The Dark Defile (35 page)

However, Auckland shortly learned that it was too late to stem the tide. On 30 January a dispatch from Jalalabad announced the annihilation of the Kabul force. Auckland could scarcely believe it, expressing his amazement that an army of well-trained, well-armed British troops could be wiped out by tribesmen with only muskets and spears. The news of the disaster unleashed a torrent of criticism in the press in India. William Peel, a naval officer and the son of the British prime minister, who was passing through India as part of Britain’s forces for the Opium War in China, complained in a letter home that he found the India press “
vile
” and that it was “astonishing that [in India] where we are but a handful and have scarcely any strength of our own, persons should be allowed to publish what they please and which must necessarily, as slander will always find more readers, and they are only intent on making money, turn with abuse and the most vulgar remarks upon the principal officers of the government.”

Auckland issued a proclamation denouncing “
a faithless enemy, stained by the foul crime of assassination,
” and setting out the measures he was taking. These included raising eight thousand new recruits and an additional regiment of irregular cavalry. However, as his private secretary John Colvin wrote to George Clerk that day, he did not intend “
to re-enter Afghanistan with a view to re-conquest, retaliation, punishment, or any other name by which a second invasion might be described,
” at least for the present.

A fresh reason for Auckland’s caution, in addition to his reluctance to commit Lord Ellenborough, was the news he had just received of a reckless and abortive attempt to force the Khyber Pass by British troops. Brigadier Charles Wild had reached Peshawar in late December with the four Bengal Native Infantry regiments sent by Clerk. Responding to Sale’s urgent entreaties and without waiting for further forces to join him, on 18 January he had advanced into the Khyber. Lacking artillery, he had taken with him a few ramshackle cannon lent him by General Avitabile, governor of Peshawar, who had also supplied him with some auxiliary Sikh troops. The Sikh guns had failed to work properly, the Sikh troops, who had a deep-seated fear of the pass, had mutinied and his own men had panicked under Afghan fire. Wild had been wounded, and the entire force had fallen back, confirming all Auckland’s fears about the dangers of acting in haste.

Fortunately, General Pollock was neither rash nor impulsive. On 5 February he reached Peshawar to find morale low and eighteen hundred of his troops in the hospital, many with malaria. His orders from Auckland were to do no more than secure the safe withdrawal of Sale’s garrison from Jalalabad and protect the frontier. These were, in fact, Auckland’s last orders as governor-general. On 28 February Lord Ellenborough’s ship anchored off Calcutta, and Auckland prepared to depart. In a letter to his old colleague Hobhouse he wrote of the unparalleled “
horror and disaster of what had happened.
” The situation in Afghanistan was “irretrievable,” but the governor-general did not blame himself since “the tone of all those whose observation should have been best, of Macnaghten, Burnes, General Elphinstone, Pottinger, was that of unlimited confidence in the growing improvement of our position at Kabul.”

Ellenborough, who had first learned “
the disastrous intelligence from Kabul of the murder of Sir W. Macnaghten and the destruction of the British and Native troops
” when his ship moored off Madras, discussed the issues with a “
greatly depressed
” Auckland during the two weeks before the latter embarked for home. Three days after his predecessor’s departure, Ellenborough wrote to Nicolls that future strategy “
rested
solely on military considerations … In the first instance regard to the safety of [the various garrisons] … and finally, to the re-establishment of our military reputation by the infliction of some signal and decisive blow upon the Afghans, which may make it appear to them, and to our own subjects and to our allies, that we have the power of inflicting punishment upon those who commit atrocities … and that we withdraw ultimately from Afghanistan, not from any deficiency of means to maintain our position but because we are satisfied that the King we have set up has not, as we were erroneously led to imagine, the support of the nation over which he has been placed.”

IN BRITAIN IN late 1841, Peel’s new government was deep in discussion about how to deal with the ongoing economic crisis that was being exacerbated by another harsh winter. Among the measures under consideration was the reintroduction of an income tax, first imposed as a temporary measure to fund the war against Napoleon and abandoned after his defeat. (The tax was reimposed in the summer of 1842.) As yet the government was still unaware of the Afghan disaster—the first reports of unrest in Kabul did not reach London until early January 1842. By late February the government knew of the danger to the Kabul force but not until 10 March did it learn that Macnaghten was dead and that some catastrophe had overtaken the garrison. The Duke of Wellington complained that “
there must have been either the grossest treachery, or the most inconceivable imbecility, and very likely a mixture of both.
” Yet even then, the full extent of the catastrophe was not understood. Reports in the
Times
suggesting disaster in Afghanistan met with public incredulity, even hostility. An officer wrote to the newspaper abusing it for publishing “
a tissue of bazaar reports injudiciously forwarded to Britain.
” However, on 5 April the paper published a private letter from Dr. Brydon to his brother Tom, written soon after reaching Jalalabad, that provided incontestable evidence of the army’s destruction.

By then the government knew the worst. On 31 March Wellington wrote to Ellenborough urging him to restore Britain’s fallen reputation and lamenting, “
Our enemies in France, the United States, and wherever found are now rejoicing in triumph upon our disasters and degradation.
” A week later, Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel, while approving such sentiments, wrote more coolly to Ellenborough, “
We shall lose nothing … by acting cautiously and deliberately—by securing ourselves against the risk of even greater disasters in Hindustan, or of reiterated failure in our attempt to inflict just retribution.
”

Ellenborough would not receive this advice for some time and meanwhile had to navigate his own course through the immediate and complex problems confronting him: how best to relieve Sale and extricate the other garrisons still in Afghanistan, how to rescue the hostages, what to do about the erstwhile British protégé Shah Shuja, still in the Balla Hissar, and how to demonstrate to the watching world that the British would not tolerate the massacre of their troops.

For the four hundred-strong British garrison in the citadel at Ghazni, it was already too late. On 6 March, after besieging Ghilzais had cut off the water supply, the commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Palmer, agreed to depart on the promise of safe passage to Peshawar sworn on the Koran. However, as soon as the garrison left the fortress it was attacked and, after suffering many casualties, surrendered. Ten officers were taken hostage, and many of their men massacred or sold into slavery. News of Ghazni’s fall reached Ellenborough in early April, and so seriously did he take it that almost immediately he left Calcutta to be closer to the northwest frontier and thus shorten the lines of communication.

At Jalalabad, as Sale had anticipated, Akbar Khan had indeed turned his attention to ejecting the British. Though he had needed time to raise sufficient troops, he had succeeded by reminding his fellow chiefs that this was jihad, writing, “
This is the work of God that has come to pass … so that the whole of Islam united with one heart have engaged in a war against the infidels.
” By early March he was blockading Jalalabad, though lack of siege cannon prevented him from launching a frontal assault.

At Kandahar the taciturn and determined Nott was also holding out. He had forcibly evicted some six thousand citizens from the city to make his position more secure. Nevertheless, he was besieged, and a relief force on its way to Kandahar via the Bolan Pass and Quetta was initially repulsed with heavy losses, only finally forcing its way to Kandahar in May.

At Peshawar Pollock was preparing his forces. Though he refused to be pressured by Sale’s appeals for help into advancing before his preparations were complete—a decision for which many would criticize him—he could at least reassure Sale that help was coming. On 31 March, after waiting for the arrival of cavalry, horse-artillery and sufficient ammunition—he was insistent that every man had two hundred rounds—Pollock set out. At three thirty on the morning of 5 April, as quietly as possible without bugle blast or drum-beat, the three columns of Pollock’s force approached the Khyber Pass.

As Pollock was well aware, the Khyberees, had constructed a giant
sangar
, a barrier of stones reinforced with branches and mud to block the mouth of the pass, where their white flag symbolizing “Victory or Death” was flying. He had decided the best tactic was one favored by the Afghans themselves: to occupy the high ground. “
Fancy English troops crowning heights … yet they can and will do it
,” an excited young officer who would lose his life in the action wrote the night before. Pollock’s plan was a success. While the Khyberees guarding the
sangar
still slept, British troops were already halfway up the cliffs overlooking the entrance. Outmaneuvered, the Khyberees fled, and the main force pushed through the pass scarcely having to fight, becoming the first troops in modern times to force the Khyber—others had bribed or negotiated their passage.

However, at Jalalabad, spies reported that Pollock had been repulsed. When, on 6 April, the garrison heard Akbar Khan’s guns firing a salute, they assumed these reports must be correct. In fact, the cannonade was celebrating the death of Shah Shuja. Under increasing pressure from chiefs on all sides—Barakzai and Sadozai—to prove he had truly broken with the British and was not “
sinking Islam,
” the king had unwisely agreed to quit the safety of the Balla Hissar to lead fresh troops against the unbelievers at Jalalabad. Early on the morning of 5 April, a son of Nawab Zaman Khan—seemingly without the knowledge or consent of the nawab, appointed king by the conspirators early in the rising and who had even sent his wife to Shah Shuja to promise on the Koran that he would be safe—had shot the king down as he was being carried in his royal litter to join the Afghan troops encamped in the hills outside Kabul.

Believing that the relief of Jalalabad was not, after all, imminent, some of Sale’s officers argued that same day that their best chance of survival was to attack Akbar Khan. Though initially reluctant, Sale finally agreed. Just then news arrived that Pollock had indeed forced the Khyber Pass, and Fighting Bob urged on preparations for the assault on Akbar Khan with renewed energy. On the night of 6 April soldiers were told to draw up wills, if they wished, “
to be attested by officers by midnight,
” and rubbish was strewn over the ground to deaden the sound of gun carriages being moved. Shortly before dawn the next day, three infantry columns supported by two hundred cavalry and artillery, marched through Jalalabad’s Kabul Gate. Akbar Khan’s camp lay two and a half miles away, but his men had occupied some forts between Jalalabad and his camp. Sale, astride a white charger, ordered Dennie and his regiment, the Thirteenth Light Infantry, supported by artillery, to attack the nearest of the forts while the rest pressed on. The prescient Dennie, who had foreseen the fate of his comrades at Kabul, met his own end during the assault. However, Sale’s attack on Akbar Khan’s camp succeeded. Though his cavalry resisted for a while, artillery fire finally drove them off, and Sale seized and burned the camp, where his men found four guns taken from the massacred Kabul garrison. The action would cause Ellenborough to glorify the men of Jalalabad as the “Illustrious Garrison” and to dash off a letter to Sir Robert Peel rejoicing that “
at last we have got a victory and our military character is re-established.
”

On 16 April Pollock and his men entered Jalalabad. Their arrival was regarded with mixed feelings. Thomas Seaton, an officer of the garrison, wrote, “
They had not arrived
in time to help us in our imminent peril, and they had lost the grand opportunity of joining with us to crush the man whose treachery had destroyed our brethren in arms, and so many thousands of unarmed camp-followers, whose bones were scattered in the Kabul passes … So when … Pollock’s force arrived, there was a hearty welcome, but a sly bit of sarcasm in the tune—an old Jacobite air—to which the band of the 13th played them in, ‘Ye’re o’er lang o’ comin.’ ”

Brydon was also not altogether delighted that Pollock had reached Jalalabad. Political officers had already been quizzing him about his account of the retreat, and he suspected Pollock would wish to hold a formal inquiry into what had happened. These suspicions seemed to be confirmed when Pollock sent his aide-de-camp to ask Brydon to call on him. Uncertain what to reveal about the behavior of some individuals during the retreat and especially about the decisions made by the commanding officers, the doctor turned for advice to a friend, Lieutenant Francis Cunningham. Together they decided what it would be judicious for Brydon to say to avoid, as Cunningham wrote, “
useless and unpleasant controversy.
” However, they had no need to be anxious. Brydon returned far sooner than Cunningham had expected with an amused expression. “He had not been asked a single question about the retreat, but had been closely pressed to testify to the actual death of a Dr. Harcourt of the HM 44th who had married Pollock’s daughter who would be unable to draw the interest on certain bonds without such a certificate.”

A WEEK EARLIER, the defeated Akbar Khan had set out north, taking the most important of his hostages with him. He might have been surprised to learn of a rumor circulating around the Jalalabad garrison that he “
intended to bring Lady Sale … before the walls, and put her to torture within sight, and so compel Sale to surrender.
” On hearing of it himself, Sale told an officer with deep emotion, “I—I will have every gun turned on her; my old bones shall be buried beneath the ruins of the fort here; but I will never surrender.”