Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (73 page)

In an effort to give Shahpur’s rule a chance of survival, on 11 October Pollock dragooned what was left of the Kabul nobility up to the Bala Hisar to swear an oath of allegiance. A document pledging loyalty was hastily drawn up, to which they all attached their seals, and one by one confirmed this by placing their hands on a Quran: ‘At this happy moment when the sultan son of the sultan, Shahpur Shah, is our sovereign, we swear and certify by God and His Prophet and all the prophets . . . that we will not choose as Shah anyone but this illustrious ruler; with heart and soul we will not stint in our service to him; we consider obligatory that his orders be carried out by us, by the country, by the soldiery, and by the populace.’
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Pollock refused however to supply the assembled nobility with any arms or ammunition, despite their pleas, so making their vows almost impossible to keep.
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The speed of the army’s departure not only doomed the pro-British nobility; it also left many of the Company’s own sepoys in captivity. ‘We ought to have remained longer to have recovered more of our captive people,’ wrote a disgusted Colin Mackenzie. ‘Hundreds were left in slavery.’
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Years later, he met an enslaved sepoy who had managed to escape from captivity and make his way back to India. From this man he learned, as he had suspected, that ‘the mountains were then full of our prisoners, many of whom were [later] sent off to Balkh as slaves. There were some English among them. Had our troops only been allowed to stay a few days longer they could all have been brought in.’
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At sunrise on 12 October 1842, the British lowered the Union Jack on the Bala Hisar, and, in the words of the Rev. I. N. Allen, ‘turned our backs on the scene of former disgrace and present outrage – a melancholy and disgraceful scene’.
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Behind them, Neville Chamberlain could see ‘the whole face of the sky was red with flames’ and the last remaining quarters of Kabul still standing – all that was left of the city of gardens which Burnes had once thought the most beautiful in the region – well on their way to becoming a smouldering wreck. ‘Ruin and revenge had uprooted families and dwellings,’ wrote Munshi Abdul Karim. ‘Few distinguished citiziens were left; the bazaars had been pulled down; open spaces were heaped with corpses and filth and stench polluted the air. Once fine gardens were now the haunt of scavengers and owls: wretched beggars were left scrabbling in the dust.’
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If many of the troops were pleased to be heading back home to their Indian cantonments, the procession which left the city was nonetheless a sad spectacle, for along with the British trudged a whole variety of groups whose lives had been uprooted and ruined by Auckland’s failed adventure: the Afghan nobility who had stood with the British, especially the more Anglophile Qizilbash, who now had little option but hastily to pack up and follow their retreating allies; the long lines of maimed and crippled sepoys who had been left to their fate on the 1842 retreat by Elphinstone’s officers, and many of whom were now gangrenous amputees who had to be carried home in swaying dhoolies and camel panniers; the 500 destitute Hindu families who had been left both ruined and homeless by the rape and destruction of their quarter in Kabul; and, bringing up the rear, the surviving members of the Sadozai dynasty and the harems of Shahs Shuja, Zaman and Fatteh Jang, all of whose hopes of recovering their Kingdom had been thwarted by the incompetence and unpopularity of the British occupation, and who now again faced an uncertain future in a foreign land. As Mohammad Husain Herati wrote in conclusion at the end of his postscript to the
Waqi’at-i-Shah Shuja
: ‘Thus did the English accomplish the destruction of the Afghan royal house of Sadozai.’
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For even as Pollock was marching his weary troops back along the skeleton-strewn Via Dolorosa of the Khord Kabul, past the sad detritus of Elphinstone’s army – ‘gloves and socks, sepoys’ hair combs, broken china all serving to remind us of the misery and humiliation of our troops’, and with the wheels of the horse artillery crushing the skulls of the fallen troops – news arrived that Ellenborough had presided over one last betrayal of the dynasty in whose name the British had invaded Afghanistan.
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Two weeks earlier, on 1 October, the Governor General had issued from Simla a Proclamation which formally distanced the British government from the Sadozais. It did this on the entirely spurious grounds that Shah Shuja’s actions had ‘brought into question his fidelity to the government by which he was restored’. This was a straightforward lie: whatever his many failings, Shuja remained strikingly faithful to the British, even after they had single-handedly torn up their treaty with him and left him to his fate in December 1841. From now on, continued Ellenborough, ‘the Governor General will leave it to the Afghans themselves to create a government amidst the anarchy which is the consequence of their crimes’. The Proclamation ended with a suitably Orwellian flourish: ‘To force a sovereign upon a reluctant people would be as inconsistent with the policy as it is with the principles of the British government. The Governor General will willingly recognise any government approved by the Afghans themselves which shall appear desirous and capable of maintaining friendly relations with the neighbouring states.’
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In reality, however, Ellenborough believed there was only one man who could restore order in Afghanistan. At the same time as the Simla Proclamation was issued, Amir Dost Mohammad was quietly released from house arrest in Mussoorie. ‘The Amir held a feast for all and sundry to celebrate, before leaving for Ferozepur,’ wrote Mirza ‘Ata.

There he had an audience with the Governor General and took his leave, accompanied by an official escort of 500 cavalry and foot-soldiers, as well as elephants, camels and bullock-carts to carry baggage. Haidar Khan, the Amir’s son [who had been captured during the taking of Ghazni] and Haji Khan Kakar [who had delayed Outram’s search party and given the Amir time to escape to Bukhara] were all sent to Ludhiana to join the Amir’s entourage. After two months the Amir and his party left for Afghanistan; Lord Ellenborough granted him a rich cloak of honour, and sat in private session with him for a whole watch, urging him never to cross or confront the English government, and to maintain peaceful relations with the Sikhs and to refrain from hostilities. He advised that the Amir should restrain his son, Akbar Khan. Then they parted, and the Governor General ordered that the Amir’s daily allowance should be paid until he entered the Khyber.
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The second retreat from Kabul began peacefully enough.

The long lines of soldiers, refugees and camp followers passed down the Khord Kabul and Tezin passes with barely a shot being fired. It was only when they neared the eastern Ghilzai heartlands just before Jagdalak that the sniping began.

It was Neville Chamberlain’s fate to bring up the end of the column:

I was walking in rear of all with my orderly, rifle in hand, taking shots at the rascals, when my orderly’s horse, from which I had been firing, was riddled through the neck. I had not gone many paces when I was struck myself. I spun around and fell to the ground, but soon got up again and staggered on in great pain. I was determined that the Affghans should not even have the satisfaction of thinking they had done for me. On putting my hand on my back I thought it was all over with me, but on getting into camp we found the ball had not penetrated the skin, and it tumbled out on the doctor touching it.
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Others were less lucky. Chamberlain recorded how in an echo of the first retreat, the camp followers and refugees were now beginning to fall by the roadside. There they had to be left ‘to be murdered by the Ghilzai, we not having any means of conveying them. I have myself given my own charger and made the men dismount to bring on the poor creatures, but after they were so weak as not to be able to ride or hang on a horse, I was obliged to abandon them to the knives of those merciless villains who gloried in cutting the throats of poor emaciated helpless beings. Every march we passed the bodies of those abandoned by the columns ahead of us.’
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In Jalalabad, Chamberlain arrived in time to see Broadfoot’s engineers mining the walls of the fortress they had twice rebuilt and then defended with such success. A massive charge was placed under each bastion, and smaller ones along each stretch of curtain.
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On 27 October, immediately after Pollock had marched out, there was a colossal explosion and Jalalabad was left as Kabul had been before it, a smoking mass of ruins.
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It was on the next stage of the retreat, the descent of the Khyber, that the British encountered the most determined resistance. The Afridis as usual streamed out of their mountain villages to snipe, gut and pillage the passing columns, and again the British exacted bloody reprisals. ‘No quarter was given,’ scribbled Chamberlain on the night of the 29th. ‘We killed between 150 and 200 men . . . All the stacks and villages plundered and fired.’ On 1 November, at the top of the pass, John Nicholson was briefly reunited with his younger brother Alexander, before John was sent to join Chamberlain in the rearguard.

The following day, Chamberlain and John Nicholson corkscrewed down the path just below Ali Masjid, accompanied by the chaplain Allen. Turning a sharp corner the three found the road thickly strewn with the bodies of their colleagues from whom they had parted the previous afternoon. Their entire party had been trapped and overwhelmed by an Afridi ambush. Now their remains were ‘lying here and there, stripped and mangled, some already partially devoured by dogs and birds of prey. Among them were two native women, one young and well looking.’
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Among the dead was Nicholson’s younger brother. His body was stark naked, and hacked to pieces. In accordance with Afridi custom, Alexander had had his genitalia cut off and stuffed in his mouth.
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The incident left Nicholson with a visceral, almost psychopathic loathing of all Muslims, and with an appetite for their destruction that he was able to indulge in periodically over the next few years, and slake fully during the Great Uprising of 1857.
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The next morning, his last in Afghanistan, it was Chamberlain’s turn to be ambushed. He was again in the rearguard and as he descended the final section of the road towards the fort at Jamrud his party were caught in a hail of bullets from jezail marksmen hidden high in the gullies above them. ‘I was riding a few paces in advance of the corps,’ he wrote,

the balls striking rather close. I turned around and said to an officer, ‘Those fellows do not fire badly.’ And true enough, for the moment afterwards I was struck. The ball hit me so hard that my friend answered, ‘You are hit, old fellow,’ but I needed not to be told to make me aware of it. The regiment galloped on to get from under the fire. I was obliged to dismount, or rather half fell from my horse, and dragged and supported by my groom and a sepoy, I lay down behind a piece of rock which sheltered me from the fire, until after some time a dhoolie was brought for me and I was carried into camp at Jamrud.
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Chamberlain had been hit with the very last shots of the war. Jamrud marked an invisible boundary, after which the murderous violence of Afghanistan abruptly stopped. By evening, the Rev. I. N. Allen had reached the very different world of the outskirts of Peshawar. ‘Men were sitting by the roadside selling grain and sweetmeats,’ he wrote in amazement. ‘These were strange sights to us who had for months been without seeing a human being, except as an enemy.’
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There followed a long five-week march through the Punjab to the boundary of the Company territories on the Sutlej, near Ferozepur. Chamberlain was carried the whole way in a litter, ‘too ill to be amused or see the country . . . Hundreds of men died during our march from fatigue or wounds. Comparatively speaking I was one of the lucky ones. But I hope I shall never again go through what I then suffered.’
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The first troops reached Ferozepur just before Christmas, on 23 December. As they marched over the bridge of boats spanning the river, Lord Ellenborough was waiting in person to greet the troops, with a regimental band playing ‘See the Conquering Hero Comes’. As Colin Mackenzie’s sister-in-law, Julia Margaret Cameron, the pioneering photographer, memorably described him, Ellenborough was ‘flighty and unmanageable in all matters of business . . . [but] violently enthusiastic on all military matters, and they alone seem to occupy his interests or his attention’.

A great ceremonial arch of bamboo, coloured cotton and bunting had been erected, ‘so closely resembling a gigantic gallows’, wrote Mackenzie, ‘that the soldiers marched under it with peals of laughter’.
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Beyond stretched a row two miles long of 250 caparisoned elephants, whose trunks the Governor General had personally helped paint.
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He had also organised a cavalcade of celebrations and parades to mark what he termed the victorious return of the army to the same grounds which they had left three years earlier. There were twenty-one-gun salutes for Sale, Pollock and Nott, and even one for the supposed Somnath Gates which were brought into camp covered in marigold garlands. A succession of banquets were then laid on in vast shamiana marquees, though many had little appetite for such festivities after what they had just gone through. Mackenzie retired to his tent, writing that few ‘felt anything like the joy which might have been anticipated . . . All the [former] captives suffered from depression of spirits, some of them, as Eyre, to a terrible degree. Some of the ladies dreamt of the horrors they had witnessed night after night for months after their release.’
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