The Dark Defile (34 page)

On 9 January a small band of Afghans had ridden up to the fort under a flag of truce and handed over a letter written in English, dated eleven days earlier and signed by both Elphinstone and Pottinger. It told Sale that it had been agreed with Akbar Khan that the British would depart from Afghanistan. Sale and his men were to march immediately for Peshawar since Elphinstone had undertaken that the Kabul force would not begin its own retreat until assured by Sale that his troops were beyond Afghanistan’s borders. “
Everything has been done in good faith. You will not be molested on your way; and to the safe-conduct which Akbar Khan has given, I trust for the passage of the troops under my immediate orders through the passes,
” Elphinstone had added.

Sale had called a council of war to help him decide how to respond to orders that Reverend Gleig called “
as peremptory as ever came from the head-quarters of an army.
” Though the letter was obviously genuine, Sale and his officers decided that it must have been written under duress. In view of this and the clear evidence that Akbar Khan was inciting the tribes to attack Jalalabad, it would, they decided, be highly imprudent to act upon it. George Broadfoot wholeheartedly supported the decision, writing in his diary, “Our duty in every case is clear—to stand fast to the last.” A few days earlier he had predicted the fate that would overtake the Kabul force if they were unwise enough to trust the Afghans, who would “probably inveigle them into the passes and attack them, and heavy indeed would be their loss without cattle, fuel or food, assailed night and day amidst the snow.”

Therefore, instead of preparing to withdraw, Sale wrote to the commander in chief in India, Sir Jasper Nicolls, that in the absence of orders from India he saw no reason to obey the instruction from Kabul, which had been forced upon the British “
with the knives at their throat.
” He asked for reinforcements from Peshawar before his ammunition and provisions ran out, and sensibly put his men to strengthening Jalalabad’s defenses further. On 12 January a message arrived reporting that the Kabul force had left the cantonments but been delayed at Boothak and that, though Akbar Khan was escorting the column, they feared he was trying to rouse the tribes against them. It was the last letter Sale would receive from an army that by then had ceased to exist.

The following day, 13 January, as Brydon was cautiously approaching, some of Sale’s men were digging a ditch around the northwestern bastion. Private Edward Teer, posted on sentry duty above the Kabul Gate on the west wall facing toward Gandamack, “
suddenly descried a dark speck
” and gave the alarm. Men grabbed their field glasses. According to the Reverend Gleig, they saw “
leaning rather than sitting upon a miserable pony, a European, faint, as it seemed, from travel, if not sick, or perhaps wounded. It is impossible to describe the sort of thrill which ran through men’s veins as they watched the movements of the stranger.
” The chaplain heard Colonel Dennie, who had been warning that “not a soul will escape from Kabul except one man; and he will come to tell us that the rest are destroyed,” exclaim, “Did I not say so? here comes the messenger.”

Cavalrymen galloped out to the slumped, swaying figure and, supporting him in the saddle, brought him in. Those gathering eagerly around learned that he was Dr. Brydon, “who at the moment believed himself to be,” wrote Gleig, “the sole survivor of General Elphinstone’s once magnificent little army.” Havelock described how “
his first few hasty sentences extinguished all hope in the hearts of the listeners regarding the fortune of the Kabul force. It was evident that it was annihilated.
” Brydon’s physical state shocked them. His body was a mass of cuts and abrasions, and his feet were so swollen with frostbite he could scarcely stand. Two days earlier he had lost a boot, and the freezing metal of the stirrup had burned his foot despite the twine he had wound around the stirrup. As for his pony, its legs were collapsing beneath it, and it died soon after.

Sale, whose thoughts must have flown instantly to his wife and daughter, at once dispatched cavalry to look for any other survivors, but “
not a straggler, however—not a living soul, man, woman or child—appeared,
” Reverend Gleig reported. They found only the mutilated corpses of Dr. Harpur and two of the officers who had been Brydon’s companions. That night and for several thereafter, Sale ordered night lanterns to be hung from poles around the ramparts, while “from time to time,” according to Gleig, “the bugles sounded the advance, in the hope that one or other of these beacons might guide some wanderer” through the darkness. No other Europeans came, but eventually about twenty sepoys reached Jalalabad. The bugle call, in the words of one of Sale’s captains, was only “
a dirge for our slaughtered soldiers.
”

Chapter Seventeen

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.

—AKBAR KHAN TO THE CHIEFS, FEBRUARY 1842

The main group of captives spent the nights of 9 and 10 January crammed into five dark rooms in the Khoord Kabul Fort, but compared to “the cold and misery [they] had been suffering in camp on the bare snow,” it was, Eyre thought, “heaven.” On 11 January their captors brought them toward Tezeen in the wake of the retreating British force. Though they could not know the full extent of the disaster overtaking the remnants of the Kabul force, they must have suspected the worst. “The snow was absolutely dyed with streaks and patches of blood for whole miles, and at every step we encountered the mangled bodies of British and Hindustani soldiers and helpless camp-followers, lying side by side … the red stream of life still trickling from many a gaping wound inflicted by the merciless Afghan knife,” wrote Eyre. Lady Sale described the “sickening” smell of blood and guiding her horse “so as not to tread on the bodies.”

Reaching the fort at Tezeen, the captives found Lieutenant Melville, who had surrendered to the Afghans the previous day having, Eyre noted unsympathetically, “received some slight sword cuts,” as well as some four hundred sepoy cavalry who had deserted to the enemy and were camped outside the fort. The next day at Seh-Baba—where the Kabul force had been attacked during its night-time flight toward the Jugdulluk Pass—gun carriages were still smoldering amid piles of bodies, including that of Dr. Duff, the surgeon whose hand had been amputated with a penknife. Camp followers sheltering among the rocks begged for food and clothing the captives could not provide. However, recognizing a wounded private, Mackenzie took him up behind him on his horse and when the horse tired, himself dismounted to walk through the snow even though one of his feet was badly frostbitten. They passed the night sixteen miles beyond Tezeen, crammed into one room and supplied with
chapattis
by an old woman who trebled her price when she saw how hungry the travelers were.

On 13 January—the day Dr. Brydon reached Jalalabad—they reached the village of Jugdulluk. Among the stone ruins where the British troops had crouched for shelter while Elphinstone and Shelton sought to negotiate with Akbar Khan, they discovered “a spectacle more terrible than any we had previously witnessed, the whole interior space being one crowded mass of bloody corpses,” as Eyre wrote. In some ragged tents the prisoners found Elphinstone, Shelton and Johnson, whom Akbar Khan had left there under guard after seizing them, and learned for the first time that they were also captives. The next morning, joined by Akbar Khan himself, the entire party was taken northward into hills, where “long glittering icicles” hung from the rocks.

IN JALALABAD, DEEPLY shocked by Dr. Brydon’s story, Sale feared that the triumphant Akbar Khan would soon attack the city. Indeed, he was so worried that he decided the best course was to attempt to negotiate the safe withdrawal of his garrison to India. Shah Shuja, in a bid to strengthen his position with the chiefs, had sent messengers with demands that Sale abide by the treaty between the British and the Afghans and depart. At a stormy council of war conducted over several days, Sale presented these as the justification for retreating. The majority of his officers initially supported him, but during the debate, in which “strong language” and “high words” flew, George Broadfoot argued passionately that retreat meant dishonor and managed to sway his fellow officers. Sale still disagreed but, finding himself outnumbered, gave in.

Fighting Bob’s hopes now focused on the arrival of reinforcements from India. Ever since reaching Jalalabad, he had been dispatching
cossids
with messages asking for reinforcements, written on tiny slips of paper which could be sewn into saddles or “
sometimes baked in a cake, sometimes inserted into a quill, which is concealed either in the beard or in an unusual receptacle behind,
” as a young lieutenant euphemistically described. However, his requests met with a mixed reception. At Government House in Calcutta, Lord Auckland was still unaware of the Kabul disaster, although warnings that all was not well had been reaching him for weeks. In late November George Clerk, a political officer posted at Ambala on India’s northern frontier, had reported unrest in Kabul and the murder of Burnes. On his own initiative, Clerk had already dispatched two regiments—the Sixtieth and the Sixty-fourth Bengal Native Infantry—across the Sutlej River to Peshawar, close to the border with Afghanistan. Worried that these might not be sufficient, he subsequently ordered two further regiments—the Fifty-third and Thirtieth Bengal Native Infantry—north as well.

Auckland had initially been annoyed when he heard of Clerk’s action. He doubted how a concentration of troops on the border could influence events in Kabul given that they could not reach the city until the snows had cleared the following spring. He was, anyway, opposed to rushing to commit further troops to Afghanistan. Lulled by Macnaghten’s optimistic reports, he believed that any disturbances in Kabul were minor and would soon be quelled. Furthermore, he was awaiting the arrival of Lord Ellenborough, his successor as governor-general, following the change of government in Britain from the Whigs to the Tories. He was well aware that the new administration—Prime Minister Peel and the Duke of Wellington especially—had always opposed the British invasion of Afghanistan. He was reluctant to commit them to further interventions of which they would be bound to disapprove.

At the end
of November, about a week after he had received Clerk’s letter, further reports of unrest in Afghanistan reached Auckland. He wrote to Sir Jasper Nicolls, “It seems to me that we are not to think of marching fresh armies for the re-conquest of that which we are likely to lose.” He still considered the number of troops in Afghanistan was sufficient to cope with the crisis and that reinforcements could not arrive in time to help. Therefore “safety to the force at Kabul can only come from itself.” However he conceded that he was glad the additional regiments had been sent to Peshawar as “they may afford a strong point of support either for retreat or for advance—and whether Brigadier Sale’s two regiments fall back upon them, or they advance to Jalalabad, there will be a respectable force for any object.” Nicolls, long opposed to the Afghan invasion, agreed, writing: “I really would not advise our forcing either Shuja or ourselves upon a nation so distant and in all respects so dissimilar both to our Sepoys and ourselves … that we have no base of operations has always been clear; but now, were we to march a reinforcement on the best horses, we could not be sure of carrying the Khyber Pass, and if snow has fallen, the road to Kabul would still be closed.”

On 4 December an account from Lady Sale detailing the deteriorating situation in Kabul up to 9 November shook Auckland. Perhaps for the first time he understood the peril. He immediately wrote to Macnaghten—a letter the envoy probably never received—that it seemed to him “
far too hazardous and too costly in money and in life” for the British to remain in Afghanistan in the face of “the universal opinion, national and religious,
” that they should leave, and that it was time to consider “in what manner all that belongs to India may be most immediately and most honourably withdrawn from the country.” Worry was by now taking its toll on the governor-general, who had hoped to sail home to England leaving a quiescent Afghanistan behind him. He was said to pace the veranda of Government House for hours in the daytime, and at night to lie on the lawn and press his face into the grass for comfort. His sister Emily thought that he looked ten years older.

Lack of reliable news sharpened Auckland’s anxiety. No official reports from Kabul reached him in December—only private letters from Jalalabad and Peshawar, often confusing and contradictory. In January he appointed General George Pollock, commander of the Agra garrison, to command the troops assembling on the border. The son of King George III’s saddler, Pollock was a capable veteran company soldier who had served in India since 1803. He had not been Auckland’s first choice. Despite Nicolls’s attempts to dissuade him, Auckland’s eye had fallen on a man in the Elphinstone mold: the elderly Major General James Lumley, then recovering from serious illness. Believing himself unfit for such a strenuous post, Lumley had sensibly asked to be examined by army doctors, who had agreed with him.

On 20 January Auckland finally learned of Macnaghten’s murder and of the British agreement to evacuate Kabul. His sister wrote, “
Poor Macnaghten’s
death has been a great shock; we knew him so well, and it has been such an atrocious act of treachery.” Auckland himself wrote that “
this calamity
” was “as inexplicable as it [was] painful” and immediately asked Nicolls to send another brigade to the border “to be prepared to march onwards if necessary.” However, he was contemplating only rescue—not retribution. Writing to the president of the Board of Control in London, he assured him, “
My present purpose is that only of gathering strength, and I will rather attempt to stem than immediately to turn the course of events.
”