Another British force of twelve thousand men, under General Pollock, was organized at Peshawur, to punish the Afghans, and, so far as might be, retrieve the errors of Elphinstone and McNaghten. Pollock's operations were, in the sense of retaliation, successful. An eminent German authority wrote: "Kabul and other towns were levelled with the ground; Akbar's troops were blown from guns, and the people were collected together and destroyed like worms." General Pollock carried the famous Khaiber Pass, in advancing to the relief of Jelalabad in April, 1842. This was the first time that the great defile--twenty-eight miles in length--had ever been forced by arms. Timur Lang and Nadir Shah, at the head of their enormous hosts, bought a safe passage through it from the Afridis. Akbar the Great, in 1587, is said to have lost forty thousand men in attempting to force it, and Aurangzeb failed to get through.
The misfortune of Elphinstone's command, great as it was, would have been much more humiliating to England, had it not been for the firmness of the gallant General Pollock, who, ordered to withdraw with his command to Peshawur, by Lord Ellenborough, without effecting one of the objects of the expedition--the deliverance of the English captives in Akbar's hands at Kabul,--protested against such a suicidal act on the part of any Englishman or any Administration, and, at great personal risk, gained his point.
In the forced march to Kabul, which Pollock made subsequently, the force of about eight thousand men moved in as light order as possible. After loading the commissariat camels to their utmost carrying capacity, the General discovered that the mounted men had in their kit a spare pair of pantaloons apiece, on which he ordered the legs to be filled with grain and carried by the men in front of them, on their saddles. By the middle of December the British had started on their return march, pursued as far as the Indus by the Afghans, and by this hurried conclusion to the war lessened their prestige in Asia to an enormous degree.
As Sir Henry Rawlinson wrote:
"It was not so much the fact of our retreat; disaster would have been diminished, if not altogether overcome; but retreating as we did, pursued even through the last pass into the plains by an implacable enemy, the impression became universal in India as well as in Central Asia, that we had simply been driven back across the mountains."
A very able Hindu gentleman, very loyal to the British, traced the mutiny of 1857 in a great measure to the Afghan campaign of 1842. He said: "It was a direct breach of faith to take the Sepoys out of India. Practically they were compelled to go for fear of being treated as mutineers, but the double pay they received by no means compensated them for losing caste. The Sepoys mistrusted the Government from that time forward, and were always fearing that their caste would be destroyed; besides, the Kabul disaster taught them that Europeans were not invincible."
The departure of the English forces was followed by the reestablishment of Dost Mohammed's authority in Afghanistan. Once, at the time of the Sikh insurrection, the Dost crossed the Indian border with two thousand horsemen, and narrowly escaped falling into the hands of the British in the affair of Gujrat, February 21, 1849, where the speed of his horse alone saved him from capture. In 1855 a better understanding was effected between the son of Dost Mohammed and his powerful European neighbor. He reconquered Balkh in 1850, and gained Kandahar by inheritance in 1855, while he lost Herat to the Persians in 1856. With the aid of Great Britain, in 1857, Persia relinquished all claims to Herat, but the Dost had eventually to besiege that city, occupied by a rebellious faction, in 1863, and after a siege of ten months reduced the place, only to find a tomb within its walls. After the usual struggle for the throne, peculiar to a change of dynasty in Afghanistan, Shere Ali, one of the Dost's sons, prevailed, and was recognized in 1868. The next decade was notable for a series of diplomatic manoeuvres between England and Russia for Afghan friendship. Shere Ali now leaned toward the Lion, now in the direction of the Bear, with the regularity of a pendulum. The advances were received with presents and promises on the one hand, and promises, powerful embassies, and imposing military expeditions on the other. On September 21, 1878, a British ambassador was turned back by the Afghan commandant of the frontier fort of Ali Musjid, and on the 20th of November, of the same year, war was declared against Shere Ali by the Anglo-Indian Government. At that time the Russian General Kaufmann was operating on the northern border of Afghanistan with a force of fifteen thousand men and sixty guns, and the Ameer had reason to think that he could rely on Russian coöperation against the English, who, with a force of forty thousand men, promptly invaded his dominion.
This force moved into Afghanistan in four columns, under the command, respectively, of Generals Browne, Roberts, Biddulph, and Stewart, with reserves under Generals Maude and Primrose.
We shall have occasion later to consider some of the details of the protracted operations which followed. They embraced several admirably conducted marches, exposure to excessively severe winter weather, the successful surmounting of great natural obstacles, the development of the usual weakness in the department of transport, with unnecessary losses in animals, a considerable sick-list, and an inconsiderable proportion of killed and wounded in action.
The military benefits were those resulting from a long and arduous field experience in a rough country. The interruption to these actual "field manoeuvres," this "fire-drill," by the enemy, was comparatively feeble,--as a rule, stimulating the Anglo-Indian force to put its best foot foremost. Under this system, at the end of the two years' campaign, all departments of the army had become moulded into the efficient machines essential to success in any military venture.