The Dark Defile (32 page)

At one point the pass became “
completely choked
.” Soldiers were trapped beneath heavy fire from Afghans on the heights above. Even when able to advance, some were too numb with cold to be able to discharge their muskets to dislodge the attackers. The fleeing mass had to cross the Kabul River no fewer than twenty-eight times in their bid to reach the end of the pass. Lieutenant Sturt rode back to help another officer whose horse had been shot from under him, only to be shot himself in the groin and unhorsed. Ghilzais would have hacked him to pieces but for Lieutenant Mein, who, though wounded himself, stayed by his side until a sergeant came to help him. Together they dragged Sturt on a quilt through the remainder of the pass and then on ponyback into the camp. Here doctors admitted they could do nothing for him.

Of the British women, Mrs. Eyre cleared the pass quickly because her horse took fright and bolted. Lady Sale and her daughter also got through speedily by urging their mounts on “as fast as they could go over a road where, at any other time, we should have walked our horses very carefully.” “Fortunately,” she wrote, “[I have] only one [musket] ball in my arm; three others passed though my poshteen near the shoulder without doing me any injury. The party that fired … was not above fifty yards from us.” Most of the rest of the British women had by now exchanged their palanquins for panniers on camels led by sepoys. Their speed was at best two miles an hour. During the harrowing journey through the pass, several lost their children, temporarily or permanently. Afghans seized Captain Boyd’s youngest son after the camel on which he was traveling was shot. However one young woman, Mrs. Mainwaring, clung doggedly to her child after the camel carrying them was hit. Lady Sale, who did not give praise lightly, described how she “not only had to walk a considerable distance with her child in her arms through the deep snow, but had also to pick her way over the bodies of the dead, dying and wounded … and constantly to cross the streams of water, wet up to the knees, pushed and shoved about by men and animals, the enemy keeping up a sharp fire and several persons being killed close to her.”

Lieutenant Eyre estimated that three thousand soldiers and camp followers died in the pass that day. The victory went down in Afghan folklore. According to some villagers more than a century later: “
When the battle entered the Khoord Kabul valley the British troops lost many of their people. Some were killed by the water, some by swords, some by guns but all by the hand of Allah.
” The three officer hostages, Lawrence, Pottinger and Mackenzie, saw for themselves the full horror of what was happening when some hours later their captors—a group of thirty horsemen in whose charge Akbar Khan had left them while he himself rode ahead, professedly to stop the Ghilzais’ attack—led them into the pass. A massacre was under way. Lawrence described the scene: “Sepoys and camp followers were being stripped and plundered on all sides, and such as refused to give up their money and valuables were instantly stabbed or cut down by the ruthless enemy with their long knives. On seeing us the poor creatures cried out for help, many of them recognising me and calling out to me by name. But what could we do? We ourselves were quite helpless.” They passed the bodies of children hacked in two and other corpses stripped naked with their throats cut ear to ear. Nearing the middle of the Khoord Kabul Pass, they found an abandoned gun and around it many more bodies.

Despite
their escorts, the hostages soon found themselves in danger as Ghilzai tribesmen clustered around. The tribesmen, according to Lawrence, “demanded that we should be given up to them for a sacrifice, brandishing their long blood-stained knives in our faces and telling us ‘to look on the heaps of carcasses around us, as we should soon be ourselves among them.’ ‘You came to Kabul for fruit, did you? How do you like it now?’ they cried.” So worried were their escorts that they concealed the officers beneath the shadows of some overhanging rocks until, with darkness falling, the tribesmen began turning for home with their spoils. When they rode on again, a wounded English sergeant cried out to them for help. At first Lawrence thought he had only lost his left hand, but, raising him up, he found that “from the nape of his neck to his backbone, he had been cut in pieces.” When Lawrence said there was nothing he could do for him, the man begged him to shoot him, but even this, Lawrence had to tell him, he could not do, to which the man gasped out, “Then leave me to die.”

The captives were, however, able to help Captain Boyd’s little son, brought to them on Akbar Khan’s orders, and the two-year-old son of a private, taken from the arms of his dead mother lying blood-spattered on the ground. They also took charge of Mrs. Bourne, the pregnant wife of another private, whom one of Akbar Khan’s men had saved from a Ghilzai as he was about to cut off her fingers for her rings. Mackenzie could scarcely persuade her to mount behind him on his horse she was “so stupefied from fear and cold.” The officers wrapped her in a sheepskin coat, tying the sleeves of it together in front, but Mackenzie wrote of the difficulty of preventing her petticoats from riding up as they continued on their journey. She was so thirsty that he felt her licking the snowflakes falling on his shoulders. Finally, long after darkness had fallen, the captives and their escorts reached a small fort, where, after a scarcely digestible meal of a sheep’s tail boiled in water and some half-baked bread, they covered themselves in sheepskins and tried to sleep.

Just beyond the far end of the Khoord Kabul Pass, those who had made it through were bivouacking in the thickly falling snow without food or fuel at an altitude of 7,200 feet. Only four tents remained to them. Elphinstone had one, and the others were supposedly meant for the women and wounded. The dying Sturt, calling desperately for water, was sharing one of them with thirty others, including his wife and mother-in-law, who were trying to ease his sufferings. Throughout the night the wounded Lieutenant Mein went to and fro to fetch water for him from a nearby stream, which Mackenzie was later told was running red with blood. He described how even the most fastidious of the women eagerly drank the blood-stained water as “all they could get.” Many more perished that night from the bitter cold. Another officer wrote of his shock on waking to discover that two sepoys had frozen to death at his feet, having crept close trying to gain a little warmth from the edges of the
poshteen
that was covering him.

At first light the next morning, 9 January, many of the troops and camp followers moved off without waiting for orders, convinced their only chance of survival lay in pushing on quickly, though some were so frostbitten they could scarcely put a foot to the ground. Lady Sale described “the only order appearing to be, ‘Come along; we are all going, and half the men are off, with the camp followers in advance!’ ” The rest of the force followed at eight A.M. Sturt died soon after, his end hastened by being jolted about in a pannier on a camel. Lady Sale and her daughter “had the sorrowful satisfaction of giving him Christian burial” in the snowy ground. He would be the only member of the entire force to receive such rites during the retreat. In the midst of this pitiful confusion, Akbar Khan sent a message to Elphinstone again promising provisions and protection if the force would halt. Ignoring Shelton’s oft-made objections that delay would cause the total destruction of the column, Elphinstone sent orders that it was to halt. Remarkably enough, people obeyed, though “
the general feeling was that there was no hope left.
”

That morning Lawrence and the hostages were taken to the nearby Khoord Kabul Fort, where Akbar Khan, clearly choosing his words with care, told them that he had a suggestion to make that, though motivated purely by feelings of humanity, he feared might be misconstrued. Clearly, he said, given the events of the previous day, the British could no longer protect the helpless women and children. Therefore he proposed that “
the ladies and their husbands, the children, and the wounded officers should be made over to him,
” promising to keep them safe and later to send them under escort to Jalalabad. By
ladies
, Akbar of course meant the European women. He had no interest in female camp followers or the sepoys’ families. Neither did the officers, men of their time, suppose he meant anything else. Though they may have been moved by the plight of the camp followers and sepoys’ wives and children, whose suffering was even greater and whose numbers were far larger, it seems never to have occurred to any of them to intercede on their behalf.

Having seen such terrible sights along the way, the officers unhesitatingly approved the scheme, and Captain Skinner, arriving soon after from the British camp, also eagerly endorsed it. The officer hostages begged him to lose no time in returning to speak to Elphinstone. Though handing over women and children to an enemy who had so far failed to keep faith caused him some soul-searching, the chance of sparing them further suffering prompted Elphinstone to agree to the scheme. That same evening Skinner returned, bringing with him a party including Lady Macnaghten, Lady Sale, Mrs. Sturt, Mrs. Boyd, Mrs. Anderson, Mrs. Eyre, Mrs. Waller, Mrs. Trevor, Mrs. Mainwaring and Mrs. Ryley, some with their husbands and children, and several others: Sergeant Wade and his family, Captain Troup and Lieutenant Mein, who were both wounded, two unnamed wives of private soldiers, as well as Mackenzie’s faithful Indian Christian servant, Jacob.

Though he had vigorously supported the scheme, now that it had come to pass, Lawrence found it “distressing beyond expression to see our countrywomen and their helpless children thus placed in the power of these ruffians. The extreme suffering of mind and body they had endured … was apparent in their worn and grief-stricken faces, many of them during these wretched days had tasted nothing but some dry biscuits and some sherry or brandy.” With the exception of the formidable Lady Macnaghten, who had saved all her property, “they had lost everything except the clothes they were wearing.” Lady Sale and her daughter, overwhelmed with grief at Sturt’s death and scarcely in a fit state to decide whether to accept Akbar Khan’s protection, had recognized there was “but faint hope of our ever getting safe to Jalalabad” and “followed the stream.”

Chapter Sixteen

When Burnes came into this country, was not
your
father entreated by us to kill him; or he would go back to Hindustan, and on some future day return with an army and take our country from us? He would not listen to our advice, and what is the consequence? Let us, now that we have the opportunity, take advantage of it, and kill those infidel dogs.

—AFGHAN CHIEFS TO AKBAR KHAN, 11 JANUARY 1842

On the morning of 10 January 1842, after a fourth night in subzero temperatures following their all-day halt near Khoord Kabul, the remnants of Elphinstone’s force set out once more for Jalalabad. Sergeant Major Lissant described men whose frostbitten feet had “
become like large burnt pieces of wood
” and whose hands were “so dreadfully swollen and cracked they could not hold, much less use a musket.” With many also suffering the agonies of snowblindness—like having grains of hot sand trapped beneath the eyelids—for which they tried rubbing their inflamed eyes with snow, they were easy prey. As they entered the narrow Tunghee Tareekee Gorge, a fifty-yard-long pinch-point, Ghilzais lying in wait on the hills above fired volley after volley at them. Survivors later told Eyre: “Fresh numbers fell at every volley, and the gorge was soon choked with the dead and dying: the unfortunate sepoys, seeing no means of escape, and driven to utter desperation, cast away their arms and accoutrements, which only clogged their movements without contributing to their defence, and along with the camp followers fled for their lives. The Afghans now rushed down upon their helpless and unresisting victims sword in hand and a general massacre took place. The last small remnant of the Native Infantry regiments were here scattered and destroyed; and the public treasure with all the remaining baggage fell into the hands of the enemy.”

The leading troops managed to push on through the gorge and after five miles halted to allow the rest to catch up. Few appeared. Nearly the entire main and rear columns had been destroyed. Fifteen officers and 300 men had died in the defile, reducing the fighting force to fifty horse-artillerymen with one howitzer, 250 men of the Forty-fourth infantry regiment and 150 cavalrymen both British and Indian and a few other sepoys. Perhaps between 3,000 and 4,000 camp followers remained, their disorder and panic continuing to hamper the soldiers’ movements.

Akbar Khan was still shadowing the retreat. A desperate Elphinstone dispatched Captain Skinner to demand why he was not protecting them as he had promised. Akbar Khan’s response, which probably had some truth in it, was that neither he nor their own chiefs could restrain the Ghilzais. Yet again he had a proposal for the British—this time that the surviving troops should surrender their arms and place themselves under his protection, though he said he could do nothing for the camp followers. Elphinstone refused, and the column descended into another defile, the three-mile-long Huft-Kotul Gorge, in whose shadowy depths they found the butchered remains of camp followers who had rushed ahead. Before long, Ghilzais attacked the rear of the column led by Shelton, but he rallied his men to return their fire and succeeded in driving them off.

At around four P.M. the retreat reached the Tezeen Valley, where Akbar Khan again tried to persuade Elphinstone to order his men to lay down their arms. Again the general refused. Instead, at Shelton’s suggestion, he decided on a forced march through the night in the hope of getting through the Jugdulluk Pass, some twenty-two miles away, before the Afghans had time to block or occupy it. After spiking the last remaining gun, to which they tied a wounded doctor too weak to go on whom they hoped the Afghans might take pity on, but who would freeze to death in the coming hours, the force moved off at seven P.M. The night was clear and bright and the snow not as deep on the ground as before. They covered the first seven miles without a shot being fired and began to hope that they might indeed slip away from their enemy. However, at Seh-Baba the Ghilzais attacked the rear, triggering panic among the camp followers, who surged forward in a great wave until the sound of further firing, this time from the front, caused them to stampede back again. In the confusion it was impossible for the soldiers to form up to defend themselves, and many fell dead or wounded.