History of the War in Afghanistan, Vol. 1 (of 3) / Third Edition

by Sir John William Kaye

As they neared the point of attack, the garrison were seen retreating by twos and threes; others were quitting the works on the pretext of carrying off the wounded. These signs of the waning courage of the defenders wrought differently on the minds of the two men who had hitherto seemed to be cast in the same heroic mould—soldiers of strong nerves and unfailing resolution. They saw that the garrison were giving way. Pottinger was eager to push on to the breach. Yar Mahomed sat himself down. The Wuzeer had lost heart. His wonted high courage and collectedness had deserted him in this emergency. Astonished and indignant at the pusillanimity of his companion, the English officer called upon the Wuzeer again and again to rouse himself—either to move down to the breach or to send his son, to inspire new heart into the yielding garrison. The energetic appeal of the young Englishman was not lost upon the Afghan chief. He rose up; advanced further into the works; and neared the breach where the contest was raging. Encouraged by the diminished opposition, the enemy were pushing on with renewed vigour. Yar Mahomed called upon his men, in God’s name, to fight; but they wavered and stood still. Then his heart failed him again. He turned back; said he would go for aid; sought the place where he had before sat down, and looked around, irresolute and unnerved. Pointing to the men, who, alarmed by the backwardness of their chief, were now retreating in every direction, Pottinger in vehement language insisted upon the absolute ruin of all their hopes that must result from want of energy in such a conjuncture. Yar Mahomed roused himself; again advanced, but again wavered; and a third time the young English officer was compelled, by words and deeds alike, to shame the unmanned Wuzeer. The language of entreaty was powerless; he used the language of reproach. He reviled; he threatened; he seized him by the arm and dragged him forward to the breach. Such appeals were not to be resisted. The noble example of the young Englishman could not infuse any real courage into the Afghan chief; but it at least roused him into action. The men were retreating from the breach. The game was almost up. The irresolution of the Wuzeer had well-nigh played away the last stake. Had Yar Mahomed not been roused out of the paralysis that had descended upon him, Herat would have been carried by assault. But the indomitable courage of Eldred Pottinger saved the beleaguered city. He compelled the Wuzeer to appear before his men as one not utterly prostrate and helpless. The chief called upon the soldiery to fight; but they continued to fall back in dismay. Then seizing a large staff, Yar Mahomed rushed like a madman upon the hindmost of the party, and drove them forward under a shower of heavy blows. The nature of the works was such as to forbid their falling back in a body. Cooped up in a narrow passage, and seeing no other outlet of escape, many of them leapt wildly over the parapet, and rushed down the exterior slope full upon the Persian stormers. The effect of this sudden movement was magical. The Persians, seized with a panic, abandoned their position and fled. The crisis was over; Herat was saved.[193]

But no exultation followed a victory so achieved. The bearing of the Afghans was that of men who had sustained a crushing defeat. The garrison were crest-fallen and dispirited. A general gloom seemed to hang over the city. Yar Mahomed, long after the danger was past, moved about as one confused and bewildered. There were few of the chiefs whose minds were not so wholly unhinged by the terrors of that great crisis as to be unable, for days afterwards, to perform calmly their wonted duties. A complete paralysis, indeed, descended upon men of all ranks. The loss on both sides had been severe; but if half the garrison had fallen in the defence of the breach, Herat could not have been more stunned and prostrated by the blow. The Persian camp was equally dispirited; and a week of inaction supervened.[194] Even the work of repairing the damaged fortifications was slowly recommenced by the garrison; and when at last the men returned to their accustomed duties it was plain that they had no heart. Nor was there anything strange and unaccountable in this. The Afghans had repulsed the Persians on the 24th of June; but they felt that nothing but a miracle could enable them to withstand another such assault. The resources of the government had failed them. Food was scarce; money was scarce. The citizens could not be fed. The soldiers could not be paid.

In all of this there was much to disquiet with painful doubts and misgivings the mind of Eldred Pottinger. To protract the siege was to protract the sufferings of the Heratees. The misery of the people was past counting. The poor were perishing for want of food; the rich were dying under the hands of the torturers. The soldiers clamoured for their pay; and wherever money was known or suspected to be, there went the ruthless myrmidons of Yar Mahomed to demand it for their master, or to wring from the agonised victim the treasure which he sought to conceal. To tear from a wretched man, at the last gasp of life, all that he possessed; then, demanding more, to torture him anew, until, sinking under the accumulated agony, the miserable victim was released by death; and then to fling his emaciated corpse, wrapped in an old shawl or blanket down at the threshold of his desolated home, was no solitary achievement of the Wuzeer. Even ladies of rank were given over to the torturers. The very inmates of the Shah’s Zenana were threatened. A reign of terror was established such as it sickened Pottinger to contemplate. He felt that he was the cause of this. Many reproached him openly. The despairing looks and gaunt figures of others reproached him more painfully still. All that he could do to redress the wrongs of the injured and alleviate the sufferings of the distressed he did in this fearful conjuncture. Men of all kinds came to him imploring his aid and importuning him for protection. Some he was able to save, stepping between the wrong-doer and the wronged; but from others he was powerless to avert by his intervention the ruin that was impending over them. Every day brought palpably before him new illustrations of the unsparing cruelty of the Wuzeer. But dire political necessity compelled him to protract a conjuncture laden with these terrible results. It is impossible to read the entrances in his journal at this time without feeling how great was the conflict within him between the soldier and the man.

The events of the 24th of June, though they had raised Pottinger’s character, as a warrior, in the Afghan city, in the Persian camp, and in the surrounding country, had, greatly indeed, diminished his popularity in Herat and increased the difficulties of his position. In the negotiations which followed, Mahomed Shah insisted upon Pottinger’s dismissal. The young English officer had excited the measureless indignation of the Persian King; and the Afghan Wuzeer was not disinclined to reproach him with presenting a new obstacle to the adjustment of the differences between the two states. The Afghan envoys said that they had always thought Pottinger was one man, but that the importance the Persians attached to his departure showed that he was equal to an army.[195] Pottinger was always ready with a declaration that no thoughts of personal safety or convenience should ever suffer him to stand in the way of an arrangement conducive to the safety of Herat and the welfare of his country, and that if these objects were to be gained by his departure, he was willing to depart. But Yar Mahomed, whilst unwilling to retain him, was unwilling to persuade him to go. The dismissal of the man who had saved Herat from the grasp of the Persians, would have been an act that might have fixed a stain upon the character of the Wuzeer, prejudicial to the success of his after-career. Moreover, it was possible that Pottinger’s assistance might be wanted at some future time—that the Persians, having obtained his dismissal, might hesitate to perform their promises, and rise in their demands on the strength of the advantage which they had thus gained.

The month of July was not distinguished by any great activity on the part of the besiegers. The siege, indeed, now began to assume the character of a blockade. The question of surrender had become a mere question of time. It seemed impossible much longer to protract the defence. Yar Mahomed, with all the resources of unscrupulous cruelty at his command, could not extort sufficient money from his victims to enable him to continue his defensive operations with any prospect of success. But it appeared to him, as it did to Pottinger, expedient to postpone the inevitable day of capitulation, in the hope that something might yet be written down in their favour in the “chapter of accidents,” out of which so often had come unexpected aid. Yar Mahomed looked for the coming of an Oosbeg army. He had long anxiously expected the arrival of a relieving force from Toorkistan; and scarcely a day had passed without some tidings, either to elevate or depress him, of the advent or delay of the looked-for succours. Pottinger, though unwilling to encourage in others expectations which might not be realised, was inwardly convinced that something of a decisive character respecting the intentions of his own government must soon be heard, and that the knowledge of those intentions would have an effect upon the Afghan garrison and the Persian camp very advantageous to the former. With the object, therefore, of gaining time, the Wuzeer renewed his exertions to raise money for the payment of the troops. Assemblies of the chiefs were held, at which every practicable method of recruiting their exhausted finances was discussed. The Sirdars addressed themselves to the discussion as men wholly in earnest, determined to do their best.[196] The resolutions of the chiefs in this conjuncture surprised and delighted Pottinger, who was little prepared for the unanimity with which they determined on protracting the defence. “With open breaches, trembling soldiery, and a disaffected populace, they determined to stand to the last. How I wished,” exclaimed Pottinger, “to have the power of producing the money!”

The plan which was at last resolved upon—one which threw into the hands of a single chief the power of seizing the property of whomsoever he thought fit to mulct for the service of the state—under a written pledge from the other chiefs not to interfere, as had been their wont, for the protection of their own friends, threw the city into such confusion, and produced so many appeals to the assembly of chiefs, that Pottinger, anxious to establish a less arbitrary system of levying contributions, suggested that all who voluntarily brought their money would be reimbursed, at his recommendation, by the British Government. But money came in slowly. The difficulties of the garrison seemed to thicken around them. Negotiations were, therefore, again resumed, with a determination at last to bring them to an issue; and messengers were constantly passing and repassing between the city and the Persian camp.

But in the mean while, far beyond the walls of Herat, events were taking shape mightily affecting the issue of the contest. Lord Auckland, who had watched with much anxiety the progress of affairs in the West, had, in the course of the spring, determined on despatching an expedition to the Persian Gulf, to hold itself in readiness for any service which Mr. M’Neill might deem it expedient to employ it upon, “with a view to the maintenance of our interests in Persia.” Instructions to this effect were forwarded to Bombay. In conjunction with Sir Charles Malcolm, the chief of the Indian navy, the Bombay Government despatched the Semiramis and Hugh Lindsay steamers, and some vessels of war, with detachments of the 15th, 23rd, and 24th Regiments, and the Marine battalion, to the Persian Gulf; and instructed the resident, Captain Hennell, to land the troops on the island of Karrack, and concentrate the squadron before it. On the 4th of June, the Semiramis steamed out of the Bombay harbour, and on the 19th anchored off Karrack. The troops were immediately landed. The governor of the island, greatly alarmed by the coming of the steamer and the fighting men, but somewhat reassured by the appearance of Captain Hennell, said that the island and everything it contained, himself and its inhabitants, were at the disposal of the British Resident; and at once began to assist in the disembarkation of the troops.

The demonstration was an insignificant one in itself; but by the time that intelligence of the movement had reached the Persian camp, the expedition, gathering new dimensions at every stage, had swollen into bulk and significance. The most exaggerated reports of the doings and intentions of the British soon forced themselves into currency. The Persian camp was all alive with stories of the powerful British fleet that had sailed into the gulf, destroyed Bunder-Abassy and all the other ports on the coast, taken Bushire, and landed there a mighty army, which was advancing upon Shiraz, and had already taken divers towns in the province of Fars. Nothing could have been more opportune than the arrival of these reports. Mr. M’Neill was making his way towards the frontier, when intelligence of the Karrack expedition met him on the road. About the same time he received letters of instruction from the Foreign-office, issued in anticipation of the refusal of Mahomed Shah to desist from his operations against Herat; and thinking the hour was favourable, he resolved to make another effort to secure the withdrawal of the Persian army, and to regain for the British Mission the ascendancy it had lost at the Persian Court.

Fortified by these instructions from the Foreign-office, Mr. M’Neill despatched Colonel Stoddart to the Persian camp, with a message to the Shah. The language of this message was very intelligible and very decided. The Shah was informed that the occupation of Herat or any part of Afghanistan by the Persians would be considered in the light of a hostile demonstration against England; and that he could not persist in his present course without immediate danger and injury to Persia. It was stated, that already had a naval armament arrived in the Persian Gulf, and troops been landed on the island of Karrack, and that if the Shah desired the British Government to suspend the measures in progress for the vindication of its honour, he must at once retire from Herat, and make reparation for the injuries which had been inflicted upon the British Mission.