The Dark Defile (38 page)

As yet the former prisoners had no way of knowing what had been happening in the wider world, and their first fear was that they might be attacked, recaptured and even sold into slavery. Johnson wrote they “were determined rather to die at Bamiyan than to perish in a dungeon in Turkestan” and immediately “laid in provisions, dug wells, filled the ditches round the fort with water, and were all prepared for a siege.” Pottinger, meanwhile, with remarkable confidence summoned local Hazara leaders to demand their allegiance. When the governor of the province refused, Johnson described how the former hostages “deposed him and set up another!”

On 15 September they learned that Akbar Khan was in flight from the British and decided to try to reach Kabul. Saleh Mohammed obtained some muskets so they could defend themselves if attacked, but when Lawrence asked for volunteers from the released private soldiers to form a guard, the men were silent, causing Lady Sale to exclaim, “You had better give
me
[a musket] and I will lead the party.” The next day the group of twenty officers, half of whom were wounded, fifty-one other ranks, twelve women and twenty-two children set out for Kabul, fearful that at any moment they might encounter Akbar Khan’s retreating forces. However, that night a messenger brought word that Shakespear was on his way to find them, and their spirits rose.

The following day, while they were resting, they saw a cloud of dust on the skyline. They hoped it was Shakespear but took up defensive positions until, as Lawrence wrote, the dust indeed “announced the advance of our friends.” An emotional Shakespear, dressed in Afghan clothing, rushed to embrace Lady Sale, only to be rebuked by Shelton, curmudgeonly to the last, for not first paying his respects to him as the senior commanding officer. Knowing that strong bands of Afghans were not far away, Shakespear urged the group to keep going as fast as they could. Three days later, they met Sale at the head of a party of dragoons. Lady Sale wrote with rare emotion of her reunion with her husband: “happiness so long delayed, as to be almost unexpected, was actually painful, and accompanied by a choking sensation which could not obtain the relief of tears.” Pollock had originally intended to dispatch Nott, not Sale, in Shakespear’s wake. However, Nott had reached Kabul on 17 September to find, to his disappointment, that Pollock had beaten him, and objected that his men were tired, adding, in a clear reference to Ellenborough’s previous lack of concern for the hostages, that since the government “
had thrown the prisoners overboard, why then should he rescue them?
”

On their way to Pollock’s camp, the former captives passed through Kabul, where, as Eyre noted, “the streets were almost empty, and an unnatural silence prevailed … We passed the spot where Sir Alexander Burnes’s house had stood.—It was now a heap of rubbish.—The garden in which he took so much interest and pride, was a desolate waste.” Reaching the camp, they were greeted by a twenty-one-gun salute, and soldiers crowded around congratulating them on their rescue. Captain Warburton was soon united with his Afghan wife and baby son, born in a Ghilzai fort between Jugdulluk and Gandamack eight weeks earlier. His wife had fled their burning house in the city after insurgents had set it alight on the day of Burnes’s murder. Since then well-wishers had concealed her, even though her cousin Akbar Khan had sworn to punish her for marrying an infidel; he had sent his soldiers to raid houses where she was believed to be hiding, “
thrusting in all directions with their lances and swords, trying to find out her hiding-place
” so that “she had often to run away from one house thus treated to take shelter in another,” as her son later wrote in his memoirs. The other British hostages in and around Kabul had also been rescued, including some two thousand sepoys and camp followers, many crippled through frostbite, found begging in the streets of Kabul.

All that remained was to deliver retribution. Pollock sent troops to seize and sack the fortified town of Istalif, where Amenoolah Khan was believed to have fled. There the soldiers released a further five hundred sepoys being kept captive in terrible conditions and exacted such revenge that a young lieutenant described how the brutality made him feel like a licensed assassin. On 9 October Pollock ordered his engineers to destroy Kabul’s seventeenth-century Grand Bazaar, where Macnaghten’s mutilated remains had been displayed, though he told them to position the charges in such a way that the surrounding portions of the city would be unharmed. According to one of Pollock’s men, the bazaar was still “
a splendid arcade, six hundred feet long, with two thousand shops, all roofed over from end to end with glass,
” where mouth-watering fruit and other delicacies were piled. Pollock’s decision to flatten it annoyed Nott, who thought it would have made more military sense to blow up the Balla Hissar. Nevertheless, the bazaar went up in smoke and flames. Despite Pollock’s orders that there was to be no looting, an officer described how when people heard the explosions “
the cry went forth that Kabul was given up to plunder. Both camps rushed into the city, and the consequence has been the almost total destruction of all parts of the town.
” Lal was deeply upset that the houses and shops of many who had befriended him were destroyed.

On 12 October Pollock and Nott led their forces from Kabul back toward India. Futteh Jung had wisely decided to go with them, leaving young Prince Shapur, another of Shah Shuja’s sons, on the throne. Though the British had nominally recognized Shapur, they left him neither military nor financial support. Akbar Khan soon arrived in Kabul to chase him from the throne, and in early 1843 Dost Mohammed returned from exile to resume his place as emir. About to leave India behind him, Dost Mohammed would tell his British “hosts”: “
I have been struck with the magnitude of your resources, your ships, your arsenals; but what I cannot understand is why the rulers of an empire so vast and flourishing should have gone across the Indus to deprive me of my poor and barren country.
”

The retreating British force reached Jalalabad safely, transiting passes that were, according to an officer, “
strewn with skeletons of men and animals
… Our gun-wheels ground to dust the bones of the dead … In some places the Affghans … had placed the skeletons in the arms one of the other, or sometimes sitting or standing against the rocks as if they were holding a conversation!” In Jalalabad they delayed several days to pull down the fortifications Broadfoot and his sappers had so carefully constructed before entering the Khyber Pass. Though the vanguard got through the pass without difficulty, Khyberees fell on the rear, picking off stragglers and carrying off baggage. A young lieutenant and an ensign became the last men to die in action during a conflict that had claimed so many thousands of lives.

In India Lord Ellenborough planned great celebrations. He issued a proclamation effectively damning Auckland’s policies and praising his own and—to emphasize further the contrasting success of himself and his predecessor—dated it 1 October, the day of Auckland’s Simla Manifesto announcing the British invasion of Afghanistan four years earlier. Ellenborough also issued a note to the princes of India glorifying the return to India of the gates of Somnath, “
so long the memorial of your humiliation.
” The gates were eventually discovered to be not the originals but later replicas of those plundered from India, and they were ignominiously dumped in a warehouse in Agra.

The governor-general
traveled from Simla to greet the returning British troops in December 1842 as they crossed the Sutlej River over a bridge of boats. At Ferozepore—where in 1838 the Army of the Indus had paraded before Lord Auckland and Ranjit Singh—Ellenborough had ordered the erection of a ceremonial bamboo arch flanked by an honor guard of gorgeously caparisoned elephants, through which the troops—many openly amused at the extravagance of it all—marched. Spectators might have been forgiven for believing they were witnessing the celebration of a great victory rather than an epilogue to failure, as the Reverend Gleig observed: “the end of a war begun for no wise purpose, carried on with a strange mixture of rashness and timidity, and brought to a close, after suffering and disaster, without much of glory attaching either to the government which directed, or the great body of the troops which waged it.”

*
Mohan Lal later became a vocal critic of the errors made by the British administration in India during the Afghan campaign. His frankness won him few favors in India, but the home government in Britain rewarded his services with a handsome pension of one thousand pounds a year. He died in Delhi in 1877 at the age of sixty-five.

Epilogue

Remember the rights of the savage as we call him … remember the happiness of his humble home … the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan among the winter snows is as inviolable in the eyes of Almighty God as can be your own.

—WILLIAM GLADSTONE, PRIME MINISTER OF BRITAIN, 1879

Now was the time for analysis and blame-sharing. Sir Jasper Nicolls, commander in chief in India, wrote to Ellenborough, succinctly listing eight reasons for the campaign’s failure.

His reasons, all valid, contain a mix of the political and the military, the strategic and the tactical. There is no doubt that the military disaster on the scale that occurred on the retreat from Kabul could have been avoided by better leadership of the army in Kabul.

Back in Britain, politicians and others concentrated on the political and moral aspects, both more subjective and more difficult to analyze. Sir John Kaye, the historian who collected many of the primary documents and indeed published in full those that had been expurgated or omitted from the government’s publication justifying the war in 1839, saw the hand of God in the outcome: “
The calamity of 1842 was retribution sufficient
… to stamp in indelible characters upon the page of history, the great truth that the policy which was pursued in Afghanistan was unjust, and that, therefore, it was signally disastrous. It was … an unrighteous usurpation, and the curse of God was on it from the first. Our successes at the outset were a part of the curse. They lapped us in false security, and deluded us to our overthrow. This is the great lesson … ‘The Lord God of recompenses shall surely requite.’ ”

Henry Lushington
, another commentator, wrote in a book-long analysis of the conflict in 1844: “We entered Afghanistan to effect a change of dynasty—we withdrew from it professing our readiness to acknowledge any government which the Afghans may themselves think fit to establish. We entered it above all to establish a government friendly to ourselves. Are the Afghans our friends now?… Except for the anarchy we have left in the place of order, the hatred in the place of kindness, all is as it was before … The received code of international morality is not even in the nineteenth century very strict. One principle however seems to be admitted in the theory, if not the practice of civilised men, that an aggressive war—a war undertaken against unoffending parties with a view to our own benefit only—is unjust, and conversely that a war to be just must partake the character of a defensive war. It may be defensive in various ways … either preventing an injury which it is attempted to inflict, or of exacting reparation for one inflicted, and taking the necessary security against its future infliction but in one way or other defensive it must be.” He could find no justification for the campaign being a defensive war since “the Afghans had not injured us either nationally or individually.” He believed that individuals could not place the blame for the war solely on the government: “The crime … is one of which the responsibility is shared by every Englishman. It is no new thing to say that a nation and especially a free nation is generally accountable for the conduct of its government.”

Lushington placed particular emphasis on the impact of misjudgment. “The great error of Sir William Macnaghten,” he wrote, “appears to us to have been the attempt to bestow too soon and without sufficient means of coercing those who had hitherto lived at the expense of their weaker neighbours, the unappreciated blessings of an organised and powerful government upon the people of Afghanistan … We have received a severe lesson which we may make a useful one if we choose to learn from it well, if not we shall perpetrate injustices again and again.”

A report produced while the war was still in progress by one of the committees of the East India Company, which, as Hobhouse had confessed, had been largely ignored in the conduct of the war, stated, “
This war of robbery is waged by the English government through the intervention of the government of India without the knowledge of England or of Parliament … and therefore evading the check placed by the constitution on the exercise of the prerogative of the crown in declaring war. It presents, therefore, a new crime in the annals of nations—a secret war. It had been made by a people without their knowledge, against another people who had committed no offence. Effects …: loss of England’s character for fair dealing; loss of her character of success; the Mussulman population is rendered hostile.
” The
Times
in May 1842 commented, “This nation spent £15 million on a less than profitable effort after self-aggrandisement in Afghanistan, and spends £30,000 a year on a system of education satisfactory to nobody.” However, calls for a full parliamentary inquiry into the background to the war and into the doctoring of the government papers, led by, among others, a newly elected Tory member of Parliament named Benjamin Disraeli, came to nothing.