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The Massacre Of An Army
by
As time went on the situation grew rapidly worse. Akbar Khan, the leading spirit among the hostile Afghans, came down from the north and occupied the Khoord Cabul Pass,–the only way back to Hindustan. Ammunition was failing, food was decreasing, the enemy were growing daily stronger and more aggressive. Affairs had come to such a pass that but one of two things remained to do,–to leave the cantonments and seek shelter in the citadel till help should arrive, or to endeavor to march back to India.
On the 23d of December the garrison was alarmed by a frightful example of boldness and ferocity in the enemy. Sir William Macnaughten, the English envoy, who had left the works to treat with the Afghan chiefs, was seized by Akbar Khan and murdered on the spot, his head, with its green spectacles, being held up in derision to the soldiers within the works.
The British were now “advised” by the Afghans to go back to India. There was, in truth, nothing else to do. They were starving where they were. If they should fight their way to the citadel, they would be besieged there without food. They must go, whatever the risk or hardships. On the 6th of January the fatal march began,–a march of four thousand five hundred soldiers and twelve thousand camp-followers, besides women and children, through a mountainous country, filled with savage foes, and in severe winter weather.
The first day’s march took them but five miles from the works, the evacuation taking place so slowly that it was two o’clock in the morning before the last of the force came up. It had been a march of frightful conditions. Attacked by the Afghans on every side, hundreds of the fugitives perished in those first five dreadful miles. As the advance body waited in the snow for those in the rear to join them, the glare of flames from the burning cantonments told that the evacuation had been completed, and that the whole multitude was now at the mercy of its savage foes. It was evident that they had a frightful gantlet to run through the fire of the enemy and the winters chilling winds. The snow through which they had slowly toiled was reddened with blood all the way back to Cabul. Baggage was abandoned, and men and women alike pushed forward for their lives, some of them, in the haste of flight, but half-clad, few sufficiently protected from the severe cold.
The succeeding days were days of massacre and horror. The fierce hill-tribes swarmed around the troops, attacking them in front, flank, and rear, pouring in their fire from every point of vantage, slaying them in hundreds, in thousands, as they moved hopelessly on. The despairing men fought bravely. Many of the foe suffered for their temerity. But they were like prairie-wolves around the dying bison; the retreating force lay helpless in their hands; two new foes took the place of every one that fell.
Each day’s horrors surpassed those of the last. The camp-followers died in hundreds from cold and starvation, their frost-bitten feet refusing to support them. Crawling in among the rugged rocks that bordered the road, they lay there helplessly awaiting death. The soldiers fell in hundreds. It grew worse as they entered the contracted mountain-pass through which their road led. Here the ferocious foe swarmed among the rocks, and poured death from the heights upon the helpless fugitives. It was impossible to dislodge them. Natural breastworks commanded every foot of that terrible road. The hardy Afghan mountaineers climbed with the agility of goats over the hill-sides, occupying hundreds of points which the soldiers could not reach. It was a carnival of slaughter. Nothing remained for the helpless fugitives but to push forward with all speed through that frightful mountain-pass and gain as soon as possible the open ground beyond.
Few gained it. On the fourth day from Cabul there were but two hundred and seventy soldiers left. The fifth day found the seventeen thousand fugitives reduced to five thousand. A day more, and these five thousand were nearly all slain. Only twenty men remained of the great body of fugitives which had left Cabul less than a week before. This handful of survivors was still relentlessly pursued. A barrier detained them for a deadly interval under the fire of the foe, and eight of the twenty died in seeking to cross it. The pass was traversed, but the army was gone. A dozen worn-out fugitives were all that remained alive.