'I am the army': the catastrophic British withdrawal from Kabul in 1842

n January 13, 1842, the soldiers who were on duty in the British garrison of Jalalabad (present-day Afghanistan ) attended an unusual scene: a rider with a bloody head, mounted on a limp horse of pure exhaustion (in fact he died minutes later ), he reached the walls, still carrying his saber cut in half in his hand. The soldiers, who were waiting for the arrival of their comrades, who had left Kabul a week earlier, asked him where the rest of the army was. "I am the army" was his famous and laconic response. The man's name was William Brydon and he was the only survivor of the disastrous withdrawal of British troops from Afghanistan.

Actually it was not the regular army we are talking about but the East India Company, that private company that received the monopoly of trade with Asia in the seventeenth century and then, after merging in 1702 with its rival, the English Company of Commerce for the East Indies, exercised the government and administration of that part of the world with the approval of London until the Government of India Act of 1858 , promulgated after the disaster of the Mutiny of the Sepoys, transferred control to the Crown directly.

Map of the area during the First Anglo-Afghan War / Image: All Empires

Although military service in the Company was not as well regarded as in the regular army, it had traditionally been a good way to manage affairs in that part of the world and its soldiers effectively solved many wars, including the Carnatic, the Maratha and the Opium, in addition to a large number of officers, the best known being Wellington. In 1838, in the face of Russia's undisguised aspirations to expand into India, the Company occupied Afghanistan to block its way, to which Moscow responded by promising help to local tribes if they rebelled.

That geostrategic tug of war became known as the Great Game and forced the British to move to Afghan land, in the spring of 1839, an important contingent under Sir Willoughby Cotton, who numbered 9,500 soldiers, 7,000 Afghan allies and a rosary of diverse assistants that included from cooks, porters and camel drivers to the own servants of the officers and the families of the sepoys, that always accompanied them to where they went. In short, some 38,000 more people, with the difficulties that this entailed in supply and protection.

Sir Willoughby Cotton / Image: public domain on Wikimedia Commons

After crossing high mountain passes they reached Kandahar, took the Ghazni fortress with only two hundred casualties, and in the middle of summer they occupied Kabul without the need to fight. Part of the troops returned leaving William Hay Macnaghten in the city as governor. He and the other commanders began a process to westernize it, along with the restitution as emir of Shah Shujah Durrani to the detriment of Dost Mohammed Khan (who despite having overthrown the former was popularly accepted for his charisma but that British eyes were too understood well with the Russians), it bothered many Afghans. The witness of Dost Mohammed - exiled to India - was picked up by his son Akbar Khan, a veteran warrior who, paradoxically, had helped the British fight the Sikhs three years before.

Akbar Khan organized a rebellion against the invaders based mainly on the support of the rural tribes, where the obedience to the emir and the governor was not based on the fear of his bayonets but on the payment of money in exchange for tranquility; scarce resources in a land that did not produce any benefit, MacNaghten had suppressed those bribes, which lost the loyalty of Afghans. This allowed Akbar Khan to gather a considerable army whose exact strength is unknown, although it is estimated at around 30,000 men. Despite its numerical superiority, for the moment it simply developed a guerrilla tactic that, given the mountainous and dry terrain, was favorable to them and a nightmare for the enemy.

Akbar Khan / Image: public domain on Wikimedia Commons

Little by little the British were reducing their movements and, therefore, losing control of the region. In the middle of 1841 Sir Willoughby Cotton was relieved as commander and replaced by Major General Sir William Elphinstone, a Scottish veteran of Waterloo but very old (although he was actually 59 years old) and with a precarious health that did not seem like more favorable conditions for that position; Suffice it to know that a comrade in arms of his, William Nott, described him as "the most incompetent soldier ever to come to general . "

Elphinstone was not able to get a real idea of the situation or to straighten it out. The troop barracks had been erected outside the walls, two and a half kilometers away, in order not to disturb the population, and in the fall one of the most capable commanders, Brigadier General Robert Henry Sale, was transferred to Jalalabad, taking good part of the cash; there were 4,500 men, mostly sepoys, and 690 Europeans. Akbar Khan considered that the time had come and on November 2 he called the open insurrection, which began with the assault of a mob on the home in Kabul of Captain Sir Alexander Burnes.

William George Keith Elphinstone (William Salter) / Image: public domain on Wikimedia Commons

This officer was one of the greatest connoisseurs of Afghanistan, which he had traveled disguised a decade before to gather information about the country (he published the results in an applauded book, Travels into Bokhara , which allowed him to enter the Royal Geographical Society and other prestigious scientific institutions). Despite this, all his advice was ignored - he had recommended not deposing Dost Mohammed, for example - and he died at home with his brother Charles and raised in the chaos that broke out, although he took half a dozen aggressors.

Surprised and confused, Elphinstone did not react and that emboldened the rebels more, who a week later raided the army's supply store in Kabul without the troops, entrenched in their barracks, being able to prevent it. They were thus in an impossible situation, since winter was approaching and the mountain passes would be closed by snow, preventing the external supply. The Afghans knew it and placed two cannons on a nearby hill from which they began to bombard the enemy positions. The outputs made to neutralize these pieces failed, leaving three hundred casualties.

Sir Alexander Burnes, dressed in Afghan fashion, tries to calm the associates of his home / Image: The British Empire

Since they could not continue like this, Elphinstone sent McNaghten to negotiate with Akbar Khan but the Afghan envoys pretended to receive him and then assassinated him with his assistants, dragging his mutilated corpse through the streets of Kabul amid a spooky screaming. The governor threw in the towel and on January 1, 1842, to the stupor of his officers, signed the surrender, delivering almost all his artillery, firearms and gunpowder reserves in exchange for the free passage to Jalalabad that Akbar Khan promised him. On day 6 that very long and varied column composed of 700 British officers, 3,800 sepoys and 12,000 civilians, including women and children, was launched.

Ahead of them were 140 kilometers of road through snow-capped mountains and the fearsome Khyber Pass , a 1,600-meter-high gorge that linked Afghanistan with Pesawar (Pakistan) through the Spin Ghar Range for 53 kilometers and that in its narrowest part does not reach 16 meters wide. From that site, Lieutenant General George Molesworth would say that it was impossible to find a stone that had not been stained with blood, since there were numerous battles throughout history, including those fought by Alexander the Great to force entry to the Indian subcontinent. .

Afghan warriors with their winter clothes (James Rattray) / Image: public domain on Wikimedia Commons

But first it would have to go through other similarities, so that would be nothing more than a concern to add to the maelstrom of nonsense that happened from the first day. To begin with and given the danger it posed to their health, the sick and injured were left in the city with the guarantee that they would be given adequate attention. As soon as the army was lost sight of, they were exterminated and the barracks burned down. Also, the march of the column was exasperatingly slow and disorganized, ordering breaks shortly after leaving that slowed down the pace enormously.

After the first and brief night of rest, on the following day the road was resumed under the shooting of Afghans in ambush - they were shot with the rifles that the British had given them - the stones thrown at them from the tops of the cliffs or the sudden attacks they made with knives and then disappear before giving time to react. Because Elphinstone was unable to cope with the debacle and by January 9 the number of casualties was around 3,000, many dejected to defect and try to return to Kabul ignoring their orders, other frozen (the sepoys were barefoot at 20 degrees below zero). It was necessary to nail the 2 or 3 cannons they kept and leave them.

The troops massacred in a 1909 illustration (Arthur David McCormick) / Image: public domain on Wikimedia Commons

On January 11, Akbar Khan, who claimed that his men were attacking on their own and had not been able to provide the promised escort because the column had left Kabul earlier than agreed, negotiated the surrender of the women and children as hostages to pay for their ransom. when it came to Jalalabad. Of course, the sepoys lacked means for this exchange of their relatives and consequently the Afghans considered them lacking in interest, so their wives perished with the maids and all those who were expendable.

The next morning, Elphinstone and his staff naively went to Akbar Khan's camp to parlay again and they were not allowed to return. The rest of the officers and soldiers, a couple of hundred men, regrouped under the command of General John Thomas Anquetil and almost all of them were massacred on the top of Jugdulluk when they found the narrow pass cut with a barrier of thorns.

Soldiers of the 44th trying to save the step cut from Jugdulluk / Image: Pinterest

About 45 British soldiers and 25 officers were saved from the massacre. They managed to jump the obstacle and make their way to a town called Gandamak. There they barricaded themselves to fight until death, because that was what awaited them as well. After rejecting several assaults fighting hand-to-hand they ended up annihilated and only 7 soldiers survived, plus a sergeant and Captain Souter, who wrapped himself in the flag and for that reason they confused him with someone important, limiting themselves to making them prisoners.

Also of the cavalry a fortnight of horsemen could escape at full gallop, although the majority were assassinated to treason by the neighbors of the town of Fattehabad, that had offered hospitality to them. Only one was left, an auxiliary surgeon who escaped thanks to the saber he received in the head was partially cushioned by a copy of Blackwood's Magazine , with which he had lined his hat to protect himself from the cold, as an Afghan peasant took pity on him, hiding him and giving him his horse.

arrival of William Brydon to Jalalabad (Elizabeth Thompson) / Image: public domain on Wikimedia Commons

This man was William Brydon, who at the beginning explained that he came more dead than alive to Jalalabad. However he survived (and, by the way, he would still experience another terrible episode in 1857, during the siege of Lucknow), which Elphinstone did not: he died in his captivity three months after these events and, although his body was recovered, he was buried in an unnamed grave of Jalalabad. Thousands of dead were on the verge of joining George Eden, Count of Auckland and Governor General of India, who suffered a stroke after receiving the news of the disaster.

That fall a column of punishment went to Afghanistan (4 brigades, about 8,000 men) that took advantage of that the commanders of some positions (for example, the aforementioned Nott in Kandahar) had disobeyed the order of Elphinstone to evacuate them. Under the command of Sir George Pollock, what was dubbed the Army of Retribution defeated the enemy in Khelat-i-Ghilzai, took and razed several neighborhoods in Kabul and was able to rescue the captives (in part because they had already agreed to a price) : 12 women, 21 children, 50 soldiers and 32 officers, as well as about 2,000 sepoys who escaped being sold as slaves by Afghans.

The *Army of Retribution* conquering Kabul / Image: BritishBattles.com

Some of the little stories were very emotional. Florentia Sale, wife of the above-mentioned General Sale and nicknamed Grenadier in Petticoats(Grenadier with Skirts) because she followed her husband around the world and overcame in the fighting resulting in wounded in one hand, left a applauded account of the withdrawal and its subsequent captivity with the title A journal of the disasters in Afghanistan, 1841-42 . It was worse for her little sister Alexandrina, who was married to Lieutenant John Sturt and they had a baby; Sturt died stabbed.

As for Akbar Khan, he ended his days poisoned - presumably - by his own father, who distrusted his ambition and who after being released resumed power until 1863; curiously, he avoided supporting the Sepoy Mutiny, a revolt that was unleashed, in the psychic part, by the demonstrated evidence that the British were not invincible.

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'I am the army': the catastrophic British withdrawal from Kabul in 1842

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