Retreat from Kabul, a lesson unremembered 

Lynn Ludlow / SF Chronicle 28oct01

All in the Valley of Death rode the 16,000. Marched. Crawled. Froze. And died.

The Remnants of an Army  by Lady Elizabeth Butler

When British history's worst military catastrophe ended in January 1842 in Afghanistan's Khoord-Kabul Pass, only one man -- a wounded surgeon on a lame pony -- managed to reach the Kabuli Gate in Jalalabad.

The Army of the Indus became a hill of bones.

And then the cover-up began.

This is probably a good time for Americans to read up on the many reasons why Afghanistan, so famous in the past for hospitality toward travelers and "honored guests," is so hard on its conquerors. Alexander the Great spent two years (326-325 B.C.) trying to quell revolts in his newest acquisition, but left little more than a city with his Afghan name, Kandahar.

Wave after wave of foreign armies found it's a lot easier to invade Afghanistan than to govern its warrior tribes in a jagged landscape ideally suited for guerrilla war.

If it hadn't been kept quiet, the instructive story of the First Anglo- Afghan War (1838-42) might have spared another generation of redcoat colonizers the further humiliation of the Battle of Maiwand. In 1880 in the Second Anglo-Afghan War, an Anglo-Indian force of 2,500 lost 1,000 dead and fled from a rebel army of about 25,000 fearless, howling irregulars.

As a result, Afghanistan remained more or less independent until invaded in 1979 by Soviet forces. That takeover gave rise to the Taliban and a decade of guerrilla war that took the lives of more than a million Afghans until the Soviets, with 14,500 dead and half a million casualties, pulled out of a devastated nation in 1989.

The Soviet experience just goes to show that the lessons of history don't do much good if suppressed and forgotten. The retreat from Kabul in 1842 was shushed for 12 years by the British government. Not until 1854 did an official inquiry provide the public with the full story of imperial arrogance, rebel ferocity, treacherous ambushes and the role of Maj. Gen. William G.K. Elphinstone, a commander armed with what one writer calls "the leadership qualities of a sheep."

Even then the ghastly revelations were muted amid patriotic uproar that year over a comparatively minor rout in yet another British adventure, the Crimean War. Although a superb demonstration of military idiocy, the event was glorified in heroic verse by Alfred, Lord Tennyson:

". . . Theirs not to reason why. Theirs but to do and die. All in the valley of Death, rode the six hundred."

Compare that with how Rudyard Kipling, in "Barracks Room Ballads" (1892), recalls the Battle of Maiwand:

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.

Tennyson's poem brought lasting fame to the blundering charge of the Light Cavalry Brigade, which cost more than 100 lives. Strangely, the 16,000 dead in the worst British defeat since the Battle of Hastings rate no more than a paragraph in the encyclopedia and not a single stanza of poetry. Except, of course, in Afghanistan.

The episode began in 1838 when British India's governor general worried that Russia's growing influence in Afghanistan might someday threaten Britain's extraction of treasure from India. He dispatched to Kabul the Army of the Indus which, after a long march and several battles, installed a puppet on the throne. The redcoats and the Indian soldiers known as sepoys settled down to a languid garrison life of cricket, polo and the cuckolding of Afghan husbands. Each officer was entitled to 10 servants; each soldier, two. But in late 1841, fury with the puppet shah inspired murderous riots and an uncontrollable uprising. In January, Elphinstone ordered a 90-mile retreat through the snowy passes to Jalalabad.

With promises of safe conduct, the march began with about 3,800 Indian soldiers, 700 Britishers (400 soldiers of the 44th Foot, about 100 cavalrymen, various officers and a few families), 3,800 Indian soldiers and 11,000 to 12, 000 servants, cooks, water carriers, grooms, blacksmiths, families of the fighting men and prostitutes.

The promises weren't kept. The columns were ambushed with deadly fire from the cliffs above. Baggage trains were looted. Stragglers were killed, stripped and mutilated. Thousands of soldiers and civilians perished in the cold. The rest were shot or stabbed to death.

Nine children, eight women, three officers and the general were taken as hostages. When he died in captivity, Elphinstone was spared a court martial. The rest were rescued months later.

Thirty-six years after the slaughter, when the Rev. Arthur Male visited the passes in 1878, a guide showed him where the redcoats and sepoys made a last stand.

"The summit of the hill was of fairly large extent," he wrote, "but as I came nearer the middle, I saw that there the surface seemed strangely white. What could it be? I hurried forward, and to my horror there I saw gathered together in a great heap the skeleton bones of that heroic band."

Sixty-five soldiers on foot and 14 men on horseback had somehow managed to escape the passes. All but one were tracked down, surrounded and killed.

On Jan. 13, seven days after the columns left Kabul, a sentry on the walls of Jalalabad looked out on the barren plain and spotted a badly wounded man on a pony. He was Dr. William Brydon, an assistant regimental surgeon and, except for the hostages, sole survivor of the 16,000 men, women and children who left Kabul.

An imaginative version of Brydon's escape was later painted by Lady Elizabeth Butler, entitled "The Remnants of an Army" and presented to the Tate Gallery in London. It's a forgotten reminder of an unlearned lesson.