The Dark Defile (31 page)

When the bridge was eventually ready, it simply proved a bottleneck with the thousands of camp followers jostling among the baggage wagons and gun carriages for their turn to cross amid “
the oaths of the camel-drivers, the bewailings of the Hindustani servants, and the roar of camels,
” as an eyewitness wrote. The advance guard took until early afternoon to cross and leave the bridge free for the main column to follow. Lady Sale and her daughter wisely preferred to ride their horses through the water rather than joining those attempting to cross what she called the “rattling bridge.” Captain Lawrence, meanwhile, was already finding it hard to keep his contingent of women and children together, with “some of the bearers hurrying on, others lagging behind with the palanquins and doolies containing the women and children.” He saw the irony that to reach the road for Jalalabad, the column had to pass close to the citadel from which Shah Shuja was doubtless watching his allies’ ignominious departure. He could not help casting “a long, lingering look at the Balla Hissar feeling assured that
even now
all might be retrieved if only the order was passed to march upon and occupy that fortress, instead of plunging into the dreadful defiles before us, to our certain destruction.”

The order of march quickly dissolved into confusion with camp followers and baggage inextricably mixed up with the troops. Such was the chaos that the main column, with its long line of laden camels, was still leaving the cantonments by late afternoon. When winter darkness fell around four o’clock, the vanguard had only reached Begramee, some five miles away, where Elphinstone called a halt for the night. In the panic and disorder and under attack by Afghans bent on loot, servants had flung down their loads or abandoned baggage animals so that, as Lady Sale wrote, “private baggage, commissariat and ammunition were nearly annihilated at one fell swoop.” With no equipment to pitch a proper camp, the women and children—most of them still in their litters for warmth—found places inside small tents. Lady Sale shared one with her daughter, son-in-law Sturt and two others, but the tent did not keep out the bitter wind. Doubling up her long legs beneath her in a straw chair provided by Captain Johnson, Lady Sale covered herself with her sheepskin coat and tried to sleep. Lawrence shared another tent with two other officers, all “thankful for the shelter and some cold meat and sherry which Lady Macnaghten was able to spare us, and without which we must have starved.”

The unfortunate rear guard, whose task had been to man the cantonment walls until the rest of the column had left, were unable to depart until six o’clock in the evening, having first destroyed almost everything they could not carry except for the guns, which the ever honorable Elphinstone considered it would be a violation of the treaty to spike. As soon as they abandoned the walls, Afghans surged in, firing at the retreating troops, killing some fifty soldiers as they tried to protect a pile of baggage waiting to be carried over Sturt’s bridge. Before long, the night sky was lit by “
columns of lurid smoke and flame
” as the Afghans set fire to the buildings in the cantonments. The rear guard remained under attack all the way to Begramee. As they fought their way forward in the darkness, they witnessed the fate of stragglers from the main column, encountering “
literally a continuous lane of poor wretches, men, women, and children dead or dying from the cold and wounds, who, unable to move, entreated their comrades to kill them and put an end to their misery.
”

The rear guard finally struggled into the encampment on the bank of the Kabul River at about two A.M., “
worn out by hunger and fatigue, and benumbed by cold,
” having abandoned much of their baggage and spiked two of their guns. They found no comfort in the camp, which was “
one mass of confusion; no places marked out for the different regiments or baggage; the snow very deep on the ground; all order gone.
” With no shelter, food or fuel, the men could only huddle together in the snow, “too weary even to cry out in their suffering,” as Lawrence reported. The night was pitch-black, but when dawn rose he was shocked to discover how many had died: “I found lying close to my tent, stiff, cold, and quite dead, in full regimentals, with his sword drawn in his hand, an old grey-haired conductor [noncommissioned officer] named Macgregor, who, utterly exhausted, had lain down there silently to die.”

The cold was as great an enemy to the British force as were the Afghans, and they had no response to it. Before setting out, Pottinger had urged his fellow officers to have old horse blankets and other materials torn into strips that could be wound around the soldiers’ feet and ankles in the Afghan fashion to protect them from the cold. However, like most of Pottinger’s advice, the suggestion had been ignored. During the early stages of the retreat, Lieutenant Eyre observed how Mackenzie’s loyal Afghan
jezailchis
cleared a small area of ground of snow, then “laid themselves down in a circle, closely packed together, with their feet meeting in the centre; all the warm clothing they could muster among them being spread equally over the whole. By these simple means sufficient animal warmth was generated to preserve them from being frostbitten; and Captain Mackenzie, who himself shared their homely bed, declared that he had felt scarcely any inconvenience from the cold.” However, no one seems to have encouraged the European and Indian troops to sleep in this way.

At seven A.M. on 7 January, the force moved out once more in temperatures so low that, as Mackenzie described, “the very air we breathed froze in its passage out of the mouth and nostrils, forming a coating of small icicles on our moustaches and beards.” Lawrence observed, “All discipline and order had ceased, and soldiers, camp followers, and baggage were all mingled together. More than half of the sepoys were, from cold and hunger, unable to handle their muskets, and throwing them away, mixed themselves up with the mass of non-combatants.” Others had deserted during the night, and some of Shah Shuja’s sappers and infantry abandoned their colors and slipped back to Kabul, “preferring becoming prisoners there to the certain death which they saw clearly must result from continuing any longer with the main body.”

As the force slowly advanced toward the Khoord Kabul Pass, still five miles away, several hundred Afghans could be seen on either side of the column, moving parallel with it. Word went around that these were the escort promised by the chiefs to protect the retreating British. By now the bearers of the ladies’ palanquins were becoming exhausted. The men carrying Lady Macnaghten declared they could go no farther, and Lawrence took her up on his own horse—a strong animal that had belonged to her husband. Overtaking a camel with empty straw panniers hanging down on either side of its ribs, Lawrence transferred the envoy’s widow into one of these, balancing her weight by placing a bundle of clothes in the other pannier. Returning to the rest of the women and children, he discovered that one—Mrs. Boyd—was nowhere to be seen. He at once rode back to look for her and, encountering Brigadier Antequil, learned that Afghans had attacked the rear of the column, carrying off two cannon due to the cowardice of the Forty-fourth regiment, all Europeans, who had not fired one shot to defend them. Though an artillery officer and some of his men had later charged the enemy and succeeded in spiking the guns, a gloomy Antequil told Lawrence the incident “was too bad to speak about.”

Meanwhile, the Afghans shadowing the retreating army had shown themselves not friends but foes, suddenly falling on the main column, killing stragglers and carrying off captives and baggage. A sergeant likened them to “
hungry wolves
.” Worried the Afghans would cut off part of his force, Elphinstone sent back troops and cannon under Shelton to try to drive them off. At this time, Nawab Zaman Khan sent a further message to Pottinger, warning that the Khoord Kabul Pass was strongly occupied by Ghilzai tribesmen and promising to disperse the attackers and to supply food and fuel if Elphinstone stopped his march. Around this time too, the British observed a chief accompanied by several hundred horsemen watching the column. Pottinger sent Captain Skinner under a flag of truce to talk to him. As Pottinger must have suspected, it was Akbar Khan himself. He reproached Skinner over the precipitate departure of the British, telling him they were to blame for their predicament and claiming that he had come to defend them against their attackers. He also told Skinner that he wanted further hostages as surety that Sale would evacuate Jalalabad.

Learning of Akbar Khan’s fresh demands, and in the light of Nawab Zaman Shah’s warning, Pottinger persuaded Elphinstone to halt although it was only midday. He agreed to stop until nightfall, when he intended to march on again. However, later that afternoon another of his officers convinced him that the troops were too exhausted for a night march, and Elphinstone ordered his column to make camp where they were, at Boothak. “
Here was another day entirely lost,
” Shelton complained. The retreating force was a mere ten miles from Kabul, having again covered only five miles that day. Furthermore, in addition to the two lost cannon, two more had had to be spiked and abandoned because the starving artillery horses were too weak to drag them any farther.

Lawrence eventually located the missing Mrs. Boyd but saw little other cause for cheerfulness. The conditions in the camp were terrible, he reported, with “thousands of human beings and animals all promiscuously huddled together in such a dense mass that it was hardly possible to move through them.” That night the temperature dropped, according to an officer’s thermometer, to minus ten degrees Fahrenheit. “Who can adequately describe the horror and sufferings of such a situation?” Lawrence asked. Lieutenant Eyre also wrote of the “monstrous, unmanageable, jumbling mass” and how night closed over the frozen, huddled people “with its attendant trains of horrors—starvation, cold, exhaustion, death.” A sergeant major told how some sepoys “
burnt the cane foundations of their caps and the butts of their muskets to get a little warmth, some of them suffering so much from the cold that he saw them thrust their poor frost-bitten hands into the fire until they were charred.
” A group of officers crouched over the ashes of a pistol case they had burned and drank wine to drive out the cold. At dawn the next morning, 8 January, further frozen corpses were found lying on the ground.

Shortly after sunrise Elphinstone dispatched Skinner to negotiate further with Akbar Khan, who now demanded that the British remain where they were or advance only as far as Tezeen until confirmation came that Sale had left Jalalabad. He also asked for four hostages, specifically naming Shelton and Lawrence. Meanwhile, several hundred Ghilzai tribesmen had been observed massing around the entrance to the Khoord Kabul Pass, but Major William Thain had led the Forty-fourth in a vigorous bayonet charge and succeeded in driving them off. Several officers thought the action proof that even at this eleventh hour the British could “if properly led have driven the enemy like sheep into Kabul, and [them-]selves have occupied the Balla Hissar,” as Lawrence wrote. Elated by Thain’s success, some artillerymen who had discovered an abandoned cask of brandy and, in Lady Sale’s words, become “much too excited,” wanted to pursue the fleeing enemy. Their commanding officer abused them as “drunkards,” but the more tactful Sturt assured them that they were “fine fellows” and their bravery much appreciated but that their lives were too valuable to be risked. Lady Sale herself was grateful to be given a tumbler of sherry “which at any other time would have made me very unlady-like, but now merely warmed me” while “cups full of sherry were given to young children three and four years old without in the least affecting their heads.”

Pottinger himself had ridden off to tell Akbar Khan that the British would agree to halt at Tezeen and there await news of Sale’s evacuation of Jalalabad. He also offered himself as hostage in the place of Shelton, who was refusing to be handed over to the enemy. Akbar Khan agreed to modify his hostage demands. He would, he said, be satisfied with three: Pottinger, Lawrence and any other Pottinger cared to nominate. Pottinger chose Mackenzie. By midmorning, in what must have seemed a bizarre change in their circumstances, the three officers found themselves breakfasting on a hillside with Akbar Khan, who had courteously invited them to join him after requesting his men to relieve them of their pistols and rifles.

At about midday the retreating British army, in Eyre’s words, “a living mass of men and animals,” was again in motion toward the forbidding five-mile-long Khoord Kabul Pass, “shut in on either hand by a line of lofty hills, between whose precipitous sides the sun at this season could dart but a momentary ray. Down the centre dashed a mountain torrent, whose impetuous course the frost in vain attempted to arrest, though it succeeded in lining the edges with thick layers of ice, over which the snow lay consolidated in slippery masses.” Eyre added, “The idea of threading the stupendous pass before us, in the face of an armed tribe of bloodthirsty barbarians, with such a dense, irregular multitude was frightful and the spectacle then presented by that waving sea of animated beings, the majority of whom a few fleeting hours would transform into a line of lifeless carcasses to guide the future traveller on his way, can never be forgotten by those who witnessed it.”

Elphinstone believed that he had secured a cease-fire from Akbar Khan, who had promised to clear the pass of Ghilzais. However, either Akbar Khan’s authority over the Ghilzais was not what he claimed, or he had lied.
²⁴
Lady Sale described how the force—“the baggage mixed up with the advance guard and the camp followers surging ahead in terror”—had barely advanced half a mile into the pass before Ghilzais concealed behind small stone breastworks (
sangars
) began firing on them while others closed in, cutting and slashing with their long knives. Terrified men, women and children splashed through the icy stream, slithering and sliding over the snowy ground in a desperate attempt to get away. A survivor described how “
dreadful indeed was the slaughter; wounded men covered with blood, vainly endeavoured to obtain a safer place in the advance, and only rendered the confusion greater. Baggage, ammunition, and even children were deserted, and to get out of the pass seemed the object of all.
”