The Dark Defile (33 page)

Dawn was breaking on 11 January when the survivors reached Kutter-Sung—still ten miles from their goal of Jugdulluk. After a brief halt to allow the rearmost to catch up, Elphinstone ordered his men onward again after they had bade farewell to those too weak to continue. These included Surgeon General Dr. Duff, who, after being badly wounded in the left hand, had directed its amputation by another doctor wielding a penknife. Elphinstone again hoped the Afghans might spare the lives of those left behind, but all were to be murdered. As the depleted column marched on, it was yet again attacked from the rear. Shelton and his men once more held off the attackers while the rest of the column struggled to the village of Jugdulluk at the entrance to the pass. As heavy, one-and-a-half-ounce, jezail balls fired by Afghan sharpshooters hissed around them, Elphinstone—perhaps hoping to cause a distraction that would help Shelton and his men—ordered twenty of his mounted officers “
to form line and show a front.
” While they did so a bullet smashed the jaw of the adjutant general, Captain Grant. As Grant slumped forward in his saddle, Captain Johnson caught him and lowered him to the ground. However, the line held until Shelton and his rear guard—fighting all the way—at last reached them, and they all took cover behind the walls of a ruined fort.

More and more Ghilzais had been occupying the surrounding heights, and their fire kept the troops pinned down behind the walls. As the hours passed, hunger and thirst tormented them. Although a stream was only 150 yards away, any attempt to reach it to drink meant death. Instead, as Johnson described, “Some snow was on the ground, which was greedily devoured; but instead of quenching, it increased our thirst.” During a lull in the firing, Elphinstone sent Johnson to see whether the camp followers had any beasts left. Discovering three bullocks, he had them butchered and distributed among the starving European soldiers, who devoured the flesh “
raw, and still reeking with blood.
”

A party of Afghan horsemen had meanwhile been observing events from a distance, and one of them now approached to say that they were Akbar Khan’s men. Elphinstone sent Skinner to demand of Akbar Khan yet again why he was not restraining the Ghilzais. While Skinner was away, the Ghilzai attack intensified. The storm of bullets so terrified some camp followers that they ran out into the open, to be struck down immediately. Army paymaster Captain Bygrave, at the head of fifteen men of the Forty-fourth, their bayonets fixed, succeeded in chasing some Afghans from the nearby hills, and several times cavalrymen charged out to dislodge the enemy. The latter sorties also provided the chance of some food. Sergeant Major Lissant described how “as the horses fell both officers and men stripped their flesh off.”

Toward late afternoon, Skinner returned with an invitation from Akbar Khan to Elphinstone and Shelton to join him at a conference with the chiefs at his camp two miles away. With the force now reduced to some 150 men of the Forty-fourth, 16 dismounted members of the Horse Artillery, 25 cavalry troopers and a few sepoys, and with little ammunition left, Elphinstone and Shelton agreed to go, taking the Persian-speaking Johnson as their interpreter. Sepoy Sita Ram wrote of the men’s amazement that Elphinstone should put himself in Afghan hands after what had happened to Burnes and Macnaghten, and wrote that “when the General
sahib
left all discipline fell away.”

Elphinstone and Shelton found their host in an apparently hospitable mood. He ordered a cloth to be spread on the frozen ground and offered his famished visitors mutton, rice and tea. When they had finished, he invited them to join the chiefs around a crackling fire, and discussions began. Elphinstone asked for food and water to be sent to his men. Akbar Khan agreed, though it was a promise he failed to keep. Perhaps knowing that Sale had not yet moved from Jalalabad, he then announced that the three officers must remain as further hostages to ensure Sale complied with the order to depart. Elphinstone argued that he must return to his men since it would otherwise appear as if he had deserted them. He offered to send Brigadier Antequil in his place, but Akbar Khan would not be swayed. That night he ordered a tent to be pitched for the three officers in which, wrapping themselves in their cloaks, they lay down and tried to sleep.

The next morning, 12 January, the conference resumed, with the frail Elphinstone reduced to pleading with Akbar Khan for the lives of his remaining troops. Akbar Khan promised to do what he could, but Johnson was shaken by the violent language of Ghilzai chiefs whom he overheard arguing with Akbar Khan. The chiefs seemed bent on exterminating the British, saying to Akbar Khan: “When Burnes came into this country, was not
your
father [Dost Mohammed] 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.
”

Akbar Khan’s father-in-law, the Ghilzai chief Mohammed Shah Khan, who seems to have been trying to assist him in reaching an accommodation with his fellow chiefs, suggested the British should pay them two hundred thousand rupees to guarantee their safe passage through the remaining passes to Jalalabad. Elphinstone readily agreed, but the chiefs were harder to convince. Meanwhile, Akbar Khan, who was denouncing the chiefs privately to the Britons as “dogs” who could not be trusted, proposed to Elphinstone and Shelton that toward dusk he and his own men should ride to the rescue of the surviving British troops and mounting them a man apiece behind them, bring them to safety. He claimed the Ghilzais would not dare attack for fear of hitting him or his men. Elphinstone and Shelton rejected the offer as dishonorable and—knowing how hard it would be to extract the soldiers from among the camp followers—impracticable.

Dusk was falling before Mohammed Shah Khan returned to tell Elphinstone that the chiefs had finally agreed, in return for payment, to allow his force to continue to Jalalabad unmolested. Akbar Khan said that he himself would ride with them, though somewhat ominously he advised Captain Johnson to summon any friends of his to join him in captivity rather than allow them to march on and face death—an offer Johnson refused. Elphinstone meanwhile wrote a letter to Brigadier Antequil ordering him to have the troops ready to march on at eight A.M. the next morning. At around seven P.M. that evening, before the letter had been sent, the sound of firing was plainly heard from the direction of the pass. In fact, Brigadier Antequil had already ordered the men to move out toward the Jugdulluk Pass. A dismayed Akbar Khan suggested “
that he and the officers should follow them
,” to which Elphinstone agreed. However, almost at once Akbar Khan changed his mind, saying that “he feared their doing so would injure the troops by bringing after them the whole horde of Ghilzais then assembled in the valley.”

Elphinstone and Shelton could not know what had been happening during their absence of more than twenty-four hours. Earlier that day, Captain Skinner, on his way to Akbar Khan’s camp, had been shot in the face by a Ghilzai and subsequently died in agony. Meanwhile, Ghilzai marksmen had been firing almost constantly on the British troops, picking off man after man. Antequil had decided he could wait no longer for news of Elphinstone and had given the order to advance under cover of darkness. Again the sick and wounded were abandoned. Sergeant Major Lissant found it “heartrending to hear the poor fellows calling on their comrades to bring them on and not leave them to be cut to pieces by the enemy.”

As Antequil and the depleted column of only some 145 men—about 120 men of the Forty-fourth and 25 cavalrymen—entered the two-mile-long Jugdulluk Pass, they suffered only the occasional volley of jezail fire. However, climbing in the darkness toward the head of the pass, they found two six-foot-high barricades of holly-oak blocking their way. According to Sergeant Major Lissant, all was immediately confusion, “horse and foot and camp followers all got into a heap, no one could move for some time … Numbers were trod to death, and the enemy getting among the rear slaughtering away at pleasure, the cries and screeches of the poor fellows were terrible.” Desperate men tore at the prickly branches with bare, cold and bloodied hands as the fighting toward the rear intensified. Though the men “fought like gods, not men,” in Sita Ram’s words, twelve officers, including Brigadier Antequil, were killed as they struggled to hold the Afghans off. Among them was the one-legged Captain Dodgin, who killed five Afghans before succumbing. Sita Ram himself was knocked unconscious by a jezail ball that grazed his head. He later came round to find himself slung across a horse and on the way to Kabul to be sold as a slave. “What dreadful carnage I saw along the road—legs and arms protruding from the snow, Europeans and Hindustanis half-buried, horse and camels all dead!” he later wrote.

Only a few—a party of fifteen mounted officers who, as soon as there was a gap wide enough, abandoned their fellows, riding over them in their haste to get away, and subsequently a larger group of fifty to sixty officers and European soldiers—got through the barrier. Captain Lawrence was later told that some men, angered by the selfishness and cowardice of the fleeing officers, had fired at them. Sergeant Major Lissant described how, with all discipline lost, “every man was acting for himself.” He and four others took refuge in a cave rather than march on.

The main body of fifty or sixty survivors hurried out of the pass toward Gandamack, several miles away, which they reached as dawn was rising. Among them was Captain Souter of the Forty-fourth, who had wrapped the regimental colors—thirty-six square feet of embroidered yellow silk—around his waist in a bid to preserve them. Ten years earlier, Burnes had admired the daisy-filled meadows of the Gandamack Valley and the surrounding pine-clad mountains, and only two years before, Captain Havelock had been captivated by its setting “in a delightful and well-watered valley, fertile, and planted with spreading mulberry trees.” However, to desperate starving men on the run in deepest winter, it was no haven. Afghans poured from their dwellings to surround the soldiers, who had barely two rounds of ammunition apiece and only twenty muskets between them.

Forced from the road, the troops climbed a nearby hill. A local chief offered to negotiate, and Major Griffiths, the senior surviving officer, rode off to see him. Meanwhile, tribesmen pressed yet closer around the troops, jostling them. Captain Souter described how, ostensibly friendly at first, the Afghans then “
commenced
snatching swords and pistols from the officers; this we could not stand but drove them from the hill, and the fight commenced again. After two hours, during which we drove the Afghans several times down the hill, our little band (with the exception of about twenty men and a few officers of different regiments) being either killed or wounded, the enemy suddenly rushed upon us with their knives and an awful scene took place and ended in the massacre of all except myself, Sergeant Fair, (our mess sergeant) and seven men, that the more than usual humanity displayed by Afghans were induced to spare.

“In the conflict my poshteen flew upon and exposed the Colour; Thinking I was some great man from looking so flash, I was seized by two fellows (after my sword dropped from my hand by a severe cut on the shoulder and my pistol missing fire) who hurried me from this spot to a distance, took my clothes from off me except my trousers and cap, led me away to a village, by command of some horsemen that were on the road, and I was made over to the head man of the village who treated me well, and had my wound attended to.” Major Griffiths and the civilian clerk he had taken with him as his interpreter were also saved.

The mounted group that had ridden ahead, abandoning their comrades, had been faring badly. Nine had been killed along the way, leaving six officers including two army doctors who managed to reach Futtehabad, only sixteen miles from Jalalabad. However, here the exhausted men made the mistake of pausing to eat bread offered them by the villagers. This allowed time for a party of Afghans to fetch their weapons and attack them. They cut two of the officers down at once. The remaining men fled, but, only four miles from Jalalabad, pursuing horsemen caught and killed three of them. The fourth man, the thirty-year-old Dr. William Brydon, had hidden behind some rocks during the pursuit and rode on alone. An assistant surgeon who had been seconded to Shah Shuja’s army, he was a resourceful man. On leaving Kabul, he had “
followed the Afghan custom of carrying a bag of parched grain mixed with raisins at their saddlebow
” to provide nourishment as he rode. Along the way, he had searched for wild liquorice roots to chew to lessen his thirst.

Suddenly, as Brydon described in a letter to his brother, “
I saw a great many people running towards me in all directions. I waited until they got pretty close and then pushed my horse into a gallop and ran the gauntlet for about two miles under a shower of large stones, sticks, and a few shots, in which I had my sword broken by a stone, my horse shot in the spine close to the tail and my body bruised all over by the stones.
” He was next attacked by an Afghan horseman, who, as Brydon flung his sword hilt at him, slashed at him with his
tulwar
, wounding him in the left hand and knee. “
[I] stretched down the right [hand] to pick up the bridle. I suppose my foe thought it was for a pistol for he turned at once and made off as quick as he could.
” The bleeding Brydon continued on his way. But “suddenly all my energy seemed to forsake me, I became nervous and frightened at shadows, and I really think I would have fallen from my saddle but for the peak of it.” Jalalabad at last came in sight, but, fearing that Sale and his force might have departed and it was in Afghan hands, Brydon dismounted and, crouching behind some fallen masonry, watched anxiously for a sign.

Sale and his garrison were indeed still there, though the past weeks had been testing ones. Since occupying Jalalabad in mid-November, they had been living in a state of constant watchfulness, sallying out to drive off groups of mounted Afghans when they pressed too close, strengthening their defenses and receiving a stream of disquieting information—some in letters, some merely rumors—about what was happening in Kabul. On 2 January a letter from Pottinger, dated a week earlier, had told them of Macnaghten’s murder and also that negotiations with the chiefs were continuing and that the Kabul force intended to fall back on Jalalabad shortly. A few days later a further letter from Pottinger, written in French for greater security, had warned that the chiefs were proving faithless and that Sale should stand firm until he received further instructions. Also at this time Sale and his men had learned from an intercepted message from Akbar Khan to a local chief that “
a holy war was proclaimed; and that all believers were adjured, in the name of the Prophet, to rise against the infidels
” and inciting him to “slay the chief of the Feringhees in Jalalabad.”