The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia (43 page)

London did not hear of the catastrophe for a further week. First to break the news, using the largest headline type it possessed, was
The Times.
‘We regret to announce’, it declared, ‘that the intelligence which this express has brought us is . . . of the most disastrous and melancholy nature.’ In a leading article a few days later it thrust an accusing finger at St Petersburg – ‘whose growing influence amongst those tribes first called for our interference’, and whose secret agents were ‘examining with the greatest care’ the passes leading towards British India. It insisted that the insurrection was far too well organised to have been spontaneous, and found it highly suspicious that the first to be murdered was Sir Alexander Burnes, ‘the keenest antagonist of the Russian agents’. Others were less sure about Russia’s implication. But everyone, including the Duke of Wellington, blamed General Elphinstone for failing to crush the insurrection at the outset, and Lord Auckland for embarking on such folly in the first place. ‘Our worst fears regarding the Afghanistan expedition’, declaimed
The Times
smugly, ‘have been justified.’

The new Tory administration led by Sir Robert Peel could at least wash its hands of all responsibility for the disaster, placing this firmly on the shoulders of Melbourne’s Whigs, who had approved the invasion plan. However, it was now faced with the task of clearing up the mess and deciding how the Afghans were to be punished for their treachery, for the nation was demanding vengeance. Fortunately, the Tories’ own man – that old India hand Lord Ellenborough, thrice President of the Board of Control – was already on his way to replace Auckland as Governor-General, though he only learned of the catastrophe when he arrived off Madras on February 21. His brief from the government had been to withdraw the British garrisons from Afghanistan in line with its stringent new economic policies, but he now found himself facing a totally unexpected situation. That night, as his vessel bore him on to Calcutta, he wrote to Peel declaring that he proposed to restore Britain’s honour and pride by teaching the Afghans a lesson they would not forget in a hurry.

On reaching the capital, Ellenborough learned that his predecessor had already dispatched a force to Peshawar to try to relieve the hard-pressed garrisons at Jalalabad and Kandahar, and to try to free the British hostages held by Akbar. The new Governor-General now took command. On March 31 the Khyber Pass was forced by Major-General George Pollock, using the tactics of the Afghans themselves, and at a cost of only fourteen British lives. As Pollock’s flanking columns seized the heights, the astonished tribesmen for the first time found themselves shot down from above. Two weeks later the relief column was played into Jalalabad to the strains of the Scots air ‘Oh, but ye’ve bin lang a’coming’. Meanwhile, in a series of actions around Kandahar, the able British commander, General Sir William Nott, had driven back the Afghans threatening the garrison. He, like Pollock, was now ready and eager to march on Kabul to avenge Elphinstone’s humiliating defeat, not to mention the deaths of Burnes, Macnaghten and the countless soldiers and families who had perished on the death march.

It was at this point that Lord Ellenborough, so hawkish at first, began to get cold feet. Anxious about the continuing drain on India’s already depleted treasury (for London was resolutely refusing to contribute to the expedition’s costs), and perhaps fearing another catastrophe, the Governor-General argued that the Afghans had now received lesson enough at the hands of Pollock and Nott. ‘At last we have got a victory,’ he wrote to Peel, ‘and our military character is re-established.’ He ordered the two generals to return with their troops to India, leaving the hostages in Akbar’s possession. After all, the British still held Dost Mohammed, while Shah Shujah (or so Ellenborough believed) continued to rule Afghanistan, nominally anyway, from the walled fastness of the Bala Hissar. Once the British troops had been withdrawn from Afghanistan, Ellenborough reasoned, negotiations for the freeing of the hostages could commence in a calmer atmosphere. But what he did not then know was that the unfortunate Shujah was no longer alive. As Pollock’s men were fighting their way up the Khyber to Jalalabad, Shujah had been lured out of the Bala Hissar, ostensibly for talks, and instead had been riddled with bullets. Akbar’s triumph, however, had proved short-lived, as fears spread among the other chiefs over the prospect of being ruled by him or his father. Just as Macnaghten had foreseen, a fierce power struggle now arose between Akbar’s supporters and his foes.

Almost simultaneously, within the ranks of the British, a struggle of a different kind broke out. Ellenborough’s order to Pollock and Nott to evacuate Afghanistan without further chastising the murderous tribes was received with dismay and disbelief by both officers and men, who wanted blood. A battle of wills now followed between the two generals and the new Governor-General, with other senior military officers in India and at home taking the side of the former. A succession of excuses – the weather, shortages of supplies, money, and so on – was found for delaying the departure of the two garrisons, while pressure grew on Ellenborough to change his mind. The hawks had a valuable ally at home in the Duke of Wellington, who still held a seat in the Cabinet. ‘It is impossible to impress upon you too strongly’, the India veteran warned Ellen-borough, ‘the notion of the importance of the restoration of reputation in the East.’ Even Sir Robert Peel, the Prime Minister, who had from the start urged extreme caution on the Governor-General, began to waver under the pressure of public opinion, and wrote to him suggesting that sterner measures might be called for.

Feeling increasingly isolated, Ellenborough finally gave way. He realised that he would either have to admit that he had previously been wrong, or risk being accused of throwing away the opportunity of freeing the hostages and salvaging Britain’s military reputation and pride. Without altering his order to evacuate Afghanistan, he told Pollock and Nott that they might, if they judged it militarily expedient, retire
by way of
Kabul. ‘No change had come over the views of Lord Ellenborough’, observed Kaye, ‘but a change had come over the meaning of certain words of the English language.’ Although Ellenborough was criticised for thus shifting the responsibility on to the shoulders of Pollock and Nott, neither complained. They had got their way, and a race began between the two to be the first into Kabul, although Nott’s men in Kandahar had by far the furthest to march – some 300 miles against Pollock’s 100.

As they fought their way back along the same route by which, only seven months earlier, Elphinstone’s ill-fated columns had left Kabul, Pollock’s troops soon came across harrowing evidence of the disaster. Everywhere there were skeletons. ‘They lay in heaps of fifties and hundreds,’ wrote one officer, ‘our gun-wheels passing over and crushing the skulls of our late comrades at almost every yard.’ Some even recognised the remains and possessions of former friends. Despite Ellen-borough’s orders to show restraint towards the populace, the growing fury of the troops led to numerous excesses being committed against those who resisted their advance. In one village, it is said, every male over the age of puberty was slaughtered, women were raped, and some even killed. ‘Tears, supplications, were of no avail,’ one young officer recalled. ‘Fierce oaths were the only answer. The musket was deliberately raised, the trigger pulled, and happy was he who fell dead.’ Shocked at what he saw, he described many of the troops as little better than ‘hired assassins’. An army chaplain, who was present at the sacking of one village which fired on them after it had surrendered, declared that seldom had a clergyman been called upon to witness such a scene. But these painful things, he added, were almost impossible to prevent ‘under such circumstances’, and regrettably were common to all wars.

In the event, the race for the Afghan capital was won by Pollock’s men, though only just. All the same it took them five times as long to fight their way there as it had taken Dr Brydon to travel the other way. They reached Kabul on September 15, to find that the enemy, including Akbar himself, had fled the city. That night they set up camp on the racecourse built by Elphinstone’s men three years earlier, and next morning entered the Bala Hissar without having to fire a shot. A few minutes later the Union Jack was flying over Kabul once more. They found much to remind them of the events they had come to avenge, including the blackened ruins of Sir Alexander Burnes’s house. ‘It was a melancholy spectacle,’ observed an officer with Nott’s force, adding that ‘the narrow street in which it stood, by the numerous scars of musket-balls, bore indubitable evidence of the fury of the conflict which had raged about it.’ He and his companions returned to the camp ‘little disposed for any conversation . . . and fully occupied by the emotions of sorrow and mortification which such scenes were calculated to call forth.’

With Shah Shujah dead, Kabul was now kingless, and Pollock, the senior of the two commanders, who had been invested with political authority by Lord Ellenborough, immediately placed Shujah’s son Futteh on the throne, thereby making him too a British puppet. Pollock’s next priority was to try to free the British hostages held by Akbar. The officer he chose for this exacting and dangerous task was Captain (now Sir) Richmond Shakespear, whose aptitude for this sort of game had been amply demonstrated at Khiva two years earlier. Although he was provided this time with a powerful escort of Kizilbashi irregulars, sworn foes of Akbar’s, there were many who feared that he would end up as one of the hostages. For roaming the Bamian area, where the latter were known to be held, were said to be 12,000 enemy troops. Undeterred by such warnings, and accompanied by his 600 armed Kizilbashis, Shakespear at once set out for Bamian, ISO miles to the northwest, having first sent messengers ahead to try to get word to the hostages that help was on the way.

By now the ranks of those held by Akbar had been swelled by the addition of a number of British captives taken by the Afghans, bringing the total to 22 officers, including Eldred Pottinger, 37 other ranks, 12 wives and 22 children. For some months they had been kept in the comparative comfort of Kabul, where they had been well treated, but with the advance of Pollock and Nott towards the capital they had been removed to a remote, mud-built fortress near Bamian. In August they heard from their servants that they were shortly to be moved northwards to Bokhara, well out of reach of any rescue attempt, where they would be presented as slaves to the tribes if the British occupied Kabul and Akbar was forced to flee. Aware that they had little time to spare, a number of the officers led by Pottinger, and aided by the wily Mohan Lai, set about trying to buy the party’s freedom from the commander of their Afghan guards. At first he demurred, but news soon began to reach Bamian that the British were fast approaching Kabul and that Akbar was preparing to flee. Ignoring an order from the latter to march the hostages into Turkestan, he agreed to free them for 20,000 rupees in cash and a monthly pension of 1,000 rupees.

Having thus obtained his co-operation, they next took over the fortress in which they had been held, and prepared to defend it until a relief expedition could get to them. They deposed the Afghan governor, ran up the Union Jack, levied taxes on passing merchants and established friendly contact with local chiefs. At the same time they made plans for withstanding a siege. As many of the British troops were too weak because of illness to hold a musket, they promised their former guards, more than 200 in number, four months’ extra pay if they remained with them until they were relieved. It was at this moment that they heard that Kabul had fallen, Akbar had fled, and that Shakespear was on his way to them with his Kizilbashi escort. At once they abandoned the fort and marched out to meet him.

After travelling for several hours, a scout spotted a large body of horsemen winding its way down through the pass towards them. For a moment it was feared that these might be Akbar’s men returning to seize them, but suddenly a horseman in British officer’s uniform was observed galloping ahead of the others. It was Sir Richmond Shakespear. He had already spotted them. The meeting was an extremely emotional one, with many of the hostages in tears. They showered Shakespear with questions, having been completely out of touch for eight months. From them Shakespear learned that back in April General Elphinstone, ailing and broken, had died, thus being spared the ignominy of having to face a public enquiry, if not a court martial, for his contribution to the catastrophe. He also learned that four babies had been born to women in the party, and that a sergeant’s wife had run off with one of her captors.

With the hostages now freed, and on their way to Kabul, there remained one last task for the British, and that was the settling of accounts. Pollock had considered blowing up the Bala Hissar, that symbol of Afghan might, but had been begged by those who had remained loyal to the British not to do so, as it would leave them defenceless. Instead therefore he decided to raze Kabul’s great covered
bazaar,
celebrated throughout Central Asia, and where Macnaghten’s dismembered corpse had been hung nine months earlier. The task was carried out by Pollock’s engineers using explosives. However, so massive was the structure that it was to take them two whole days. The general had issued strict orders that no one was to be harmed, and that property elsewhere in the old city was not to be touched. Guards were placed on the principal gates and in the area around the
bazaar
to ensure that no looting took place. But there followed a total breakdown of discipline. ‘The cry went forth that Caubul was given up to plunder,’ wrote Major Henry Rawlinson, a political officer with Nott’s force. Troops and camp-followers streamed into the city, pillaging shops and applying torches to houses. Guilty and innocent alike, including the friendly Kizilbashis, saw their homes and businesses destroyed, and large areas of Kabul were laid low. Among those who lost everything they possessed were 500 Indian families who were now forced to beg their way home in the rear of the British troops. It was an inglorious episode with which to crown the victory of Pollock and Nott. Clearly it was time for the British to go.