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

by Sir John William Kaye

That night the force again halted in the snow, now deepened by a heavy fall, which, as the army neared the high table-land of Koord-Caubul, had increased the bitterness of the march.[241] The night was, like its predecessors, one of intense suffering, spent by the perishing troops without shelter, without firewood, and without food. At early morn there was another rush of camp-followers and undisciplined Sepoys to the front; but the march of the troops, which had been ordered at ten o’clock, was countermanded by the General. Akbar Khan was then offering to supply the force with provisions, and to do his best for its future protection. At his suggestion a halt was ordered by Elphinstone; and the perishing troops sate down in the snow, which another march would have cleared, for a day of painful uncertainty. The whole force was against the delay. Shelton went to the General to remonstrate against it. In vain he urged that such a measure would cause the total destruction of the column. The General was not to be moved from his purpose. The day was one of idleness and desertion. The Native troops, led by Shah Soojah’s cavalry, began to bethink themselves of escaping from the horrors of the retreat by going over to the enemy. The General had paraded the ruins of the different regiments to repel an anticipated attack; and now Captain Grant, the adjutant-general, accompanied by the Tezeen chief, Khoda Bux Khan, rode to the head of these skeleton corps, now numbering scarcely more than a hundred men in each, and explained to them that Akbar Khan had declared his intention to kill all, who deserted to him, on the spot. But the contagion was then fast spreading; and nothing could check the progress of the disease. The Shah’s 2nd Cavalry had gone over nearly to a man.

In the mean while Major Pottinger, who had passed the night in a neighbouring castle, was in consultation with Akbar Khan; and Captain Skinner was acting as the vehicle of communication between them and the head-quarters of the army. A new, and, at the first sound, startling proposition was now made by the Sirdar. He proposed that all the English ladies with the force should be placed under his charge, that he might convey them safely to Peshawur. Remembering that the families of the Sirdar himself were prisoners in the hands of the British, and believing that he was sincere in his desire to save the ladies and children from the destruction that awaited them on the line of march, Pottinger sanctioned the proposal; and Skinner was despatched to the head-quarters of the force to obtain the General’s consent. “Desirous to remove the ladies and children, after the horrors they had already witnessed, from the further dangers of our camp, and hoping that, as from the very commencement of the negotiations the Sirdar had shown the greatest anxiety to have the married people as hostages, this mark of trust might elicit a corresponding feeling in him,”[242] Elphinstone complied with the request. A party of Afghan horse were in readiness to conduct them to the presence of the Sirdar; and so Lady Macnaghten, Lady Sale, and the other widows and wives of the British officers, became the “guests” of the son of Dost Mahomed Khan.

They did not go alone. The married men went with them. The propriety of this step has been questioned. It has been even said that they were not demanded at all by Akbar Khan, but that they threw themselves spontaneously upon the mercy of the chief. It is right, therefore, that so grave a question should not be slurred over. There were three unprejudiced witnesses, whose statements, on such a point, would be worthy of acceptation, as the statements of honourable and unprejudiced men, familiar with all the circumstances of the case. Major Pottinger, Captain Skinner, and General Elphinstone knew all those circumstances, and had no reason to misrepresent them. Major Pottinger says that, “on Sirdar Mahomed Akbar Khan offering to take charge of the ladies and protect them to Peshawur, I considered it advisable to recommend that they should come over, as the Sirdar’s family being in our hands was a sufficient guarantee for their good treatment, and it was evident that our own people were too much diminished to protect them. Captain Skinner accordingly went over and mentioned the offer to General Elphinstone, who approved of it, and sent over the ladies, children, and married officers.” Captain Skinner has left upon record no narrative of these proceedings. But General Elphinstone has distinctly stated that Captain Skinner was sent to him with a proposal “that the married people and their families should be made over to him, promising honourable treatment to the ladies.” Whatever may have been the proposition, as it originally emanated from the Sirdar, there is no room to doubt that General Elphinstone shaped it into a recommendation that the husbands should accompany their wives, and that the former went over to Akbar Khan with the entire sanction of their military chief.[243]

That the safety of the women and children was secured by their removal from General Elphinstone’s disorganised camp to the custody of Akbar Khan, is now a fact which stands out distinctly in the broad light of historical truth. But writing now after the event, it becomes one to consider rather the wisdom of the experiment than the success of the result. I believe that Pottinger and Elphinstone judged wisely. There was a choice of evils, and it appears to me that they chose the least. The women and the children could not long have survived the horrors of that perilous march. They had hitherto escaped, almost by a miracle, the assaults of the cruel climate and the inexorable foe. They were insufficiently clad. They had no servants to attend upon them. They had scarcely tasted food since they left Caubul. They had no shelter during the frosty night-season. Some had just become, or were about soon to become, mothers; and yet they had been compelled to ride in jolting camel-panniers, or on the backs of stumbling baggage-ponies. It was plain that Akbar Khan had no power to restrain the tribes who were butchering our helpless people. The army was fast melting away. It was doubtful whether a man would reach Jellalabad in safety. To have left the women and children to pursue their march would have been to have left them to inevitable destruction. Akbar Khan might be a man of violent and ferocious temper, and no very scrupulous good faith; but because he had slain the Envoy in a gust of passion, it did not necessarily follow that he would betray the widow of his victim and the other English ladies who were now to be entrusted to his safe keeping. Moreover, if no sentiments of honour and no feelings of compassion were within him, he might still be swayed by motives of self-interest; and it was not forgotten that his father, his brothers, and the ladies of his family were prisoners in the hands of the British Government, in the provinces of Hindostan.

The married officers and their families having gone over to the Sirdar, the remnant of the doomed force on the following morning (the 10th of January) resumed its march towards Jellalabad. There was the same miserable confusion as on the preceding morning. Soldiers and camp-followers rushed promiscuously to the front. The Native regiments were fast melting into nothing. Throwing down their arms and crowding in among the mass of camp-followers, the Sepoys were rapidly swelling the disorganised rabble in front. Their hands were frost-bitten; they could not pull a trigger; they were paralysed, panic-struck; they rushed forward in aimless desperation, scarcely knowing what they did or where they went; whilst the Afghans, watching the cruel opportunity, came down, with their long knives, amidst their unresisting victims, and slaughtered them like sheep. “A narrow gorge between the precipitous spurs of two hills” was the appointed shambles. There the dead and the dying soon choked up the defile. There was not now a single Sepoy left. Every particle of baggage was gone. About fifty horse-artillerymen, with one howitzer gun; some 250[244] men of the 44th; and 150 cavalry troopers, now constituted the entire force. Of the 16,000 men—soldiers and camp-followers—who had left Caubul, not more than a quarter survived.

Still hovering on the flanks of our retreating force, Akbar Khan, attended by a party of horsemen, watched the butchery that was going on below; and when Elphinstone sent Skinner to remonstrate with him, declared that he was powerless to restrain the savage impetuosity of the Ghilzyes, whom even their own immediate chiefs could not control. But he had a proposal to make. Those were not times when any very nice regard for the national honour prompted the rejection of even humiliating terms offered by our Afghan enemies; but when the Sirdar proposed that the remnant of the British army should lay down their arms, and place themselves entirely under his protection, Elphinstone at once refused his consent. The march was therefore resumed. The wreck of the British force made its desperate way down the steep descents of the Haft-Kotul, into a narrow defile, strewn with the ghastly remains of the camp-followers and soldiers, who had pushed on in advance of the column. As they passed down the defile, the enemy opened a destructive fire on their rear. The rear was then commanded by Shelton. With a handful of Europeans he repulsed their attacks, “though obliged to nurse their ammunition by a watchful check on its expenditure.” “Nobly and heroically,” says Shelton, in his rapid narrative of the march, “these fine fellows stood by me.”[245] The gallantry of these few men was, for a time, the salvation of the whole.

After another attempt at negotiation, resulting only in the same demand for the disarming of the remnant of the force, it was determined, at Shelton’s suggestion, that a desperate effort should be made to reach Jugdulluck by a rapid night-march. Enfeebled by starvation, the troops were little able to struggle forward, on their perilous march, over a difficult country, and in the face of an active enemy. But despair had given them strength; and when the order was given, having spiked their last remaining gun, they moved off lightly and quietly in the hope of shaking off, under cover of the night, the curse of camp-followers, which had sate upon them with such destructive tenacity from the first. But no sooner had the soldiers began to move, than the camp-followers started up to accompany them; and throughout that fearful night-march clustered around the few good fighting men and paralysed the movements of the force.

It was a bright, frosty night. The snow was lying only partially on the ground. For some miles they proceeded unmolested. But when, at Seh-Baba, the enemy again opened a fire upon their rear, the camp-followers rushed to the front; and when firing was heard ahead of the column, again fell back on the rear. Thus surging backwards and forwards—the ebb and flow of a great tide of people—these miserable camp-followers, in the wildness of their fear, overwhelmed the handful of soldiers who were still able and willing to show a front to the enemy, blocked up the road, and presented to the eyes of the Afghan marksmen a dark mass of humanity, which could not escape their fire even under cover of the night.

Soon after daybreak the advance reached Kutter-Sung. They were still ten miles from Jugdulluck. Halting only till the rear-guard had come up, they pushed on with an energy, which at the commencement of the retreat might have saved the force from destruction. But it was now too late. The enemy were crowning the heights; there was no possibility of escape. Shelton, with a few brave men of the rear-guard, faced the overwhelming crowd of Afghans with a determined courage worthy of British soldiers; and fought his way to Jugdulluck. Almost every inch of ground was contested. Gallantly did this little band hold the enemy in check. Keeping the fierce crowd from closing in upon the column, but suffering terribly under the fire of their jezails, they made their way at last to the ground where the advance had halted, behind some ruined walls on a height by the road-side. Their comrades received them with a cheer. The cheer came from a party of officers, who had extended themselves in line on the height to show an imposing front to their assailants.[246] The enemy seemed to increase in number and in daring. They had followed the rear-guard to Jugdulluck, and they now took possession of the heights commanding the position of their victims.