Sixteen Thousand Left Kabul: The One Rider Who Returned

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On the afternoon of the thirteenth of January, eighteen forty-two, the sentries looking out from the walls of the British fortress at Jalalabad saw a single horse on the horizon. The man on it was slumped over the saddle, a piece of his skull had been sheared away by a sword, and the horse's strength gave out at the fortress gate. A week earlier, sixteen thousand people had set out for that gate.

On the afternoon of the thirteenth of January, eighteen forty-two, sentries looking out from the ramparts of the British fort at Jalalabad saw a single horse on the horizon. The man on its back was slumped over the saddle, a piece of his skull had been sheared away by a sword, and the horse's strength gave out at the fortress gate. A week earlier, sixteen thousand people had set out toward that gate.

In the autumn of eighteen thirty-eight, there was a map on the desks of the men who governed India, and the north-western corner of that map was keeping them awake at night. The Persian army, with Russian advisers at its side, had laid siege to Herat, considered the western gateway to Afghanistan. In London and Calcutta, that siege did not look like a matter of one city alone; it was taken as the first sign of Russia's step-by-step march southward, toward the Indian Ocean. In those years Afghanistan was not a target in its own right. It was a mountainous, impoverished, deeply fragmented stretch of land lying between two empires, and both sides saw it as part of their own line of defence. In this calculation, what the Afghans themselves wanted barely figured at all.

In Kabul at that time was Dost Mohammad Khan. He was a capable, hard, hard-bargaining ruler; he was ready to come to terms with Britain, but in return he wanted Peshawar — and Peshawar was in the hands of Britain's allies, the Sikhs. Dost Mohammad's decision to receive a Russian envoy in Kabul was the final straw for the Governor-General of India, Lord Auckland. In October eighteen thirty-eight, in a declaration issued from Simla, Britain pronounced Dost Mohammad untrustworthy and resolved to install in his place Shah Shuja — a man who had lost his throne years earlier and had been living in India on a Company pension. The justification was defence; the method was invasion.

In the winter of eighteen thirty-nine, the force given the name the Army of the Indus set out. Some twenty thousand soldiers, and behind them, marching with camels, ox-carts and tents, somewhere around thirty-eight thousand auxiliaries, servants, drivers and tradesmen. That figure alone explains the logic of the expedition: Britain was not sending an army into Afghanistan, it was sending a city on the move. Kandahar fell in April without resistance. On the twenty-third of July, eighteen thirty-nine, the gate of Ghazni was blown apart with gunpowder and the fortress was taken in a single morning. On the seventh of August, Shah Shuja entered Kabul with British bayonets at his side. The crowds were silent. Dost Mohammad fled north, and a year later, at the end of eighteen forty, he surrendered and was sent into exile in India. On paper, the expedition was over.

The real problem began precisely here. Shah Shuja's throne rested not on the consent of his own people but on the presence of a foreign army. Which meant the army could not leave. And because it could not leave, a temporary expedition turned into a permanent settlement. Officers sent for their wives, horse races were held on the Kabul plain, cricket was played, and in winter they skated on the frozen ponds. The cantonment north-east of Kabul began to look less like a military headquarters than like a suburb transplanted from India.

The siting of that cantonment was the costliest decision in the whole story. Inside the city, on a rocky height, stood the Bala Hissar: a walled, commanding fortress that had held Kabul for centuries. The British stayed there for a while, then moved out on the view that room had to be made for Shah Shuja's palace and his harem. In its place they built a cantonment on the plain, with low walls, a shallow ditch, and a perimeter approaching nearly one and a half kilometres. The cantonment was surrounded by gardens, mud-brick towers and small forts; every one of them a ready-made firing position for a marksman. Worst of all, the entire store of provisions and ammunition lay outside the cantonment, in a separate fort some three hundred and fifty metres away. In other words, the moment they were besieged, their food would be on the enemy's side of the line. Militarily this was a mistake beyond argument, and the officers of the day knew it; they said so plainly in the letters they wrote.

In April eighteen forty-one, command of the force was given to Major-General William Elphinstone. Elphinstone was a courteous, well-liked, experienced officer; he had been at Waterloo. But by the time he reached Kabul, gout and rheumatism left him unable to mount a horse unaided, he was often carried in a litter, and his capacity to make decisions had dissolved along with his health. His second, Brigadier John Shelton, was brave but ill-tempered, openly at odds with his commander, and insolent enough to lie down on the floor wrapped in a blanket during staff conferences. At the head of the British force in Kabul were a sick commander and a stubborn deputy who disliked each other.

The last nail was driven in with money. The passes linking Kabul to India were in the hands of the Ghilzai tribes, and for years Britain had been making regular payments to these tribal chiefs, buying the roads' remaining open. In October eighteen forty-one, when India's budget came under strain, the political envoy Sir William Macnaghten cut these payments in half. The decision was an accounting entry; its consequence was an uprising. The passes closed, Brigadier Robert Sale's brigade was sent east to open the roads, and so the force in Kabul was deprived of its most battle-hardened unit. Macnaghten, meanwhile, was packing his trunks in the delight of having been appointed Governor of Bombay, writing to Calcutta that Kabul was quieting down.

On the morning of the second of November, eighteen forty-one, a crowd gathered in the bazaar of Kabul. Their target was Sir Alexander Burnes, who was living in a house inside the city. Burnes knew Afghanistan better than anyone; years earlier he had travelled as far as Bukhara, had become a friend of Dost Mohammad, and had made his name in London with his book of travels. That morning he stepped out onto the balcony of his house, called down to the crowd in Persian, offered money, and asked them to disperse. It did not work. The crowd came over the garden wall, set the house alight, and killed Burnes, his brother Charles, and Lieutenant Broadfoot, who was with them. The treasury building nearby was plundered.

The cantonment did nothing about any of this. The city lay a kilometre and a half away, and in the first hours of the rising a decisive intervention could have changed everything. Elphinstone gave no orders, the staff argued, and the day passed. Three days later the commissariat fort outside the cantonment fell. After that it was simple arithmetic: with winter setting in on the Kabul plain, thousands of people were trapped in a city of tents whose food supply was in enemy hands.

Through November the siege tightened. The rising had begun of its own accord, but it soon acquired a name: Dost Mohammad's son, Muhammad Akbar Khan. Akbar Khan reached Kabul at the end of November and succeeded in drawing the scattered tribal chiefs together around a single objective. On the twenty-third of November, Shelton marched out to take the Bemaru Heights, which overlooked the cantonment, and came back heavily defeated; from that day on the garrison never again mounted a serious operation beyond its own perimeter. The snow began to fall. The fuel ran out. The horses were slaughtered. The soldiers were put on half rations. The appeals for help sent to Calcutta stayed on the far side of passes that had closed.

By the middle of December, Macnaghten could see no way forward but to sit down and negotiate. Talks with Akbar Khan began; at the same time Macnaghten was circulating secret offers designed to set the tribal chiefs against one another, and this double game was noticed. On the morning of the twenty-third of December, eighteen forty-one, Macnaghten rode out with three of his officers to meet Akbar Khan on a snow-covered flat just outside the cantonment. As a gesture of goodwill he brought a pair of pistols as a gift. Shortly after the conversation began, Akbar Khan's men set upon the envoy. Macnaghten was killed on the spot — by some accounts with one of the very pistols he had given. Captain Trevor, who was with him, was also killed; Lawrence and Mackenzie were taken prisoner.

What followed is the most talked-about scene in the whole story. Macnaghten's body was dismembered, his severed head and his torso were paraded through the bazaar of Kabul, and then hung on butchers' hooks in the Char Chatta, the city's great covered market. The fully accredited representative of an empire had been killed a kilometre and a half from his own army, in full view of it, and his corpse put on display in a marketplace. Not one gun was fired from the cantonment, not one regiment marched out. While the body of its chief negotiator was being exhibited in the city, the besieged garrison sat down to appoint a new negotiating party. From that moment on there was no power left at the table to bargain with; there was only one side, begging for permission to leave.

On the first of January, eighteen forty-two, the agreement was signed. For the British, Elphinstone and his staff; for the Afghans, Akbar Khan and a group of tribal chiefs. The terms were plain: the British force would abandon Kabul and Afghanistan entirely, leave behind most of its artillery and its heavy stores, make a substantial payment, hand over officers as hostages to guarantee the agreement, and permit the return of Dost Mohammad from India. In exchange, the force would be granted safe passage as far as Jalalabad, with provisions along the road and an escort. On paper, the force had bought its own survival.

The problem lay not in what the paper said but in who had signed it. The men who put their names to that agreement had no authority to make anyone honour it. There was no central authority in Afghanistan to begin with, and the rising had not been born under a single command. Akbar Khan was the leading figure, but the Ghilzai chiefs who held the passes between Kabul and Jalalabad were under no obligation to obey him. They had calculations of their own: the subsidies Macnaghten had cut off, the debts of months of fighting, and the wealth carried by a column of sixteen thousand people marching through snow under heavy loads. Sitting on the lip of a gorge and firing down into it was profitable enough that nobody was going to ask whose signature was on what.

Not everyone in the cantonment believed in this agreement. Eldred Pottinger, the political officer who had made his name at the siege of Herat, opposed the withdrawal outright; he argued that the force should move into the Bala Hissar and wait for spring, holding out behind walls even if it meant hunger. His reasoning was sound: a column marching through mountain passes in winter was defenceless, whereas a garrison behind stone kept its bargaining power. The proposal was rejected. For a sick commander, a divided staff and a cantonment out of food, setting off down the road was the easiest form of not deciding at all.

On the morning of the sixth of January, eighteen forty-two, the snow lay a hand's span deep, and the cold, by the accounts we have, was of a severity not seen for years. At around nine in the morning the gate of the cantonment opened. The escort that had been promised never came; nor were there any of the supply depots that were to have been left along the road. The column set out all the same: four thousand five hundred soldiers and some twelve thousand civilians, sixteen thousand five hundred people in all. Of the soldiers, only about six hundred and ninety were European; the rest were Indian sepoys of the Bengal regiments. Most of the civilians were Indian too — the soldiers' wives, their children, cooks, grooms, camel drivers, carpenters, servants. Which is to say that the greater part of the crowd that walked out of Kabul were people who had never had the slightest say in why this war was being fought.

Order collapsed within the first few hours. The temporary bridge thrown across the canal jammed, civilians became entangled with the troops, the pack animals fouled one another. The groups at the back had not yet cleared the cantonment gate when those at the front were already being plundered. That day the column managed to get roughly six kilometres from Kabul; the rearguard came in to the halting ground past midnight, at two in the morning. There were no tents, no fuel, no food. People sat down in the snow and waited for morning. By the time morning came, hundreds had frozen to death and thousands had frostbitten feet. Not a single pass had yet been entered. The first large-scale desertions among the troops in Shah Shuja's service began that night. The paper signed on the first of January had lost all force on the very first night of the march.

On the eighth of January the column entered the Khord Kabul Pass. The pass was a cleft some eight kilometres long, sheer on both sides, with a frozen stream running along its bed; the road crossed and recrossed that stream again and again, which meant everyone on foot had to step into the icy water and out of it, over and over. The one rule of mountain warfare is to hold the heights; that morning the heights were not held. Ghilzai marksmen settled into the rocks on either side and fired down into the crowd below at their leisure. The jezails they used had a far longer range than the smoothbore muskets of the British infantry, so the soldier below could not answer the fire that was striking him. In that single day more than three thousand people died in the pass. Most of the dead were unarmed civilians — people who were frozen, no longer able to walk, left behind at the tail of the column.

At the far end of the pass, Akbar Khan again offered to negotiate. Pottinger and Lawrence were taken from the column as hostages. On the ninth of January the force handed the European women and children over into Akbar Khan's protection; among them was Lady Sale, who kept the most detailed journal of the whole siege. To those who made the decision that day it felt like a capitulation; in the event, that group became the only part of the column to survive on any scale. The same morning many units moved off without waiting for orders; what was moving now was no longer an army corps but clusters of people scattered across the snow, cut off from one another.

By the tenth of January, when Tezeen was reached, what remained of the force was this: some seventy men of the Forty-Fourth Regiment of Foot, about fifty horse artillerymen, and roughly one hundred and fifty cavalry. Out of the four thousand five hundred soldiers who had marched out of Kabul four days earlier, that was the number still fit to fight. The guns were abandoned on the road and spiked; the ammunition was gone and the draught animals were dead. On the eleventh of January the column reached Jagdalak. Shelton fought for hours in the rearguard with his dwindling handful of men; his stubbornness in those days is the one record that does justice to a man who would later be the target of the harshest criticism.

On the night of the twelfth of January, at Jagdalak, the road ahead was blocked. Where the pass narrowed, a barricade close to two metres high had been woven from branches of prickly holly oak. That same day Akbar Khan summoned Elphinstone and Shelton on the pretext of a parley and never let them go again. The force was now without a commander. Most of the remaining sepoys melted away that night. Those who were left charged the thorn barricade in the darkness; some managed to tear the branches apart with their hands and get through to the other side, but most died in front of it.

On the morning of the thirteenth of January, after the last fight at Surkhab, at the point where the road comes close to the village of Gandamak, about twenty officers and forty-five soldiers were left on the top of a hill. All of them were from the Forty-Fourth Regiment of Foot. Seven days had passed since they left Kabul; for seven days these were people who had barely eaten, barely slept, and had walked through ice water. Their ammunition was down to two or three cartridges a man. The tribal fighters who surrounded the hill first called on them to surrender; the call was refused. When the cartridges ran out, muskets were used as clubs, and the fighting went on with bayonet and sword. The hill fell before noon. As the story is told, Captain Thomas Souter wound the regiment's colour around his waist and pulled his jacket on over it; his attackers took him for an important hostage and so spared him and made him a prisoner, and in that way Souter lived. The hill at Gandamak is where the last organised resistance of the army that marched out of Kabul came to an end.

Beyond the barricade at Jagdalak, scattered and in no order, about twelve mounted officers had got through. Along the road their numbers fell. Near Futtehabad they were down to six; the villagers brought them bread, got them down off their horses, and then set upon them. A little while later, there was a single horseman left on that road riding toward Jalalabad: William Brydon, assistant surgeon of the Bengal army.

Part of Brydon's skull had been sheared away by a sword stroke. The blow failed to kill him because of the magazine he had stuffed inside his cap against the cold — a Scottish periodical, Blackwood's Magazine. The blade cut through the pages but never finished the skull. His own sword had snapped; with a broken blade in his hand, wounded in the leg and in the hand, he rode on atop a tired pony that could barely carry him. On the afternoon of the thirteenth of January, the sentries on the walls of Jalalabad saw a single horseman approaching along the road from the west. The garrison, waiting for word from the Kabul force, ran to the gate. They asked about the army. There are several different accounts of what he answered, but all of them agree on the same point: there was no army. The pony went into the stable that day and never got up again.

The garrison of Commander Sale, who held Jalalabad, lit great fires in front of the walls through the night for days on end and sounded regimental bugle calls — in case someone searching for the road in the darkness might hear them. No one came. The story of Brydon, told for years as "the only survivor," is powerful for that very reason, but it is not quite true. There were some one hundred and fifteen Britons who stayed alive because they had been taken prisoner; there was a Greek merchant named Baness who reached Jalalabad and died shortly afterwards; and most importantly, there were nearly two thousand sepoys and camp followers who were found in and around Kabul months later and taken back to India. The overwhelming majority of the twelve thousand civilians who marched out of Kabul were Indian, and their names were written down nowhere. The image of "the lone horseman who came back" is tremendously effective at conveying the annihilation of an army; but it can also be read as a document of who was counted and who was not.

The story did not end at Gandamak. In February, Jalalabad lost part of its walls to an earthquake; the garrison rebuilt them, and on the seventh of April, eighteen forty-two, Sale marched out of the fortress and scattered Akbar Khan's force. In those same days Shah Shuja was killed on the fifth of April, as he was leaving his refuge in the Bala Hissar. The throne Britain had carried on bayonets for three years emptied in a single morning once its protector grew weak. Elphinstone died of illness in captivity in April; his body was sent to Jalalabad for burial.

Over the summer, Britain assembled the force remembered as the "Army of Retribution." Commander George Pollock forced the Khyber Pass from the east with eight thousand men, while Commander William Nott came up from Kandahar with roughly three thousand. Pollock entered Kabul on the fifteenth of September without meeting serious resistance, and Nott arrived two days later. On the eighteenth of September most of the hostages were released, and the last prisoner was recovered on the twenty-seventh of September. Then Pollock handed down a punishment: the Char Chatta Bazaar, where the severed heads of Macnaghten and Burnes had been paraded, was to be destroyed. Built in the seventeenth century by Ali Mardan Khan, Shah Jahan's governor of Kabul, and counted among the most magnificent covered bazaars in Central Asia, the structure was burned; the fire spread to the surrounding neighbourhoods and much of the city was damaged. What was destroyed was not a headquarters or a fortress; it was a monument of commerce and architecture, and the decision to destroy it served no military purpose.

In October the British forces withdrew from Afghanistan. Dost Mohammad was released from exile and sat on the throne of Kabul again in eighteen forty-three. In other words, four years, an army, a treasury and tens of thousands of lives had been spent so that Britain could put back with its own hand the very man it had removed with its own hand. British influence over Afghanistan's borders and foreign policy lasted for decades more, but the idea of installing a client ruler in Kabul was buried along with this campaign.

The lesson this episode left to military history is narrow and plain: a column does not enter the mountains without holding the heights above the pass; it does not place its supplies outside its line of defence; and it does not trust the terms of an agreement it cannot enforce by its own strength. The lesson it left to political history proved longer-lived. In eighteen seventy-nine, the painter Elizabeth Butler depicted the wounded horseman approaching the walls of Jalalabad under the title The Remnants of an Army, and the painting drew great attention in London. That same year, after a second Afghan war, Britain signed a treaty; the name of the place where it was signed was Gandamak. The hill where the last sixty-five soldiers died in eighteen forty-two and the village where the table for a new treaty was set in eighteen seventy-nine bore the same name, and this was a coincidence no one had engineered. Empires sometimes carry in their memory not a victory but a single horseman; because that horseman is a reminder that what decides the outcome is not how flawless the plan looked, but who held the heights.

That brings us to the end of today's episode of Neuron History. Until we meet again in a new story.

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