Retreat from Kabul
IGNOMINIOUS is not an epithet which the British, or indeed any other nation, care to apply to enterprises undertaken by their forebears, how- ever resoundingly these may have failed; it is, I am afraid, only thus that not only the out- come, but the whole course and conduct of the First Afghan War can be fairly described.
It was on a preventive campaign that Lord Auckland, who as the East India Company's Governor-General in Bengal was under the remote control of the British government, con- ceived himself to be embarking in 1838. The Napoleonic bogy of a French attack on India had dwindled and disappeared; but behind the arras of the North-West Frontier now lurked, or was assumed to lurk, the menace of Russia. The bell had sounded for the first—and much the costliest—round in the Great Game, a shadow-fight which would not be recognised as such for another seventy years.
The methods by which Auckland and his chief political adviser, Macnaghten, proposed to con- vert the proudest, hardiest, most contumacious and (except for Tibet) least accessible community in Asia into a British-dominated buffer-state were ludicrously inept. Dost Mahomed, the well- disposed and effective ruler of Afghanistan, was to be replaced by the elderly puppet Soojah, who had no following in the country; and the Sikhs, the Afghans' traditional enemies, were to supply the main strength of the usurper's army. For reasons which in Mr. Macrory's narrative remain obscure it was decided to replace the Sikh spear- head with a strong British force and the 'Army of the Indus,' an amalgam of Queen's (i.e., regular British) regiments and Company troops, was mustered. Lavishly provided with inessen- tials, it was inappropriately equipped-5,000 camels, ill-suited to the mountains, quickly died —and poorly administered; at ari early stage of the advance 'the camp followers were eating sheepskins fried in dry blood.'
But the expedition bumbled bravely on. Dost Mahomed defeated an advance-guard, leading his cavalry in person; then, possibly because he was impressed by the bravery of the British officers who charged him while their native troopers fled, more probably from complex motives which history has lost the chance to analyse, surrendered to the invaders. Kabul had already—in August 1839—fallen to them. The army of occupation, faced with the problem of accommodating itself, its numerous followers and (in time) some of its wives and children, sited its cantonments in an insalubrious death- trap outside the city. The magazine and the `commissariat fort' were at some distance from the perimeter of the cantonments. The pall of doom which had from the first hung over the Afghan expedition—and which had been dis- cerned by a surprising number of those con- nected with it—was thickening.
It was further inspissated by Auckland's appointment, in the spring of 1841, of General Elphinstone to command a force which, like all armies of occupation, had begun to deteriorate. Elderly, infirm, benign and well-connected, Elphinstone had, like Redvers Buller, the capacity to inspire without effort devotion and respect among men whom he was totally unfitted to command. It was not that he made wrong de- cisions; he made none. 'A fish rots,' according to the Russian proverb, 'from the head down.' It was Elphinstone's indecision that resulted in the massacre of his army. It was, one cannot help thinking, his niceness, his worthiness, that prevented wiser and more forthright counsels prevailing when the Afghans closed in on these hostages to fortune.
Macnaghten, whose complacent view of Afghan intentions was perhaps based—like Chamberlain's attitude to the Nazis—on a deep .inner conceit, was cut down and dismembered during a parley. Various other `politicals,' resid- ing in Kabul, were murdered. The cantonments were invested. The odd thing is that, in a situation which, though critical, was by no means hopeless, nobody rose to the occasion. The mild Elphinstone was barely on speaking terms with Shelton, his cantankerous second-in-command; the voices of bold and able subordinates failed Ito make themselves heard above the buzz of testy vacillation; errors and omissions accumu- lated until at last the garrison virtually sur- rendered in return for a safe conduct of more than questionable validity. Early in January 1842 the Army of the Indus-4,500 fighting men (700 of them British), attended by three times that number of camp-followers—set off for India. About sixty officers and men and thirty women and children were taken prisoner, decently treated and eventually rescued by a relief force; of the rest, only one European—Dr. Brydon- And a handful of native stragglers survived the ambushes which awaited them in the snow- bound passes.
This sad and, in its closing stages, grisly tale Mr. Macrory retells with skill and spirit. State papers in the archives of the Public Record Office would have thrown light on the vagaries of Im- perial policy which led to the debacle; but there is plenty of material in the sources which Mr. Macrory has used—mainly Sir John Kaye's History of the War in Afghanistan, intelligently supplemented by the memoirs of survivors—to *construct the folly, the heroism and the final agony of a disastrously conceived and disas- trously executed enterprise. He has written an enthralling book.
PETER FLEMING
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