Return of a king, p.46
Return of a King, page 46
He then went on to tell Prince Timur of his hopes. ‘Do not grieve,’ he wrote, ‘a better state of things is now in progress. Be happy and contented – we shall still attain the objects of which we have been disappointed and I shall keep a careful eye upon you. I cannot send you the particulars as I could wish, for the road is full of danger. There is much to communicate – if matters should turn out happily, and according to my heart’s desire, you will know all very soon!’18
By now, with the rebel Afghan leadership still fractured and disunited, Shuja’s letters were showing his increasing confidence. To MacGregor in Jalalabad he wrote urging a rapid British advance on Kabul – ‘Not a cat belonging to you shall be injured,’ he promised – before returning to his old theme of the faithlessness of the Barakzais. He particularly decried the respect that he imagined the British were still paying to his old enemy, Amir Dost Mohammad. ‘I cannot think that you are possessed of a proper sense of honor,’ he lectured MacGregor.
After all that has happened, why do Dost Mahommed and his family remain there in luxury? What has been your treatment of that dog, and what return have you received from this faithless one, Mahommed Akbar? Dost Mahommed and his wives and his children, in revenge for the sahibs who have fallen in this country, should be seen wandering in destitution through the bazaars and streets of Hindustan. May God accomplish this wish of my heart! If Akbar ever falls into my power what treatment shall he receive!19
One reason the British did not take revenge on Dost Mohammad in the manner suggested by Shuja was the very large number of prisoners of war now held by Akbar Khan.
Some were the wounded who had been left behind in Kabul; some had been given over as hostages by treaty; others had surrendered or been captured and dragged from the caves and villages where they had taken shelter. In all, around 120 Europeans had now been rounded up, of whom Akbar had collected some forty, including Lady Macnaghten and her cat (though the parakeet does not seem to have survived the retreat from Kabul), the widowed Mrs Trevor and the formidable Lady Sale and her pregnant and bereaved daughter Alexandrina.
The first few days had been the worst, as Akbar’s prisoners were escorted through the snowbound passes and held in dirty mountain-top forts and remote tower houses. For several days amid ‘bitterly cold’ winds the hostages had had to ride over the bloody and mutilated corpses of their comrades. Occasionally they recognised close friends, such as when Mackenzie saw the remains of James ‘Gentleman Jim’ Skinner lying among a pile of corpses near Jagdalak, and had to ask permission to stop and dig him a shallow grave. They also passed small knots of their ‘naked, wounded and frostbitten’ sepoys ‘huddled together . . . Alas! We could do nothing for these poor wretches, none of whom survived the next few days.’20 It is difficult to assess whether the captive British officers could actually have done much more to save their sepoys, but rumours were soon making their way down the passes to India that the British officer class had saved their own skins while abandoning their men to slavery and death.
One fort refused to admit the prisoners, ‘stating that we were Kafirs’, and forced them to take shelter in ‘a wretched cowshed’.21 They forded several branches of the freezing Panjshir River ‘which was not only deep but exceedingly rapid’. During one of these crossings they were ambushed by ‘a body of Afghan plunderers who attacked all those who remained on the bank . . . Many in despair threw themselves into the river and were drowned.’22 This was followed by the ascent of a steep pass, ‘where I found it requisite to hold tight on by the mane’, wrote Lady Sale, ‘lest the saddle and I should slip off together’. At the top they then got caught in the middle of an inter-tribal blood feud, but after the volleys they had just experienced in the Khord Kabul this seemed almost trivial in its violence, at least to Lady Sale: ‘A few jezails were fired; there was great talking and noise; and then it was over.’ Soon even the smallest pleasures seemed to the hostages wild extremes of luxury. ‘We enjoyed washing our faces very much,’ wrote Lady Sale one morning, and ‘had a grand breakfast of dal and radishes’.23
Once they arrived at the fortress of Akbar Khan’s father-in-law, however, conditions improved. In all the Afghan accounts, and in several of the Indian Muslim ones too, Akbar Khan’s kindness to his prisoners is regarded as exemplary and in the epic poems he is depicted as a paragon of chivalry, a sort of Afghan Saladin, which is still how he is remembered in Kabul today. Munshi Abdul Karim’s account is typical. ‘When Commander Akbar’s guests had somewhat recovered,’ he wrote,
and were able once again to stand and move their frozen limbs, the Commander returned to the Fort to pay them a courtesy visit.
The hostages all stood in line, trembling and fearful, to express their gratitude. Commander Akbar comforted them, and, showing great respect to General Elphinstone and the Minister’s widow, offered them sable-lined cloaks of cloth-of-gold, which he himself draped around their shoulders. He gave each of them a warm sheep-skin poshteen and with tears in his eyes, said ‘No-one can foretell, no-one can alter the decrees of fate and Divine will! The old men of Kabul in my army tell me that such extremes of snow and ice have not been seen in these parts in living memory. Have no fear – I will protect you and send you to the warmer clime of Laghman to rest and recover, until the sun enters the house of Pisces, the snows melt and the road to Hindustan will once again be open.’ Commander Akbar’s exemplary behaviour, fine manners, personal modesty, and solicitous care won the universal admiration of his guests, who swore lifelong gratitude. Once the hostage guests had reached Laghman, spacious apartments were set aside for the ladies, with serving girls in attendance. Food too was generously provided: grains and meat, the fat sheeps’ tails, chickens, eggs, as well as all kinds of dried and fresh fruits.24
What is perhaps more surprising is that while some British accounts do concentrate on the sufferings of the prisoners of war, many also commend Akbar for his care of them. Pottinger formally wrote to General Pollock to assure him ‘that in the Afghan fashion, we received every attention which prisoners could expect, and that any incivility we received was from the inferior agents against the wish of Mahomed Akbar Khan who on complaint gave redress as far as lay in his power’.25 Lawrence went further, noting that ‘Akbar gave up his palanquin to Ladies Sale and Macnaghten,’ that he was ‘invariably most courteous’, especially to Lady Macnaghten, and that he assured the ladies ‘that they were his “honoured guests, that they should want nothing he could supply them with, and that as soon as the roads were safe enough he would forward them to Jalalabad; in the meantime they could write freely to their friends”’. When Lawrence told Akbar that the prisoners needed a little money he was immediately offered a thousand rupees: ‘on my giving him a receipt for it, he tore it up, saying such things were only required among traders, not between gentlemen’. Later, when Lawrence complained that he had been insulted by one of the servants, ‘the Sirdar had the man soundly flogged, saying that “if that was not sufficient I might have his ears if I pleased”’.26
There was also surprisingly widespread recognition by the hostages of the more positive qualities of the Afghans. ‘There is no doubt that Afghans and Europeans get on much better than Europeans and Hindustanis,’ wrote Colin Mackenzie during his captivity. ‘The Afghans are an extremely hardy, bold, independent race, very intelligent with a ready fund of conversation and pleasantry which renders them very agreeable companions . . . The Afghan gentlemen are extremely sensitive to courtesy, having excellent manners themselves.’27 Vincent Eyre agreed: ‘We found the Afghan gentry most agreeable travelling companions.’ Lawrence found that on further acquaintance Sultan Jan, who had only a month earlier murdered his friend Captain Trevor, ‘was naturally a fine-tempered man, and very fond of children’.28jj
The prisoners were considerably less positive about some of their own number. Lady Macnaghten, who had somehow managed to save her baggage, but refused to share any of her clothes, or her sherry, remained a figure disliked by all. The Anglo-Indian Mrs Wade was more unpopular still: soon after her arrival at Laghman, she divorced her English husband and eloped with one of her captors, converting to Islam, ‘adopting the costume of the Mussalmans and professing to have changed her creed . . . She gave information of some plans laid by the men for their escape, which very nearly caused them all to have their throats cut . . . Having reported to her Afghan paramour the manner her husband had secreted some gold mohurs in his robes, he was of course plundered of them.’29 Most hated of all was the crabby Brigadier Shelton, who quarrelled with almost every one of the other prisoners. Even when they were all nearly killed by an earthquake on 19 February, Shelton found a way to use it as a pretext for an argument. When the earthquake struck, he happened to be sitting on a bench with Mackenzie on the flat roof of the fort:
He looked around fiercely to see who was shaking his bench. Mackenzie cried: ‘It’s an earthquake Brigadier!’ and, calling to Lady Sale, made for the stairs, which were cracking and falling about them, and by God’s mercy, they all reached the bottom in safety. In the evening Shelton came up and said: ‘Mackenzie, I want to speak to you.’ ‘Very well, Brigadier.’ In a solemn tone, to make him feel the enormity of offence [he said]: ‘Mackenzie, you went downstairs first today’; to which the latter coolly replied: ‘It’s the fashion in an earthquake Brigadier. I learned it among the Spaniards in Manila.’30
Lady Sale, meanwhile, took the earthquake with her usual spirit: ‘The roof of our room fell in with a dreadful crash. The roof of the stairs fell in as I descended them; but did me no injury. All my anxiety was for Mrs Sturt; but I could only see a heap of rubbish. I was nearly bewildered, when I heard the joyful sound, “Lady Sale come here, all are safe”; and found the whole party uninjured in the courtyard . . . Lady M’s cat’, she added, ‘was buried in the ruins, but dug out again.’31
On that same morning, 19 February, Thomas Seaton had been sent out of the south gate of Jalalabad with a pickaxe to lead a working party.
He and his men had been ordered to destroy some ruined mud walls just outside the city. The walls had provided cover for groups of Afghan cavalry who had been harassing the foraging parties the British daily sent out to gather fodder, and Seaton was told to knock them down so as to provide a clear line of shot for the cannon on the gate and make the whole sector safer for the grass-cutting syces [grooms] and haymaking camp followers. There was some urgency to this work and Seaton had strict instructions to finish it before sundown as the British had learned from their spies that Akbar Khan and his army were now only a day’s ride away from Jalalabad: having deposited his prisoners of war beyond rescue by the British – or abduction by his rivals – Akbar was now returning to finish off the remaining British presence in the country.
A little after eleven o’clock, Seaton had put down his pickaxe and was admiring the view down the valley when he felt a faint shaking beneath his feet accompanied by a low rumbling. There was a pause. Then,
[in] an instant, the rumbling increased and swelled to the loudest thunder, as if a thousand heavy wagons were driven at speed over a rough pavement. I turned quite sick and an awful fear came over me. The ground heaved and set like the sea, and the whole plain appeared rolling in waves towards us. The motion was so violent that I was nearly thrown down and I expected every moment to see the whole town swallowed up. My eyes being attracted towards the fort, I saw that the houses, the walls and the bastions were rocking and reeling in the most terrific manner, and falling into complete ruin, while all along the south and west faces the parapets which had cost us so much labour, and had been erected with so much toil, were crumbling away like sand. The whole fort was enveloped in one immense impenetrable cloud of dust, out of which came the cries of alarm and terror from the hundreds within.
When ‘the dreadful noise and quaking’ had stopped, there was a deathly silence. ‘The men were absolutely green with fear, and I felt myself that I was deadly pale. Looking around the valley, I saw everywhere indications of the awful visitation. Every village, town and fort was enveloped in dense clouds of dust. From some the dust was streaming away with an appearance as if the place was on fire; from others it rose high up in the air, in thick dense columns, as if a mine had been exploded.’ It was evident that not a village, town or fort had escaped.
When the breeze had cleared away the dust from Jalalabad, the place presented an awful appearance of destruction and desolation. The upper stories of the houses that a few minutes before had reared themselves above the ramparts so trim and picturesque, were all gone, and beams, posts, doors, planks, windows, bits of walls, ends of roofs, earth and dust, all mingled together in one confused heap, were all that remained. The walls presented an equally awful appearance. The parapet all around had fallen, and was lying at the foot of the wall in heaps of rubbish. The walls were split through in many places; and the outer surfaces of many of the bastions had sheered off. A breach had been made in the eastern wall, large enough for two companies abreast to march through . . . A month’s cannonading with a hundred pieces of heavy artillery could not have produced the damage that the earthquake had effected in a few seconds.32
In the hours that followed, the chief engineer George Broadfoot took General Sale on a tour of the wrecked defences. Sale was appalled by what he saw. He wrote to Calcutta that when he had first arrived at the city two months earlier, ‘I found the walls of Jalalabad in a state which might have justified despair as to the possibility of defending them.’ Through sheer hard manual labour the fortress had been made secure, and ‘the unremitting and almost incredible labours of the troops, aided by the zeal and science of Capt Broadfoot put the town in an efficient state of defence’. Now the defenders had to start all over again as the earthquake had destroyed ‘all our parapets, injured a third of the town, made a considerable breach in the ramparts of a curtain in the Peshawar face and reduced the Cabool Gate to a shapeless mass of ruins’.33
There was no alternative but to draw up the entire garrison into working squads and immediately begin repairing the breaches. Even as the work was making some initial progress, ‘towards sunset, a small body of horsemen from Akbar’s camp came to reconnoitre. The artilleryman Augustus Abbott, who was on the look-out, sent a [cannon] shot right into the party, making them scamper off.’34 Broadfoot muttered, ‘Now is the time for Akbar!’35
Luckily for the defenders, it seems that the earthquake had affected the besiegers as badly as the besieged, for no more was seen of the Afghans for five crucial days. In that time, the garrison hardly slept. At dawn, wrote Seaton, ‘every man in the garrison was on foot, ready to commence work as soon as it was light enough, and officers and men laboured at their appointed task with a will . . . By the evening of the 24th the bastions were repaired, the parapet built all around, and in many places double the strength it was before. The labour was terrible; and in the evenings my hands were so swelled I could scarcely close them on my knife and fork. During those four days not an officer or man took off his clothes. Everyone slept at his post on the ramparts, ready for defence if attacked, or for work at dawn of day.’36
Finally, on the morning of 25 February, Akbar Khan crossed the river and the plumes of his Uzbek cavalry were sighted silhouetted as they climbed the Piper’s Hill to the south of the town, ‘all splendidly mounted and bearing their standards, making a great show’. Minutes afterwards, the cavalry were riding down on the fleeing grass-cutters and foragers. The gates were closed and ‘Afghans moved round us in great force, with increased numbers of foot soldiers’. The siege of the city now resumed in earnest, but the garrison’s moment of greatest vulnerability had passed.
As in Kabul, Akbar Khan immediately took effective measures to stop supplies getting into the city, threatening all the local villagers with death if they sold food, sulphur, saltpetre or ammunition to the Firangis. Soon Seaton was recording his own growing hunger in his diary: ‘2nd March. All our comforts are rapidly disappearing. Tea has long been gone; coffee has disappeared today; sugar on its last legs; butter gone; there is no grass for the cows; candles not to be had; wine and spirits are a matter of memory. In a few days we shall be reduced to our rations of half a pound of salt beef and half a pound of coarse sugar, and further reductions are in prospect.’ A few days later the entry read, even more ominously: ‘No tiffin today; meat becoming scarce.’37 By 23 March, Sale sent word to General Pollock in Peshawar that he could not hold out much longer: he had already destroyed all his transport camels so that what fodder there was could be given to the cavalry, and he calculated that what remained of the salt meat would run out on 4 April.38 Ammunition for the muskets was also soon running perilously short.
Akbar again positioned himself as the champion of Islam and used his new-found reputation as a holy warrior to draw supporters and allies, even among those who were otherwise sceptical about his leadership. As MacGregor wrote to Pollock in mid-March: ‘He represents himself as one who has now no home, no family, no ties and no object, but the revival of the true religion and the extermination of its enemies.’39 On the evening halts on his way from Laghman to Jalalabad, Akbar used his time in camp to send out a stream of diplomatic messages trying to rally the Afghan nobles to his standard, using the language of the jihad in a more direct and innovative way than he or any other Afghan had yet done.40 Anyone who had allied with Shah Shuja, he hinted, should be treated as an apostate. No one would be allowed to sit on the fence. To one noble, Saiyed Ahai-ud-Din, who had been a close ally of the Shah, he wrote:
