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.
[Illustration: CABUL the CANTONMENT and the Surrounding COUNTRY.]
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.