Candahar was fortunately preserved, but at the end of March the unpleasant tidings came that Ghuznee, which British valour had carried by storm three years before, had now reverted into Afghan possession. The siege had lasted for nearly three and a half months. In mid-December the besiegers occupied the city in force, introduced by the citizens through a subterranean way; and the garrison, consisting chiefly of a regiment of sepoys, withdrew into the citadel. The bitter winter and the scant rations took the heart out of the natives of the warm and fertile Indian plains; but nevertheless it was not until March 6th that the garrison, under pledge of being escorted to Peshawur with colours, arms, and baggage, marched out. The unfortunates would have done better to have died a soldierly death, with arms in their hands and the glow of fighting in their hearts. As the event was, faith with them was broken, and save for a few officers who were made prisoners, most were slaughtered, or perished in a vain attempt to escape.
During his long isolation Nott's resources had been seriously depleted, and he had ordered up from Scinde a brigade, escorting much needed treasure, ammunition, and medicines. Brigadier England was entrusted with the command of this force, whose assemblage at Quetta was expected about the end of March. Pending its gathering England had moved out toward the entrance of the Kojuk Pass, where he met with a sharp and far from creditable repulse, and fell back on Quetta miserably disheartened, suggesting in his abjectness that Nott should abandon Candahar and retire on him. The stout old soldier at Candahar waxed wroth at the limpness of his subordinate, and addressed to England a biting letter, ordering peremptorily the latter's prompt advance to Candahar, engaging to dry-nurse him through the Kojuk by a brigade sent down from Candahar for the purpose, and remarking sarcastically, 'I am well aware that war cannot be made without loss; but yet perhaps British troops can oppose Asiatic armies without defeat.' Thus exhorted England moved, to find his march through the Kojuk protected by Wymer's sepoys from Candahar, who had crowned the lateral heights before he ventured into the pass; and he reached Candahar without maltreatment on the 10th May, bringing to Nott the much needed supplies which rendered that resolute man equal to any enterprise.
It remained, however, to be seen whether any enterprise was to be permitted to him and to his brother commander lying in camp on the Jellalabad plain. Lord Ellenborough, the successor of Lord Auckland, had struck a firm if somewhat inexplicit note in his earliest manifesto, dated March 13th. A single sentence will indicate its tenor: 'Whatever course we may hereafter take must rest solely on military considerations, and hence in the first instance regard to the safety of our detached garrisons in Afghanistan; to the security of our troops now in the field from unnecessary risks; and finally, to the re-establishment of our military reputation by the infliction upon the Afghans of some signal and decisive blow.' Those were brave words, if only they had been adhered to. But six weeks later his lordship was ordering Nott to evacuate Candahar and fall back on Quetta, until the season should permit further retirement to the Indus; and instructing Pollock, through the Commander-in-Chief, to withdraw without delay every British soldier from Jellalabad to Peshawur, except under certain specified eventualities, none of which were in course of occurrence. Pollock temporised, holding on to his advanced position by the plea of inability to retire for want of transport, claiming mildly to find discretionary powers in the Government instructions, and cautiously arguing in favour of an advance by a few marches to a region where better climate was to be found, and whence he might bring to bear stronger pressure for the liberation of the prisoners. Nott was a narrower man than Pollock. When he got his orders he regarded them as strictly binding, no matter how unpalatable the injunctions. 'I shall not lose a moment,' he wrote, 'in making arrangements to carry out my orders, without turning to the right or the left, and without inquiring into the reasons for the measures enjoined, whatever our own opinions or wishes may be.' He reluctantly began preparations for withdrawal. Carriage was ordered up from Quetta, and a brigade was despatched to withdraw the garrison of Khelat-i-Ghilzai, and to destroy the fort which Craigie had so long and valiantly defended.
It would be tedious to detail the vacillations, the obscurities, and the tortuosities of Lord Ellenborough's successive communications to his two Generals in Afghanistan. Pollock had been permitted to remain about Jellalabad until the autumn should bring cooler marching weather. Nott had been detained at Candahar by the necessity for crushing menacing bodies of tribal levies, but as July waned his preparations for withdrawal were all but complete. On the 4th of that month Lord Ellenborough wrote to him, reiterating injunctions for his withdrawal from Afghanistan, but permitting him the alternatives of retiring by the direct route along his line of communications over Quetta and Sukkur, or of boxing the compass by the curiously circuitous 'retirement' via Ghuznee, Cabul, and Jellalabad. Pollock, for his part, was permitted, if he thought proper, to advance on Cabul in order to facilitate Nott's withdrawal, if the latter should elect to 'retreat' by the circuitous route which has just been described.
One does not care to characterise the 'heads I win, tails you lose' policy of a Governor-General who thus shuffled off his responsibility upon two soldiers who previously had been sedulously restricted within narrow if varying limits. Their relief from those trammels set them free, and it was their joy to accept the devolved responsibility, and to act with soldierly initiative and vigour. The chief credit of the qualified yet substantial triumph over official hesitation certainly belongs to Pollock, who gently yet firmly forced the hand of the Governor-General, while Nott's merit was limited to a ready acceptance of the responsibility of a proffered option. A letter from Nott intimating his determination to retire by way of Cabul and Jellalabad reached Pollock in the middle of August, who immediately advanced from Jellalabad; and his troops having concentrated at Gundamuk, he marched from that position on 7th September, his second division, commanded by M'Caskill, following next day. Pollock was woefully short of transport, and therefore was compelled to leave some troops behind at Gundamuk, and even then could carry only half the complement of tentage. But his soldiers, who carried in their haversacks seven days' provisions, would gladly have marched without any baggage at all, and the chief himself was eager to hurry forward, for Nott had written that he expected to reach Cabul on 15th September, and Pollock was burning to be there first. In the Jugdulluk Pass, on the 8th, he found the Ghilzais in considerable force on the heights. Regardless of a heavy artillery fire they stood their ground, and so galled Pollock's troops with sharp discharges from their jezails that it became necessary to send infantry against them. They were dislodged from the mountain they had occupied by a portion of the Jellalabad brigade, led by gallant old General Sale, who had his usual luck in the shape of a wound.
This Jugdulluk fighting was, however, little more than a skirmish, and Pollock's people were to experience more severe opposition before they should emerge from the passes on to the Cabul plain. On the morning of the 13th the concentrated force had quitted its camp in the Tezeen valley, and had committed itself without due precaution to the passage of the ravine beyond, when the Afghan levies with which Akbar Khan had manned the flanking heights, opened their fire. The Sirdar had been dissuaded by Captain Troup, one of his prisoners, from attempting futile negotiations, and advised not to squander lives in useless opposition. Akbar had replied that he was too deeply committed to recede, and that his people were bent on fighting. They were not baulked in the aspiration, which assuredly their opponents shared with at least equal zeal. Pollock's advance guard was about the middle of the defile, when the enemy were suddenly discovered blocking the pass in front, and holding the heights which Pollock's light troops should have crowned in advance of the column. Akbar's force was calculated to be about 15,000 strong, and the Afghans fought resolutely against the British regiments which forced their way up the heights on the right and left. The ghazees dashed down to meet the red soldiers halfway, and up among the precipices there were many hand-to-hand encounters, in which the sword and the bayonet fought out the issue. The Afghans made their last stand on the rocky summit of the Huft Kotul; but from this commanding position they were finally driven by Broadfoot's bloodthirsty little Goorkhas, who, hillmen themselves from their birth, chased the Afghans from crag to crag, using their fell kookeries as they pursued. It was Akbar Khan's last effort, and the quelling of it cost Pollock the trivial loss of thirty-two killed and 130 wounded. There was no more opposition, and it was well for the Afghans, for the awful spectacles presented in the Khoord Cabul Pass traversed on the following day, kindled in Pollock's soldiers a white heat of fury. 'The bodies,' wrote Backhouse in his unpublished diary, 'lay in heaps of fifties and hundreds, our gun wheels crushing the bones of our late comrades at every yard for four or five miles; indeed, the whole march from Gundamuk to Cabul may be said to have been over the bodies of the massacred army.' Pollock marched unmolested to Cabul on the 15th, and camped on the old racecourse to the east of the city.
Nott, in evacuating Candahar, divided his force into two portions, the weaker of which General England took back to India by Quetta and Sukkur, while on August 9th Nott himself, with two European battalions, the 'beautiful sepoy regiments' of which he had a right to be proud, and his field guns, marched away from Candahar, his face set towards Cabul. His march was uneventful until about midway between Khelat-i-Ghilzai and Ghuznee, when on the 28th the cavalry, unsupported and badly handled in a stupid and unauthorised foray, lost severely in officers and men, took to flight in panic, and so gave no little encouragement to the enemy hanging on Nott's flank. Two days later Shumshoodeen, the Afghan leader, drew up some 10,000 men in order of battle on high ground left of the British camp. Nott attacked with vigour, advancing to turn the Afghan left. In reprisal the enemy threw their strength on his left, supporting their jezail fire with artillery, whereupon Nott changed front to the left, deployed, and then charged. The Afghans did not wait for close quarters, and Nott was no more seriously molested. Reaching the vicinity of Ghuznee on September 5th, he cleared away the hordes hanging on the heights which encircle the place. During the night the Afghans evacuated Ghuznee. Soon after daylight the British flag was waving from the citadel. Having fulfilled Lord Ellenborough's ridiculous order to carry away from the tomb of Sultan Mahmoud in the environs of Ghuznee, the supposititious gates of Somnath, a once famous Hindoo shrine in the Bombay province of Kattiawar, Nott marched onward unmolested till within a couple of marches of Cabul, when near Maidan he had some stubborn fighting with an Afghan force which tried ineffectually to block his way. On the 17th he marched into camp four miles west of Cabul, whence he could discern, not with entire complacency, the British ensign already flying from the Balla Hissar, for Pollock had won the race to Cabul by a couple of days.
For months there had been negotiations for the release of the British prisoners whom Akbar Khan had kept in durance ever since they came into his hands in the course of the disastrous retreat from Cabul in January, but they had been unsuccessful, and now it was known that the unfortunate company of officers, women, and children, had been carried off westward into the hill country of Bamian. Nott's officers, as the Candahar column was nearing Cabul, had more than once urged him to detach a brigade in the direction of Bamian in the hope of effecting a rescue of the prisoners, but he had steadily refused, leaning obstinately on the absence from the instructions sent him by Government of any permission to engage in the enterprise of attempting their release. He was not less brusque in the intimation of his declinature when Pollock gave him the opportunity to send a force in support of Sir Richmond Shakespear, whom, with a detachment of Kuzzilbash horse, Pollock had already despatched on the mission of attempting the liberation of the prisoners. The narrow old soldier argued doggedly that Government 'had thrown the prisoners overboard.' Why, then, should he concern himself with their rescue? If his superior officer should give him a firm order, of course he would obey, but he would obey under protest. Pollock disdained to impose so enviable a duty on a recalcitrant man, and committed to Sale the honourable and welcome service—all the more welcome to that officer because his wife and daughter were among the captives. At the head of his Jellalabad brigade, he was to push forward by forced marches on the track of Shakespear and his horsemen.
The strange and bitter experiences of the captives, from that miserable January Sabbath day on which they passed under the 'protection' of Akbar Khan until the mid-September noon when Shakespear galloped into their midst, are recorded in full and interesting detail in Lady Sale's journal, in Vincent Eyre's Captivity, and in Colin Mackenzie's biography published under the title of Storms and Sunshine of a Soldier's Life. Here it is possible only briefly to summarise the chief incidents of the captivity. The unanimous testimony of the released prisoners was to the effect that Akbar Khan, violent, bloody, and passionate man though he was, behaved toward them with kindness and a certain rude chivalry. They remained for nearly three months at Budiabad, living in great squalor and discomfort. For the whole party there were but five rooms, each of which was occupied by from five to ten officers and ladies, the few soldiers and non-commissioned officers, who were mostly wounded, being quartered in sheds and cellars. Mackenzie drily remarks that the hardships of the common lot, and the close intimacy of prison life, brought into full relief good and evil qualities; 'conventional polish was a good deal rubbed off and replaced by a plainness of speech quite unheard of in good society.' Ladies and gentlemen were necessitated to occupy the same room during the night, but the men 'cleared out' early in the morning, leaving the ladies to themselves. The dirt and vermin of their habitation were abominably offensive to people to whom scrupulous cleanliness was a second nature. But the captives were allowed to take exercise within a limited range; they had among them a few books, and an old newspaper occasionally came on to them from Jellalabad, with which place a fitful correspondence in cypher was surreptitiously maintained. They had a few packs of playing cards; they made for themselves backgammon and draught-boards, and when in good spirits they sometimes played hopscotch and blindman's-buff with the children of the party. The Sundays were always kept scrupulously, Lawrence and Mackenzie conducting the service in turn.
The earthquake which shook down the fortifications of Jellalabad brought their rickety fort about the ears of the captives. Several escaped narrowly with their lives when walls and roofs yawned and crumbled, and all had to turn out and sleep in the courtyard, where they suffered from cold and saturating dews. After the defeat of Akbar by the Jellalabad garrison on April 7th, there was keen expectation that Sale would march to their rescue, but he came not, and there were rumours among the guards of their impending massacre in revenge for the crushing reverse Akbar had experienced. Presently, however, Mahomed Shah Khan, Akbar's lieutenant, arrived full of courtesy and reassurance, but with the unwelcome intimation that the prisoners must prepare themselves to leave Budiabad at once, and move to a greater distance from Jellalabad and their friends. For some preparation was not a difficult task. 'All my worldly goods,' wrote Captain Johnson, 'might be stowed away in a towel.' Others who possessed heavier impedimenta, were lightened of the encumbrance by the Ghilzai Sirdar, who plundered indiscriminately. The European soldiers were left behind at Budiabad, and the band of ladies and gentlemen started on the afternoon of April 10th, in utter ignorance of their destination, under the escort of a strong band of Afghans. At the ford across the Cabul river the cavalcade found Akbar Khan wounded, haggard, and dejected, seated in a palanquin, which, weak as he was, he gave up to Ladies Macnaghten and Sale, who were ill. A couple of days were spent at Tezeen among the melancholy relics of the January slaughter, whence most of the party were carried several miles further into the southern mountains to the village of Zandeh, while General Elphinstone, whose end was fast approaching, remained in the Tezeen valley with Pottinger, Mackenzie, Eyre, and one or two others. On the evening of April 23d the poor General was finally released from suffering of mind and body. Akbar, who when too late had offered to free him, sent the body down to Jellalabad under a guard, and accompanied by Moore the General's soldier servant; and Elphinstone lies with Colonel Dennie and the dead of the defence of Jellalabad in their nameless graves in a waste place within the walls of that place. Toward the end of May the captives were moved up the passes to the vicinity of Cabul, where Akbar Khan was now gradually attaining the ascendant. Prince Futteh Jung, however, still held out in the Balla Hissar, and intermittent firing was heard as the weary cortège of prisoners reached a fort about three miles short of Cabul, which the ladies of the proprietor's zenana had evacuated in their favour. Here they lived if not in contentment at least in considerable comfort and amenity. They had the privacy of a delightful garden, and enjoyed the freedom of bathing in the adjacent river. After the strife between Akbar Khan and Futteh Jung ceased they were even permitted to exchange visits with their countrymen, the hostages quartered on the Balla Hissar. They were able to obtain money from the Cabul usurers, and thus to supply themselves with suitable clothing and additions to their rations, and their mails from India and Jellalabad were forwarded to them without hindrance. The summer months were passed in captivity, but it was no longer for them a captivity of squalor and wretchedness. Life was a good deal better worth living in the pleasant garden house on the bank of the Logur than it had been in the noisome squalor of Budiabad and the vermin-infested huddlement of Zandeh. But they still-lived under the long strain of anxiety and apprehension, for none of them knew what the morrow might bring forth. While residing in the pleasant quarters in the Logur valley the captives of the passes were joined by nine officers, who were the captives of Ghuznee. After the capitulation the latter had been treated with cruel harshness, shut up in one small room, and debarred from fresh air and exercise. Colonel Palmer, indeed, had undergone the barbarity of torture in the endeavour to force him to disclose the whereabouts of treasure which he was suspected of having buried.