that Sale was himself hopelessly besieged and outnumbered in Jalalabad and in no position to relieve Kabul; he also reported that the Khyber had been lost and was now closed to any potential relief force attempting to make its way up from Peshawar. On 7 December, after thick snow had blocked the route, it became clear that no help was likely to make it through from Kandahar either, at least until the spring thaw. On the morning of the 8th Macnaghten heard from the last remaining garrison, Ghazni, that they too were besieged and unable to come to the aid of their compatriots in Kabul.
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Now, with only one day’s provisions left, there was no hope. Imminent starvation loomed. The military leadership remained paralysed. Elphinstone and Shelton both seemed locked in despair. The defeated and hungry troops were on the verge of mutiny. The numbers of the Afghan resistance were now estimated at over 50,000, outnumbering the British garrison about ten to one.

All these anxieties culminated in a stormy meeting of the British commanders on the evening of 8 December. By this time, Elphinstone, Shelton and Macnaghten were barely on speaking terms, and the childishly obstreperous Shelton was especially disparaging about the Envoy. ‘I will sneer at him,’ he announced. ‘I like to sneer at him.’
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At Councils of War he was openly insolent to the General, rolling himself up in his quilt on the floor, from which requests for his opinion would be answered with loud snores.

At the meeting, Elphinstone produced the written letter Macnaghten had requested, taking formal responsibility for opening surrender negotiations, explaining that:

after having held our position here for upwards of three weeks in a state of siege, from the want of provisions and forage, the reduced state of our troops, the large number of wounded and sick, the difficulty of defending the extensive and ill-situated cantonment we occupy, the near approach of winter, our communication cut off, no prospect of relief, and the whole country in arms against us, I am of the opinion that it is not feasible any longer to maintain our position in this country, and that you ought to avail yourself of the offer to negotiate which has been made to you.
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The other officers also formally declared the British situation untenable, ‘giving it as their decided and unqualified opinion that no more military operations could be undertaken by the troops in their present condition, and that therefore no time should be lost in negotiating for a safe retreat to Hindustan, without any reference to Shah Shuja or his interests, for their first duty was to provide for the honour and welfare of the British troops under their command’.
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The readiness of the military to abandon Shuja stood in stark contrast to the Shah’s remarkable fidelity to the British, despite a stream of tempting proposals from the rebels for him to abandon his unpopular Kafir allies. Macnaghten repeatedly warned that any attempt to abandon Shuja would cover the British with ‘everlasting infamy’. But he was overruled and ordered to meet with Akbar Khan to see what terms he could get to guarantee the safety of the British during an immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan.

This first meeting between the two took place on the icy banks of the Kabul River, just beyond the charred remains of the bridge. Macnaghten was accompanied by Lawrence, Trevor and Mackenzie; Akbar brought with him all the leading chiefs of the rebellion.
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Macnaghten began with a characteristically preening and disingenuous preamble, which he read out in fluent court Persian: ‘Whereas it has become apparent from recent events that the continuance of the British army in Afghanistan for the support of Shah Shuja-ool-Moolk is displeasing to the majority of the Afghan nation, and whereas the British government had no other object in sending troops to this country than the integrity, happiness and welfare of the Afghans, therefore it can have no wish to remain when that object is defeated by its presence.’ Then came the meat of Macnaghten’s draft treaty. ‘1st, the British troops now at Kabul will repair to Peshawar with all practical expedition, and thence return to India. 2nd, the Sirdars engage that the British troops shall be unmolested in their journey, shall be treated with all honour, and receive all possible assistance in carriage and provisions.’
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It was at this point, noted Macnaghten in his last memo, that ‘Mahommed Akbar interrupted me and observed that we did not require supplies as there was no impediment to our marching the next morning. I mention the above fact to shew the impetuous disposition of this youth. He was reproved by the other Chiefs and he himself, except on this occasion, behaved with courtesy, though evidently elevated by his sudden change of fortune.’
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After two hours, an agreement was reached. The British were to withdraw three days later, on 14 December, and their safety was to be guaranteed. Captain Trevor was to be handed over as a hostage. Jalalabad, Ghazni and Kandahar would also be evacuated. In return for a large down-payment, food, grain and transport cattle would be sent to the British to help them on their way. Shah Shuja would be given the choice of leaving with the British or remaining in Kabul as a private citizen. The Bala Hisar would first be evacuated by its few remaining British officers and handed over to Akbar Khan. Meanwhile Dost Mohammad would be released from his house arrest in Ludhiana and allowed to return to the throne. The Afghans would undertake not to ally with any foreign power without the consent of the British, and the British in return promised that ‘the English army will not cross into Afghan territory unless the Afghan leaders request it’.

Macnaghten thought the terms as good as he was likely to get and, naive and delusional as ever, wrote to Auckland, ‘We shall part with the Afghans as friends, and I feel satisfied that any government which may be established hereafter will always be disposed to cultivate a good understanding with us.’
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One person who of course was not consulted about any of this was Shah Shuja – the man in whose name the war had been waged and the occupation administered. His biographer Mohammad Husain Herati gives the only surviving account of the Shah’s reaction when he heard of the terms which had been offered by Macnaghten, his one-time champion:

When His Majesty got intelligence of this agreement, he wrote to Macnaghten as follows: ‘Did you bring us back to this country only to hand us over to our enemies? Have you still no idea of the faithlessness of the Barakzais and of the people of this country? By throwing money at these vengeful people, you are only hastening your own and our death and destruction! Is that sensible?’ Macnaghten merely countered: ‘It is too late to change the agreements that have been made.’ His Majesty was distraught, running hither and thither like liquid mercury, wringing his hands day and night, saying ‘Macnaghten has taken leave of his senses – it will be the death of both of us!’

Macnaghten ordered the remaining British troops to leave the Bala Hisar and despatched a message to inform Akbar Khan that the fort had been evacuated and that he should send his own troops to garrison it.

Mohammad Akbar Khan immediately sent 2,000 jezail-bearing Ghilzais. The decent citizens of Kabul were horrified, exclaiming ‘If Akbar Khan takes over the fort, what will happen to Shah Shuja’s womenfolk and children and dependants? God help them!’

At the thought of the imminent rape and pillage, His Majesty was sunk in a whirlpool of despondency. However the denizens of the Bala Hisar fort were mostly old retainers, born within the compound, loyal servants who had grown up under the protection and patronage of the royal family: these at least did not weakly give in to despair, and as soon as the last of the English forces had marched out of the fort, they boldly shut the gates behind them and killed any of the rebel soldiers who had already penetrated the fort, so that Akbar Khan’s troops were forced to retire disappointed.
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Akbar Khan’s troops tried twice more to assault the main gate of the Bala Hisar, but Shah Shuja’s household troops, whom the British had long disparaged as ‘a useless rabble’, successfully drove them back, inflicting serious casualties. ‘We could not but admire the promptitude and courage he [Shuja] had displayed on this very critical occasion,’ wrote Lawrence, ‘and heartily desired that a similar energy might be shown by our own leaders, who still appeared quite incapable of adopting any measures to secure our honour and our safety.’
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As the British buckled and surrendered, ignoring all Shuja’s warnings, the Shah remained strong and successfully held out in the Bala Hisar until he chose to march out from his well-provisioned fortress many months later, at the onset of the spring thaw.

While Macnaghten was quietly sacrificing Shah Shuja, Lord Auckland was, somewhat unexpectedly, entertaining Shuja’s old rival, Dost Mohammad, at a ball in Calcutta.

After the ‘bracing’ air of Simla, the Edens were appalled by the heat and humidity of a Calcutta summer. ‘We have subsided from the interests of Afghan politics’, wrote Emily to a friend, ‘into the daily difficulties of keeping ourselves from being baked alive. I may say we have risen to this higher pursuit, for it is much the more important of the two, and of much more difficult achievement?. . .’
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The heat confirmed her in her opinion that it was time for them all to get out of the horrors of Asia and head quickly back to the safety of Kensington: ‘Our George has done very well in India, has he not? You know we always thought very highly of him even in his comical dog days . . . Now I think he has done enough, and might as well go home, but none of the people at home will hear of it, and this month’s despatches have made me desperate.’
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But duty was duty, and on Queen Victoria’s birthday, amid the drenching humidity of a Bengali June, ‘the most desperate weather ever felt in India’, the sisters decided to throw a ball. ‘Our Queen’s ball was very magnificent,’ Emily wrote soon afterwards, ‘and as I fondly hope it is our last, I am glad it went off so well.
I wore my diamonds!
’
The star guest, on exhibit to all both as a curiosity and as an advertisement for the great successes of Lord Auckland’s foreign policy, was the Amir himself. ‘We had Dost Mohammad and his sons and suite at the ball,’ continued Emily,

the first time he had ever seen European ladies in their shameless dress; but he did not see the dancing – George took him to another room. He is a very kingly sort of person, and carries off his half-captive, half-lion position with great tact. By way of relieving George part of the evening, I asked him to play at chess, and we played game after game, which was rather a triumph considering native chess is not like ours, and he kept inventing new rules as we went on. If he were not a Dost it was not quite fair.
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Afterwards, Emily asked her chess partner if she could make a portrait of him and his followers. He agreed to sit for her pencil, but then, as appalled as she was by the Calcutta humidity, set off back up country to Ludhiana without telling her and before she had finished. ‘I have been making a sketch of Dost Mohammad and his family,’ Emily reported somewhat tetchily to her sister in England, ‘and he set off this morning for the upper provinces, leaving me with one of their nephews unsketched. So this morning, with great activity I got up early, and Colvin abstracted the nephew from the steamer and brought him to sit for his picture before breakfast. The nephew is very like the picture of Judas Iscariot, but he is a fine subject. Considering Colvin had no breakfast, he seemed to talk Persian with wonderful animation.’
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The situation in Afghanistan had begun to deteriorate rapidly soon after Dost Mohammad’s departure from Calcutta. News had arrived a fortnight later that a Tory government had been elected in London, and after mulling over his options, Lord Auckland resigned as Governor General. Lord Ellenborough, the man who had originally written the memo that sent Burnes up the Indus ten years earlier, was appointed to replace him.

A week later, the news of Burnes’s murder and the fast unravelling of Lord Auckland’s entire Afghan strategy arrived in Bengal by courier. The first despatch to make it to Government House was a short note from General Sale written three weeks earlier in Jalalabad telling Auckland of the first rumours of disaster in Kabul and of his own encirclement. ‘I need not tell you that these communications very greatly distress me,’ Auckland wrote to Sir Jasper Nicholls, the Commander-in-Chief, that night. ‘They leave room for very formidable and serious speculation. I would not however speak of my own feelings. The question is, what is to be done?’

He then laid out various options, but like his generals in Kabul the stream of depressing news seemed to paralyse him and from the beginning he opposed the idea of an immediate military response. ‘I propose to have a special Council tomorrow,’ he wrote, ‘but it seems to me that we are not to think of marching fresh armies for the reconquest of that which we are likely to lose . . . I fear that the Afghan national spirit has been generally roused.’
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The truth was that Auckland had already realised months earlier that his whole Afghan policy had been catastrophically mistaken and was in danger of bankrupting the entire Indian government. Now with disaster looming, and with his treasury empty, he had no hesitation in taking the decision that he should simply write off the entire project and not throw any further resources into what was clearly a losing battle.