The First Afghan War

by Mowbray Morris

Elphinstone, as has been said, was now in command of the British forces. Next in rank to him were Sir Robert Sale, of the 13th Light Infantry, and Brigadier Shelton, who had come up in the spring of the year with his regiment, the 44th of the Line. Soojah's own troops were under Brigadier Anquetil, who had superseded Roberts, much to Macnaghten's satisfaction, for Roberts was too much of an "alarmist" to please the sanguine Envoy. The main body of the garrison lay in the new cantonments. These remarkable works had been erected in the previous year. Situated in low, swampy ground about two miles from the citadel, they were defended only by a low mud rampart and ditch, over which a pony had been ridden for a wager by one of our own officers; they were commanded on every side by hills and villages, while, to make matters still worse, the Commissariat supplies were stored in a small fort without the wall. The authority for this unfortunate arrangement has been the subject of much discussion, into which it would be neither profitable nor pleasant to enter here; but it should not, at least, be forgotten that our engineer officers had always urged most strongly the expediency of posting the troops in the Bala Hissar, or citadel, a strong position on a hill commanding the entire city and suburbs. At first, indeed, this had been done, but the soldiers were soon required to give way to the ladies of Soojah's harem, and it was then deemed necessary, by some person or persons, to build what Kaye aptly calls "the sheep-folds on the plain." Elphinstone, at any rate, was not to blame, whoever was, for the folly had been committed before Elphinstone had assumed the command.

But familiarity, as usual, soon begot security, and in this dangerous position our officers and men soon learned to live as tranquilly and easily as in the strongest fortress in the world, or as in the luxurious quarters they had left in peaceful Hindostan. The time passed pleasantly enough. Lady Macnaghten and Lady Sale had joined their husbands, and nearly all the married officers had followed the example of their chiefs. The climate was fine and bracing, nor was there any lack either of amusement or society. Englishmen carry their sports with them into every quarter of the globe, and the stolid Afghans looked in amazement and admiration on the races, the cricket, and the skating with which the white-faced infidels beguiled the idle days. But there were unfortunately other habits in which some of the English chose to indulge which stirred up in the native heart feelings of a very different nature, habits which have already been briefly touched upon, and which were growing fast into an open and notorious scandal. "There are many," wrote Kaye in 1851, "who can fill in with vivid personality all the melancholy details of this chapter of human weakness, and supply a catalogue of the wrongs which were soon to be so fearfully redressed."

Macnaghten proposed to set his face towards home in November. His last days, as ill-fortune would have it, had been again embittered with revolt, arising from an unpopular measure which he had felt himself obliged to sanction. Our sojourn in Afghanistan had been a fearful drain on the resources of the Indian Government, and the need for economy had been urgently pressed upon Lord Auckland by the authorities at home. Macnaghten, casting about for the means of obeying his chief's instructions, unluckily hit upon the most unfortunate means he could have chosen. He determined to inaugurate a general system of retrenchment in the stipends, or subsidies, paid to the chiefs, and as a beginning, the sum of £3000, which had been yearly paid to the Eastern Ghilzyes to secure our communications with Hindostan, was forthwith stopped. As a natural result they at once flew to arms, occupied the passes on the road to Jellalabad, commenced an organised system of plundering, and entirely cut off the communications it was our greatest interest to keep open. But the Envoy was not very seriously disturbed. Sale's brigade, which was under orders for India, could "thresh the rascals" on its homeward journey, and clear the passes easily enough. Monteith was accordingly sent out with the 35th Native Infantry, a squadron of cavalry, and some guns, and Sale followed with his own regiment, the 13th Light Infantry. The task was not so easy as the Envoy had anticipated. Sale himself was wounded and Wyndham, of the 35th, killed. It was found necessary to despatch more troops before the work could be done. It was done, however, partly by force and partly by diplomacy; the Khoord-Cabul defile was once more cleared; detachments of troops were posted at intervals along the pass, while Sale himself, halting at Gundamuck, put away his ideas of home for a time.

November 1st was the day fixed for Macnaghten's departure. He was not without warnings that for some days past there had existed strong symptoms of disaffection in the city, where the shopkeepers were closing their shutters, and refusing to sell their wares to the English. John Conolly, a relative of the Envoy's, had got an inkling of what was meditated, while Mohun Lal, an interpreter, who had served us faithfully from the time of our first entry into the country, had directly warned Burnes of a conspiracy of which Abdoolah Khan, one of our most uncompromising opponents, was the prime instigator, and in which the chiefs of all the tribes then assembled in Cabul were alike implicated. But Burnes was still under the orders of Macnaghten, and Macnaghten still refused to listen to the "croakers." On that very evening the conspirators met for the last time, and on the morning of the 2nd the city rose in insurrection.

Burnes himself was the first victim. His house was within the city walls, next to that of Captain Johnson, the paymaster of Soojah's troops. On the previous night Johnson had slept in the cantonments, but Burnes was at home, and with him his brother Charles, and William Broadfoot, an able officer, who had been selected by the expectant Envoy for the post of military secretary. Before daybreak he had again been warned of his danger by a friendly native, and at a later hour came Osman Khan, the Vizier himself, with the same tale, imploring him to seek safety either in the citadel or the cantonments. Burnes could no longer disbelieve, for already an angry crowd was gathering under his windows, and angry voices were raised in clamour for the lives of the Englishmen. He consented to write to the Envoy for aid, and to send messengers to Abdoolah Khan, promising him that if he would restrain the citizens his grievances should receive prompt redress. Why no immediate answer was returned to the first of these messages has never been made perfectly clear; the latter resulted only in the death of the messenger. Meanwhile Burnes himself was haranguing the mob from an upper gallery, while his brother and the guard were firing on them from below. In vain he appealed to their avarice; the only answer was that he should "come down into the garden." A Cashmerian, who had found his way into the house, swore to pass him and his brother out in safety to the cantonments, if the latter would bid the firing cease. Hastily disguising themselves, the brothers followed the man to the door, but scarcely had they set foot beyond it, when the traitor shouted with a loud voice, "This is Sekunder Burnes!" In a moment the mob were on them, and, hacked to pieces by the cruel Afghan knives, then fell the first, but not the last victims of a long series of mistakes.

The paymaster's house was next sacked; upwards of £17,000 of the public money and £1000 of Johnson's private fortune fell to the share of the murderers. No force came from the cantonments to check them, and the only effort made in the early part of the day was made by Soojah himself, who sent one of his own regiments down from the Bala Hissar into the city. Entangled in a network of narrow lanes and bazaars, they could do no good, and Shelton, coming up later with a small body of infantry and artillery, was in time only to cover a disorderly flight. It is difficult to decide on the true cause of the lateness of Shelton's arrival, but it is certain that had Burnes's message received prompt attention, the insurrection, for that time at least, would have been nipped in the bud. That such was the opinion of the Afghans themselves many of our officers were subsequently assured, and the fact that none of the chief conspirators took any part in the first outbreak seems to give colour to the supposition that it was not the original design to proceed to such extremities as followed, but rather to convey to the British such a warning as might convince them of the hopelessness of their cause, and induce them at last to take measures to leave the country to its own devices. Be this, however, as it may, nothing was done till the time had passed for anything to be of use, and a riot which 300 resolute men could have quelled with ease in the morning, would in the afternoon have taxed, if not defied, the best energies of 3000.

The history of the days which followed between the first rising and the opening of negotiations is as difficult to write as it is painful to read. So many and so conflicting are the accounts that have been received, that it is impossible within a limited space to present a distinct and coherent narrative of events, or, without the risk of a hasty conclusion, to apportion, even were it desirable to do so, the precise share of responsibility to each actor in that dismal tragedy of errors. It is certain, at least, that from the 2nd to the 25th November the utmost confusion and dismay prevailed within the British cantonments. No two of the authorities seem ever to have counselled alike; there was disunion between Elphinstone and Macnaghten, and disunion even between Elphinstone and Shelton. Orders were issued one hour to be countermanded the next, and then re-issued. There was no lack of individual boldness in council, and, among the officers, no lack of individual bravery in action, but want of co-operation rendered both alike useless. Our strength was frittered away in a series of petty sorties, conducted by insufficient numbers, and generally ordered when the time for immediate action was past. Our soldiers, even our own English soldiers, disheartened and demoralized by repeated defeats, for which they felt that they themselves were not to blame, lost confidence alike in their commanders and in themselves. It is said that it was actually found necessary to employ a Sepoy guard to prevent the soldiers of an English regiment leaving their post, and it is certain that on one, if not on more than one occasion, our men fairly turned their backs and ran before the Afghan hordes. At an early day, as might well have been foreseen, the forts containing the Commissariat supplies and stores fell into the enemy's hands, and though this disaster was for a time remedied by the energies of our Commissariat officers, who had fortunately not been lost with the stores, and who managed to collect supplies from some of the neighbouring villages, there soon arose a new danger in the doubt whether the the siege would not outlast the ammunition. Urgent and frequent messages had been sent to bring up Sale's brigade, which was supposed to be still among the Khoord-Cabul hills, and to Eldred Pottinger to join the garrison with his detachment from Charekur, a place about 60 miles north of Cabul. But Sale's brigade was already on its march to Jellalabad, and of Pottinger's detachment only he and another officer reached Cabul alive. To crown all, it was known that Akbar Khan was moving down from Bamean. On the 23rd a strong force of cavalry and infantry, but accompanied, through what strange process of reasoning it is impossible to say, by only one gun, moved out under Shelton to occupy a hill commanding the sources of our supplies, which had been recently threatened by the enemy. The expedition was a total failure. Shelton himself behaved with conspicuous gallantry, and his officers nobly followed his example; but the men, discouraged by frequent defeat, and finding their muskets no match for the Afghan jezails, were mown down like grass, till, having lost their solitary piece of artillery, they fled in disgraceful panic back to the cantonments. With this disastrous attempt concluded all exterior operations, and on the same day Macnaghten received instructions from Elphinstone to open negotiations for surrender.

At the first meeting the terms offered were so insulting that Macnaghten refused to continue the conference. His hopes, too, had somewhat revived of late by a communication from Mohun Lal, whom he had secretly employed to sow, with offers of large bribes, dissensions among the hostile chiefs, and by the news of the death of two of our bitterest foes, Abdoolah Khan and Meer Musjedee. Whether these men died from wounds received in battle, or by assassins set on by Mohun Lal, is not certain, but it seems tolerably clear that the interpreter was instigated by some one in the British camp to offer large sums of money for the heads of the principal insurgents. As a set-off to this, however, came grave reports from the Commissariat department, and the news that there was little prospect of Maclaren's brigade, which had set out from Candahar to their relief, being able to win its way to Cabul. On December 11th, therefore, negotiations were renewed. Akbar Khan, who had by this time joined his countrymen amid uproarious expressions of delight, with the chiefs of all the principal tribes, met the Envoy on the banks of the Cabul river, about a mile from the cantonments. Macnaghten read in Persian the draft treaty he had prepared, of which the main stipulations were to the following effect:—That the British troops in Afghanistan should be withdrawn to India as speedily as possible, accompanied by two Sirdars of rank as guarantees of safe conduct; that on their arrival at Peshawur arrangements should at once be made for the return of Dost Mahomed and all others of his countrymen at that time detained in India; that Soojah should be allowed to depart with the troops, or to remain where he was on a suitable provision, as he might prefer; and that four "respectable" British officers were to be left at Cabul as hostages for the due fulfilment of the treaty until the return of Dost Mahomed and his family. After a discussion of two hours the terms were accepted, and it was agreed that the evacuation of our position should commence in three days' time. Such a treaty is not to be read with pleasure, but it was possibly the best that could have been concluded under the circumstances that had arisen; for which Macnaghten himself appears, at least, to have been less responsible than his military colleagues, at whose urgent and repeated instigations he had undertaken the work.

It became soon apparent how little dependence was to be placed on the Afghan word. On the 13th, according to the stipulation, the British troops stationed in the citadel left their quarters, about six o'clock on a winter's evening. Scarcely had they cleared the gates, when an ugly rush was made for them by the crowd outside. The gates were immediately closed, and the guns of the citadel opened an indiscriminate fire on friends and foes alike. Akbar Khan declared that at that late hour he could not undertake their safe conduct to the cantonments, and the men were therefore obliged to pass the night on the frosty ground, without tents, without food, and without fuel. On the following morning they reached the cantonments in safety, but half-dead with hunger and exposure. It had been agreed that the Afghans should supply the necessary provisions and carriage for the march; but it had also been agreed that the British forts in the neighbourhood of their position should be given up. The Afghans refused to play their part till we had played ours, and the forts were accordingly placed in their hands. Still, provisions came in but slowly, and carriage not at all. A horde of robbers and fanatics swarmed between the city and the cantonments, plundering under our very eyes the few supplies that were sent in, but as they were now to be considered "as our allies" not a shot was permitted to be fired. Yet even then Macnaghten continued to hope against hope, that "something might turn up" to spare the humiliation of an enforced retreat, and on the evening of the 22nd it seemed to him that such a chance had arrived. It came in the shape of a proposal from Akbar Khan that he and the Ghilzyes should, in the face of the concluded treaty, unite with the English to re-occupy the citadel and the abandoned forts; that our forces should be allowed to remain in Afghanistan till the spring, and then withdraw as though of their own free-will; that the head of the formidable Ameen-oolah Khan should be sent to the Envoy, and that in consideration of all these good offices Akbar Khan himself should receive an annuity of four lakhs of rupees from the British Government, together with a bonus of thirty lakhs. The offer of murder was indignantly rejected, but with the others Macnaghten closed at once, and on the following morning, having requested that two regiments with some guns might be held ready for instant service, he rode out to the proposed place of conference, accompanied by Lawrence, Trevor and Mackenzie. The latter, indeed, learning the new design, ventured to expostulate with his chief on the risk he was about to run, while Elphinstone earnestly implored him to pause before he committed himself to so perilous and so crooked a course; but despising warnings and advice alike, Macnaghten rode hopefully out to his death.