The Dark Defile (36 page)

By then the hostages had been in captivity for three months, during which Lady Sale had continued to keep her sharply observed, unhysterical journal. In the first days, shunted from mud fort to mud fort, they had seen huddles of starving, naked people who, they were told, “had sustained life by feeding on their dead comrades.” However, on 17 January they had reached the stronghold of Budeeabad—belonging to Akbar Khan’s father-in-law, the Ghilzai chief, Mohammed Shah Khan—at the head of the Lughman Valley, some forty miles from Jalalabad. Here they had remained for eleven weeks, the officers and ladies sharing five rooms, while others found what shelter they could in stables and sheds. Some, including a sergeant major who had only joined the army “in consequence of having committed a murder,” according to Mackenzie, were so badly wounded that they died within a few days.

Lady Sale was glad that at last she could at least wash her face; “it was rather a painful process,” though, “as the cold and glare of the sun on the snow had three times peeled my face, from which the skin came off in strips.” She also described how the captives made coffee substitute from rice and barley. Their food consisted of rice, flour and the flesh of the two lambs killed daily that Lawrence rationed out between them. Despite the privations, the officers and ladies were attended by Hindu servants who had chosen to accompany them into captivity. However, a few weeks later, the Afghans insisted on turning out of the fort any servant too ill and frostbitten to work—and there were many. Eyre described how “the limbs of many of these poor wretches had completely withered … the feet of others had dropped off from the ankle.” He thought their expulsion “a cruel scene.”

As time passed, the captives grew desperate for news, trying to piece together what was happening from rumors and scraps of information. Akbar Khan himself told them that the only European to reach Jalalabad was Dr. Brydon.
²⁵
From the thin and ill-looking Major Griffiths and Captain Souter, brought to Budeeabad in mid-February, they learned of the final massacre at Gandamack, while Sergeant Major Lissant, also brought to join them, had his own stories of the retreat to tell. However, Akbar Khan did permit Lady Sale to correspond with her husband. Sale’s letters—though he must have written with care, knowing the Afghans would read them—reported that Jalalabad was holding out and that General Pollock was marching to relieve the garrison. Sale also sent his wife boxes of clothes as well as books to ease the boredom of captivity.

Clean clothes were especially welcome since, as Lady Sale noted, “very few of us … are not covered with crawlers.” They soon became adept at distinguishing different types of vermin—calling lice “infantry” and fleas “light cavalry.” Despite their common plight, some of the women showed little generosity. Mrs. Eyre, who only had one gown, asked another with several trunks full to lend her one but was refused. The owner of the trunks was probably Lady Macnaghten, who had somehow preserved most of her baggage, including valuable shawls and her jewels. Lady Sale also seems to have been selfish. Captain Mackenzie asked her to lend Mrs. Eyre a needle so that she could sew clothes from material sent by Akbar, but his diplomacy failed.

On 19 February a powerful earthquake struck. The bedridden Elphinstone was carried to safety in the arms of his servant, a private of the Forty-fourth. The ceiling of a room that Lady Sale had luckily just vacated fell in. Rushing outside to look for her daughter, she found everyone safe. She reported that even one of Lady Macnaghten’s cats was dug out alive from the ruins. Shelton admonished Mackenzie for a breach of military protocol “
in a solemn tone to make him feel the enormity of his offence.
” “Mackenzie, you went downstairs
first
today.” To which Mackenzie replied, “I’m sorry; it’s the fashion in earthquakes, Brigadier.” That night the captives slept in the open.

The same earthquake did much to nullify the work that Broadfoot had been doing to strengthen Jalalabad’s defenses. Luckily, Akbar Khan did not take advantage of the destruction to attack, and Broadfoot and his sappers were able to rectify the damage. Though Akbar’s camp out on the plains was largely untouched, many of his men had hurried home to their villages to check on their families. The quake was also felt as far away as Peshawar, disturbing some of Pollock’s young officers as they played quoits and obliging others “
to hold on to the ropes of our tents to prevent falling.
” It also raised a great dust cloud over the city, where houses and towers collapsed. Pollock himself had a narrow escape when a beam crashed down on a desk at which he had been working a few moments earlier.

In succeeding weeks aftershocks shook the earth, so that sometimes Lady Sale felt “a tremulous motion as of a ship that has been heavily struck by a sea” or the sensation “of a heavy ball rolling over our heads, as if on the roof of our individual room, accompanied by the sound of distant thunder.” Sometimes there were other alarms for the captives—rumors that Jalalabad had fallen, which made Lady Sale extremely anxious, and lurid tales of the cruelty of Akbar Khan, who, she wrote, “is known to have had a man flayed alive in his presence, commencing at the feet.”

The prisoners tried to judge their own situation from the attitude of their jailors, who were sometimes kind, sometimes talked of ransom but at other times robbed them and threatened them with being sold as slaves. On 6 April they learned of Shah Shuja’s murder, and three days later, the owner of their fortress prison, Mohammed Shah Khan, arrived to confirm stories they had already heard that Sale’s men had destroyed Akbar Khan’s camp. Mohammed Shah Khan told them that many of the chiefs wanted to kill them but that Akbar Khan was resisting. Instead, he intended moving them somewhere more remote from where the British could never rescue them. As the captives soon learned, Akbar Khan’s plans extended only to the most valuable of his prisoners: the officers and “ladies.” The soldiers, their wives and children were to remain behind.

On 10 April these choice hostages, relieved of their remaining valuables, left Budeeabad. Barely four miles into their journey, according to Lawrence, “a horseman was seen advancing from the south-east at full gallop, waving his turban and shouting out some phrases in Persian which threw our escort into the most intense excitement. They wheeled round flourishing their arms, and I really thought for a few minutes that it was a preconcerted signal for commencing our indiscriminate slaughter.”

In fact, the messenger was bringing orders from Akbar Khan to return the prisoners to Budeeabad because he feared the other chiefs might attempt to seize them. However, on returning to the fort they were ordered not to unpack and the next morning rode out once more to their uncertain future.

Chapter Eighteen

The object of the combined march of your army and Major General Nott’s upon Kabul will be to exhibit our strength where we suffered defeat, to inflict just, but not vindictive retribution upon the Afghans.

—LORD ELLENBOROUGH TO GENERAL POLLOCK, 23 JULY 1842.

Ellenborough’s satisfaction that Pollock had forced the Khyber Pass did not encourage him to be rash. On 19 April he instructed Nott to evacuate Kandahar and retreat via Quetta as soon as he was able—a “
peremptory order
” that came “like a thunderclap,” as Nott’s political officer Rawlinson wrote. Nott informed Ellenborough that as he was short of everything, especially transport—which he had repeatedly requested—the earliest he could march his troops back through Quetta was October.

The governor-general also instructed Pollock and Sale to move their troops from Jalalabad closer to the Indian border unless negotiations over the hostages or military considerations made such a step unwise. Pollock was horrified and wrote to Nott urging him to remain in Kandahar. The letter no longer exists, but Pollock many years later explained his reasons: “
I felt at the time that to retire would be our ruin—the whole country would have risen to endeavour to destroy us. I therefore determined on remaining at Jalalabad until an opportunity offered for our advance, if practicable … Stopping Nott for a few days, after his receipt of orders to retire, was perhaps a very bold step … but I felt it pretty certain that if we worked together in earnest, the game would be ours.
”

Even after learning that Sale had routed Akbar Khan, Ellenborough still did not alter his opinion that the British forces should fall back toward India. Instead, he hoped Sale’s victory could be regarded as the “
signal and decisive blow upon the Afghans
” he had promised on his arrival in Calcutta. However, Ellenborough knew that he risked public and political odium if he appeared to be abandoning the hostages, and in a further letter to Pollock of 28 April, he implied that the general might, under certain circumstances, advance on Kabul. The many crossings-out and marginal notes on drafts of that letter show his nervousness about taking such a step. Pollock grasped at the prospect, replying, “
I trust that I am not wrong in considering this letter as leaving to me discretionary powers
” and insisting that immediate withdrawal “would be construed into a defeat, and our character as a powerful nation would be entirely lost in this part of the world.”

POLLOCK MEANWHILE HAD opened negotiations with Akbar Khan for the release of his hostages, who had been taken through drenching rain to the fort at Tezeen. Here on 20 April, as the fort’s walls rattled and shook during yet another earthquake, Mrs. Waller, the wife of an artillery officer, gave birth to a girl—the fourth British child born in captivity. She had little time to recuperate before Akbar Khan decided to move his prisoners south into the Zandeh Valley. When the officers complained that dragging ill and exhausted women and children about was inhuman, Akbar Khan’s father-in-law, Mohammed Shah Khan, retorted, according to Eyre, that “wherever he went we must all follow; and if our horses failed, we must trudge on foot; and if we lagged behind, he would drag us along by force.” Akbar Khan seemingly rebuked Mohammed Shah for his rudeness to the hostages but certainly did not alter his plans.

The journey into the Zandeh Valley was General Elphinstone’s last. On the evening of 23 April, suffering from violent dysentery for which opium and the bitter liquid of a boiled pomegranate provided only temporary relief, he died. Throughout his captivity he had repeatedly spoken of his wish to have perished with his men on the retreat. Akbar Khan ordered the body to be wrapped in felt blankets, packed around with highly scented wormwood leaves inside a rough wooden casket and sent to Jalalabad with a small escort. Private Miller, one of Elphinstone’s batmen (soldier-servants), disguised himself as an Afghan to accompany the body. Near Jugdulluk, Ghilzais attacked, broke open the coffin and stripped and stoned the corpse. Only the warnings of Akbar Khan’s men of the punishment he would inflict deterred them from burning it. Hearing what had happened, Akbar Khan dispatched a much larger escort to repack the body. The cortege, accompanied still by Miller despite his having been wounded, finally reached Jalalabad, where Elphinstone was buried with full military honors.

Akbar Khan’s gesture in returning the body for burial was an indication of his desire to bring negotiations with Pollock to a satisfactory conclusion. He talked at length and in private to Lawrence about his anxiety to make terms. Captain Lawrence responded that as a gesture of goodwill Akbar Khan should send the women and children to Jalalabad while retaining the men. However, Akbar Khan replied that the other chiefs would never permit it and were in fact demanding the prisoners be assembled in one place so that each “could kill a captive with his own hands.”

Akbar Khan’s own position among the chiefs was growing precarious. Following Shah Shuja’s murder, Prince Futteh Jung—Shah Shuja’s second son—had declared himself his father’s successor. From the Balla Hissar he was demanding that all the European hostages be handed over to him. The powerful Amenoolah Khan—one of the original instigators of the uprising—had suddenly switched his allegiance from Akbar Khan to Futteh Jung, whom he joined in the Balla Hissar. Akbar Khan’s response was to besiege them in the citadel until an intervention from Nawab Zaman Khan made him desist.

Neither were Akbar Khan’s negotiations with the British prospering. Just after Elphinstone’s death, he had dispatched Colin Mackenzie on parole to Jalalabad carrying a letter setting out his terms for freeing the hostages. Mackenzie was a deeply religious man who regularly conducted services for the captives. He had been selected as emissary because the chiefs “had got it into their heads that I was a Mullah and they thought I would come back.” Mackenzie was warmly greeted on his arrival at Jalalabad, though his louse-ridden clothes were immediately taken away and burned. The proposals he brought from Akbar Khan—to release the prisoners either if the British withdrew from Afghanistan or when his father, Dost Mohammed, returned from exile—were less well received. Pollock had no authority from Ellenborough to agree to either suggestion and sent Mackenzie back with a counterproposal: a payment of two hundred thousand rupees for the prisoners’ release.

On his return Mackenzie learned that during his absence Captain and Mrs. Anderson had been reunited with their young daughter, whom they had lost during the frantic fighting in the Khoord Kabul Pass four months earlier. The child had been taken to the Kabul slave market for sale. Alerted by British prisoners in Kabul, Nawab Zaman Khan had purchased her for four hundred rupees and taken her into his household. Akbar Khan had recently taken Troup and Pottinger with him to Kabul, where they had seen the girl and persuaded Nawab Zaman Khan to return her to her parents. She was healthy but spoke only Persian and had been taught to say, “
My father and mother are infidels, but I am a Mussalman.
”

Disappointed that Pollock was only offering money, Akbar Khan sent Mackenzie back to Jalalabad with further and more complex proposals, including an amnesty for himself and his close associates and—on the basis that the British intended withdrawing from Afghanistan—their recognition of him as the country’s interim ruler. He also asked for a handsome annual payment and a large lump sum. Pollock’s reply to Akbar Khan was noncommittal, offering little more than the two hundred thousand rupees already proposed. Unknown to Pollock, even this was more than Ellenborough was prepared to countenance. Ellenborough’s attitude toward negotiating with the enemy had been hardening. In mid-May he wrote to Pollock warning him not even to consider making terms with a man who not only was Macnaghten’s “
acknowledged murderer
” but had “deceived and betrayed a British army into a position in which it was destroyed.” The most for which “so great a criminal” could hope was that the British would spare his life.