History of the War in Afghanistan, Vol. 2 (of 3) / Third Edition

by Sir John William Kaye

The command of the troops was in the hands of General Elphinstone—an old officer of the Queen’s service, of good repute, gentlemanly manners, and aristocratic connections. He had succeeded Sir Willoughby Cotton in the early part of the year. But it must have been a wonder to him, as it was to all who knew him, what business he had in such a place. He had no Indian experience of any kind, and he was pressed down by physical infirmities. When Sir Willoughby Cotton intimated his desire, on the plea of ill health, to be relieved from the command of the troops in Afghanistan, there was an officer already in the country to whom their charge might have been safely delegated. But he was not in favour either at the Mission or at the Calcutta Government House. Sir Jasper Nicolls would have placed Nott in command; but there were obstacles to his appointment, at which I have already hinted; and it was deemed expedient to send to Caubul a man of a more ductile nature, with as few opinions of his own as might be, to clash with those of the political chief. So Lord Auckland despatched General Elphinstone to Afghanistan—not in ignorance of his disqualifications, for they were pointed out to him by others—but in spite of a clear perception of them. Whether those who sent the brave old gentleman to India with all his infirmities thick upon him, recommended him for this especial field of service, or whether any notions of routine and the obligations of the roster pressed themselves upon Lord Auckland with irresistible force, I cannot confidently declare; but so inexplicable by any reference to intelligible human motives and actions is an appointment of this kind, that it is impossible not to recognise in such a dispensation a mightier agency than that of man, or to reject the belief that, when Elphinstone went to Caubul, the curse which sate upon our unholy policy was working onward for our overthrow.

Next in rank to General Elphinstone were Sir Robert Sale and Brigadier Shelton—both officers of the Queen’s service, but soldiers of long Indian experience. Each had served with his regiment in the Burmese war; and each had acquired a reputation for the highest personal courage. Sale’s regiment was the 13th Light Infantry. Shelton’s was the 44th.[75] Both of these regiments were now at Caubul. But the 13th was about to return to India, and soon afterwards to great Britain. It had seen many years of Indian service, and had been in Afghanistan since Keane’s army first entered the country. The 44th had come up early in the year, and had done some service in the Naziain valley, near Jellalabad, on the way.

The command of the Shah’s troops was vested in Brigadier Anquetil, a native of one of those lovely islands in the Channel which have sent forth so many brave men to fight our battles by sea and land. He was esteemed a good soldier; and I believe that Macnaghten found him a more pliant colleague than the “alarmist” whom he had supplanted. The controversies between Brigadier Roberts and the Envoy had ended in the departure of the former. His advice had been resented; his warnings had been scouted. His clear insight into the dangers which were beneath our feet had been regarded as idle and imbecile fear; and the unwelcome declarations of his honest convictions as little short of rank mutiny. He had done his duty; he had spoken the truth; and he had paid the inevitable penalty of his unwillingness to make an easy and a prosperous present at the cost of a tumultuous and disastrous future. He had returned in disgrace to the British provinces; but he had left his predictions behind him, and he knew that, sooner or later, History would do him justice.

The main body of the British troops were in the new cantonments. These works had been erected in the course of 1840. They were situated on a piece of low ground open to the Kohistan road. They were extensive and ill defended. They were nearly a mile in extent, and were surrounded by ramparts so little formidable that they might be ridden over.[76] Near the cantonments was the Mission compound, occupying an extensive space, and surrounded by a number of houses and buildings belonging to the officers and retainers of the Mission. There was here, also, a weak attempt at defence; but the walls were beyond measure contemptible; and the whole expanse of building, the entrenched camp and Mission compound together, were so planted, as to be swept on every side by hills, and forts, and villages, and whatever else in such a country could bristle with armed men. No such works were ever known—so wretched in themselves, and so doubly wretched by position. If the object of those who constructed them had been to place our troops at the mercy of an enemy, they could not have been devised more cunningly in furtherance of such an end. They were commanded on every side; and so surrounded with villages, forts, gardens, and other cover for an enemy, that our troops could neither enter nor leave the camp without exposing themselves to a raking fire from some one of these points of attack. And to crown the calamity of the whole, the Commissariat supplies, on which our army depended for its subsistence, were stored in a small fort, not within, but beyond, the cantonments. The communication between the two places was commanded by an empty fort, and by a walled garden, inviting the occupation of an enemy. Human folly seemed to have reached its height in the construction of these works. There stood those great, indefensible cantonments, overawed on every side, a monument of the madness which Providence, for its own ends, had permitted to cloud and bewilder the intelligence of the “greatest military nation of the world.” There it stood, a humiliating spectacle; but except by new-comers, who stood in amazement before the great folly, little account was taken of it. Men’s eyes had become accustomed to the blot.

And whose was this stupendous error? Are we to assign its origin to the professional incapacity of the engineer officers attached to the force; to the ignorance and carelessness of the officers commanding it; or to the wilfulness of the Envoy? Not to the engineers—Durand, who had first held the post, had urged upon the Envoy the necessity of constructing barracks and posting our troops in the Balla Hissar; and Macnaghten, yielding to these solicitations, had overcome the reluctance of the Shah—but the barracks had been afterwards given up to the accommodation of the old king’s harem; and from that time, though Sturt who succeeded Durand, insisted, with equal urgency on the expediency of locating the troops in the Balla Hissar, and strengthening its defences, all hope of securing a strong military position at Caubul was gone. The sheep-folds on the plain were built. When Brigadier Roberts, in the spring of 1840, saw that the work had commenced, and what it was proposed to do, he remonstrated against the plan; and was told that it had been approved by Sir Willoughby Cotton. The Brigadier had been connected with the Building Department in the upper provinces of India, and freighted his remonstrances, therefore, with much professional experience, bearing upon the sanatory as well as upon the defensive aspects of the question; but, although he believed at first that he had made some impression on the Envoy, his protests were disregarded. And so the cantonments had sprung up, such as we have described them; and there, in that late autumn of 1841, they stood, bare and defenceless, as sheep-pens, whilst the wolves were howling around them.[77]

The English had by this time begun to settle themselves down in Caubul. Indeed, from the very commencement, they had done their best, as they ever do, to accommodate themselves to new localities and new circumstances, and had transplanted their habits, and, I fear it must be added, their vices, with great address, to the capital of the Douranee Empire. It was plain that they were making themselves at home in the chief city of the Afghans. There was no sign of an intended departure. They were building and furnishing houses for themselves—laying out gardens—surrounding themselves with the comforts and luxuries of European life. Some had sent for their wives and children. Lady Macnaghten, Lady Sale, and other English women, were domesticated in comfortable houses within the limits of the great folly we had erected on the plain. The English, indeed, had begun to find the place not wholly unendurable. The fine climate braced and exhilarated them. There was no lack of amusement. They rode races; they played at cricket. They got up dramatic entertainments. They went out fishing; they went out shooting. When winter fell upon them, and the heavy frosts covered the lakes with ice, to the infinite astonishment of the Afghans they skimmed over the smooth surface on their skates. There is no want of manliness among the Afghans; but the manliness of the Feringhee strangers quite put them to shame. They did not like us the less for that. The athletic amusements of our people only raised their admiration. But there was something else which filled them with intensest hate.[78]

I am not writing an apology. There are truths which must be spoken. The temptations which are most difficult to withstand, were not withstood by our English officers. The attractions of the women of Caubul they did not know how to resist. The Afghans are very jealous of the honour of their women; and there were things done in Caubul which covered them with shame and roused them to revenge. The inmate of the Mahomedan Zenana was not unwilling to visit the quarters of the Christian stranger. For two long years, now, had this shame been burning itself into the hearts of the Caubulees; and there were some men of note and influence among them who knew themselves to be thus wronged. Complaints were made; but they were made in vain. The scandal was open, undisguised, notorious. Redress was not to be obtained. The evil was not in course of suppression. It went on till it became intolerable; and the injured then began to see that the only remedy was in their own hands. It is enough to state broadly this painful fact. There are many 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.

Such, dimly traced in its social aspects, was the general condition of things at Caubul in this month of September, 1841. Politically—such was Macnaghten’s conviction—everything was quiet from Dan to Beersheba. The noses of the Douranee Khans had, he said, “been brought to the grindstone;” and the Gooroo and other Ghilzye chiefs were in his safe keeping at Caubul, seemingly contented with their lot. As the month advanced the Envoy continued to write that our prospects were “brightening in every direction,” that everything was “couleur de rose.” It is true that Eldred Pottinger, who after a brief visit to the British provinces had returned to Afghanistan, was not sending in very favourable reports from the Kohistan and the Nijrow country, which were now his new sphere of action; but of these troubles Macnaghten made light account. He believed that Pottinger was an alarmist. It is true, also, that an expedition was going out to Zao, to reduce some turbulent robber tribes; but this necessity he attributed to the indiscretion of one of our own officers, who had needlessly attacked the place with insufficient means, and been compelled to beat a retreat.[79] The expedition, too, as Macnaghten said, was only a “little go;” and immensely popular with our officers, who were zealously volunteering for the sport, as though it had been a battu or a steeple-chase.[80]

The popular expedition into the Zoormut country was completely successful. Macgregor, who accompanied the force in the character of political adviser, found the rebellious forts evacuated. He had only, therefore, to destroy them. The results, however, of the movement were not wholly pacificatory. Pottinger said that the feeling which it engendered in the Kohistan was extremely unfavourable to us. It confirmed, he said, in the minds of the malcontents, “the belief so industriously spread of our difficulties, whilst rumours from Herat and Candahar of invasion, renewed rebellion, and disturbances, were again spread abroad.”[81]