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"If anything occurs, for God's sake clear the passes quickly, that I might get away."General Elphinstone, commander Kabul garrison |
| After Shah Shujah was installed on
the throne in Kabul, life was not particularly onerous for the British
there. The city was quiet and it was not long before General Keane and
most of the army returned to India. Soon the British felt secure enough
to move from their cramped quarters in the Bala Hissar citadel to a cantonment
built on the plain just outside the city. Although the cantonment was only
a mile from the city, it was poorly sited to cope with any kind of siege.
With a foolishness that pre-dated that of General Wheeler at Cawnpore
almost twenty years later, the main commissariat building and thus almost
all the stores was left outside the perimeter. All around the cantonment
were orchards which provided a beautiful setting for officers' early morning
rides but made a mockery of the military necessity for clear fields of
fire. The plain itself was criss-crossed with hundreds of irrigation ditches
which could give good cover to an advancing attacker. On the hills above
were scores of old watchtowers and keeps, like so many tumbledown Martello
towers, and they added to the 'goldfish bowl' atmosphere that soon made
everyone feel that everything they did was watched by a hundred pairs of
brooding eyes. Still the British seemed to enjoy themselves and settled
down to a lifestyle not markedly different from that they lived in the
hill-stations of India. They arranged race meetings, played polo, enjoyed
amateur dramatics and played cricket, that most boring of England's legacies
to the sporting life. Food was plentiful and the Kabuli bazaar merchants
eager to do business with their new visitors. Some officers even sent for
their wives and families to come join them and it is perhaps a pity that
not more had done so for many officers cast lecherous eyes at the dark-eyed
women of Kabul and liaisons, not particulary discreet, became common. In
a land were pederasty was more often viewed as a preference rather than
a sin, this was a dangerous tack to take. The women could be frighteningly
willing but their cuckolded husbands remained just that, cuckolds. The
bitterness of these men would stoke the fires of Afghan discontent and
help lead to disaster. When the city finally exploded and the killing began,
they would be in the forefront of the mob.
One of the greatest womanisers was Sir Alexander Burnes, newly knighted and deputy to Sir William Macnaghten, Britain's envoy to the court of Shah Shujah. Such behaviour by any officer was reprehensible but for a man in Burnes' position it was very inflammatory indeed. Burnes entertained lavishly at his residence in the city (Macnaghten preferred to live in the cantonment) and he was easily the most conspicuous example of a foreign presence that was rapidly coming to repel most Afghans. His would be one of the first heads to fall. |
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Sir William Macnaghten |
For a while, however, things seemed
to go quite well. Some tribes were bribed with gold, others crushed by
punitive expeditions and this carrot and stick approach came to fruition
on November 3rd, 1840 when Dost Mohammed himself surrendered to Macnaghten
as the latter was enjoying his evening ride. The Dost was sent into exile
in India. So confident was Macnaghten that he sent the government his celebrated
message in which he declared that all was quiet 'from Dan to Bersheeba'.
Macnaghten was hot for the post of Governor of Bombay, one of the top three
positions in British India, and perhaps his ardour to leave Afghanistan
clouded his judgement. Others were more perceptive. Henry Rawlinson, now
in Kandahar saw the rising discontent. Eldred Pottinger, working in the
country north of Kabul, felt it growing and reported as such. His warnings
fell on deaf ears. In Kabul itself there was serious cause for alarm. Prices
had risen with the arrival of so many well-paid red-coated consumers. Shah
Shujah had foolishly raised taxes to pay for a lifestyle many Kabulis felt
unnecessary and inappropriate and the cuckolded husbands were highly vocal
in their whispered claims of honour outraged and welcomes overstayed. As
a sense of foreboding was building up in the cantonment a new commander
had arrived. His name was General Elphinstone. He was almost sixty years
old and had last seen combat at Waterloo, more than twenty years before.
He was crippled by gout and had the leadership qualities of a sheep. Though
everyone agreed he was an affable old gent, as a commander he was met with
absolutely no respect and worse, a great degree of scorn. Only once it
seems did he make a useful comment when in a casual conversation with another
officer he remarked that if things went badly, it was vital the passes
were quickly cleared of Afghans so that he might get his army away.
For weeks trouble had been brewing. There were rumours of attacks on outlying British outposts guarding the lines of communication back to India and winter was rapidly approaching when the passes would be closed by snow, making reinforcement of the British garrison impossible. The British were lucky in that Mohan Lal, the astute Kashmiri on Burnes' staff was an invaluable source of information on what was happening in the city. Unfortunately, at a crucial time Burnes chose to ignore Lal's warnings. On November 1st 1841, Lal came to Burnes and told him the mood in the city was ugly and that Burnes' residence was to be attacked the next day. Burnes, however, felt safe enough with his sepoy guard and the cantonment full of British troops only a mile away and he brushed aside Lal's misgivings. At first light the next morning a mob began to gather outside the building. Rumours spread that the residency contained a treasury full of gold and as the day wore on the mob grew larger and noisier. Burnes tried to persuade them to disperse. He then ordered them to and when this failed offered them money to return to their homes. This last only served to convince the mob that the rumours of gold were true and increased their desire to have it. Finally Burnes told his sepoy guard to open fire. What might have worked at the beginning when the crowd was small, now had no chance with the great mob already highly inflamed. The sepoys were too few and they were easily overpowered. One of Burnes' companions, an English officer called Broadfoot, was shot as he tried to hold off the mob. We do not know exactly how Burnes died. Some said his native servants offered to wrap him in a carpet and carry him to safety through the mob busily looting the house, but Burnes refused this very sensible idea. Others say an Afghan he trusted offered to take him to safety disguised in native dress and this time Burnes accepted. Outside in the garden the Afghan suddenly declared to the mob, " Here is Sikunder (Alexander) Burnes!" and the enraged Kabulis fell upon him with their long knives and hacked him to pieces. We do know that in the cantonment, the firing could be easily heard and the British did almost nothing. Some troops were sent into the city, but not to the residency only to the Bala Hissar. There they were met by fleeing troops belonging to Shah Shujah. He, at least, had tried to help Burnes but the force he sent to rescue the Englishman was first stopped then turned back by what was looking more like a general rising every minute. |
| The paralysis that was to affect
senior officers in the Indian
Mutiny when faced with the shock of a frenzied native challenge to
their authority now struck Elphinstone and Macnaghten. Perhaps Macnaghten
was so concerned with his career that he wished to minimise the damage
a full scale British assault on the city would cause his reputation as
a political officer. Most junior officers and men were outraged at the
murder of Burnes and wished to storm into the city in revenge. The Kabulis
expected the British to do just that and when they didn't the confidence
of the Afghans increased, along with their numbers, and the prestige of
the British was fatally weakened. As the days passed the British seemed
to cower in their cantonment, the Afghans grew bolder and what had began
as a riot evolved into a general uprising and then a siege of the British
garrison. The British, with 4,500 men were still a formidable force
had they but had the will to use it. There was sniping on the cantonment
but the Afghans, who had a great respect for British artillery, never mounted
any major assault on the British position. On November 23rd, the British
finally ventured out of the cantonment, but not to strike at the heart
of the insurrection. The Afghans had hauled two guns up one of the overlooking
hills and it was to dislodge these that the British sallied forth. They
destroyed the two Afghan guns easily and then they turned their attention
to a nearby village full of Afghan insurrectionists. The British, however,
had made a crucial mistake in only taking one field piece with them on
the attack. At first this gun cleared the Afghans from in front of the
advancing infantry, but it soon overheated and couldn't be fired. The attack
on the village was repulsed and a great force of Afghan horsemen and infantry
closed in on the British. The redcoats promptly formed square as they had
done in every similar emergency since Waterloo. The Afghans, seeing the
British gun out of action simply stayed out of range of the British muskets
and opened fire with their longer ranged jezails. The British troops broke,
were rallied by their brigadier and then the gun came back into action
again. Once more the Afghans suffered heavy casualties but they had learned
their lesson and concentrated their fire on the gun crew. Soon the gun
was impossible to operate and the Afghan attack stiffened. It was too much
for the British troops and once more they broke. This time they didn't
stop until they were safe inside the cantonment. They left over 300 of
their comrades dead on the field.
To compound their difficulties the British learned that Mohammed Akbar, son of Dost Mohammed, had arrived in Kabul with a force of 6,000 men and had assumed the leadership of the uprising. There were now almost 30,000 Afghans in arms against the British in Kabul. Akbar promptly forbade the selling of any food to the cantonment on pain of death and the inflow of supplies stopped completely. The British seemed to forget that though their position looked perilous they still had, in the person of Dost Mohammed safely in exile in India, the ultimate hostage. Still they were surprised when Akbar offered them a truce. His immediate demands were for the removal of Shah Shujah, the return of Dost Mohammed and an end to the British presence in Kabul. These terms were rejected by Macnaghten and he set about trying to divide the Afghans. At a second meeting Macnaghten issued what amounted to a capitulation that stated the British desire to withdraw their support from Shah Shujah and quit Afghanistan immediately. Macnaghten reasoned that some chiefs saw the potential return of Dost Mohammed, a strong ruler, as being a threat to their own power and actually preferred the weaker Shah Shujah. He sniffed an opportunity to divide and rule. It was a dangerous web to weave but Macnaghten felt confident in his skill as an intriguer. With Mohan Lal as his intermediary he tried to sow dissension in the Afghan ranks. When Akbar returned with new terms for the British , Macnaghten's efforts appeared to be working. The new terms allowed Shah Shujah to remain on the throne with Akbar as his Grand Vizier, the British could stay until spring and then leave peacefully with their honour intact. A meeting was arranged by the banks of the Kabuli river to cement the new agreement. Macnaghten was warned by everyone that this could be a trap, but he reacted angrily to the suggestion that his judgement in this matter was flawed. Still, as the meeting was to be held only half-a-mile from the cantonment he asked Elphinstone to have some troops ready just in case. This Elphinstone neglected to do. Macnaghten should have listened to the prophets of doom for, unbeknownst to him, Akbar had been playing a double game and had out-intrigued the intriguer. Akbar had told the chiefs who were open to Macnaghten's intrigues that the British were not to be trusted and the new terms he had proposed were simply designed to show these chieftains that this was so. When Macnaghten rode out of the cantonment with three other political officers on December 23rd, he was riding to his death. When Macnaghten met Akbar and his party they were seated on carpets spread out in the snow. Macnaghten and the political officers were asked to join them. When they were seated Akbar asked Macnaghten if the new terms were accaptable. Macnaghten replied, "Why not?" and with these words sealed his own fate. Akbar ordered his men to seize the four Britons. The three political officers were thrown onto the backs of Afghan horses whose riders galloped off in the direction of the city. One of them fell off and was cut to pieces by the enraged Afghans. Macnaghten was dragged down a slope and shouting "For God's sake!" in Persian, was brutally murdered. Some say that Akbar slew Macnaghten with a pair of pistols that Macnaghten himself had given to Dost Mohammed. Later that day Macnaghten's corpse, with the head and limbs cut off, was hung from a pole in the bazaar. His severed limbs were carried round the city in triumph. Even though the commotion at the meeting place had been seen by the troops in the cantonment, again Elphinstone did nothing. |
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| The continued refusal of Elphinstone
to take any kind of retaliatory action made the Afghans realise they had
nothing to fear from the British and gave them complete control in any
future negotiations. It was a miserable Christmas, cold, hungry and fearful,
that the inhabitants of the cantonment were to spend that year. Pottinger
was ordered to obtain the best terms he could from Akbar and though still
insisting that it was not to late to strike at the Afghans, he was overruled
and had no choice but to negotiate what was , in effect, the humiliating
surrender of the once proud Army of the Indus. Akbar demanded that the
redcoats leave immediately, surrendering all their artillery and leaving
some married officers and their families as hostages for the good faith
of the British. Pottinger had no choice but to accede to Akbar's demands,
managing only to have army be allowed to keep three mule-guns and six other
fieldpieces and that the hostages to be held by the Afghans would be officers
but not their families. Akbar promised to provide an armed escort to see
the British safely through the passes and provisions for the journey.
And so, as the winter closed in, the British prepared for the most horrific march in their history. |