One distasteful task he had to perform before he should go. The Home Government had become seriously disquieted by the condition of affairs in Afghanistan. The Secret Committee of the Court of Directors, the channel through which the ministry communicated with the Governor-General, had expressed great concern at the heavy burden imposed on the Indian finances by the cost of the maintenance of the British force in Afghanistan, and by the lavish expenditure of the administration which Macnaghten directed. The Anglo-Indian Government was urgently required to review with great earnestness the question of its future policy in regard to Afghanistan, and to consider gravely whether an enterprise at once so costly and so unsatisfactory in results should not be frankly abandoned. Lord Auckland was alive to the difficulties and embarrassments which encompassed the position beyond the Indus, but he was loth to admit that the policy of which he had been the author, and in which the Home Government had abetted him so eagerly, was an utter failure. He and his advisers finally decided in favour of the continued occupation of Afghanistan; and since the Indian treasury was empty, and the annual charge of that occupation was not less than a million and a quarter sterling, recourse was had to a loan, Macnaghten was pressed to effect economies in the administration, and he was specially enjoined to cut down the subsidies which were paid to Afghan chiefs as bribes to keep them quiet. Macnaghten had objected to this retrenchment, pointing out that the stipends to the chiefs were simply compensation for the abandonment by them of their immemorial practice of highway robbery, but he yielded to pressure, called to Cabul the chiefs in its vicinity, and informed them that thenceforth their subsidies would be reduced. The chiefs strongly remonstrated, but without effect, and they then formed a confederacy of rebellion. The Ghilzai chiefs were the first to act. Quitting Cabul, they occupied the passes between the capital and Jellalabad, and entirely intercepted the communications with India by the Khyber route.

Macnaghten did not take alarm at this significant demonstration, regarding the outbreak merely as 'provoking,' and writing to Rawlinson that 'the rascals would be well trounced for their pains.' Yet warnings of gathering danger were rife, which but for his mood of optimism should have struck home to his apprehension. Pottinger had come down from the Kohistan, where he was acting as political officer, bent on impressing on him that a general rising of that region was certain unless strong measures of prevention were resorted to. For some time before the actual outbreak of the Ghilzais, the Afghan hatred to our people had been showing itself with exceptional openness and bitterness. Europeans and camp followers had been murdered, but the sinister evidences of growing danger had been regarded merely as ebullitions of private rancour. Akbar Khan, Dost Mahomed's son, had moved forward from Khooloom into the Bamian country, and there was little doubt that he was fomenting the disaffection of the Ghilzai chiefs, with some of whom this indomitable man, who in his intense hatred of the English intruders had resolutely rejected all offers of accommodation, and preferred the life of a homeless exile to the forfeiture of his independence, was closely connected by marriage.

The time was approaching when Sale's brigade was to quit Cabul on its return journey to India. Macnaghten seems to have originally intended to accompany this force, for he wrote that he 'hoped to settle the hash of the Ghilzais on the way down, if not before.' The rising, however, spread so widely and so rapidly that immediate action was judged necessary, and on October 9th Colonel Monteath marched towards the passes with his own regiment, the 35th Native Infantry, some artillery and cavalry details, and a detachment of Broadfoot's sappers.

How able, resolute, and high-souled a man was George Broadfoot, the course of this narrative will later disclose. He was one of three gallant brothers, all of whom died sword in hand. The corps of sappers which he commanded was a remarkable body—a strange medley of Hindustanees, Goorkhas, and Afghan tribesmen of divers regions. Many were desperate and intractable characters, but Broadfoot, with mingled strength and kindness, moulded his heterogeneous recruits into skilful, obedient and disciplined soldiers. Broadfoot's description of his endeavours to learn something of the nature of the duties expected of him in the expedition for which he had been detailed, and to obtain such equipment as those duties might require, throws a melancholy light on the deteriorated state of affairs among our people at this period, and on the relations between the military and civilian authorities.

Broadfoot went for information, in the first instance, to Colonel Monteath, who could give him no orders, having received none himself. Monteath declined to apply for details as to the expedition, as he knew 'these people' (the authorities) too well; he was quite aware of the danger of going on service in the dark, but explained that it was not the custom of the military authorities at Cabul to consult or even instruct the commanders of expeditions. Broadfoot then went to the General. Cotton's successor in the chief military command in Afghanistan was poor General Elphinstone, a most gallant soldier, but with no experience of Indian warfare, and utterly ignorant of the Afghans and of Afghanistan. Wrecked in body and impaired in mind by physical ailments and infirmities, he had lost all faculty of energy, and such mind as remained to him was swayed by the opinion of the person with whom he had last spoken. The poor gentleman was so exhausted by the exertion of getting out of bed, and being helped into his visiting-room, that it was not for half-an-hour, and after several ineffectual efforts, that he could attend to business. He knew nothing of the nature of the service on which Monteath was ordered, could give Broadfoot no orders, and was unwilling to refer to the Envoy on a matter which should have been left to him to arrange. He complained bitterly of the way in which he was reduced to a cypher—'degraded from a general to the "Lord-Lieutenant's head constable."' Broadfoot went from the General to the Envoy, who 'was peevish,' and denounced the General as fidgety. He declared the enemy to be contemptible, and that as for Broadfoot and his sappers, twenty men with pickaxes were enough; all they were wanted for was to pick stones from under the gun wheels. When Broadfoot represented the inconvenience with which imperfect information as to the objects of the expedition was fraught, Macnaghten lost his temper, and told Broadfoot that, if he thought Monteath's movement likely to bring on an attack, 'he need not go, he was not wanted'; whereupon Broadfoot declined to listen to such language, and made his bow. Returning to the General, whom he found 'lost and perplexed,' he was told to follow his own judgment as to what quantity of tools he should take. The Adjutant-General came in, and 'this officer, after abusing the Envoy, spoke to the General with an imperiousness and disrespect, and to me, a stranger, with an insolence it was painful to see the influence of on the General. His advice to his chief was to have nothing to say to Macnaghten, to me, or to the sappers, saying Monteath had men enough, and needed neither sappers nor tools.' At parting the poor old man said to Broadfoot: 'If you go out, for God's sake clear the passes quickly, that I may get away; for if anything were to turn up, I am unfit for it, done up in body and mind.' This was the man whom Lord Auckland had appointed to the most responsible and arduous command at his disposal, and this not in ignorance of General Elphinstone's disqualifications for active service, but in the fullest knowledge of them!

Monteath's camp at Bootkhak, the first halting-place on the Jellalabad road, was sharply attacked on the night of the 9th, and the assailants, many of whom were the armed retainers of chiefs living in Cabul sent out specially to take part in the attack, although unsuccessful, inflicted on Monteath considerable loss. Next day Sale, with H.M.'s 13th, joined Monteath, and on the 13th he forced the long and dangerous ravine of the Khoord Cabul with sharp fighting, but no very serious loss, although Sale himself was wounded, and had to relinquish the active command to Colonel Dennie. Monteath encamped in the valley beyond the pass, and Sale, with the 13th, returned without opposition to Bootkhak, there to await reinforcements and transports. In his isolated position Monteath remained unmolested until the night of the 17th, when he repulsed a Ghilzai attack made in considerable strength, and aided by the treachery of 'friendly' Afghans who had been admitted into his camp; but he had many casualties, and lost a number of camels. On the 20th Sale, reinforced by troops returned from the Zurmut expedition, moved forward on Monteath, and on the 22d pushed on to the Tezeen valley, meeting with no opposition either on the steep summit of the Huft Kotul or in the deep narrow ravine opening into the valley. The Ghilzais were in force around the mouth of the defile, but a few cannon-shots broke them up. The advance guard pursued with over-rashness; the Ghilzais rallied, in the skirmish which ensued an officer and several men were killed, and the retirement of our people unfortunately degenerated into precipitate flight, with the Ghilzais in hot pursuit. The 13th, to which the fugitive detachment mainly belonged, now consisted mainly of young soldiers, whose constancy was impaired by this untoward occurrence.

Macnaghten had furnished Sale with a force which, in good heart and vigorously commanded, was strong enough to have effected great things. The Ghilzai chief of Tezeen possessed a strong fort full of supplies, which Dennie was about to attack, when the wily Afghan sent to Major Macgregor, the political officer accompanying Sale, a tender of submission. Macgregor fell into the snare, desired Sale to countermand the attack, and entered into negotiations. In doing so he committed a fatal error, and he exceeded his instructions in the concessions which he made. Macnaghten, it was true, had left matters greatly to Macgregor's discretion; and if 'the rebels were very humble,' the Envoy was not disposed to be too hard upon them. But one of his firm stipulations was that the defences of Khoda Buxsh's fort must be demolished, and that Gool Mahomed Khan 'should have nothing but war.' Both injunctions were disregarded by Macgregor, who, with unimportant exceptions, surrendered all along the line. The Ghilzais claimed and obtained the restoration of their original subsidies; a sum was handed to them to enable them to raise the tribes in order to keep clear the passes; Khoda Buxsh held his fort, and sold the supplies it contained to Sale's commissary at a fine price. Every item of the arrangement was dead in favour of the Ghilzais, and contributory to their devices. Sale, continuing his march, would be separated further and further from the now diminished force in Cabul, and by the feigned submission the chiefs had made they had escaped the permanent establishment of a strong detachment in their midst at Tezeen.

Macnaghten, discontented though he was with the sweeping concessions which Macgregor had granted to the Ghilzais, put the best face he could on the completed transaction, and allowed himself to believe that a stable settlement had been effected. On the 26th Sale continued his march, having made up his baggage animals at the expense of the 37th Native Infantry, which, with half of the sappers and three guns of the mountain train, he sent back to Kubbar-i-Jubbar, there to halt in a dangerously helpless situation until transport should be sent down from Cabul. His march as far as Kutti Sung was unmolested. Mistrusting the good faith of his new-made allies, he shunned the usual route through the Purwan Durrah by taking the mountain road to the south of that defile, and thus reached the Jugdulluk valley with little opposition, baulking the dispositions of the Ghilzais, who, expecting him to traverse the Purwan Durrah, were massed about the southern end of the defile, ready to fall on the column when committed to the tortuous gorge.

From the Jugdulluk camping ground there is a steep and winding ascent of three miles, commanded until near the summit by heights on either side. Sale's main body had attained the crest with trivial loss, having detached parties by the way to ascend to suitable flanking positions, and hold those until the long train of slow-moving baggage should have passed, when they were to fall in and come on with the rear-guard. The dispositions would have been successful but that on reaching the crest the main body, instead of halting there for the rear to close up, hurried down the reverse slope, leaving baggage, detachments, and rear-guard to endure the attacks which the Ghilzais promptly delivered, pressing fiercely on the rear, and firing down from either side on the confused mass in the trough below. The flanking detachments had relinquished their posts in panic, and hurried forward in confusion to get out of the pass. The rear-guard was in disorder, when Broadfoot, with a few officers and some of his sappers, valiantly checked the onslaught, but the crest was not crossed until upwards of 120 men had fallen, the wounded among whom had to be abandoned with the dead. On October 30th Sale's force reached Gundamuk without further molestation, and halted there temporarily to await orders. During the halt melancholy rumours filtered down the passes from the capital, and later came confirmation of the evil tidings from the Envoy, and orders from Elphinstone directing the immediate return of the brigade to Cabul, if the safety of its sick and wounded could be assured. Sale called a council of war, which pronounced, although not unanimously, against a return to Cabul; and it was resolved instead to march on to Jellalabad, which was regarded as an eligible point d'appui on which a relieving force might move up and a retiring force might move down. Accordingly on November 11th the brigade quitted Gundamuk, and hurried down rather precipitately, and with some fighting by the way, to Jellalabad, which was occupied on the 14th.

Some members of the Gundamuk council of war, foremost among whom was Broadfoot, argued vigorously in favour of the return march to Cabul. Havelock, who was with Sale as a staff-officer, strongly urged the further retreat into Jellalabad. Others, again, advocated the middle course of continuing to hold Gundamuk. It may be said that a daring general would have fought his way back to Cabul, that a prudent general would have remained at Gundamuk, and that the occupation of Jellalabad was the expedient of a weak general. That a well-led march on Cabul was feasible, although it might have been difficult and bloody, cannot be questioned, and the advent of such men as Broadfoot and Havelock would have done much toward rekindling confidence and stimulating the restoration of soldierly virtue, alike in the military authorities and in the rank and file of the Cabul force. At Gundamuk, again, the brigade, well able to maintain its position there, would have made its influence felt all through the Ghilzai country and as far as Cabul. The evacuation of that capital decided on, it would have been in a position to give the hand to the retiring army, and so to avert at least the worst disasters of the retreat. The retirement on Jellalabad, in the terse language of Durand, 'served no conceivable purpose except to betray weakness, and still further to encourage revolt.'

While Sale was struggling through the passes on his way to Gundamuk, our people at Cabul were enjoying unwonted quietude. Casual entries in Lady Sale's journal, during the later days of October, afford clear evidence how utterly unconscious were they of the close gathering of the storm that so soon was to break upon them. Her husband had written to her from Tezeen that his wound was fast healing, and that the chiefs were extremely polite. She complains of the interruption of the mails owing to the Ghilzai outbreak, but comforts herself with the anticipation of their arrival in a day or two. She was to leave Cabul for India in a few days, along with the Macnaghtens and General Elphinstone, and her diary expresses an undernote of regret at having to leave the snug house in the cantonments which Sale had built on his own plan, the excellent kitchen garden in which her warrior husband, in the intervals of his soldiering duties, grew fine crops of peas, potatoes, cauliflowers and artichokes, and the parterres of flowers which she herself cultivated, and which were the admiration of the Afghan gentlemen who came to pay their morning calls.



The defencelessness of the position at Cabul had long engaged the solicitude of men who were no alarmists. Engineer officer after engineer officer had unavailingly and a half from the cantonments, with the Cabul river intervening. With Shelton's troops and those in the cantonments General Elphinstone had at his disposition, apart from the Shah's contingent, four infantry regiments, two batteries of artillery, three companies of sappers, a regiment of cavalry, and some irregular horse—a force fully equipped and in good order. In the Balla Hissar Shah Soojah had a considerable, if rather mixed, body of military and several guns.

The rising of the 2d November may not have been the result of a fully organised plan. There are indications that it was premature, and that the revolt in force would have been postponed until after the expected departure of the Envoy and the General with all the troops except Shelton's brigade, but for an irrepressible burst of personal rancour against Burnes. Durand holds, however, that the malcontents acted on the belief that to kill Burnes and sack the Treasury was to inaugurate the insurrection with an imposing success. Be this as it may, a truculent mob early in the morning of November 2d assailed Burnes' house. He at first regarded the outbreak as a casual riot, and wrote to Macnaghten to that effect. Having harangued the throng without effect, he and his brother, along with William Broadfoot his secretary, prepared for defence. Broadfoot was soon killed, and a little later Burnes and his brother were hacked to pieces in the garden behind the house. The Treasury was sacked; the sepoys who had guarded it and Burnes' house were massacred, and both buildings were fired; the armed mob swelled in numbers, and soon the whole city was in a roar of tumult.

Prompt and vigorous military action would no doubt have crushed the insurrection, at least for the time. But the indifference, vacillation and delay of the British authorities greatly encouraged its rapid development. Macnaghten at first 'did not think much of it.' Shelton was ordered into the Balla Hissar, countermanded, a second time ordered, and again instructed to halt for orders. At last the Envoy himself despatched him, with the loose order to act on his own judgment in communication with the Shah. Shelton marched into the Balla Hissar with part of his force, and the rest of it was moved into the cantonments. When the Brigadier went to the Shah, that potentate demanded to know who sent him, and what he had come for. But the Shah, to do him justice, had himself taken action. Informed that Burnes was attacked and the city in revolt, he had ordered Campbell's regiment of his own levies and a couple of guns to march to his assistance. Campbell recklessly attempted to push his way through the heart of the city, instead of reaching Burnes' house by a circuitous but opener route, and after some sharp street fighting in which he lost heavily, he was driven back, unable to penetrate to the scene of plunder and butchery. Shelton remained inactive in the Balla Hissar until Campbell was reported beaten and retreating, when he took some feeble measures to cover the retreat of the fugitives, who, however, abandoned their guns outside the fortress. The day was allowed to pass without anything further being done, except the despatch of an urgent recall to Major Griffiths, whom Sale had left at Kubbar-i-Jubbar, and that good soldier, having fought every step of the way through the passes, brought in his detachment in unbroken order and without loss of baggage, notwithstanding his weakness in transport. Shelton, reinforced in the Balla Hissar, maintained an intermittent and ineffectual fire on the city. Urgent orders were despatched to Sale, recalling him and his brigade—orders with which, as has been mentioned, Sale did not comply—and also to Nott, at Candahar, begging him to send a brigade to Cabul. In compliance with this requisition, Maclaren's brigade immediately started from Candahar, but soon returned owing to the inclemency of the weather.

Captain Mackenzie was in charge of a fort containing the Shah's commissariat stores; this fort was on the outskirts of a suburb of Cabul, and was fiercely attacked on the 2d. For two days Mackenzie maintained his post with unwearying constancy. His garrison was short of water and of ammunition, and the fort was crowded with women and children, but he held on resolutely until the night of the 3d. No assistance was sent, no notice, indeed, of any kind was taken of him; his garrison was discouraged by heavy loss, and by the mines which the enemy were pushing forward. At length, when the gate of the fort had been fired, and his wounded were dying for lack of medical aid, he evacuated the fort, and fought his way gallantly into cantonments, bringing in his wounded and the women and children. With this solitary exception the Afghans had nowhere encountered resistance, and the strange passiveness of our people encouraged them to act with vigour. From the enclosed space of the Shah Bagh, and the adjacent forts of Mahmood Khan and Mahomed Shereef, they were threatening the Commissariat fort, hindering access to it, and besetting the south-western flank of the cantonments. A young officer commanded the hundred sepoys garrisoning the Commissariat fort; he reported himself in danger of being cut off, and Elphinstone gave orders that he and his garrison should be brought off, and the fort and its contents abandoned. Several efforts to accomplish the withdrawal were thwarted by the Afghan flanking fire, with the loss of several officers and many men. The commissary officer urged on the General the disastrous consequences which the abandonment of the fort would entail, containing as it did all the stores, adding that in cantonments there were only two days' supplies, without prospect of procuring any more. Orders were then sent to Warren to hold out to the last extremity; which instructions he denied having received. Early in the morning of the 5th troops were preparing to attack the Afghan fort and reinforce the Commissariat fort, when Warren and his garrison reached the cantonments. The gate of the Commissariat fort had been fired, but the enemy had not effected an entrance, yet Warren and his people had evacuated the fort through a hole cut in its wall. Thus, with scarcely a struggle to save it, was this vital fort allowed to fall into the enemy's hands, and thenceforward our unfortunate people were to be reduced to precarious and scanty sources for their food.

From the 5th to the 9th November there was a good deal of desultory fighting, in the course of which, after one failure, Mahomed Shereef's fort was stormed by a detachment of our people, under the command of Major Griffiths; but this success had little influence on the threatening attitude maintained by the Afghans. On the 9th, owing to the mental and physical weakness of poor General Elphinstone, Brigadier Shelton was summoned into cantonments from the Balla Hissar, bringing with him part of the garrison with which he had been holding the latter post. The hopes entertained that Shelton would display vigour, and restore the confidence of the troops, were not realised. He from the first had no belief in the ability of the occupants of the cantonment to maintain their position, and he never ceased to urge prompt retreat on Jellalabad. From the purely military point of view he was probably right; the Duke of Wellington shared his opinion when he said in the House of Lords: 'After the first few days, particularly after the negotiations at Cabul had commenced, it became hopeless for General Elphinstone to maintain his position.' Shelton's situation was unquestionably a very uncomfortable one, for Elphinstone, broken as he was, yet allowed his second in command no freedom of action, and was testily pertinacious of his prerogative of command. If in Shelton, who after his manner was a strong man, there had been combined with his resolution some tact and temper, he might have exercised a beneficial influence. As it was he became sullen and despondent, and retired behind an 'uncommunicative and disheartening reserve.' Brave as he was, he seems to have lacked the inspiration which alone could reinvigorate the drooping spirit of the troops. In a word, though he probably was, in army language, a 'good duty soldier,' he certainly was nothing more. And something more was needed then.

Action on Shelton's part became necessary the day after he came into cantonments. The Afghans occupied all the forts on the plain between the Seah Sung heights and the cantonments, and from the nearest of them, the Rikabashee fort, poured in a heavy fire at close range, which the return artillery fire could not quell. On Macnaghten's urgent requisition the General ordered out a strong force, under Shelton, to storm the obnoxious fort. Captain Bellew missed the gate, and blew open merely a narrow wicket, but the storming party obeyed the signal to advance. Through a heavy fire the leaders reached the wicket, and forced their way in, followed by a few soldiers. The garrison of the fort hastily evacuated it, and all seemed well, when a sudden stampede ensued—the handful which, led by Colonel Mackrell of the 44th and Lieutenant Bird of the Shah's force, had already entered the fort, remaining inside it. The runaway troops were rallied with difficulty by Shelton and the subordinate officers, but a call for volunteers from the European regiment was responded to but by one solitary Scottish private. After a second advance, and a second retreat—a retreat made notwithstanding strong artillery and musketry support—Shelton's efforts brought his people forward yet again, and this time the fort was occupied in force. Of those who had previously entered it but two survivors were found. The Afghans, re-entering the fort, had hacked Mackrell to pieces and slaughtered the men who tried to escape by the wicket. Lieutenant Bird and a sepoy, from a stable the door of which they had barricaded with logs of wood, had fended off their assailants by a steady and deadly fire, and when they were rescued by the entrance of the troops they had to clamber out over a pile of thirty dead Afghans whom the bullets of the two men had struck down.

It had come to our people in those gloomy days, to regard as a 'triumph' a combat in which they were not actually worsted; and even of such dubious successes the last occurred on November 13, when the Afghans, after having pressed our infantry down the slopes of the Behmaroo ridge, were driven back by artillery fire, and forced by a cavalry charge to retreat further, leaving behind them a couple of guns from which they had been sending missiles into the cantonments. One of those guns was brought in without difficulty, but the other the Afghans covered with their jezail fire. The Envoy had sent a message of entreaty that 'the triumph of the day' should be completed by its capture. Major Scott of the 44th made appeal on appeal, ineffectually, to the soldierly feelings of his men, and while they would not move the sepoys could not be induced to advance. At length Eyre spiked the piece as a precautionary measure, and finally some men of the Shah's infantry succeeded in bringing in the prize. The return march of the troops into cantonments in the dark, was rendered disorderly by the close pressure of the Afghans, who, firing incessantly, pursued the broken soldiery up to the entrance gate.

On the depressed garrison of the Cabul cantonments tidings of disaster further afield had been pouring in apace. Soon after the outbreak of the rising, it was known that Lieutenant Maule, commanding the Kohistanee regiment at Kurdurrah, had been cut to pieces, with his adjutant and sergeant-major, by the men of his own corps; and on November 6th intelligence had come in that the Goorkha regiment stationed at Charikar in the Kohistan, where Major Pottinger was Resident, was in dangerous case, and that Codrington, its commandant, and some of his officers had already fallen. And now, on the 15th, there rode wearily into cantonments two wounded men, who believed themselves the only British survivors of the Charikar force. Pottinger was wounded in the leg, Haughton, the adjutant of the Goorkha corps, had lost his right hand, and his head hung forward on his breast, half severed from his body by a great tulwar slash. Of the miserable story which it fell to Pottinger to tell only the briefest summary can be given. His residence was at Lughmanee, a few miles from the Charikar cantonments, when early in the month a number of chiefs of the Kohistan and the Nijrao country assembled to discuss with him the terms on which they would reopen the communications with Cabul. Those chiefs proved treacherous, slew Rattray, Pottinger's assistant, and besieged Pottinger in Lughmanee. Finding his position untenable, he withdrew to Charikar under cover of night. On the morning of the 5th the Afghans assailed the cantonments. Pottinger was wounded, Codrington was killed, and the Goorkhas were driven into the barracks. Haughton, who succeeded to the command of the regiment, made sortie on sortie, but was finally driven in, and the enemy renewed their assaults in augmented strength. Thenceforward the position was all but hopeless. On the 10th the last scant remains of water was distributed. Efforts to procure water by sorties on the nights of the 11th and 12th were not successful, and the corps fell into disorganisation because of losses, hardships, exhaustion, hunger and thirst. Pottinger and Haughton agreed that there was no prospect of saving even a remnant of the regiment unless by a retreat to Cabul, which, however, was clearly possible only in the case of the stronger men, unencumbered with women and children, of whom, unfortunately, there was a great number in the garrison. On the afternoon of the 13th Haughton was cut down by a treacherous native officer of the artillery, who then rushed out of the gate, followed by all the gunners and most of the Mahommedans of the garrison. In the midst of the chaos of disorganisation, Dr Grant amputated Haughton's hand, dressed his other wounds, and then spiked all the guns. When it was dark, the garrison moved out, Pottinger leading the advance, Dr Grant the main body, and Ensign Rose the rear-guard. From the beginning of the march, discipline was all but entirely in abeyance; on reaching the first stream, the last remains of control were lost, and the force was rapidly disintegrating. Pottinger and Haughton, the latter only just able to keep the saddle, pushed on toward Cabul, rested in a ravine during the day, evaded the partisan detachment sent out from Cabul to intercept them, rode through sleeping Cabul in the small hours of the morning, and after being pursued and fired upon in the outskirts of the city, finally attained the cantonments. It was afterwards learned that a portion of the regiment had struggled on to within twenty miles from Cabul, gallantly headed by young Rose and Dr Grant. Then the remnant was destroyed. Rose was killed, after despatching four Afghans with his own hand. Dr Grant, escaping the massacre, held on until within three miles of the cantonments, when he too was killed.

Macnaghten was naturally much depressed by the news communicated by Pottinger, and realised that the Afghan masses already encompassing the position on the Cabul plain would certainly be increased by bands from the Kohistan and Nijrao, flushed already with their Charikar success. He sided strongly with the large party among the officers who were advocating the measure of abandoning the cantonments altogether, and moving the force now quartered there to the safer and more commanding position in the Balla Hissar. The military chiefs opposed the project, and propounded a variety of objections to it, none of which were without weight, yet all of which might have been overcome by energy and proper dispositions. Shelton, however, was opposed to the scheme, since if carried out it would avert or postpone the accomplishment of his policy of retreat on Jellalabad; Elphinstone was against it in the inertia of debility, and the project gradually came to be regarded as abandoned. Another project, that of driving the Afghans from Mahmood Khan's fort, commanding the direct road between the cantonments and the Balla Hissar, and of occupying it with a British force, was so far advanced that the time for the attempt was fixed, and the storming party actually warned, when some petty objection intervened and the enterprise was abandoned, never to be revived.

The rising was not three days old when already Elphinstone had lost heart. On the 5th he had written to Macnaghten suggesting that the latter should 'consider what chance there is of making terms,' and since then he had been repeatedly pressing on the Envoy the 'hopelessness of further resistance.' Macnaghten, vacillating as he was, yet had more pith in his nature than was left in the debilitated old general. He wrote to Elphinstone on the 18th recommending, not very strenuously, the policy of holding out where they were as long as possible, and indeed throughout the winter, if subsistence could be obtained. He pointed out that in the cantonments, which he believed to be impregnable, there were at least the essentials of wood and water. Arguing that a retreat on Jellalabad must be most disastrous, and was to be avoided except in the last extremity, he nevertheless ended somewhat inconsistently by leaving to the military authorities, if in eight or ten days there should appear no prospect of an improvement of the situation, the decision whether it would be wiser to attempt a retreat or to withdraw from the cantonments into the Balla Hissar.

Far from improving, the situation was speedily to become all but hopeless. The village of Behmaroo, built on the north-eastern slope of the ridge of the same name bounding the plain on the north-west, lay about half a mile due north of the cantonments, part of which some of the houses on the upper slope commanded. From this village, after the loss of the Commissariat fort, our people had been drawing supplies. On the morning of the 22d the Afghans were seen moving in force from Cabul toward Behmaroo, obviously with intent to occupy the village, and so deprive the occupants of the cantonments of the resource it had been affording them. A detachment under Major Swayne, sent out to forestall this occupation, found Behmaroo already in the possession of a body of Kohistanees, who had so blocked the approaches that Swayne did not consider himself justified in attempting the fulfilment of his orders to storm the place; and he contented himself with maintaining all day an ineffectual musketry fire on it. A diversion in his favour by a gun supported by cavalry had no result save that of casualties to the gunners and troopers; reinforcements brought out by Shelton effected nothing, and in the evening the troops were recalled. On this ill-fated day Akbar Khan, Dost Mahomed's fierce and implacable son, arrived in Cabul, and the evil influence on the British fortunes which he exerted immediately made itself felt, for the events of the following day were to bring about a crisis in the fate of our ill-starred people.

Recognising the mischief wrought by the hostile occupation of our only source of supplies, the Envoy strongly urged the immediate despatch of a strong force to occupy the Behmaroo ridge, and dislodge from the village its Kohistanee garrison. Shelton opposed the measure, urging the dispirited state of the troops, their fatigue from constant defensive duty, and their weakened physique because of poor and scanty rations. He was overruled, and before daybreak of the 23d a force under his command, consisting of five companies of the 44th, twelve companies of native infantry, some cavalry, and one horse-artillery gun, was in position on the north-eastern extremity of the ridge overhanging the village. The gun opened fire on the village with grape, and after a short resistance the greater part of its garrison quitted it. The storming party intrusted to Major Swayne did not, however, act, and was withdrawn. Leaving a detachment on the knoll above the village, Shelton moved his force along the upland to a position near the gorge intersecting the ridge, forming his infantry into two squares, with the cavalry in rear. The further hill beyond the gorge was crowded with hostile Afghans from Cabul, and the long-range fire of their jezails across the dividing depression, carried execution into the squares which Shelton had inexplicably formed as if to furnish his foes with a target which they could not miss. The muskets of his men could not retaliate, and the skirmishers he threw forward to the brow of his hill could not endure the Afghan fire. Shelton's single gun maintained a hot and telling fire on the Afghan masses on the opposite hill, and baulked an attempt against his right flank made by the Afghan cavalry swarming in the outer plain; but when its vent became too hot for the gunners to serve it, the dullest comprehension became alive to the folly of sending a single gun into the field.

Shelton's men, falling fast though they were, and faint with fatigue and thirst, yet had endured for hours a fusillade to which they could not reply, when a body of Afghan fanatics suddenly sprang up out of the gorge, swept back with their fire the few skirmishers who had been still holding the brow of the hill, and planted their flag within thirty yards of the front of the nearer of the squares. Shelton offered a large reward to the man who should bring it in, but there was no response. In a passion of soldierly wrath, the veteran commanded a bayonet charge; not a man sprang forward at the summons which British soldiers are wont to welcome with cheers. The cowed infantry remained supine, when their officers darted forward and threw stones into the faces of the enemy; the troopers heard but obeyed not that trumpet-call to 'Charge!' which so rarely fails to thrill the cavalryman with the rapture of the fray. The gunners only, men of that noble force the Company's Horse-Artillery, quitted themselves valiantly. They stood to their piece to the bitter end. Two of them were killed beside it, another was severely wounded, a fourth, refusing to run, took refuge under the gun, and miraculously escaped death. But the gallant example of the artillerymen in their front did not hearten the infantrymen of the leading square. The panic spread among them, and they broke and fled. Fortunately they were not pursued. The rear square stood fast, and the officers by great exertion succeeded in rallying the fugitives under the cover it afforded. The news that a principal chief, Abdoolah Khan, had been severely wounded in the plain gave pause to the offensive vigour of the Afghans, and the assailants fell back, abandoning the gun, but carrying off the limber and gun-team. Our people reoccupied the position, the gun recommenced its fire, and if the cavalry and infantry could have been persuaded to take the offensive the battle might have been retrieved. But they remained passive. The reinforced Afghans renewed their long-range fire with terrible effect; most of the gunners had fallen, and the Brigadier, recognising the growing unsteadiness of his command and the imminent danger of capture to which the solitary gun was again exposed, ordered a retirement on the detachment left near Behmaroo and the limbering up of the gun, to which a second limber had been sent out from the cantonments. The movement was scarcely begun when a rush of fanatic Afghans completely broke the square, and all order and discipline then disappeared. A regular rout set in down the hill toward cantonments, the fugitives disregarding the efforts of the officers to rally them, and the enemy in full pursuit, the Afghan cavalry making ghastly slaughter among the panic-stricken runaways. The detachment near Behmaroo attempted to fall back in orderly fashion, but the reinforced garrison of the village swept out upon it, surrounded it, broke it up, and threw it into utter rout with the loss of a large proportion of its strength, one whole company being all but annihilated. It seemed as if pursued and pursuers would enter the cantonments together so closely were they commingled; but the fire from the ramparts and an opportune charge of horse arrested the pursuit. Yet Eyre reckons as the chief reason why all the British force that had gone out to battle was not destroyed, the fact that a leading Afghan chief forced his men to spare the fugitives, and ultimately halted and withdrew his people when the opportunity for wholesale slaughter lay open to them. Most of the wounded were left on the field, where they were miserably cut to pieces; and the gun, which had been overturned in the attempt of the drivers to gallop down the face of the hill, finally passed into the possession of the Afghans. Shelton's dispositions as a commander could not well have been worse; his bearing as a soldier, although undaunted, imparted to his hapless troops nothing of inspiration. The obstinacy with which he held the hill after the impossibility of even partial success must have been patent to him, was universally condemned. It need scarcely be added that his loss was very severe.

No more fighting was possible. What, then, was to be done? Elphinstone and Shelton were at one in opposing removal into the Balla Hissar. Macnaghten, to whom Shah Soojah had communicated his urgent recommendation of that measure as the only expedient which could secure the safety of the British troops, fell in with the views of the military authorities. There came to him a letter from Osman Khan, the chief who had called off his adherents on the previous day from pursuing the fugitives fleeing into cantonments. Osman wrote that, if his troops had followed up their successes, the loss of the cantonments and the destruction of the British force were inevitable; but, he continued, that it was not the wish of the chiefs to proceed to such extremities, their sole desire being that our people should quietly evacuate the country, leaving the Afghan sirdars to govern it according to their own customs, and with a king of their own choosing. In communicating this letter to General Elphinstone, Sir William asked for the latter's opinion on the military possibility, or the reverse, of the retention of the British position in Afghanistan. Elphinstone, in reply, enumerated sundry reasons which led him to the conclusion which he stated, that 'it is not feasible any longer to maintain our position in this country, and that you ought to avail yourself of the offer to negotiate which has been made to you.'



CHAPTER VI: THE ROAD TO RUIN

As the result of the military disaster of November 23d, and of the representations of the General, recorded in the last chapter, Macnaghten, with whatever reluctance, permitted himself to entertain proposals for an arrangement made by the Afghan leaders. From the beginning of the outbreak, while urging on the military authorities to exert themselves in putting down the revolt, he had been engaged in tortuous and dangerous intrigues, with the object of sowing discord among the Afghan chiefs, and thus weakening the league of hostility against Shah Soojah and his British supporters. In the conduct of these intrigues he used the services of Mohun Lal, who had been one of Burnes' assistants, and who, having escaped the fate of his chief, had found refuge in the city residence of a Kuzzilbash chief. Mohun Lal was a fitting agent for the sort of work prescribed to him, and he burrowed and suborned with assiduity, and not altogether without success. But it is unhappily true that he was commissioned to carry out a darker enterprise, the removal by assassination of certain of the more virulently hostile among the Afghan leaders. The incident is the blackest of the many discreditable transactions which chequer the inner political history of this melancholy chapter of our annals. It is unfortunately certain that Lieutenant John Conolly, Macnaghten's kinsman and his confidential representative with Shah Soojah, authorised Mohun Lal, in writing, to compass the taking off of prominent Afghan leaders. In a letter to Mohun Lal, of 5th November, Conolly wrote: 'I promise 10,000 rupees for the head of each rebel chief.' Again, on the 11th, he wrote: 'There is a man called Hadji Ali, who might be induced by a bribe to try and bring in the heads of one or two of the Mufsids. Endeavour to let him know that 10,000 rupees will be given for each head, or even 15,000 rupees.' Two chiefs certainly did die under suspicious circumstances, and in each case the blood-money was claimed. It was refused by Mohun Lal on the plea that the stipulation that the heads of the dead Afghans should be brought in was not fulfilled.

Whether Macnaghten inspired those nefarious machinations, whether indeed he was actively aware of them, are questions which, in the absence of conclusive evidence, may judiciously be left unanswered. There is extant a letter from him to Mohun Lal, written December 1st, which has the following passage: 'I am sorry to find from your letter of last night that you should have supposed it was ever my object to encourage assassination. The rebels are very wicked men, but we must not take unlawful means to destroy them.' And later he is reported to have informed an Afghan deputation that, 'as a British functionary, nothing would induce him to pay a price for blood.' Durand holds that it was the belief on the part of the Afghan chiefs that the British Envoy had set a price on their heads which destroyed all confidence in Macnaghten's good faith, and which was Akbar Khan's chief incentive to his murder.

The terms proffered on November 25th by an Afghan deputation were so humiliating that Macnaghten peremptorily rejected them; and the threat of immediate hostilities unless our people promptly surrendered their arms and withdrew was not carried out. A period of inaction strangely ensued, which on the Afghan side was a treacherous lull, but which Macnaghten, hoping against hope that some turn in our favour might yet occur, regarded with complacency. The chiefs, aware that winter was approaching with added hardship to the forlorn garrison, temporarily desisted from urging negotiations. But the British military authorities, with troops living from hand to mouth on precarious half rations, and with transport cattle dying fast of starvation, kept urging the Envoy to activity in making terms, if absolute starvation was to be averted. Futile projects were discussed between Envoy and General, only to be put aside. As the dreary days of inaction and depletion passed, the deterioration of military spirit among our people manifested itself more and more plainly. British soldiers stolidly watched the Afghans destroying our bridge across the Cabul river, within a quarter of a mile from cantonments. Scared by the threat of an assault, which, in the scornful words of brave Lady Sale, a child with a stick might have repulsed, the garrison of the Mahomed Shereef fort abandoned it in a panic, the white soldiers of the 44th showing the example of pusillanimity to the sepoys whom their cowardice demoralised. Next day the detachment of the 44th which had guarded an exposed position had to be withdrawn, ceding the post of honour to the stauncher sepoys. The camp followers were living on carrion; the commissaries reported but four days' provisions in store, and their inability to procure any more supplies. At length on December 8th the four senior military officers informed the Envoy that it was imperatively necessary he should negotiate a retreat, on the best terms he could obtain.

Macnaghten had to bring himself to recognise that the alternatives were negotiation or starvation, and on the 11th December, with a draft treaty in his hand, he met the principal Afghan chiefs on the river side between the cantonments and the city. After the introductory palavers, Macnaghten read the proposed treaty, whose purport was as follows: that the British should evacuate Afghanistan forthwith unmolested, furnished with supplies and accompanied by hostages, on their march to India; that the Dost, his family, and other Afghan political exiles, should be allowed to return to their country; that Shah Soojah should have the option of remaining at Cabul or going down to India; that amnesty should be accorded to all adherents of Shah Soojah and his British allies; that all prisoners should be released; and that perpetual friendship and mutual good offices should thenceforth endure between the British and the Afghans.

Akbar Khan made demur to some of the provisions, but was overruled, and the main stipulations of the treaty were agreed to by the chiefs. The conference broke up with the understanding that the British troops should evacuate cantonments within three days, and that meanwhile provisions should be sent in for their use. The treaty was simply a virtual capitulation all along the line; but the inherent falseness of our position, the incapacity of the military chiefs, and the debased spirit of the troops, consequent partly on low rations but mainly because of the utter absence of competent and vigorous leadership such as a Broadfoot or a Havelock would have supplied, enforced on the reluctant Envoy conditions humiliating beyond previous parallel in the history of our nation.

From the outset the Afghan chiefs defaulted from their promise of sending in supplies, but some grain was brought into cantonments by the troops, whose evacuation of the Balla Hissar on the 13th was effected under humiliating circumstances. The Afghans demanded the surrender of the forts in British occupation in the vicinity of the cantonments. The requisition was complied with, and the Magazine fort furnished the enemy with both arms and ammunition.

The three stipulated days passed away, and still the British force remained motionless in the cantonments. Macnaghten was bent on procrastination, and circumstances seemed to favour a policy which to all but himself was inexplicable. By the treaty, Shah Soojah was in effect committed to withdraw to India, but soon after its acceptance the chiefs had invited him to remain in Cabul as king, on the stipulation that he should give his daughters in marriage to leaders of the malcontents. After considerable deliberation, the Shah had consented to remain on the condition named, but a few days later he withdrew his acceptance. His vacillation increased the suspicions of the chiefs, and they demanded the immediate evacuation of the cantonments, refusing to furnish provisions until that was done. Meanwhile they sent in no transport animals, although large sums had been handed over for their purchase. Our people were still immobile, and already, on the 18th, there had occurred a fall of snow several inches deep.

The Envoy was engaged in strange and dubious intrigues, and since the Afghans were not fulfilling their share of the treaty obligations, he appears to have regarded himself as no longer bound by its conditions, and free to try to obtain better terms from other sources, in pursuit of which purpose he was expending money in a variety of directions. The dark and unscrupulous Mohun Lal was his confidant and instrument. Akbar Khan and the chiefs of his party had become aware of Macnaghten's machinations, and they laid a snare for him into which he fell with open eyes. Emissaries were sent to him with the sinister proposals that the British should remain in Afghanistan until the spring, when they were to withdraw as of their own accord; that the head of Ameenoolla Khan, one of the most powerful and obnoxious of the rebel leaders, should be presented to the Envoy in return for a stipulated sum of money; and that for all those services the British Government should requite Akbar Khan with a present of thirty lakhs of rupees, and an annual pension of four lakhs. Macnaghten refused peremptorily the proffer of Ameenoolla's head, but did not reject co-operation in that chiefs capture by a dubious device in which British troops were to participate; he did not hesitate to accept the general terms of the proposals; and he consented to hold a conference with Akbar Khan on the following day to carry into effect the projected measures.

On the morning of the 23d the deceived and doomed man, accompanied by his staff-officers, Lawrence, Trevor and Mackenzie, rode out from cantonments to keep the fateful tryst on the bank of the Cabul river. His manner was 'distracted and hurried.' When he told Lawrence of the nature of the affair on which he was going, that shrewd officer immediately warned him that it was a plot against him. 'A plot!' he replied hastily, 'let me alone for that; trust me for that!' and Lawrence desisted from useless expostulation. Poor old Elphinstone had scented treachery; but the Envoy had closed his mouth with the impatient words: 'I understand these things better than you!' As he rode out, he admitted the danger of the enterprise, but argued that if it succeeded it was worth all risks. 'At all events,' he ended, 'let the loss be what it may, I would rather die a hundred deaths than live the last six weeks over again.' The escort halted, and the four British gentlemen advanced to the place of rendezvous, whither came presently Akbar Khan and his party. Akbar began the conference by asking the Envoy if he was ready to carry out the proposals presented to him overnight. 'Why not?' was Sir William's short reply. A number of Afghans, armed to the teeth, had gradually formed a circle around the informal durbar. Lawrence and Mackenzie pointed out this environment to some of the chiefs, who affected to drive off the intruders with their whips; but Akbar observed that it did not matter, as they 'were all in the secret.' 'Suddenly,' wrote Mackenzie, 'I heard Akbar call out, "Begeer! begeer!" ("Seize! seize!") and turning round I saw him grasp the Envoy's left hand with an expression on his face of the most diabolical ferocity. I think it was Sultan Jan who laid hold of the Envoy's right hand. They dragged him in a stooping posture down the hillock, the only words I heard poor Sir William utter being, "Az barae Khooda" ("For God's sake"). I saw his face, however, and it was full of horror and astonishment.' Neither Mackenzie nor Lawrence, the surviving companions of the Envoy, witnessed the actual end. 'Whether,' writes Kaye, 'he died on the spot, or whether he was slain by the infuriated ghazees, is not very clearly known; but the fanatics threw themselves on the prostrate body and hacked it with their knives.' There is no doubt that the head of the unfortunate Macnaghten was paraded in triumph through the streets of Cabul, and that the mangled trunk, after being dragged about the city, was hung up in the great bazaar. Of the three officers who accompanied the Envoy to the conference, Trevor was massacred, Lawrence and Mackenzie were saved with difficulty by friendly chiefs, and brought into the city, where they and Captain Skinner joined the hostages, Captains Connolly and Airey, under the safe roof of the venerable Mahomed Zemaun Khan.

That Akbar and the confederate chiefs spread a snare for the Envoy is plain, and that they regarded his acceptance of their deceitful proposals as a proof of his faithlessness to the treaty obligations to which he had bound himself. It was no element in their reasoning that since they had not regarded the treaty the British functionary might without breach of faith hold that it did not bind him. But it is improbable that the murder of Macnaghten was actually included in their scheme of action. Their intention seems to have been to seize him as a hostage, with intent thus to secure the evacuation of Afghanistan and the restoration of Dost Mahomed. The ill-fated Envoy's expressions on his way to the rendezvous indicate his unhinged state of mind. He went forth to sure treachery; Akbar's gust of sudden fury converted the planned abduction into savage murder, and his abrupt pistol bullet baulked the more wily and less ruthless project which had probably been devised in cold blood.

The escort brought back into cantonments tidings that the Envoy had been seized. The garrison got under arms, and remained passive throughout the day. The defences were manned at night, in the apprehension that the noise and disturbance in the city portended an assault; but that clamour was caused by the mustering of the Afghans in expectation that the British would attack the city, bent on vengeance on the murderers of the Envoy. Action of that nature was, however, wholly absent from the prostrate minds of the military chiefs. On the following afternoon Captain Lawrence transmitted certain overtures from the chiefs, as the result of a conference held by them, when, notwithstanding severe comments on the conduct of the Envoy, professions were made of sincere regret for his death. With certain alterations and additions, the treaty drawn up by Macnaghten was taken by the chiefs as the basis for the negotiations which they desired to renew. Major Pottinger, as now the senior 'political' with the force, was called on by General Elphinstone to undertake the task of conducting negotiations with the Afghan leaders. The high-souled Pottinger rose at the summons from the sickbed to which he had been confined ever since his wonderful escape from Charikar, and accepted the thankless and distasteful duty. It is not necessary to recount the details of negotiations, every article and every stage of which display the arrogance of the men who knew themselves masters of the situation, and reveal not less the degrading humiliation to which was submitting itself a strong brigade of British troops, whose arms were still in the soldiers' hands, and over whose ranks hung banners blazoned with victories that shall be memorable down the ages. On the sombre and cheerless Christmas Day Pottinger rose in the council of men who wore swords, and remonstrated with soldierly vigour and powerful argument against the degrading terms which the chiefs had contumeliously thrown to them. He produced letters from Jellalabad and Peshawur giving information of reinforcements on the way from India, and urging the maintenance of resistance. He argued that to conclude a treaty with the Afghans would be a fatal error, and suggested two alternative courses which offered a prospect of saving their honour and part of the army—the occupation of the Balla Hissar, which was the preferable measure, or the abandonment of camp, baggage, and encumbrances, and forcing a retreat down the passes. The council—Pottinger must have written sarcastically when he termed it a 'council of war'—unanimously decided that to remain in Cabul and to force a retreat were alike impracticable, and that nothing remained but the endeavour to release the army by agreeing to the conditions offered by the enemy. 'Under these circumstances,' in the words of Pottinger, 'as the Major-General coincided with the officers of the council, and refused to attempt occupying the Balla Hissar, and as his second in command declared that impracticable, I considered it my duty, notwithstanding my repugnance to and disapproval of the measure, to yield, and attempt to carry on a negotiation.'

This Pottinger accordingly did. The first demand with which he had to comply was to give bills for the great sums promised by the Envoy to the chiefs for their services in furthering and supporting his treaty. This imposition had to be submitted to, since the Afghans stopped the supplies until the extortion was complied with. The next concession required was the surrender of the artillery of the force, with the exception of six field and three mule guns; and the military chiefs endured this humiliation, against which even the demoralised soldiery chafed. Then the demand for hostages had to be complied with, and four officers were sent on to join the two hostages already in Afghan hands. The chiefs had demanded four married hostages, with their wives and children, and a circular was sent round offering to volunteers the inducement of a large stipend; but the sentiment of repulsion was too strong to be overcome by the bribe. The sick and wounded who could not bear the march were sent into the city in accordance with an article of the treaty, two surgeons accompanying their patients.

The treaty, ratified by the leading chiefs and sent into cantonments on New Year's Day 1842, provided that the British troops, within twenty-four hours after receiving transport, and under the protection of certain chiefs and an adequate escort, should begin their march of evacuation, the Jellalabad garrison moving down to Peshawur in advance; that the six hostages left in Cabul should be well treated, and liberated on the arrival at Peshawur of Dost Mahomed; the sick and wounded left behind to be at liberty to return to India on their recovery; all small arms and ordnance stores in the cantonment magazine to be made over to the Afghans 'as a token of friendship,' on which account also, they were to have all the British cannon except as above mentioned; the Afghans to escort the Ghuznee garrison in safety to Peshawur; and a further stipulation was that the British troops in Candahar and Western Afghanistan were to resign the territories occupied by them and start quickly for India, provisioned and protected from molestation by the way.

Severe and humiliating as were those terms, they were not obtained without difficulty. The terms put forward in the earlier drafts of the treaty were yet more exacting, and the tone of the demands was abrupt, contemptuous, and insulting. Pottinger had to plead, to entreat, to be abject; to beg the masterful Afghans 'not to overpower the weak with sufferings'; 'to be good enough to excuse the women from the suffering' of remaining as hostages; and to entreat them 'not to forget kindness' shown by us in former days. One blushes not for but with the gallant Pottinger, loyally carrying out the miserable duty put upon him. The shame was not his; it lay on the council of superior officers, who overruled his remonstrances, and ground his face into the dust.

Our people were made to pass under the yoke every hour of their wretched lives during those last winter days in the Cabul cantonments. The fanatics and the common folk of the city and its environs swarmed around our petty ramparts, with their foul sneers and their blackguard taunts, hurled with impunity from where they stood at the muzzles of the loaded guns which the gunners were forbidden to fire. Officers and rank and file were in a condition of smouldering fury, but no act of reprisal or retribution was permitted. If the present was one continuous misery, the future lowered yet more gloomily. It was of common knowledge as well in the cantonments as in the city, that the engagements made by the chiefs were not worth the paper on which they had been written, and that treachery was being concerted against the force on its impending travail through the passes. It was told by a chief to one of the officers who was his friend, that Akbar Khan had sworn to have in his possession the British ladies as security for the safe restoration of his own family and relatives, and, strange forecast to be fulfilled almost to the very letter, had vowed to annihilate every soldier of the British army with the exception of one man, who should reach Jellalabad to tell the story of the massacre of all his comrades. Pottinger was well aware how desperate was the situation of the hapless people on whose behalf he had bent so low his proud soul. Mohun Lal warned him of the treachery the chiefs were plotting, and assured him that unless their sons should accompany the army as hostages, it would be attacked on the march. Day after day the departure was delayed, on the pretext that the chiefs had not completed their preparations for the safe conduct of the force and its encumbrances. Day after day the snow was falling with a quiet, ruthless persistency. The bitter night frosts were destroying the sepoys and the camp followers, their vitality weakened by semi-starvation and by the lack of firewood which had long distressed them. At length on January 5th, Sturt the engineer officer got his instructions to throw down into the ditch a section of the eastern rampart, and so furnish a freer exit than the gates could afford. The supply of transport was inadequate, provisions were scant, and the escort promised by the chiefs was not forthcoming. Pottinger advised waiting yet a little longer, until supplies and escort should arrive; but for once the military chiefs were set against the policy of delay, and firm orders were issued that the cantonments should be evacuated on the following day.

Shah Soojah remained in Cabul. The resolution became him better than anything else we know of the unfortunate man. It may be he reasoned that he had a chance for life by remaining in the Balla Hissar, and that from what he knew, there was no chance of life for anyone participating in the fateful march. He behaved fairly by the British authorities, sending more than one solemn warning pressing on them the occupation of the Balla Hissar. And there was some dignity in his appeal to Brigadier Anquetil, who commanded his own contingent, 'if it were well to forsake him in the hour of need, and to deprive him of the aid of that force which he had hitherto been taught to regard as his own?'



CHAPTER VII: THE CATASTROPHE

The ill-omened evacuation by our doomed people of the cantonments wherein for two months they had undergone every extremity of humiliation and contumely, was begun on the dreary winter morning of January 6th, 1842. Snow lay deep on plain and hill-side; the cruel cold, penetrating through the warmest clothing, bit fiercely into the debilitated and thinly clad frames of the sepoys and the great horde of camp followers. The military force which marched out of cantonments consisted of about 4500 armed men, of whom about 690 were Europeans, 2840 native soldiers on foot, and 970 native cavalrymen. The gallant troop of Company's Horse-Artillery marched out with its full complement of six guns, to which, with three pieces of the mountain train, the artillery arm of the departing force was restricted by the degrading terms imposed by the Afghan chiefs. In good heart and resolutely commanded, a body of disciplined troops thus constituted, and of a fighting strength so respectable, might have been trusted not only to hold its own against Afghan onslaught, but if necessary to take the offensive with success. But alas, the heart of the hapless force had gone to water, its discipline was a wreck, its chiefs were feeble and apathetic; its steps were dogged by the incubus of some 12,000 camp followers, with a great company of women and children. The awful fate brooded over its forlorn banners of expiating by its utter annihilation, the wretched folly and sinister prosecution of the enterprise whose deserved failure was to be branded yet deeper on the gloomiest page of our national history, by the impending catastrophe of which the dark shadow already lay upon the blighted column.

The advance began to move out from cantonments at nine A.M. The march was delayed at the river by the non-completion of the temporary bridge, and the whole of the advance was not across until after noon. The main body under Shelton, which was accompanied by the ladies, invalids, and sick, slowly followed. It as well as the advance was disorganised from the first by the throngs of camp followers with the baggage, who could not be prevented from mixing themselves up with the troops. The Afghans occupied the cantonments as portion after portion was evacuated by our people, rending the air with their exulting cries, and committing every kind of atrocity. It was late in the afternoon before the long train of camels following the main body had cleared the cantonments; and meanwhile the rear-guard was massed outside, in the space between the rampart and the canal, among the chaos of already abandoned baggage. It was exposed there to a vicious jezail fire poured into it by the Afghans, who abandoned the pleasures of plunder and arson for the yet greater joy of slaughtering the Feringhees. When the rear-guard moved away in the twilight, an officer and fifty men were left dead in the snow, the victims of the Afghan fire from the rampart of the cantonment; and owing to casualties in the gun teams it had been found necessary to spike and abandon two of the horse-artillery guns.

The rear-guard, cut into from behind by the pestilent ghazees, found its route encumbered with heaps of abandoned baggage around which swarmed Afghan plunderers. Other Afghans, greedier for blood than for booty, were hacking and slaying among the numberless sepoys and camp followers who had dropped out of the column, and were lying or sitting on the wayside in apathetic despair, waiting for death and careless whether it came to them by knife or by cold. Babes lay on the snow abandoned by their mothers, themselves prostrate and dying a few hundred yards further on. It was not until two o'clock of the following morning that the rear-guard reached the straggling and chaotic bivouac in which its comrades lay in the snow at the end of the first short march of six miles. Its weary progress had been illuminated by the conflagration raging in the cantonments, which had been fired by the Afghan fanatics, rabid to erase every relic of the detested unbelievers.

It was a night of bitter cold. Out in the open among the snow, soldiers and camp followers, foodless, fireless, and shelterless, froze to death in numbers, and numbers more were frost-bitten. The cheery morning noise of ordinary camp life was unheard in the mournful bivouac. Captain Lawrence outlines a melancholy picture. 'The silence of the men betrayed their despair and torpor. In the morning I found lying close to me, stiff, cold, and quite dead, in full regimentals, with his sword drawn in his hand, an old grey-haired conductor named Macgregor, who, utterly exhausted, had lain down there silently to die.' Already defection had set in. One of the Shah's infantry regiments and his detachment of sappers and miners had deserted bodily, partly during the march of the previous day, partly in the course of the night.

No orders were given out, no bugle sounded the march, on the morning of the 7th. The column heaved itself forward sluggishly, a mere mob of soldiers, camp followers and cattle, destitute of any semblance of order or discipline. Quite half the sepoys were already unfit for duty; in hundreds they drifted in among the non-combatants and increased the confusion. The advance of the previous day was now the rear-guard. After plundering the abandoned baggage, the Afghans set to harassing the rear-guard, whose progress was delayed by the disorderly multitude blocking the road in front. The three mountain guns, temporarily separated from the infantry, were captured by a sudden Afghan rush. In vain Anquetil strove to rouse the 44th to make an effort for their recapture. Green was more successful with his handful of artillerymen, who followed him and the Brigadier and spiked the pieces, but being unsupported were compelled a second time to abandon them. On this march it became necessary also, from the exhaustion of their teams, to spike and abandon two more of the horse-artillery guns; so that there now remained with the force only a couple of six-pounders. While the rear-guard was in action, a body of Afghan horse charged on the flank, right into the heart of the baggage column, swept away much plunder, and spread confusion and dismay far and wide. The rear of the column would probably have been entirely cut off, but that reinforcements from the advance under Shelton pushed back the enemy, and by crowning the lateral heights kept open the thoroughfare. At Bootkhak was found Akbar Khan, who professed to have been commissioned to escort the force to Jellalabad, and who blamed our people for having marched out prematurely from the cantonments. He insisted on the halt of the column at Bootkhak until the following morning, when he would provide supplies, but he demanded an immediate subsidy of 15,000 rupees, and that Pottinger, Lawrence and Mackenzie should be given up to him as hostages that the force would not march beyond Tezeen until tidings should arrive that Sale had evacuated Jellalabad. Those officers by the General's instructions joined the Afghan chief on the following morning, and Akbar's financial requisition was obsequiously fulfilled. After two days' marching our people, who had brought out with them provisions for but five and a half days, expecting within that time to reach Jellalabad, were only ten miles forward on their march.

Another night passed, with its train of horrors—starvation, cold, exhaustion, death. Lady Sale relates that scarcely any of the baggage now remained; that there was no food for man or beast; that snow lay a foot deep on the ground; that even water from the adjacent stream was difficult to obtain, as the carriers were fired on in fetching it; and that she thought herself fortunate in being sheltered in a small tent in which 'we slept nine, all touching each other.' Daylight brought merely a more bitter realisation of utter misery. Eyre expresses his wonderment at the effect of two nights' exposure to the frost in disorganising the force. 'It had so nipped even the strongest men as to completely prostrate their powers and incapacitate them for service; even the cavalry, who suffered less than the rest, were obliged to be lifted on their horses.' In fact, only a few hundred serviceable men remained. At the sound of hostile fire the living struggled to their feet from their lairs in the snow, stiffened with cold, all but unable to move or hold a weapon, leaving many of their more fortunate comrades stark in death. A turmoil of confusion reigned. The Afghans were firing into the rear of the mass, and there was a wild rush of camp followers to the front, who stripped the baggage cattle of their loads and carried the animals off, leaving the ground strewn with ammunition, treasure, plate, and other property. The ladies were no longer carried in litters and palanquins, for their bearers were mostly dead; they sat in the bullet fire packed into panniers slung on camels, invalids as some of them were—one poor lady with her baby only five days old. Mess stores were being recklessly distributed, and Lady Sale honestly acknowledges that, as she sat on her horse in the cold, she felt very grateful for a tumbler of sherry, which at any other time would have made her 'very unladylike,' but which now merely warmed her. Cups full of sherry were drunk by young children without in the least affecting their heads, so strong on them was the hold of the cold.

It was not until noon that the living mass of men and animals was once more in motion. The troops were in utter disorganisation; the baggage was mixed up with the advance guard; the camp followers were pushing ahead in precipitate panic. The task before the wretched congeries of people was to thread the stupendous gorge of the Khoord Cabul pass—a defile about five miles long, hemmed in on either hand by steeply scarped hills. Down the bottom of the ravine dashed a mountain torrent, whose edges were lined with thick layers of ice, on which had formed glacier-like masses of snow. The 'Jaws of Death' were barely entered when the slaughter began. With the advance rode several Afghan chiefs, whose followers, by their command, shouted to the Ghilzais lining the heights to hold their fire, but the tribesmen gave no heed to the mandate. Lady Sale rode with the chiefs. The Ghilzai fire at fifty yards was close and deadly. The men of the advance fell fast. Lady Sale had a bullet in her arm, and three more through her dress. But the weight of the hostile fire fell on the main column, the baggage escort, and the rear-guard. Some of the ladies, who mostly were on camels which were led with the column, had strange adventures. On one camel was quite a group. In one of its panniers were Mrs Boyd and her little son, in the other Mrs Mainwaring, with her own infant and Mrs Anderson's eldest child. The camel fell, shot. A Hindustanee trooper took up Mrs Boyd en croupe, and carried her through in safety; another horseman behind whom her son rode, was killed, and the boy fell into Afghan hands. The Anderson girl shared the same fate. Mrs Mainwaring, with her baby in her arms, attempted to mount a baggage pony, but the load upset, and she pursued her way on foot. An Afghan horseman rode at her, threatened her with his sword, and tried to drag away the shawl in which she carried her child. She was rescued by a sepoy grenadier, who shot the Afghan dead, and then conducted the poor lady along the pass through the dead and dying, through, also, the close fire which struck down people near to her, almost to the exit of the pass, when a bullet killed the chivalrous sepoy, and Mrs Mainwaring had to continue her tramp to the bivouac alone.

A very fierce attack was made on the rear-guard, consisting of the 44th. In the narrow throat of the pass the regiment was compelled to halt by a block in front, and in this stationary position suffered severely. A flanking fire told heavily on the handful of European infantry. The belated stragglers masked their fire, and at length the soldiers fell back, firing volleys indiscriminately into the stragglers and the Afghans. Near the exit of the pass a commanding position was maintained by some detachments which still held together, strengthened by the only gun now remaining, the last but one having been abandoned in the gorge. Under cover of this stand the rear of the mass gradually drifted forward while the Afghan pursuit was checked, and at length all the surviving force reached the camping ground. There had been left dead in the pass about 500 soldiers and over 2500 camp followers.

Akbar and the chiefs, taking the hostages with them, rode forward on the track of the retreating force. Akbar professed that his object was to stop the firing, but Mackenzie writes that Pottinger said to him: 'Mackenzie, remember if I am killed that I heard Akbar Khan shout "Slay them!" in Pushtoo, although in Persian he called out to stop the firing.' The hostages had to be hidden away from the ferocious ghazees among rocks in the ravine until near evening, when in passing through the region of the heaviest slaughter they 'came upon one sight of horror after another. All the bodies were stripped. There were children cut in two. Hindustanee women as well as men—some frozen to death, some literally chopped to pieces, many with their throats cut from ear to ear.'

Snow fell all night on the unfortunates gathered tentless on the Khoord Cabul camping ground. On the morning of the 9th the confused and disorderly march was resumed, but after a mile had been traversed a halt for the day was ordered at the instance of Akbar Khan, who sent into camp by Captain Skinner a proposal that the ladies and children, with whose deplorable condition he professed with apparent sincerity to sympathise, should be made over to his protection, and that the married officers should accompany their wives; he pledging himself to preserve the party from further hardships and dangers, and afford its members safe escort through the passes in rear of the force. The General had little faith in the Sirdar, but he was fain to give his consent to an arrangement which promised alleviation to the wretchedness of the ladies, scarce any of whom had tasted a meal since leaving Cabul. Some, still weak from childbirth, were nursing infants only a few days old; other poor creatures were momentarily apprehending the pangs of motherhood. There were invalids whose only attire, as they rode in the camel panniers or shivered on the snow, was the nightdresses they wore when leaving the cantonments in their palanquins, and none possessed anything save the clothes on their backs. It is not surprising, then, that dark and doubtful as was the future to which they were consigning themselves, the ladies preferred its risks and chances to the awful certainties which lay before the doomed column. The Afghan chief had cunningly made it a condition of his proffer that the husbands should accompany their wives, and if there was a struggle in the breasts of the former between public and private duties, the General humanely decided the issue by ordering them to share the fortunes of their families.

Akbar Khan sent in no supplies, and the march was resumed on the morning of the both by a force attenuated by starvation, cold, and despair, diminished further by extensive desertion. After much exertion the advance, consisting of all that remained of the 44th, the solitary gun, and a detachment of cavalry, forced a passage to the front through the rabble of camp followers, and marched unmolested for about two miles until the Tunghee Tariki was reached, a deep gorge not more than ten feet wide. Men fell fast in the horrid defile, struck down by the Afghan fire from the heights; but the pass, if narrow, was short, and the advance having struggled through it moved on to the halting-place at Kubbar-i-Jubbar, and waited there for the arrival of the main body. But that body was never to emerge from out the shambles in the narrow throat of the Tunghee Tariki. The advance was to learn from the few stragglers who reached it the ghastly truth that it now was all that remained of the strong brigade which four days before had marched out from the Cabul cantonments. The slaughter from the Afghan fire had blocked the gorge with dead and dying. The Ghilzai tribesmen, at the turn into the pen at the other end of which was the blocked gorge, had closed up fiercely. Then the steep slopes suddenly swarmed with Afghans rushing sword in hand down to the work of butchery, and the massacre stinted not while living victims remained. The rear-guard regiment of sepoys was exterminated, save for two or three desperately wounded officers who contrived to reach the advance.

The remnant of the army consisted now of about seventy files of the 44th, about 100 troopers, and a detachment of horse-artillery with a single gun. The General sent to Akbar Khan to remonstrate with him on the attack he had allowed to be made after having guaranteed that the force should meet with no further molestation. Akbar protested his regret, and pleaded his inability to control the wild Ghilzai hillmen, over whom, in their lust for blood and plunder, their own chiefs had lost all control; but he was willing to guarantee the safe conduct to Jellalabad of the European officers and men if they would lay down their arms and commit themselves wholly into his hands. This sinister proposal the General refused, and the march was continued, led in disorder by the remnant of the camp followers. In the steep descent from the Huft Kotul into the Tezeen ravine, the soldiers following the rabble at some distance, came suddenly on a fresh butchery. The Afghans had suddenly fallen on the confused throng, and the descent was covered with dead and dying.

During the march from Kubbar-i-Jubbar to the Tezeen valley Shelton's dogged valour had mainly saved the force from destruction. With a few staunch soldiers of his own regiment, the one-armed veteran, restored now to his proper metier of stubborn fighting man, had covered the rear and repelled the Ghilzai assaults with persevering energy and dauntless fortitude. And he it was who now suggested, since Akbar Khan still held to his stipulation that the force should lay down its arms, that a resolute effort should be made to press on to Jugdulluk by a rapid night march of four-and-twenty miles, in the hope of clearing the passes in that vicinity before the enemy should have time to occupy them.

That the attempt would prove successful was doubtful, since the force was already exhausted; but it was the last chance, and Shelton's suggestion was adopted. In the early moonlight the march silently began, an ill omen marking the start in the shape of the forced abandonment of the last gun. Fatal delay occurred between Seh Baba and Kutti Sung because of a panic among the camp followers, who, scared by a few shots, drifted backwards and forwards in a mass, retarding the progress of the column and for the time entirely arresting the advance of Shelton's and his rear-guard. The force could not close up until the morning, ten miles short of Jugdulluk, and already the Afghans were swarming on every adjacent height. All the way down the broken slope to Jugdulluk the little column trudged through the gauntlet of jezail fire which lined the road with dead and wounded. Shelton and his rear-guard handful performed wonders, again and again fending off with close fire and levelled bayonets the fierce rushes of Ghilzais charging sword in hand. The harassed advance reached Jugdulluk in the afternoon of the 11th, and took post behind some ruins on a height by the roadside, the surviving officers forming line in support of the gallant rear-guard struggling forward through its environment of assailants. As Shelton and his brave fellows burst through the cordon they were greeted by cheers from the knoll. But there was no rest for the exhausted people, for the Afghans promptly occupied commanding positions whence they maintained a fire from which the ruins afforded but scant protection. To men parched with thirst the stream at the foot of their knoll was but a tantalising aggravation, for to attempt to reach it was certain death. The snow they devoured only increased their sufferings, and but little stay was afforded by the raw flesh of a few gun bullocks. Throughout the day volley after volley was poured down upon the weary band by the inexorable enemy. Frequent sallies were made, and the heights were cleared, but the positions were soon reoccupied and the ruthless fire was renewed.

Captain Skinner, summoned by Akbar, brought back a message that General Elphinstone should visit him to take part in a conference, and that Brigadier Shelton and Captain Johnson should be given over as hostages for the evacuation of Jellalabad. Compliance was held to be imperative, and the temporary command was entrusted to Brigadier Anquetil. Akbar was extremely hospitable to his compulsory guests; but he insisted on including the General among his hostages, and was not moved by Elphinstone's representations that he would prefer death to the disgrace of being separated from his command in its time of peril. The Ghilzai chiefs came into conference burning with hatred against the British, and revelling in the anticipated delights of slaughtering them. Akbar seemed sincere in his effort to conciliate them, but was long unsuccessful. Their hatred seemed indeed stronger than their greed; but at length toward nightfall Akbar announced that pacific arrangements had been accepted by the tribes, and that what remained of the force should be allowed to march unmolested to Jellalabad.

How futile was the compact, if indeed there was any compact, was soon revealed. The day among the ruins on the knoll had passed in dark and cruel suspense—in hunger, thirst, and exhaustion, in the presence of frequent death; and as the evening fell, in anguish and all but utter despair. As darkness set in the conviction enforced itself that to remain longer in the accursed place was madness; and the little band, leaving behind perforce the sick and wounded, marched out, resolute to push through or die fighting. In the valley the only molestation at first was a desultory fire from the camping Ghilzais, who were rather taken by surprise, but soon became wide awake to their opportunities. Some hurried forward to occupy the pass rising from the valley to the Jugdulluk crest; others, hanging on the rear and flanks of the column encumbered with its fatal incubus of camp followers, mixed among the unarmed throng with their deadly knives, and killed and plundered with the dexterity of long practice. Throughout the tedious march up the steeply rising defile a spattering fire came from the rocks and ridges flanking the track, all but blocked by the surging concourse of miserable followers. The advance had to employ cruel measures to force its way through the chaos toward the crest. As it is approached from the Jugdulluk direction the flanking elevations recede and merge in the transverse ridge, which is crowned by a low-cut abrupt rocky upheaval, worn down somewhat where the road passes over the crest by the friction of traffic. Just here the tribesmen had constructed a formidable abattis of prickly brushwood, which stretched athwart the road, and dammed back the fugitives in the shallow oval basin between the termination of the ravine and the summit of the ridge. In this trap were caught our hapless people and the swarm of their native followers, and now the end was very near. From behind the barrier, and around the lip of the great trap, the hillmen fired their hardest into the seething mass of soldiers and followers writhing in the awful Gehenna on which the calm moon shone down. On the edges of this whirlpool of death the fell Ghilzais were stabbing and hacking with the ferocious industry inspired by thirst for blood and lust for plunder. It is among the characteristics of our diverse-natured race to die game, and even to thrill with a strange fierce joy when hope of escape from death has all but passed away and there remains only to sell life at the highest possible premium of exchange. Among our people, face to face with death on the rocky Jugdulluk, officers and soldiers alike fought with cool deadly rancour. The brigadier and the private engaged in the same fierce melee, fought side by side, and fell side by side. Stalwart Captain Dodgin of the 44th slew five Afghans before he fell. Captain Nicholl of the horse-artillery, gunless now, rallied to him the few staunch gunners who were all that remained to him of his noble and historic troop, and led them on to share with him a heroic death.