The Dark Defile (21 page)

Elphinstone had arrived in Kabul to assume command in late April 1841, to be assured by the eager-to-depart Cotton, “
You will have nothing to do here. All is peace
”—a view not shared by Cotton’s Persian interpreter, Captain Henry Palmer, who, when offered the chance to transfer to Elphinstone’s staff and remain in Kabul, refused on the grounds that it would not be “
more than a few months before every European soldier is murdered.
” He was not the only one to have a sense of impending catastrophe. Not long after, Major Hamlet Wade had recorded in his diary the disturbing image that had filled his mind while watching Sale review his regiment: “
The colours of the regiment are very ragged, and when they passed in review I was suddenly startled by what I took to be a large funeral procession. What put such a thing into my head I know not, as I was thinking of very different subjects. I cannot help recording this, it has made such an impression.
”

Almost as soon as he arrived, Elphinstone was struck down by fever and chronic rheumatic gout and regretted ever coming to Kabul. The arrival in July of his second-in-command, Brigadier John Shelton, did nothing to cheer him. Like Cotton, Shelton was a veteran of Wellington’s Peninsular Wars, where he had lost his right arm at the Battle of San Sebastian, apparently standing unflinching outside his tent while surgeons cut it from its shoulder socket. Shelton was also a bad-tempered martinet with contempt for almost everyone else’s views except his own. He had reached Kabul after marching a relief brigade, including a Queen’s regiment, the Forty-fourth Foot of which he was colonel, up through the Khyber Pass with such severity that his bullying had sparked a brief mutiny. However, he had succeeded along the way in destroying more than a hundred forts used by rebel tribesmen.

Another to depart was Brigadier Abraham Roberts, the commander of the shah’s contingent who had disagreed with Macnaghten about how best to train and recruit an Afghan national army and been treated with scant respect by Macnaghten, who had considered the expression of his views little short of mutiny. As a consequence Roberts had resigned, to be replaced by the sixty-year-old Brigadier Thomas Antequil. Auckland, knowing that there had been, to say the least, faults on both sides, urged Macnaghten to treat the new appointee with more consideration.

It was soon obvious to all that Elphinstone and Shelton, who was to command the Kabul garrison, were grossly mismatched. Shelton was openly rude to the mild and courtly major general, whose response was to have as little to do with his second-in-command as possible. However, one matter on which both Elphinstone and Shelton could agree was the poor siting of the cantonments, where the main body of British troops was billeted. Elphinstone was so worried by their exposed position that he offered to purchase several surrounding orchards and gardens at his own expense so that they could be razed to deny potential enemies cover. When his offer was turned down—none of the extant records or memoirs explain why—he suggested purchasing the land to the south of the cantonments so that a fortress could be built there to hold weapons and stores. Macnaghten, himself a little anxious about the vulnerability of the cantonments, supported Elphinstone’s plan, and work began. However, when Lord Auckland learned it would cost £2,400, he at once ordered the project to be abandoned.

The growing desire for economies would be a crucial factor in the disaster about to unfold. The cost of the Afghan occupation was approaching £1.25 million per annum.
²⁰
In London the company’s Court of Directors and the Board of Control had early begun to doubt whether keeping an unpopular king on his throne was worth the cost. In December 1840 they had recorded their view that the restored monarchy would for years to come need British forces “
to maintain peace in its own territory, and prevent aggression from without
” and that “to attempt to accomplish this by a small force, or by the mere influence of British Residents, will, in our opinion, be most unwise and frivolous and … we should prefer the entire abandonment of the country, and a frank confession of complete failure, to any such policy.” To them, the only options were a speedy retreat or a considerable increase in military forces. Even after learning of Dost Mohammed’s surrender—news of which had reached London on 6 January, hastened on the last stage of its journey by the newly introduced French telegraph from Marseilles—they wrote again to Auckland stating that they had not changed their views.

When these letters reached Calcutta in March 1841, Auckland had convened his Supreme Council to debate whether the British should remain in Afghanistan. Auckland had neither the kind of strength of character nor the depth of experience to go against the advice of those on the ground in Kabul and to authorize a withdrawal. Therefore, bolstered by his council’s conclusion, albeit one reached with no great enthusiasm, that the British should remain, Auckland assured the Court of Directors and Board of Control that he would keep a strong force in Afghanistan while fostering the development of an effective Afghan army and discouraging any attempt by Shah Shuja to expand his territories. However, Auckland had not consulted Sir Jasper Nicolls, the military commander in chief in India, who was not in entire agreement. In his private journal Nicolls wrote that the Afghan occupation was untenable in the long term: “
We cannot afford the heavy, yet increasing drain upon us. Nine thousand troops between Quetta and Karachi; at least 16,000 of our army and the Shah’s to the north of Quetta. The king’s expenses to bear in part—twenty-eight political officers to pay, besides Macnaghten … To me it is alarming.
”

Macnaghten, though, was relieved; withdrawal from Afghanistan would have associated him forever with failure rather than success. Others too had their own interests to consider. Speaking in the west country of England in June 1841, Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston boasted that “
a distinguished military officer
” recently returned from Afghanistan had assured him that “accompanied by half a dozen attendants, but without any military escort, [he] had ridden on horseback many hundreds of miles through a country inhabited by wild and semi-barbarous tribes who but two years ago were arrayed in fierce hostility against the approach of the British arms … with as much safety as he could have ridden from Tiverton to John O’Groats.”

Meanwhile, Auckland had floated a bond in Calcutta to raise funds to pay for the costs of the occupation. Despite a favorable rate of interest, take-up was slow but eventually reached more than £2 million. Macnaghten was so divorced from financial realities that when he learned of the bond he assumed it was intended to raise funds for the British expeditionary force currently off the coast of China intent on forcing the Chinese to open their ports to Indian opium. However, Auckland left the envoy in no doubt that he too had to make economies. Lady Sale wrote in her journal of letters arriving from Calcutta by every post urging retrenchment. Macnaghten accepted that the cost of the occupation was “
an awful outlay.
” Perhaps that was why in August 1841, believing the tribes had by then been brought to heel, he canceled his earlier request to Auckland to send five extra regiments to Afghanistan and even suggested that “
part of those now in the country might be withdrawn.
” As a result, Brigadier Sale was ordered to take his brigade back to India, effectively cutting the Army of the Indus stationed around Kabul by almost a half. However, Macnaghten’s change of heart was very much against the views of Nott, watching events from Kandahar, who believed that “unless several regiments be quickly sent, not a man will be left to note the fall of his comrades.”

In Britain a series of poor harvests and a downturn in home demand for manufactures, together with rising government costs including those of the military, had led to an economic crisis. Sir Robert Peel, leader of the opposition in Parliament, derided the chancellor of the exchequer’s (treasury secretary’s) position: “
Can there be a more lamentable picture than that of a Chancellor of the Exchequer seated on an empty chest—by the pool of a bottomless deficiency—fishing for a Budget?
” In the early summer of 1841 Lord Melbourne, the Whig prime minister, called a general election, which Peel and the Tories (Conservatives) won. Peel succeeded Melbourne as prime minister.

Also at around the time of the election, Britain agreed to a treaty, whose other signatories included the Ottoman Turkish Empire and Russia, which stipulated that no naval vessels other than Turkish ones could transit the Bosphorus and Dardanelles, thus ending British concern that the Russian navy had free passage from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. This treaty, together with a further one signed earlier in 1841 guaranteeing Ottoman Turkey’s sovereignty, marked a further relaxation of tensions between Britain and Russia over the “Eastern question,” making the possibility of any Russian move toward India remote for the present.

However, many on both sides saw the détente between Britain and Russia as a pause, not a cessation, in their confrontation. The wife of the Russian foreign minister wrote to her husband, “We coax the English too much, they are always false brothers and desert you as soon as it is not in their interest to be with you.” The
London Morning Herald
declared of Russia, “A power driven by the spirit of insatiable conquest and whose dominance is based on darkness and error, does not seem to us to be the right ally for England in the settling of the affairs of other nations.” The
Times
thundered, “There is poison in the hilts of [Russian] swords and the blades are stained with the blood of the Poles.”

The news of the election’s outcome reached Lord Auckland, a Melbourne appointee, in India on 16 August. Four days later he dispatched a letter of resignation to Hobhouse in London, expressing his hope that he could sail home the following March. In this letter he noted that matters remained to be settled in India, and in regard to Afghanistan warned Hobhouse that Elphinstone’s health was failing and that Macnaghten, who claimed his health was also poor, should not remain much longer in Kabul. The following day, probably as a consequence of the change of government, he wrote to Macnaghten emphasizing that the situation of the British in Afghanistan was now much more at risk “
from financial than from military difficulties.
”

Macnaghten took the point and a little later made the fateful decision to cut the subsidies the British had earlier agreed to pay to the tribes controlling the passes leading in and out of Afghanistan. As Henry Havelock wrote, the payment of these subsidies—the equivalent of “protection money”—was integral to Afghan life. The tribes “cared not which of their rulers, whether Barakzai or Sadozai, lorded it in the Balla Hissar, provided they were left in their undisturbed enjoyment of their ancient privileges of levying tribute from caravans, or of mercilessly plundering all who resisted … or received from the existing Government a handsome annual stipend.” Macnaghten knew eliminating the subsidies might backfire, but decided that “
the necessities of his Majesty, and the frequent prohibitions I have received against further reliance on the resources of the British government, appeared to admit of no alternative.
”
²¹

The most ill-judged economy of all was to dock the payments to the Ghilzais who controlled the shortest route to India through the eastward passes, including the Khyber, even though, as Macnaghten admitted, they had been scrupulous in keeping their side of the bargain. For months, convoys and caravans “of all descriptions had passed through these terrific defiles, the strongest barriers of mountains in the world,” in safety, as Havelock wrote. In early October 1841 Macnaghten summoned the Ghilzai chiefs to Kabul. They received with apparent indifference the news that henceforth they would receive only half the annual agreed subsidy of eighty thousand rupees (eight thousand pounds) and left Kabul quietly. However, they at once occupied the eastern passes, declared jihad (holy war) and plundered the next caravan to attempt to reach Kabul.

The Ghilzai rising delayed the planned departure from Kabul of Sale’s brigade, together with a number of sick and wounded, back to India. The Macnaghtens were also intending to accompany it on their way to their new life in Bombay, as were Lady Sale and Elphinstone. The elderly major general was so crippled by rheumatism and gout that he could no longer mount his horse unaided, and openly admitted to his officers that he was no longer fit to command. He had been pressing Auckland to relieve him on the grounds that, as he had written to his cousin Mountstuart, his presence in Kabul was “
useless to the public service and distressing
” to himself. His replacement, at least temporarily, was—to Brigadier Shelton’s chagrin—to be Major General Nott, who was ordered up to Kabul from Kandahar.

Macnaghten stubbornly dismissed repeated warnings from Mohan Lal and his network of spies that the Ghilzai rising was not an isolated event but the forerunner of a more widespread and concerted insurrection. Increasingly, Shah Shuja’s writ scarcely extended beyond Kabul and its immediate hinterland.
²²
He also ignored the advice of Eldred Pottinger, the new political officer in Kohistan, who was convinced that the Douranee, Ghilzai and Kohistani chiefs had formed an alliance, and predicted a “
coming tempest
.” Just as he had dismissed the Douranees as “children,” Macnaghten assured Auckland that the eastern Ghilzais were rascals who would be easily trounced. Brigadier Sale was the man ordered to do the trouncing and to secure the vital route through the Khyber Pass before escorting his charges safely to Peshawar as previously planned.

On 9 October a vanguard of eight hundred men under Colonel Thomas Monteith set out from Kabul to secure the Khoord Kabul Pass, a narrow defile hemmed in by high rock walls some ten miles east of the city. Among this advance guard was Captain George Broadfoot, who commanded a regiment of Indian, Gurkha and Afghan sappers among Shah Shuja’s levies. His orders were to accompany Monteith with a hundred of his men, but worried by the vagueness of his instructions, he wanted to know whether the column was likely to be opposed and whether there would be forts to be assaulted so he could decide what equipment his sappers should bring.