The dreadful tidings borne by Dr Brydon – the Messenger of Death, as he was to become known – reached Lord Auckland, the retiring Governor-General, in Calcutta, a fortnight later. The shock, his sister Emily noted, was to age him by ten years. Things had gone wrong so terribly fast. Only a few weeks earlier Sir William Macnaghten had written from Kabul assuring him that everything was firmly under control. And now his entire policy in Central Asia was in ruins. Far from establishing a friendly rule in Afghanistan to buttress India against Russian encroachments, it had led instead to one of the worst disasters ever to overtake a British army. A mob of mere heathen savages, armed with home-made weapons, had succeeded in routing the greatest power on earth. It was a devastating blow to British pride and prestige. The ignominy suffered by St Petersburg following the Khivan debacle was nothing compared to this. To the bemused Auckland, who had been reluctant to use British troops to unseat Dost Mohammed in the first place, it was ‘as inexplicable as it was appalling’. And now, with Akbar’s forces beginning to hammer at the gates of the two remaining British garrisons in Afghanistan, Jalalabad and Kandahar, fears arose that the warlike Afghans, flushed by victory, might pour down through the passes into northern India, as they had done more than once in the past.
London did not hear of the catastrophe for a further week. First to break the news, using the largest headline type it possessed, was The Times. ‘We regret to announce’, it declared, ‘that the intelligence which this express has brought us is . . . of the most disastrous and melancholy nature.’ In a leading article a few days later it thrust an accusing finger at St Petersburg – ‘whose growing influence amongst those tribes first called for our interference’, and whose secret agents were ‘examining with the greatest care’ the passes leading towards British India. It insisted that the insurrection was far too well organised to have been spontaneous, and found it highly suspicious that the first to be murdered was Sir Alexander Burnes, ‘the keenest antagonist of the Russian agents’. Others were less sure about Russia’s implication. But everyone, including the Duke of Wellington, blamed General Elphinstone for failing to crush the insurrection at the outset, and Lord Auckland for embarking on such folly in the first place. ‘Our worst fears regarding the Afghanistan expedition’, declaimed The Times smugly, ‘have been justified.’
The new Tory administration led by Sir Robert Peel could at least wash its hands of all responsibility for the disaster, placing this firmly on the shoulders of Melbourne’s Whigs, who had approved the invasion plan. However, it was now faced with the task of clearing up the mess and deciding how the Afghans were to be punished for their treachery, for the nation was demanding vengeance. Fortunately, the Tories’ own man – that old India hand Lord Ellenborough, thrice President of the Board of Control – was already on his way to replace Auckland as Governor-General, though he only learned of the catastrophe when he arrived off Madras on February 21. His brief from the government had been to withdraw the British garrisons from Afghanistan in line with its stringent new economic policies, but he now found himself facing a totally unexpected situation. That night, as his vessel bore him on to Calcutta, he wrote to Peel declaring that he proposed to restore Britain’s honour and pride by teaching the Afghans a lesson they would not forget in a hurry.
On reaching the capital, Ellenborough learned that his predecessor had already dispatched a force to Peshawar to try to relieve the hard-pressed garrisons at Jalalabad and Kandahar, and to try to free the British hostages held by Akbar. The new Governor-General now took command. On March 31 the Khyber Pass was forced by Major-General George Pollock, using the tactics of the Afghans themselves, and at a cost of only fourteen British lives. As Pollock’s flanking columns seized the heights, the astonished tribesmen for the first time found themselves shot down from above. Two weeks later the relief column was played into Jalalabad to the strains of the Scots air ‘Oh, but ye’ve bin lang a’coming’. Meanwhile, in a series of actions around Kandahar, the able British commander, General Sir William Nott, had driven back the Afghans threatening the garrison. He, like Pollock, was now ready and eager to march on Kabul to avenge Elphinstone’s humiliating defeat, not to mention the deaths of Burnes, Macnaghten and the countless soldiers and families who had perished on the death march.
It was at this point that Lord Ellenborough, so hawkish at first, began to get cold feet. Anxious about the continuing drain on India’s already depleted treasury (for London was resolutely refusing to contribute to the expedition’s costs), and perhaps fearing another catastrophe, the Governor-General argued that the Afghans had now received lesson enough at the hands of Pollock and Nott. ‘At last we have got a victory,’ he wrote to Peel, ‘and our military character is re-established.’ He ordered the two generals to return with their troops to India, leaving the hostages in Akbar’s possession. After all, the British still held Dost Mohammed, while Shah Shujah (or so Ellenborough believed) continued to rule Afghanistan, nominally anyway, from the walled fastness of the Bala Hissar. Once the British troops had been withdrawn from Afghanistan, Ellenborough reasoned, negotiations for the freeing of the hostages could commence in a calmer atmosphere. But what he did not then know was that the unfortunate Shujah was no longer alive. As Pollock’s men were fighting their way up the Khyber to Jalalabad, Shujah had been lured out of the Bala Hissar, ostensibly for talks, and instead had been riddled with bullets. Akbar’s triumph, however, had proved short-lived, as fears spread among the other chiefs over the prospect of being ruled by him or his father. Just as Macnaghten had foreseen, a fierce power struggle now arose between Akbar’s supporters and his foes.
Almost simultaneously, within the ranks of the British, a struggle of a different kind broke out. Ellenborough’s order to Pollock and Nott to evacuate Afghanistan without further chastising the murderous tribes was received with dismay and disbelief by both officers and men, who wanted blood. A battle of wills now followed between the two generals and the new Governor-General, with other senior military officers in India and at home taking the side of the former. A succession of excuses – the weather, shortages of supplies, money, and so on – was found for delaying the departure of the two garrisons, while pressure grew on Ellenborough to change his mind. The hawks had a valuable ally at home in the Duke of Wellington, who still held a seat in the Cabinet. ‘It is impossible to impress upon you too strongly’, the India veteran warned Ellen-borough, ‘the notion of the importance of the restoration of reputation in the East.’ Even Sir Robert Peel, the Prime Minister, who had from the start urged extreme caution on the Governor-General, began to waver under the pressure of public opinion, and wrote to him suggesting that sterner measures might be called for.
Feeling increasingly isolated, Ellenborough finally gave way. He realised that he would either have to admit that he had previously been wrong, or risk being accused of throwing away the opportunity of freeing the hostages and salvaging Britain’s military reputation and pride. Without altering his order to evacuate Afghanistan, he told Pollock and Nott that they might, if they judged it militarily expedient, retire by way of Kabul. ‘No change had come over the views of Lord Ellenborough’, observed Kaye, ‘but a change had come over the meaning of certain words of the English language.’ Although Ellenborough was criticised for thus shifting the responsibility on to the shoulders of Pollock and Nott, neither complained. They had got their way, and a race began between the two to be the first into Kabul, although Nott’s men in Kandahar had by far the furthest to march – some 300 miles against Pollock’s 100.
As they fought their way back along the same route by which, only seven months earlier, Elphinstone’s ill-fated columns had left Kabul, Pollock’s troops soon came across harrowing evidence of the disaster. Everywhere there were skeletons. ‘They lay in heaps of fifties and hundreds,’ wrote one officer, ‘our gun-wheels passing over and crushing the skulls of our late comrades at almost every yard.’ Some even recognised the remains and possessions of former friends. Despite Ellen-borough’s orders to show restraint towards the populace, the growing fury of the troops led to numerous excesses being committed against those who resisted their advance. In one village, it is said, every male over the age of puberty was slaughtered, women were raped, and some even killed. ‘Tears, supplications, were of no avail,’ one young officer recalled. ‘Fierce oaths were the only answer. The musket was deliberately raised, the trigger pulled, and happy was he who fell dead.’ Shocked at what he saw, he described many of the troops as little better than ‘hired assassins’. An army chaplain, who was present at the sacking of one village which fired on them after it had surrendered, declared that seldom had a clergyman been called upon to witness such a scene. But these painful things, he added, were almost impossible to prevent ‘under such circumstances’, and regrettably were common to all wars.
In the event, the race for the Afghan capital was won by Pollock’s men, though only just. All the same it took them five times as long to fight their way there as it had taken Dr Brydon to travel the other way. They reached Kabul on September 15, to find that the enemy, including Akbar himself, had fled the city. That night they set up camp on the racecourse built by Elphinstone’s men three years earlier, and next morning entered the Bala Hissar without having to fire a shot. A few minutes later the Union Jack was flying over Kabul once more. They found much to remind them of the events they had come to avenge, including the blackened ruins of Sir Alexander Burnes’s house. ‘It was a melancholy spectacle,’ observed an officer with Nott’s force, adding that ‘the narrow street in which it stood, by the numerous scars of musket-balls, bore indubitable evidence of the fury of the conflict which had raged about it.’ He and his companions returned to the camp ‘little disposed for any conversation . . . and fully occupied by the emotions of sorrow and mortification which such scenes were calculated to call forth.’
With Shah Shujah dead, Kabul was now kingless, and Pollock, the senior of the two commanders, who had been invested with political authority by Lord Ellenborough, immediately placed Shujah’s son Futteh on the throne, thereby making him too a British puppet. Pollock’s next priority was to try to free the British hostages held by Akbar. The officer he chose for this exacting and dangerous task was Captain (now Sir) Richmond Shakespear, whose aptitude for this sort of game had been amply demonstrated at Khiva two years earlier. Although he was provided this time with a powerful escort of Kizilbashi irregulars, sworn foes of Akbar’s, there were many who feared that he would end up as one of the hostages. For roaming the Bamian area, where the latter were known to be held, were said to be 12,000 enemy troops. Undeterred by such warnings, and accompanied by his 600 armed Kizilbashis, Shakespear at once set out for Bamian, ISO miles to the northwest, having first sent messengers ahead to try to get word to the hostages that help was on the way.
By now the ranks of those held by Akbar had been swelled by the addition of a number of British captives taken by the Afghans, bringing the total to 22 officers, including Eldred Pottinger, 37 other ranks, 12 wives and 22 children. For some months they had been kept in the comparative comfort of Kabul, where they had been well treated, but with the advance of Pollock and Nott towards the capital they had been removed to a remote, mud-built fortress near Bamian. In August they heard from their servants that they were shortly to be moved northwards to Bokhara, well out of reach of any rescue attempt, where they would be presented as slaves to the tribes if the British occupied Kabul and Akbar was forced to flee. Aware that they had little time to spare, a number of the officers led by Pottinger, and aided by the wily Mohan Lai, set about trying to buy the party’s freedom from the commander of their Afghan guards. At first he demurred, but news soon began to reach Bamian that the British were fast approaching Kabul and that Akbar was preparing to flee. Ignoring an order from the latter to march the hostages into Turkestan, he agreed to free them for 20,000 rupees in cash and a monthly pension of 1,000 rupees.
Having thus obtained his co-operation, they next took over the fortress in which they had been held, and prepared to defend it until a relief expedition could get to them. They deposed the Afghan governor, ran up the Union Jack, levied taxes on passing merchants and established friendly contact with local chiefs. At the same time they made plans for withstanding a siege. As many of the British troops were too weak because of illness to hold a musket, they promised their former guards, more than 200 in number, four months’ extra pay if they remained with them until they were relieved. It was at this moment that they heard that Kabul had fallen, Akbar had fled, and that Shakespear was on his way to them with his Kizilbashi escort. At once they abandoned the fort and marched out to meet him.
After travelling for several hours, a scout spotted a large body of horsemen winding its way down through the pass towards them. For a moment it was feared that these might be Akbar’s men returning to seize them, but suddenly a horseman in British officer’s uniform was observed galloping ahead of the others. It was Sir Richmond Shakespear. He had already spotted them. The meeting was an extremely emotional one, with many of the hostages in tears. They showered Shakespear with questions, having been completely out of touch for eight months. From them Shakespear learned that back in April General Elphinstone, ailing and broken, had died, thus being spared the ignominy of having to face a public enquiry, if not a court martial, for his contribution to the catastrophe. He also learned that four babies had been born to women in the party, and that a sergeant’s wife had run off with one of her captors.
With the hostages now freed, and on their way to Kabul, there remained one last task for the British, and that was the settling of accounts. Pollock had considered blowing up the Bala Hissar, that symbol of Afghan might, but had been begged by those who had remained loyal to the British not to do so, as it would leave them defenceless. Instead therefore he decided to raze Kabul’s great covered bazaar, celebrated throughout Central Asia, and where Macnaghten’s dismembered corpse had been hung nine months earlier. The task was carried out by Pollock’s engineers using explosives. However, so massive was the structure that it was to take them two whole days. The general had issued strict orders that no one was to be harmed, and that property elsewhere in the old city was not to be touched. Guards were placed on the principal gates and in the area around the bazaar to ensure that no looting took place. But there followed a total breakdown of discipline. ‘The cry went forth that Caubul was given up to plunder,’ wrote Major Henry Rawlinson, a political officer with Nott’s force. Troops and camp-followers streamed into the city, pillaging shops and applying torches to houses. Guilty and innocent alike, including the friendly Kizilbashis, saw their homes and businesses destroyed, and large areas of Kabul were laid low. Among those who lost everything they possessed were 500 Indian families who were now forced to beg their way home in the rear of the British troops. It was an inglorious episode with which to crown the victory of Pollock and Nott. Clearly it was time for the British to go.
On October 11 they hauled down the Union Jack over the Bala Hissar, and the next morning the first units marched away from Kabul. Once again they set out along the skeleton-strewn trail, the via dolorosa of the previous winter, leading towards the Khyber Pass, and home. Her honour nominally satisfied, Britain was content to leave Afghan politics to the Afghans – for the time being anyway. The First Afghan War, as historians now call it, was finally over. The British had received a terrible mauling, for all Lord Ellenborough’s pretences, including a massive victory celebration, that it had ended in triumph. But no amount of medal-giving, triumphal arches, regimental balls and other extravaganzas could conceal the final irony. No sooner had the British left Afghanistan than the blood began to flow once more. Within three months Shah Shujah’s son had been overthrown, and Dost Mohammed was allowed by the British to return unconditionally to the throne from which he had been removed at such terrible cost. No one now had any doubt that he was the only man capable of restoring order to Afghanistan. Events had come full circle.
But even now the Central Asian tragedy was not quite over for the British. Throughout that year the unfolding story had dominated the headlines both in India and at home. Deep anxiety had been felt over the fate of the hostages, particularly the women and children, and news of their release unharmed sent a wave of relief and rejoicing through the nation. Then, just as the celebrations ordered by Lord Ellenborough in India were getting under way, chilling news reached the British Mission in Teheran. It was brought by a young Persian, once employed by Arthur Conolly, who had just returned from Bokhara. Conolly and Stoddart, whose plight had been all but forgotten in the wake of the Kabul catastrophe, were, he reported, both dead. It had happened, he said, back in June, when Britain’s reputation as a power to be feared in Central Asia was at rock bottom. Furious at receiving no reply to his personal letter to Queen Victoria, and no longer worried by any fear of retribution, the Emir of Bokhara had ordered the two Englishmen, then enjoying a brief spell of freedom, to be seized and thrown back into prison. A few days later they had been taken from there, with their hands bound, and led into the great square before the Ark, or citadel, where stood the Emir’s palace. What followed next, the Persian swore, he had learned from the executioner’s own lips.
First, while a silent crowd looked on, the two British officers were made to dig their own graves. Then they were ordered to kneel down and prepare for death. Colonel Stoddart, after loudly denouncing the tyranny of the Emir, was the first to be beheaded. Next the executioner turned to Conolly and informed him that the Emir had offered to spare his life if he would renounce Christianity and embrace Islam. Aware that Stoddart’s forcible conversion had not saved him from imprisonment and death, Conolly, a devout Christian, replied: ‘Colonel Stoddart has been a Mussulman for three years and you have killed him. I will not become one, and I am ready to die.’ He then stretched out his neck for the executioner, and a moment later his head rolled in the dust beside that of his friend.
News of their brutal murder sent a wave of horror through the nation, but short of sending another expedition across Afghanistan to deal with this petty tyrant, there was precious little that could be done about it. Even at the risk of losing further face in Central Asia, the Cabinet decided that it would be better if the whole unfortunate affair were quietly forgotten. However, angry friends of the dead men, who blamed their deaths on the government’s abandonment of them, were determined not to let this happen. Some even believed that the Persian might have been lying, and that the two officers might, after all, still be alive. A subscription was raised, and a brave but highly eccentric clergyman, the Reverend Joseph Wolff from Richmond, Surrey, volunteered to travel to Bokhara to ascertain the truth. Unhappily, the Persian’s story was to prove true in all but a few details, and the intrepid Wolff himself was lucky to escape with his own life, only doing so, it is said, because his bizarre appearance, in full canonicals, made the unpredictable Emir ‘shake with uncontrollable laughter’. A detailed account of Wolff’s courageous journey, not strictly part of the Great Game, is given in his own book, Narrative of a Mission to Bokhara, published in 1845, after his return to London.
Twenty years later a poignant footnote was added to the story of Conolly and Stoddart. Through the post one day a small parcel arrived at the home of Conolly’s sister in London. It contained a battered prayer book which had been in her brother’s possession throughout his captivity, and had evidently brought comfort to him and Stoddart during their long and painful ordeal. On the end-papers and in the margins were penned in a tiny hand details of their misfortunes. The last of these entries ended abruptly in mid-sentence. The prayer book had eventually found its way into the hands of a Russian living in St Petersburg who had managed to track down Conolly’s sister. Sad to relate, this relic was subsequently lost.
For Conolly and Stoddart, like Burnes and Macnaghten, the Great Game was over. All had been victims of the forward policies which they themselves had so eagerly embraced and helped to shape. Within months, Eldred Pottinger, hero of Herat and Kabul, was also dead, struck down by fever at the age of 32. Another promising young player lost to the game was Lieutenant John Conolly, also of the political service. He had died of illness while Akbar’s hostage in Kabul, without ever learning of the fate which had befallen his idolised brother Arthur. Thus, in swift succession, six prominent British players had gone to join William Moorcroft and their Russian adversaries, Griboyedov and Vitkevich, in the Valhalla reserved for Great Game heroes. Nor would they be the last.
For a while, however, it seemed that both Britain and Russia, chastened by their costly adventures in Central Asia, had learned their lesson, and that henceforward more cautious counsels would prevail. The period of détente which followed was to last for a decade, despite mutual fears and suspicions. The two powers were to use it to consolidate their frontiers, but in the end it proved merely to be half-time in the struggle for ascendancy in Central Asia.