The Dark Defile (28 page)

The next day the chiefs approached Shah Shuja with a proposition: He could remain as king provided he gave several of his daughters as wives to the leading chiefs and dispensed with some of the cumbersome ceremonials that they so much resented but that he so enjoyed. Shah Shuja, after some thought, accepted. However, Macnaghten’s
couleur de rose
confidence that all would be well was challenged almost at once when, on the “
exceedingly dark and freezingly cold
” evening of 13 December, the six hundred British troops who still remained in the Balla Hissar departed for the cantonments to prepare for what they believed would be their imminent departure from Kabul. As the tail of the British column was passing through the gates of the citadel, some of Akbar Khan’s men tried to rush through them. Shah Shuja’s own soldiers only closed the gates against them with difficulty and in so doing stranded a number of British troops inside, as well as some much needed supplies of wheat and flour intended for the cantonments.

Outside the citadel, British soldiers were caught in the crossfire. Akbar Khan, who had promised to provide a safe escort for them, suddenly announced that with the surrounding area teeming with bandits, he could not guarantee their safety. They must halt for the night while he negotiated their safe passage with the local chiefs. Several officers walked up to the gates of the Balla Hissar to demand that the troops be allowed to reenter, but Shah Shuja’s soldiers immediately fired on them. When they demanded to know on whose authority they were being thus attacked, the answer came that the king had ordered the gates to be held whatever the cost.

The troops had no option but to bed down beneath the walls of the citadel without food, fuel or tents on ground that was white with hoarfrost. When morning finally came, the numb and frozen men at last set out for the cantonments. Although Akbar Khan kept up some semblance of honoring his promise to protect the troops, threatening to cut down any man who molested them, Afghans still attacked the rear of the column. Lieutenant Eyre recorded the fate of “a poor sick European artillery-man who, for want of a more suitable conveyance, had been lashed to the gun, [but] was unmercifully butchered.” However, by ten A.M., the starving and exhausted force finally reached the cantonments. By then Shah Shuja, terrified by Akbar Khan’s assault on the Balla Hissar, had changed his mind about the wisdom of accepting the chiefs’ offer.

As yet, Akbar Khan and the other Afghan leaders had produced none of the promised supplies. When the British protested that this was delaying their preparations for departure, they claimed it was not their fault—that every time they collected food and animals to bring to the cantonments, the uncontrollable
ghazis
stole them. Lady Sale, sharper witted than many of her male colleagues, understood what was behind the shrugging off of responsibility: “Our allies, as they are now called, will be very magnanimous if they let us escape, now that they have fairly got us in their net.”

The day stipulated in the treaty for the British departure passed without any sign of the agreed-upon provisions. Macnaghten sought another meeting with the chiefs at which he insisted they honor their commitments. Their response was that the British must first demonstrate their own good faith by handing over any forts they still occupied in the vicinity of the cantonments. Macnaghten knew that to do so would leave the cantonments even more exposed and vulnerable. He urged Elphinstone instead to take advantage of the extra troops recently arrived from the Balla Hissar to mount an attack on the city. The general insisted that such an action could only end in disaster. And so on 16 December the forts were surrendered as a goodwill gesture to the supposed “allies” of the British. Lawrence watched with tears in his eyes as “these strongholds, the last prop of our tottering power in Kabul, which it had cost us so much blood to seize and defend,” were surrendered. By four o’clock the new occupants were sitting on the walls of one fort “from which every point of cantonment was visible” and passing “remarks and jokes on the conduct of those within.” Four more officers were handed over as hostages, and a new date—22 December—was fixed for the British departure.

On 18 December thick snow began to fall in Kabul, adding to the misery of life within the cantonments. Eyre called it “a new enemy … which we were destined to find even more formidable than an army of rebels.” The following day, Macnaghten received confirmation that Brigadier Maclaren had indeed given up his attempt to get through the snow-filled passes to Kabul and was returning to Kandahar. Meanwhile, in a further tightening of the screw, the Afghan chiefs declared that they would not permit the British to leave Kabul until Macnaghten and Elphinstone had ordered the other British garrisons in the country—at Kandahar, Jalalabad and Ghazni—to retreat to India as well. With few options left, the general and the envoy did as they were told.

At this low point—a time when Lady Sale was confiding to her journal, “We have very little hope of saving our lives”—Macnaghten decided on one final attempt to salvage the situation by manipulating the shifting loyalties and ingrained rivalries of the Afghans. For this delicate task he turned again to Mohan Lal, still living concealed in the Kizzilbashi quarter of the city, to try and lure the Kizzilbashis and the Ghilzais to the British cause. On 20 December he wrote to Lal, “
You can tell the Ghilzais and Khan Shirin [chief of the Kizzilbashis] that after they have declared for his Majesty [Shah Shuja] and us and sent in 100
kurwars
of grain to cantonments, I shall be glad to give them a bond for five lakhs of rupees.
” The following day, he wrote even more explicitly: “If any portion of the Afghans wish our troops to remain in the country, I shall think myself at liberty to break the engagement which I have made [i.e., with Akbar Khan] to go away, which engagement was made believing it to be in accordance with the wishes of the Afghan nation. If the Ghilzais and Kizzilbashis wish us to stay, let them declare so openly in the course of tomorrow.”

Leaving Mohan Lal to try to detach the Ghilzai and Kizzilbashi leaders, Macnaghten continued his ever more humiliating exchanges with Akbar Khan. As the envoy well knew, time was not on his side. Akbar Khan and his supporters were making increasingly aggressive demands, even asking for Brigadier Shelton as a hostage. A few days earlier they had also asked for all the married men and their families to be handed over as surety for Dost Mohammed’s safe return. Lady Sale was relieved to learn that Macnaghten had refused to give up any woman. Shelton was also extremely unwilling to be surrendered, so two lieutenants—Conolly and Airey—were given in his place. Macnaghten also agreed under pressure to hand over some of the British military stores and in a bid to mollify Akbar Khan, even made him a gift of his own carriage and horses. In the increasingly menacing atmosphere and with no sign of the Ghilzais and Kizzilbashis responding to Mohan Lal’s overtures, Macnaghten got cold feet about his intriguing, writing anxiously to Lal that he must refuse any presents of grain: “
The sending [of] grain to us just now would do more harm than good to our cause; and it would lead the Barakzais to suppose that I am intriguing with a view of breaking my agreement
”—as, indeed, he was.

Macnaghten was right to be cautious in a place where little remained secret for long—Lady Sale was convinced that the cantonments teemed with spies. Akbar Khan had indeed learned of the envoy’s “intriguing” and duly set a trap for him. On 22 December—the new day set for the British to depart from Kabul—he offered Macnaghten a secret deal. His envoy was Captain “Gentleman Jim” Skinner—a British officer so nicknamed for his charm and courteous manners. Trapped in the city at the start of the insurrection, Skinner had at first been protected by friends but later had fallen into the hands of Akbar Khan, who had treated him well. Skinner was accompanied to the meeting by two Afghans—one a merchant and former acquaintance of Alexander Burnes who in better times had sold camels to the British army, and the other a first cousin of Akbar Khan’s. Macnaghten and Skinner dined together while the Afghans waited in another room. During the meal, according to Captain Mackenzie, who was present, Skinner hinted that he and his companions were bearers of a “most portentous” message and that he himself “felt as if laden with combustibles.” Mackenzie noticed how “the Envoy’s eye glanced eagerly towards Skinner with an expression of hope … like a drowning man clutching at straws.”

As soon as the envoy and Skinner rejoined the Afghans and the four were alone, Akbar Khan’s cousin revealed the contents of the “portentous” message. Akbar Khan proposed that the next day he and the Ghilzais should unite with the British troops to mount a joint attack on the Mahmud Khan Fort, which commanded the road between the cantonments and the Balla Hissar, and to seize Amenoolah Khan, the Barakzai chief instrumental in the murder of Alexander Burnes. Akbar Khan even offered, in return for payment, to send Macnaghten Amenoolah’s head. Though Shah Shuja could remain as king, he himself was to be appointed vizier and receive a lump sum of 3 million rupees as well as a handsome lifelong stipend. As for the British, they could remain until the following spring when, as the snows cleared from the passes, they could depart with honor as if of their own accord. Finally Akbar Khan asked that Macnaghten keep his offer secret, lest news of it reach Amenoolah Khan. Macnaghten eagerly took what one officer called “
the gilded bait
.” Though balking at the John the Baptist–like delivery to him of Ameenolah’s head, he accepted everything else, then naively penned and signed a document in Persian confirming it. He also promised to meet Akbar Khan the following day to ratify this in person.

At first, Macnaghten told no one—not even his three staff officers Mackenzie, Trevor, whom the Afghans had released, and Lawrence—what he had done. Mackenzie later wrote, “It seemed as if he feared that we might insist on the impracticability of the plan which he must have studiously concealed from himself.” Early the following day, Mohan Lal learned from one of his informants that Akbar Khan had “laid a deep scheme to entrap the Envoy” and was even contemplating shooting him with the handsome brace of double-barreled pistols the envoy had just given him. Mohan Lal wrote at once to Macnaghten imploring him not to meet the Afghan chief outside the cantonments. On reading Lal’s note, the envoy is said to have paled. However, it did not cause him to reconsider.

Lal’s warning was, in fact, only the first of many. A little later that morning, when Macnaghten finally told Mackenzie of his secret pact with Akbar Khan, the captain’s immediate response was that it must be a trick, to which Macnaghten snapped back, “
A Plot! Let me alone for that, trust me for that!”
Elphinstone, too, was also deeply skeptical when Macnaghten told him what he had agreed. He asked what part the other Barakzai leaders, who had been involved in the previous negotiations, had played in these, to which Macnaghten replied that they were “
not in the plot.
” Macnaghten’s choice of language revealed more clearly than anything else the dangerous path he had chosen. Elphinstone suggested that Akbar Khan could well be playing a double game himself, but Macnaghten dismissed his fears and requested that he have two regiments and two guns standing by ready to capture the Mahmud Khan Fort. When Elphinstone objected that the troops were not to be relied on and he still suspected treachery, Macnaghten turned impatiently away, saying, “Leave it all to me—I understand these things better than you.”

The usually hesitant Elphinstone continued to be so worried that he sat down and wrote a letter to Macnaghten, again dwelling on the risks and asking what guarantees the envoy had received for the truth of what he had been told. He even made one last attempt to intervene in person. Just as Macnaghten was preparing to leave the cantonments, he came to find him and again expressed his misgivings. Lawrence heard Macnaghten reply, “If you will at once march out the troops and meet the enemy, I will accompany you, and I am sure we shall beat them; as regards these negotiations, I have no faith in them,” to which Elphinstone responded, with a shake of his elderly head, “Macnaghten, I can’t; the troops are not to be depended on.”

And so at midday on 23 December, immaculate in gray trousers, black frock coat and top hat, the bespectacled Macnaghten rode out of the cantonments accompanied by Captains Lawrence, Trevor and Mackenzie in their scarlet uniforms and tall black shakos to his appointed meeting place with Akbar Khan about six hundred yards east of the cantonments near the banks of the Kabul River. He had an escort of only ten horsemen since the much larger one he had requested was not ready and he chose not to wait. Macnaghten was by this point mentally and physically exhausted. When Lawrence again asked whether there was a risk of betrayal, he wearily replied: “Of course there is; but what can I do? The General has declared his inability to fight, we have no prospect of aid from any quarter, the enemy are only playing with us … and I have no confidence whatever in them. The life I have led for the last six weeks, you, Lawrence, know well; and rather than be disgraced and live it over again, I would risk a hundred deaths; success will save our honour, and more than make up for all risks.” Like a desperate gambler, he was prepared to stake all on one throw of the dice.

Suddenly Macnaghten remembered an Arab mare, belonging to a British captain, that Akbar Khan had admired and that he had subsequently purchased from the officer so he could present it to the chief as a goodwill gesture, and sent Mackenzie back to fetch it. By the time he returned, Macnaghten and the rest had already reached the riverbank. Akbar Khan and a large group of beturbaned Afghans in sheepskin coats—Amenoolah’s brother among them, which should have been a warning in itself—were waiting. After the usual salutations of “
Salaam Aleikum
” (Peace be with you), Macnaghten presented the mare to Akbar Khan, who also thanked him for his recent gift of pistols, which—he pointed out—he was wearing. He suggested to Macnaghten that they dismount and take their ease on some horse blankets that his men had spread on the far side of a hillock sloping down to the river where the snow was less thick. To Mackenzie, the atmosphere was sinister: “Men talk of presentiment; I suppose it was something of the kind which came over me, for I could scarcely prevail upon myself to quit my horse.” However, whatever his own fears and feelings, Macnaghten dismounted, scrambled up the slope and reclined on a blanket, Trevor and Mackenzie beside him. Lawrence remained standing behind him until, at the chiefs’ insistence to be seated, he knelt on one knee close behind Macnaghten, ready to spring up if necessary.