Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (46 page)

Macnaghten took Nizam al-Daula’s advice to reduce particularly the subsidies of the Ghilzai khans on the grounds that ‘They eat up thousands of rupees, all wasted quite unnecessarily: if these are stopped, no one will dare protest!’ However, ‘the Ghilzais did dare protest, and loudly too’, recorded Herati. ‘No ruler has ever, at any time, cut back or abolished our subsidy: we work for it, we guard the roads and the security posts, we restore stolen goods, it is not given to us for nothing and we will not accept any reduction at all!’ The Ghilzais had a point. Since the time of the Mughals, both the Ghilzais and the Khyber and Peshawar tribes had been paid
rahdari
[road keeping] to maintain the road and protect the armies and traders en route to India. The Khattaks kept the road open from the Indus to Peshawar and the Afridis from Peshawar to Jamrud. Every king had paid this subsidy, but now Macnaghten informed the chiefs that he was arbitrarily abrogating this agreement in contravention of customary tribal law and his own written undertakings. To make matters worse, as Herati noted, ‘Nizam al-Daula foolishly refused to hear the complaints of the chiefs, and spoke roughly to them: so they left him and at night, and fled from Kabul back to their hills to open the doors of sedition, raise rebellion, loot the caravans, and block the roads.’
56

Maulana Kashmiri in his
Akbarnama
presents the departure of the khans from Kabul less as an angry protest and more as a considered strategy. According to him, the Afghan sardars, fearful that their loss of salaries would be followed by forced exile to India or even London, decided to take action. They met and swore on the Qu’ran to rise up in rebellion so as to lure the bulk of the British troops out of Kabul, then fall on the British leaders when there were few soldiers left in Kabul to defend them:

When night fell,
all the Khans of Kabul came together

At the house of Abdullah Khan Achakzai to sit and confer

Now the remedy is in our hands, said they

The bow is ready and the arrow is in our hands

The waters of this storm have not reached our head

We must get ourselves ready for action

Dying by the sword on the battlefield

Is better than living in the prisons of Firang

Like the very devil, all evil is the work of Burnes

Concealed, he goes about whispering to every soul

So this very night Mohammad Shah Khan Ghilzai must go forth

With his tribesmen, brave and fierce

They will ignite the fire of battle

And throw brimstone upon the flames

They will sit hidden between the mountain valleys

And seize all the traders and travellers upon the road

So the Shah may send his army forth to make war

Then, when the army leaves, we will deal with Burnes . . .
57

As fate would have it, the beginning of the Ghilzai rebellion coincided with General Elphinstone going down with a new attack of gout.

A month earlier, Elphinstone’s surgeon, Dr Campbell, had inspected his patient and been horrified by what he discovered. According to his confidential report, ‘Genl. Elphinstone has been very seriously ill ever since his arrival here. His malady attacked him in all his limbs, making a perfect wreck of him. I saw him a short time since & very much astonished I was at the very great alteration in his appearance. He is reduced to a perfect skeleton, both hands in flour and water, and legs swathed in flannel and in a very low and desponding condition, totally incapable, I feel assured, of giving any attention to any affair howsoever important. I fear in my humble opinion his constitution is shattered beyond redemption.’
58
Elphinstone had sent the report to Auckland and asked to be relieved of his command; now he was finalising his plans for returning to India, and hence to retirement among his beloved Scottish grouse moors.

As part of the cuts, Macnaghten had also decided to further reduce the small British garrison remaining in Afghanistan and to send back to India ‘Fighting Bob’ Sale and his brigade. Sale was now instructed to make a detour on his return journey to knock down a few Ghilzai forts and quell any signs of the uprising that he encountered on his way out of the country: the tribes, Macnaghten wrote calmly, ‘were very kind in breaking out just at the moment most opportune for our purpose. The troops will take them en route to India.’
59

When Sale’s Orcadian Military Engineer, George Broadfoot, went to see Elphinstone to collect intelligence and finalise the plans to ‘chastise’ the eastern Ghilzais, he found the General ‘in a pitiable state of health, absolutely unfit for duty’, and so ‘lost and perplexed’ he ended up asking himself whether the General was still entirely sane.
60

He insisted in getting up and was supported to his visitor’s room. This exertion so exhausted him that it was half an hour before he could attend to business, indeed several ineffectual attempts to do so had excited him so much that I was sorry I had come at all . . . He said he did not know the number or strength of the [Ghilzai] forts [and] complained bitterly of the way he was deprived of all authority [by Macnaghten] and reduced to a cipher . . . [Later] I went back to the General and found him in bed and quite worn out . . . He told me once more how he had been tormented by Macnaghten from the first; reduced, to use his own words, from a General to a head constable. He asked me to see him before I moved, but he said, ‘if anything occurs, for God sake clear the passes quickly, that I may get away. For, if anything were to turn up I am unfit for it, done up body and mind, and I have told Lord Auckland so.’ This he repeated two or three times, adding he doubted very much he would ever see home, even if he did get away.
61

As he left, Broadfoot told the General about his own anxieties: he had tried to get the smiths and armourers in the city to manufacture some mining tools to be used in the siege of the Ghilzai forts, but they had all ‘refused to work for the Firangis as they were busy forging arms, for what purpose we have since learned, though Burnes said it was for the wandering tribes about to migrate’.
62

Macnaghten, meanwhile, had been characteristically unfazed by the departure of his army commander, by the intelligence of intense arms manufacture in the bazaars or even by the angry exit of the Ghilzai chiefs, writing to Auckland that they were simply ‘kicking up a row about some deductions which have been made from their pay’ and would be ‘well trounced for their pains . . . These fellows will require many a hiding yet,’ he wrote, ‘before they settle down into peaceable citizens.’
63

The advance guard of Sale’s brigade, around one thousand men, left Kabul on the morning of 9 October. They marched to Butkhak, a distance of fifteen miles from the cantonment on the Jalalabad road. That night, just after dark, as the troops were camped near the mouth of the pass, the sentries heard a strange sound echoing from the shadowy slopes and bare crags above them. Among the younger officers was Thomas Seaton, who was looking forward to returning to the pleasures of India.

Our mess-dinner was just over, when the native officers commanding the quarter guard sent in a sepoy to tell the colonel that a great number of people were to be seen assembled on the hill above us, and that he had heard them loading their juzzails . . . The ball is put into juzzails naked, and requires to be hammered a great deal with an iron ramroad to get it home. This hammering makes a loud ringing noise, that can be heard at a considerable distance and so unmistakable in its character that it can never be forgotten by those whose ears have once been startled by the unfamiliar sound. ‘Gentlemen,’ said the colonel, ‘you had better go and turn out your respective companies instantly, and as quietly as possible. They will be on you immediately.’

The Colonel sent parties round the camp to extinguish all the lights, and Seaton was ordered to take two companies to the foot of the hill where the Afghans were gathered, ‘with directions to keep the men as silent as death; to make them kneel or sit down, and not to fire a shot’ until the enemy descended from the hill. ‘I marched off at the head of my men, and had scarcely reached my post when the whole hilltop seemed to burst into flame from the simultaneous discharge of hundreds of juzzails. Shouts and yells of “Yelli, Yelli, Yelli” [short for Ya Allah] at the same time rent the air, accompanied by howlings that would have done credit to a thousand jackals.’ This onslaught was maintained for upwards of an hour.

The long continued darkness and silence in our camp greatly puzzled the Afghans, especially as we did not attempt to return their fire. Imagining we had either run away or that their fierce fire ‘had sent all the sons of burned fathers to Jehunnum,’ they moved down the hill in two bodies to spoil the camp and slay the wounded, their progress being accompanied by fierce yells and shouts . . .

[Finally] we could just see them looming through the gloom. The men of my two companies had been sitting down on the ground, with their muskets between their knees, but the short word ‘Ready!’ brought them to the kneeling position; and at the word ‘Present!’ a volley from 170 men crashed amongst the enemy with awful effect . . . We had some forty men killed and wounded, and but for our colonel’s presence of mind and foresight, our loss would have been trebled.
64

When Macnaghten heard about the ambush he was furious. ‘Imagine the impudence of the rascals,’ he wrote. ‘Taking up a position with four or five hundred men in the Khoord-Kabul Pass, not fifteen miles from the capital.’ ‘Fighting Bob’ Sale was promptly sent off on 12 October with the rest of his brigade – around 1,600 men in all – to relieve the advance guard and reopen the passes.

Their first night at the mouth of the pass was quiet, and the following morning they marched at dawn into the narrow winding heights of the Khord Kabul. ‘No opposition met them until they were fairly entangled in the pass,’ remembered the chaplain, the Rev. G. R. Gleig, who was planning to return to India with the brigade.

Then from the rocks and precipices on either side, such a storm of fire opened as told of itself that the heights above were occupied in great force. So skilful too were the Afghans in the art of skirmishing, that, except by the flashes which their matchlocks emitted, it was impossible to tell where the marksmen lay. Rocks and stones, some of them hardly larger than a thirteen-inch shell, seemed to offer them excellent shelter. They squatted down showing nothing above the crag except the long barrels of their fusils and the tops of their turbans; and with such unerring aim were their shots thrown that, both in the advance guard, and from the body of the column, men began to drop.
65

It was already becoming clear, as an official report to Calcutta pointed out, that in the high passes ‘our regular European and Hindoostanee Troops fight against Afghans in their native hills to a great disadvantage. The superior agility of the latter enables them to evade pursuit and their jezails or long guns carry with deadly precision to a distance where our muskets are harmless.’
66
The ability of the Afghans to melt invisibly into the landscape also alarmed the British; as Sale reported to his wife, ‘until they commenced firing, not a man was known to be there’.
67
One of the casualties was ‘Fighting Bob’ himself, who had his leg shattered with the ball of a jezail within the first minute of the ambush. ‘I could not help admiring old Sale’s coolness,’ said his Brigade Major. ‘He turned to me and said, “Wade, I have got it,” and then remained on horseback directing the skirmishers until compelled from loss of blood to make over command to Dennie.’
68

Despite this, Sale’s force pushed on down the Khord Kabul Pass, reinforced by more troops from Kabul and taking increasingly heavy casualties as they went, Sale again directing operations, this time from a palanquin. The worst losses took place during another night attack a week later on 17 October. Around 5 p.m., one of the Tezin chiefs sent a note to the British ‘saying that they had arrived at the Tung-i-Tareekhi [the Dark Gorge], and that in two hours they would attack us. A polite reply was sent to the effect that we should be happy to receive the chiefs, and would endeavour to give them a suitable welcome.’
69
The note proved a stratagem: by telling the British to expect a frontal attack, and beginning to launch one, the Ghilzai managed to surprise the British when their main force appeared to the rear, where some of Shah Shuja’s newly recruited Hazirbash cavalry had been bribed to let them within the camp: ‘They were of the same tribe, and whilst the rest were fighting, these ever-ready gentlemen did a little work of their own, cutting downs surwans [camel drivers] and hamstringing camels.’
70

That night Sale’s brigade lost a further eighty-nine men, as well as much of their baggage and ammunition, which was removed to the Ghilzai fortress in Tezin on ninety of the Company’s own camels. The expedition which was supposed to chastise the Ghilzais turned out to have a very different victim to that intended: in the narrow web of the mountain passes, the spider had become the fly; and the hunters found to their surprise and discomfort that they had now become the prey.