News of the appalling fate which had befallen Sir Alexander Burnes and his two companions, not to mention some thirty sepoy guards and servants, sent a wave of horror through the British garrison. At first it was rumoured that Burnes had managed to escape, and was lying low somewhere, but any such hopes were soon dashed. The mob, meanwhile, emboldened by the failure of the British to act, continued on its rampage, burning homes, looting shops and slaughtering anyone suspected of collaboration with the British. Now and again, above the tumult and the roaring flames, could be heard warning cries of ‘They are coming . . . they are coming’, for the rioters were expecting swift and violent retribution. Indeed, so that they could make a quick get-away, the ringleaders, it was learned later, had their horses already saddled up. But in the cantonments Macnaghten and Elphinstone continued to vacillate and agonise, wasting even more precious time. And this despite reports that several other officers, as well as Mohan Lai, were still hiding out in the old city, hoping to escape the mob’s vengeance.
By now it had become clear to everyone, even to Macnaghten, that this was something far more serious than a rabble out of control. Word was coming in that thousands of Afghans were joining the cause by the hour, and that similar disturbances were taking place in the surrounding countryside. Rumours also reached British ears claiming that Shah Shujah himself had called for a holy war against the British. Letters to this effect, bearing his personal seal, were discovered in circulation. For a while it was feared that these might be genuine, and that Shujah had been playing a double game with those who had restored him to his throne. But, on examination, the letters proved to be forgeries and the rumours to be false, deliberately spread by the conspirators. Indeed, it was clear that Shujah’s own position was no less precarious than that of his sponsors. He, to be fair, was the only one who had tried to save Burnes and his companions on learning of their peril, but his troops had been ill-led. Instead of swiftly skirting the city to reach the quarter where Burnes’s house stood, they had tried to advance through the crowded centre, with its narrow, winding streets, dragging their guns behind them. They soon found themselves trapped, and at the mercy of the rioters, many of whom were armed and who greatly outnumbered them. Two hundred of them were killed. The rest, having abandoned their guns, fled in disorder to the shelter of the Bala Hissar, their unseemly retreat covered by the British relief party.
The humiliating rout of Shujah’s troops, supposedly there to protect him, reduced the Afghan ruler to ‘a pitiable state of dejection and alarm’, Kaye tells us, over his own personal safety. The British, too, were badly shaken by this violent and unexpected turn of events. ‘The unwelcome truth was forced upon us’, observed one officer in his diary, ‘that in the whole Afghan nation we could not reckon on a single friend.’ The champagne life, which the garrison had enjoyed for so long, was now clearly at an end. In a half-finished memorandum, which was found after his death, Macnaghten tried to justify his failure to anticipate the uprising. ‘I may be considered culpable’, he wrote, ‘for not having foreseen the coming storm. To this I can only reply that others, who had much better opportunities of watching the feelings of the people, had no suspicion of what was coming.’ He made no mention of Rawlinson or Pottinger, whose warnings he had ignored, and tried to blame Burnes, now conveniently dead, for failing to alert him to the danger. On the evening before his assassination, Macnaghten claimed, Burnes had congratulated him on leaving to take up his new post at a time of ‘such profound tranquillity’. It was no secret, however, that Burnes could hardly wait to see his chief go, and was unlikely to have said anything which might delay his departure, and therefore his own assumption of Macnaghten’s mantle.
According to his friend Mohan Lai, Burnes had viewed the situation as anything but tranquil, even if he had gravely underestimated his own personal danger that night. On the previous evening he had declared that ‘the time is not very far off when we must leave this country’. The Kashmiri took this to mean that Burnes was perfectly aware of the deepening hostility of the Afghans towards the British in their midst. However, he could equally well have been referring to the new policy towards Afghanistan which had just been announced in London. For in August of that year a Tory government led by Sir Robert Peel had replaced Melbourne’s Whig administration and had immediately set about stringent economies. Maintaining troops in Afghanistan was costing a fortune, and it was felt that Shujah should now be made to stand on his own feet, especially as the Russian threat appeared to have receded. It was proposed, therefore, that while Shujah’s own forces should be built up, the British military presence in Afghanistan, though not the political one, should be phased out. For a start, Macnaghten had been instructed to end the lavish payments he had been making to the tribes commanding the crucial passes between Kabul and British India. It was to prove a fatal move, for these previously quiescent tribes were among the first to join the insurrection.
Meanwhile, in the cantonments, instead of venturing out against the ill-armed and (as yet) ill-organised rebels, the British began preparing for a siege. It was only now that they realised their folly in agreeing to move out of the Bala Hissar. The cantonments, it transpired, were singularly ill-sited for defence, being built on low, marshy ground, overlooked by hills on all sides. They were surrounded, moreover, by orchards, which obstructed the defenders’ lines of fire and observation, while the numerous irrigation channels which criss-crossed this dead ground offered an attacker excellent cover. A mud-built wall surrounded the British position, but this was no more than waist-high in some places, providing little protection from sniper or artillery fire. Macnaghten’s engineers had warned him of this at the time of the move from the Bala Hissar, but unlike the majority of Great Game professionals he had little or no military experience, and anyway was confident that no such contingency would ever arise. He had thus ignored their advice, with the result that 4,500 British and Indian troops and 12,000 camp-followers, including some three dozen British wives, children and nannies, found themselves beleaguered in what Kaye described as little better than ‘sheep-folds on the plain’.
Had Macnaghten and Elphinstone acted decisively and promptly at the first signs of trouble they would have been in time to move the entire garrison into the Bala Hissar, with its high, protective walls. But they continued to procrastinate until it was too late to embark on such a risky undertaking. Instead, Macnaghten sought another way out of the perilous situation into which his policies had plunged them all. Using the resourceful Mohan Lai as his go-between, he set about trying to buy the support of key Afghan leaders in the hope of turning the tables on the rebellious factions and tribes. Considerable quantities of largesse were dispensed, or promised (for much of Macnaghten’s treasury was now in the hands of the mob), but it was to singularly little effect. ‘There were too many hungry appetites to appease, too many conflicting interests to reconcile,’ observed Kaye. ‘It was altogether, by this time, too mighty a movement to be put down by a display of money-bags. The jingling of the coin could not drown the voice of an outraged and incensed people.’
With the situation deteriorating by the hour, something more drastic was obviously called for. It was not long before a solution was forthcoming, though whose idea it was is unclear. Mohan Lai was authorised to offer a reward of 10,000 rupees to anyone who succeeded in assassinating one of the principal rebel leaders. The instruction, together with a list of names, was issued to him by Lieutenant John Conolly, younger brother of Arthur and a junior political officer on Macnaghten’s staff. Conolly was at that time inside the Bala Hissar, serving as liaison officer with the anxious Shujah. As elsewhere, contact was maintained by means of fleet-footed messengers, known as cossids, who took their lives in their hands running the gauntlet with secret dispatches concealed on them. On learning of the offer of blood-money, Macnaghten professed to be horrified by this thoroughly un-British stratagem. But he had certainly agreed to rewards being offered for the capture of hostile chieftains, and Kaye doubts whether Lieutenant Conolly would have acted on his own ‘in a matter of such responsibility’ without the prior approval of his chief. He concludes that Macnaghten almost certainly knew about the offer of blood-money and chose to turn a blind eye to it, even if he did not actually authorise it. As both Macnaghten and Conolly were shortly to perish, this is as near to the truth as we are likely to get.
Two rebel leaders, each high on Conolly’s list, did in fact die not long afterwards in decidedly mysterious circumstances, and claims were immediately put in for the reward. One came from an individual who insisted that he had personally shot one of the men, while the other maintained that he had suffocated the second in his sleep. Mohan Lai was not convinced by their stories, however, and the money was never paid. The Kashmiri argued that he had offered it for the men’s heads, and that the claimants had failed to produce these. As it turned out, their elimination did little to ease the plight of the garrison. This sudden gap in the ranks of the rebel leaders neither weakened their resolve nor divided them. For word had just reached them that Mohammed Akbar Khan, favourite son of the exiled Dost Mohammed, was on his way from Turkestan to take personal command of what had now become a full-scale insurrection against the British and their puppet ruler. This fiery warrior-prince had vowed to overthrow Shujah, expel the British and restore his father to the throne.
In the cantonments, meanwhile, things were going from bad to worse. News was coming in of the fall of outlying British posts to the rebels, with considerable loss of life, including the massacre of an entire Gurkha regiment. A number of officers had been killed and others wounded, among them Major Eldred Pottinger, the hero of Herat. The cruel Afghan winter had already begun, far earlier than usual, and food, water, medicines and morale were beginning to run low. So too, it appears, was courage, for the garrison’s one and only major assault on the rebels had ended in a humiliating and costly defeat which saw the headlong flight of the British and Indian troops back to their own lines. Kaye was to call it ‘disgraceful and calamitous’. It took place on November 23, when the Afghans suddenly moved two guns to the top of a hill overlooking the British position and began to bombard the crowded camp below.
Even General Elphinstone, who until now had expended more energy quarrelling with Macnaghten than in engaging the enemy, could not ignore this threat. He ordered a far from enthusiastic brigadier to venture forth with a force of infantry and cavalry. Having successfully seized the hill and silenced the guns, the brigadier turned his attention to the enemy-held village below. It was here that things began to go wrong. There had long been a standing order that guns must always move in pairs, but for some reason, perhaps to give himself greater mobility, the brigadier had only taken one 9-pounder with him. At first the grape-shot from this had had a devastating effect on the Afghans occupying the village, but soon it began to overheat, putting it out of action when it was most needed. As a result the attack on the village was driven back. Meanwhile the Afghan commanders had dispatched a large body of horsemen and foot-soldiers to the assistance of their hard-pressed comrades. Seeing the danger, the brigadier at once formed his infantry into two squares, massing his cavalry between them, and waited for the enemy onslaught, confident that the tactics which had won the Battle of Waterloo would prove as deadly here.
But the Afghans kept their distance, opening up a heavy fire on the tightly packed British squares with their long-barrelled matchlocks, or jezails. To the dismay of the brigadier’s men, easy targets in their vivid scarlet tunics, their own shorter-barrelled muskets were unable to reach the enemy, the rounds falling harmlessly short of their targets. Normally the brigadier could have turned his artillery on the Afghans, causing wholesale slaughter in their ranks, whereupon his cavalry would have done the rest. However, as Kaye observed, it seemed as though ‘the curse of God was upon those unhappy people’, for their single 9-pounder was still too hot for the gunners to use without the risk of it exploding, and in the meantime men were falling in scores to the Afghan marksmen. Then, to the horror of those watching the battle from the cantonments far below, a large party of the enemy began to crawl along a gully towards the unsuspecting British. Moments later they broke cover and flung themselves with wild cries upon their foes, who promptly turned and fled. Desperately the brigadier tried to rally his men, displaying remarkable courage in facing the enemy single-handed, while ordering his bugler to sound the halt. It worked, stopping the fleeing men in their tracks. The officers re-formed them, and a bayonet charge, supported by the cavalry, turned the tide, scattering the enemy. By now the 9-pounder was back in action, and the Afghans were finally driven off with heavy casualties.
The British triumph was short-lived, though, for the Afghans were quick to learn their lesson. They directed the fire of their jezails against the unfortunate gunners, making it all but impossible to use the 9-pounder. At the same time, from well out of range of the British muskets, they kept up a murderous hail against the exhausted troops, whose morale was once more beginning to crumble. It finally gave way when a party of Afghans, again crawling unseen up a gully, leaped unexpectedly upon them with blood-curdling screams and long, flashing knives, while their comrades kept up an incessant fire from near-invisible positions behind the rocks. This was too much for the British and Indian troops. They broke ranks and fled back down the hill all the way to the cantonments, leaving the wounded to their inevitable fate.
‘The rout of the British force was complete,’ wrote Kaye. ‘In one confused mass of infantry and cavalry – of European and native soldiers – they fled to the cantonment walls.’ In vain did General Elphinstone and his staff officers, who had watched the battle from the British lines, try to rally them and turn them back against the Afghans. They had lost all heart and discipline, not to mention 300 of their comrades. As Kaye coldly put it: ‘They had forgotten they were British soldiers.’ So intermixed were the advancing Afghans with the fleeing British that the cantonment guns could no longer be fired in safety. Had the triumphant enemy continued their pursuit, observes Kaye, the entire garrison would almost certainly have been slaughtered. But by some miracle they held back, apparently on the orders of their commander, and shortly afterwards melted away. ‘They seemed astonished at their own success,’ reported one young officer, ‘and after mutilating in a dreadful manner the bodies left on the hill, they retired with exulting shouts to the city.’
The next day, to the surprise of the British, the Afghans offered them a truce. The rebels had now been joined, amid much jubilation, by Mohammed Akbar Khan, accompanied by 6,000 fighting men. This brought the Afghan strength to something like 30,000 foot-soldiers and cavalry, thereby outnumbering the British troops by about seven to one. No doubt Akbar, with such overwhelming force behind him, would have liked to put the whole British garrison to the sword in revenge for the overthrow of his father. However, if he was to restore him to the throne, he knew he must proceed with caution, for Dost Mohammed was still securely in British hands in India. Macnaghten, for his part, realised that he had little choice but to negotiate with the Afghans if the garrison was to be saved from annihilation or starvation. But before he agreed to do so he demanded from Elphinstone a written statement declaring their situation, militarily speaking, to be hopeless, unless reinforcements, reported to be on their way from Kandahar, arrived in a matter of days. For, still hopeful of salvaging his career, he was determined to pin the blame for their predicament on Elphinstone’s ineptitude and the pusillanimity of his troops.
The general duly supplied him with what he wanted, together with a recommendation that they negotiate with the Afghans. The long catalogue of the garrison’s woes (which Macnaghten already well knew) ended thus: ‘Having held our position here for upwards of three weeks in a state of siege, from the want of provisions and forage, the reduced state of our troops, the large number of wounded and sick, the difficulty of defending the extensive and ill-situated cantonments we occupy, the near approach of winter, our communications cut off, and the whole country in arms against us, I am of the opinion that it is not feasible any longer to maintain our position in this country.’ Elphinstone’s gloom had been deepened by two further pieces of intelligence which had just reached him. The first was that Akbar had warned that any Afghan found selling or supplying food to the British would be killed instantly. The second was that the hoped-for relief expedition from the south had been forced back by heavy snowfalls in the passes, and would be unable to reach Kabul that winter.
Armed with the general’s bleak prognosis, Macnaghten sat down to write an urgent dispatch to Lord Auckland describing their grave situation, and placing responsibility for it squarely on the shoulders of the military, whom he accused of being ill-led and cowardly. ‘Our provisions will be out in two or three days, and the military authorities have strongly urged me to capitulate,’ he wrote, adding smugly: ‘This I will not do, till the last moment.’ He was still convinced that he could outwit the Afghans by exploiting divisions which he knew to exist among their leaders. In response to their offer of a truce, therefore, he invited them to send a deputation to discuss terms. While the negotiations were proceeding, extraordinary scenes took place in the British lines, as crowds of Afghans, all armed to the teeth, swarmed across the low perimeter walls and began fraternising with the British and Indian troops. Many of them carried fresh vegetables which they pressed on those they had been trying to kill only hours before. At first it was feared that these might have been ‘spiked’ in some way, or even poisoned, but careful examination showed this suspicion to be groundless.
For a start the Afghan negotiators wanted Shah Shujah, still reasonably secure behind the massive walls and ramparts of the Bala Hissar, to be handed over to them. They would guarantee his life (although it was whispered that they intended to put out his eyes so that he could never again be a threat). Next they demanded that all British troops in Afghanistan, after first surrendering their arms, should leave at once for India, and that at the same time Dost Mohammed should be returned to them. And to make quite sure that they were not double-crossed, they intended to hold British officers and their families as hostages until all the troops had left the country, and Dost Mohammed was safely back in Kabul. Needless to say, these demands were totally unacceptable to Macnaghten. The euphoria and fraternising came to an abrupt end as the talks broke up with both sides vowing angrily to go to war again.
In the event this did not happen. Instead, a few days later, a second meeting was arranged, this time on the banks of the Kabul river, a mile from the cantonments. Akbar himself led the Afghan delegation, which consisted of most of the leading tribal chiefs. Macnaghten now put forward his own proposals. ‘Whereas’, he began, reading in Persian from a prepared statement, ‘it has become apparent from recent events that the continuance of the British Army in Afghanistan for the support of Shah Shujah is displeasing to the great majority of the Afghan nation, and whereas the British Government had no other object in sending troops to this country than the integrity, happiness and welfare of the Afghans, it can have no wish to remain when that object is defeated by its presence.’ The British, therefore, would withdraw all their troops, provided the Afghans would guarantee their safe passage to the frontier. Shah Shujah (who appears not to have been consulted) would give up his throne and return with the British to India. Akbar himself would accompany them to the frontier, and be personally responsible for their safety, while four British officers, but no families, would remain behind in Kabul as hostages. On the safe arrival of the British garrison in India, Dost Mohammed would be free to proceed to Kabul and the British officers to return home. Finally, despite recent events, it was to be hoped that the two nations would remain friends, and in return for British assistance if they ever needed it, the Afghans would agree not to enter into an alliance with any other foreign power.
This was not quite the capitulation that it appeared. Macnaghten, an intriguer to his very fingertips, was taking one last desperate gamble. He had learned from Mohan Lai that some of the more powerful chiefs privately feared the return of Dost Mohammed, a tough and masterful ruler, and actually preferred the weaker, more compliant Shujah. Nor were they in such a hurry as Akbar to see the British, with their generous largesse, depart. After discussing Macnaghten’s proposals among themselves, the Afghans, seemingly unanimous, agreed to them in principle. Preparations began at once for the evacuation of the garrison, and the implementation of the other parts of the agreement, before the winter made this impossible. But faced by the reality of Shujah’s imminent departure, those who were apprehensive about Dost Mohammed’s return began to have second thoughts, as Macnaghten had anticipated. Using Mohan Lai once again as his go-between, and with tempting promises of gold to come, Macnaghten set about trying to widen the divide in the Afghan ranks. ‘If any portion of the Afghans wish our troops to remain in the country,’ he told his Kashmiri agent, ‘I shall think myself at liberty to break the engagement which I have made to go away, which was made believing it to be in accordance with the wishes of the Afghan nation.’
During the next few days the tireless Mohan Lai was kept feverishly busy endeavouring to spread strife among the Afghan leaders, and to turn as many as possible against Akbar. Macnaghten, wrote Kaye, was aware that there was no real unity between the Afghans, merely temporary alliances where it suited the respective parties. ‘It is not easy’, Kaye adds, ‘to group into one lucid and intelligible whole all the many shifting schemes and devices which distracted the last days of the Envoy . . . He appears to have turned first to one party, then to another, eagerly grasping at every new combination that seemed to promise more hope than the last.’ Nor did he have to wait too long for signs that his strategy seemed to be working, and that Akbar and his supporters were finding themselves under powerful pressure from within.
On the evening of December 22, Akbar sent a secret emissary to the British lines to tell Macnaghten that he had an entirely new proposal to put to him. Its terms were startling, to say the least. Shah Shujah would be allowed to remain on the throne after all, but with Akbar as his Vizier. The British would stay in Afghanistan until the spring, whereupon they would leave, as though by their own choice, thereby saving face. At the same time, the individual known to be behind the assassination of Sir Alexander Burnes would be seized and handed over to the British for punishment. In return for all this, Akbar was to receive a lump sum of £300,000 and an annuity of £40,000, plus the help of the British against certain of his rivals.
Clearly, or so it seemed to Macnaghten, Akbar had been forced into this compromise by those parties whom he, with the aid of Mohan Lai and the promise of British gold, had won over to Shah Shujah’s cause. Macnaghten was triumphant. He had saved the British from humiliation, the garrison from massacre, Shujah from abdication and his own career from ruination. A rendezvous was arranged for the following morning at which, amid great secrecy, the two would finalise the agreement. That night Macnaghten scribbled a note to Elphinstone saying that he had struck a deal with Akbar which would bring all their anxieties to an end.
The next day, accompanied by three of his political officers, Macnaghten set out for the spot where he and Akbar had agreed to meet. To Elphinstone, who had asked whether it might not be a trap, he answered sharply: ‘Leave it all to me. I understand these things better than you.’ Similar fears were expressed by one of the officers chosen to go with him, as well as by his own wife. Mohan Lai, too, had warned him that Akbar was not a man to be trusted. But Macnaghten, whom no one could accuse of lacking courage, refused to heed them. ‘Treachery,’ he declared, ‘of course there is.’ Success, however, would retrieve their honour, and more than make up for the danger. ‘Rather than be disgraced,’ he added, ‘I would risk a thousand deaths.’
Akbar and his party were waiting for them on a snow-covered hillside overlooking the Kabul river, 600 yards from the south-eastern corner of the cantonments. ‘Peace be with you!’, the Afghans greeted the Englishmen as they rode up. Servants had spread horse-cloths on the ground, and after both sides had saluted from the saddle Akbar suggested that Macnaghten and his companions dismount and seat themselves. Captain Kenneth Mackenzie, one of the officers, wrote afterwards: ‘Men talk of presentiment. I suppose that something of the kind came over me, for I could-scarcely prevail upon myself to quit my horse. I did so, however, and was invited to sit down among the sirdars.’ When everyone was seated and quiet, Akbar turned to Macnaghten with a smile and asked him whether he accepted the proposal which had been put to him the previous evening. ‘Why not?’ replied Macnaghten. Those two short words were to seal not only his own fate but also that of the entire British garrison.
Unknown to Macnaghten, Akbar had learned of his duplicity and had decided to turn it to his own advantage. He warned the other chiefs of Macnaghten’s willingness to cut them out and do a secret deal with him behind their backs. And now – for it appears that some of them were present – they had heard the Englishman’s treachery with their own ears. Akbar had never intended to let either the British or Shujah stay on. His offer was designed solely to trap Macnaghten, and regain the allegiance of those whom Macnaghten had sought to turn against him. He had merely answered treachery with treachery, and had come off best.
Still suspecting nothing, Macnaghten enquired who the several strangers present were. Akbar told him not to be alarmed, then added: ‘We are all in the secret.’ No sooner had he uttered that, according to Captain Mackenzie, than he suddenly screamed to his men: ‘Begeer! Begeer!’, meaning ‘Seize! Seize!’ At once Mackenzie and his two colleagues found themselves pinioned from behind, while Akbar himself, together with another chief, held Macnaghten. On Akbar’s face, Mackenzie remembered, was an expression ‘of the most diabolical ferocity’. As Macnaghten was dragged out of sight down the hill, Mackenzie got a brief glimpse of his face too. ‘It was’, he wrote afterwards, ‘full of horror and astonishment.’ He also heard him cry: ‘Az barae Khooda’, which means ‘For God’s sake’. His immediate concern, however, was over his own fate, for some of the more fanatical of the Afghans were demanding his blood and that of his two fellow officers. But Akbar, it seems, had given orders that they were to be taken alive. Stripped of their weapons, they were ordered at gunpoint to mount the horses of three of his men, and ride behind them in the saddle. Then, hotly pursued by those who still wanted to kill them, they were swept away to the safety of a nearby fort where they were thrown into a dank cell. By ill luck, one of their number, Captain Trevor, either fell or was dragged from his mount during the chase, and was brutally hacked to death in the snow.
Precisely how Macnaghten died will never be known. His murderers apart, there were no witnesses to what happened to him after he was dragged, struggling, down the hill. Akbar himself swore later that he had intended to hold the Englishman hostage against his father’s safe return, but that the captive had fought so fiercely that they had been forced to kill him lest he broke free and escaped to the British lines. Another version, however, maintains that Akbar, who blamed Macnaghten personally for his father’s overthrow, shot him dead in a blind rage, using one of an ornate pair of pistols which Macnaghten had earlier presented to him, and even shown him how to load.
Meanwhile, realising that something was amiss, look-outs in the cantonments had reported this to General Elphinstone. But once again incompetence, irresolution and plain cowardice prevailed, for no move was made to try to save Macnaghten and his companions, although they were less than half a mile away from the cantonments. Macnaghten had asked Elphinstone to have troops standing by in case anything went wrong, but even this he had failed to do. The excuse given afterwards for this inaction was that Macnaghten and his three fellow officers were thought to have ridden off with Akbar to finalise the deal elsewhere. It was not until later, when they failed to return, that the appalling truth became known. That night reports reached the horrified garrison that Macnaghten’s corpse, minus its head, arms and legs, could be seen suspended from a pole in the bazaar, while his bloodstained limbs were being passed round the town in triumph.