IN THE BALA HISSAR.
Our advanced post was in the Kurram Valley--the only part of the
Afghan border which had been trodden by the foot of a Briton since
the previous Cabul war--a post, the boundary of the so-called
'scientific frontier,' which had been held by a body of our troops,
European and native, for some three months during the summer of this
eventful year; and all had been suffering more or less from the
breathless heat and malaria, dulness, and that growing _ennui_ which
a languid game of polo or lawn-tennis (without ladies) utterly failed
to ameliorate; and all thought that, as anything exciting was better
than nothing, a brush with the Mongols, the Ahmed, or Hassan Keyls
would be a relief.
Many officers began to think, even to talk, hopefully of leave of
absence to visit India, to look up old chums in Peshawur, Rawul
Pindi, or Lahore; or when longer leave for Europe must be given; when
news of the attack on the Residency at Cabul, and the massacre of the
envoy and his people fell upon them like a clap of thunder!
These terrible tidings were brought by Taimur, a Usbeg Tartar, who
served as a trooper in the Guide escort--a man of undoubted daring,
bravery, and hardihood--who had achieved his escape from the city of
blood by the aid of some of his own race who were among the Cabulee
troops that had come in from Herat.
After twelve days' wandering, and enduring great suffering in those
savage and stupendous mountain gorges that lie between Cabul and the
Kotal of Lundikhani, he reached the advanced post in the Kurram
Valley, in rags, famished, and every way in a deplorable state of
destitution, to make his report, which was instantly telegraphed by
the officer commanding to the Viceroy at Simla.
'Everyone cut off as close as a whistle! By Jove, colonel, we'll
have to be up and doing something,' said Algy Redhaven, the hussar,
as he lounged, pipe in mouth, and hands in the pockets of his
pyjamas, into the tent of old Spatterdash.
The early summer months had been passed peacefully and pleasantly by
our embassy at Cabul, notwithstanding the petty insults and annoyance
we have already referred to. In the cool, breezy morning, when the
sun was coming up above the hills that look down on the clear,
shallow, and rapid Cabul flowing towards the Indus; or in the
evening, when he was setting behind the summits of the Haft Kotal,
Sir Louis Cavagnari, attended by Colville and others, escorted by a
few of the Guide Corps, rode through the city to view places of
interest in the neighbourhood, sometimes towards the Chardeh Valley
eastward, or the plains of Killa-Kazi on the west.
Their quarters in the picturesque and ancient Bala Hissar were
rendered as comfortable as furniture of English style and
make--relics of Elphinstone's slaughtered army and plundered
cantonments--could make them; but the walls of the rooms were
scribbled over with ribald pencillings, anti-English hits and
insolent political allusions there was no mistaking, left there by
members of the late Russian mission; while 'from the Ameer himself,
as from the commandant, dalis of fruit and vegetables, fish, milk,
and sweetmeats were daily provided; and whatever Cabul could offer in
the way of entertainment or amusement was readily forthcoming.'
All seemed so peaceful, and the chances of renewed hostility so
remote, that Colville was about to make arrangements for quitting the
Embassy, resigning his appointment, and procuring an escort through
the passes to Lundi Khani Khotal in the Kurram Valley on his homeward
way.
He also intended to take with him Robert Wodrow. The latter had
changed greatly of late for the better. In his face, that which had
been mere good looks had deepened into earnestness of purpose in
every feature. If, under the heat of the summer sun, his cheek was
browner and less round, his mouth, in expression, was a trifle harder
and more set, changes indicative of one who was aware that he had his
way in the world to hew out, and due to Colville's influence,
presence, and friendly encouragement.
He found him one day whistling loudly while grooming his horse in the
stables of the Bala Hissar.
'Wodrow, old man,' said Colville, laughingly, 'by Jove, I am glad to
hear you whistling. Your lips seemed only capable of sighing once.
But the air you indulge in is a sad one.'
'It is "The Birks of Invermay," sir. I was thinking as usual of old
times, and of those from whom we are so far away.'
'Many a thousand miles, even as the crow flies.'
All remained, to all appearance, peaceful, we say, at Cabul, till one
fatal morning, about eight o'clock, when the Turkistani and Ordal
Regiments, consisting of several battalions in the Ameer's army, were
mustered for arrears of pay in one of the stately courts of the Bala
Hissar.
Daud Shah, a sirdir or general of the army--a venerable
soldier--could only distribute one month's pay, but, with shrill and
vehement shouts that made every carved arcade and shaded balcony
re-echo, they demanded two.
'Two months' pay or blood!'
The sirdir attempted to remonstrate with them, on which tumult and
disorder pervaded their ranks, and they broke out into open mutiny.
Then another sirdir--whose name is not unknown to the
reader--exclaimed, with a voice loud enough to be heard above the
fast-growing disturbance,
'Let us kill the Envoy and then the Ameer who would sell us to the
Feringhees!'
'Deen! deen! deen and death,' shouted all, and, rushing into the
greater court of the palace, they proceeded to stone and loot without
mercy the servants of the Residency.
Enraged by this rough treatment, Taimur, the Usbeg Tartar, and some
of his Guide comrades, without temporising or waiting for the orders
of their officers, betook them to their carbines and opened a fire
upon the multitude from the open windows and stately galleries
overlooking the court.
Colville and other officers called upon them to cease firing, and
they did so for a time.
Then it was that the Sirdir Mahmoud Shah, a man whose fanaticism made
him all but a Ghazi, shook his hand upwards at the gallery where they
stood, and called, with a shrill voice,
'Brutes! beasts! vermin! filthy Feringhees! Enjoy the pleasures of
life for a brief time, but your speedy departure shall be into the
flames of hell, with water like molten brass to drink, and ye shall
say, as the Koran tells us--"Oh, Malec, intercede for us, that the
Lord may end us by annihilation."'
He spoke in Afghani, yet many understood him, and an officer said,
'These beggars quote their Koran as glibly as Cromwell's Puritans did
the Bible, and with the same view to blood and slaughter.'
Led by Mahmoud chiefly, the mutineers rushed away to procure their
arms and ammunition, with which they returned in a few minutes,
inflamed by all the hate and rancour of race and religion, and
pitilessly resolved to massacre all.
The time of their absence has been given as about fifteen minutes,
and, with horses at hand, it is said that all in the Residency might
have made their escape, had they chosen to attempt it, but either
they trusted to the sacred character of the embassy, underrated the
actual amount of peril, or, like bold Britons, were determined to
face it, and show fight.
The roof of the Residency was an untenable place, being commanded by
the flat roofs and windows of loftier houses, yet there Sir Louis
Cavagnari and his little band were gathered, and there, making a kind
of rampart or shelter-trench with what they could collect, they
resolved to sell their lives as dearly as possible in conflict with
the savage hordes--the sea of human beings that surged around them.
The mutineers, all well-armed with rifles and bayonets, and supplied
with excellent ammunition, were now joined by the fanatical
multitudes of the city, by robbers intent on plunder, budmashes, and
villains of every kind, seeking blood and outrage, brandishing long
juzails, sabres, and charahs, or deadly native knives, with points
like needles and edges like razors--blades that flashed and glanced
in the sunshine like their bloodshot and malevolent eyes; their
strange garments, wide-sleeved camises, sheepskin cloaks, and
bright-coloured loonghees or caps, adding to the picturesqueness of
the savage and bewildering scene, overlooked by the pillared arcades,
with horse-shoe arches, and the carved balconies on ponderous marble
brackets projecting from the palace walls, and all half revealed and
half hidden amid the eddying smoke of pistols and musketry.
All were yelling, till their yells ended in a death-shriek, as a shot
struck them down; many were quoting the inevitable Koran, or hurling
offensive and abusive epithets, as they crushed upon and jostled each
other, while seething and surging around their victims.
Hope of victory--even of successful defence--the latter could have
none. For them nothing was left now but to struggle to the last of
their blood and breath, and until the last man perished in his agony!
Colville, while handling the carbine of a Guide who had fallen near
him, even in that desperate time, thought how hideous looked the sea
of human faces into which he was sending shot after shot, as fast as
he could drop them into the block of the breechloader.
'The faces of the Afghans,' says a writer, 'often develop into those
of the most villainous-looking scoundrels. Shylock, Caliban, and
Sycorax and his dam all have numerous representatives, though I think
the first is the commonest type, on account of the decidedly Jewish
cast of most Cabuli features, and the low cunning and cruelty which
supplies the only animation in their otherwise stolid countenances,
true indices of the mind beneath--fatalist by creed; false,
murderous, and tyrannical by education. In this description,' he
adds, 'I do not include the Kuzzil Bash (Persian), or Hindoo
settlers, who preserve their own distinctive features, both mental
and physical.'
For five hours had the unequal conflict been waged, when Sir Louis
Cavagnari, who was in the thick of it, was wounded in the forehead by
a ball that had ricochetted from a wall near him.
Close and terrible was the fire poured by the Guides with their
carbines and by the few European officers into the dense masses of
the foe beneath, and deadly that fire proved--the front files, if
they could be termed so, melted away or fell over each other in
heaps, but fresh men pushed forward from the rear and took their
places, serving only to feed the harvest of death gathered at the
hands of those who fought not for existence--the hope of that was
quite lost now--but for vengeance.
'Allah! Allah! Allah! Deen! Deen! Deen!' were the shouts that
loaded the air below, rising above the sputtering roar of the
firearms. On the other side was no sound, but a yell or a groan as a
man fell wounded, too often mortally. 'La Ilah illa Allah!' ('There
is no God but God.')
Yet devilry, cruelty, and slaughter were there supreme.
'I wish we could make a headlong rush on them and clear the square by
a charge--cut our way through,' cried Colville; 'but we have not men
enough, and then Sir Louis Cavagnari and all the wounded would be
butchered if left behind.'
'How fast the devils fire!' exclaimed a young officer; 'my revolver
barrel is quite hot already.'
'You'll soon get used to the whizz of the bullets,' replied Colville,
whose face if now pale with desperation, was filled with an
expression of determination too. 'Keep cool, men--aim well, and let
every shot tell.'
But amid that dense mob below--a literal sea of upturned and dark,
revengeful faces, with glistening teeth and flashing eyes--no bullet
could miss a mark; while all around were heard the crash of falling
bricks, beams, and plaster, the yells of the Afghans, the shrieks of
their women, and the roar of the fast gathering flames.
'Mark that fellow!' cried several officers, indicating a leader in a
green loonghee, who seemed to have a charmed life--Mahmoud Shah, in
fact.
'I should like to pick that devil off,' said Robert Wodrow, dropping
a cartridge into the breechblock of his carbine. 'He seems to be
head cock and bottle-washer of the whole shindy!' he added, in the
phraseology of his student days. His ballet sped, but only grazed
the shoulder of the old fanatic, and added to the latter's fury.
A soldier of the Guides who had been wounded in the temple fell
headlong from the flat roof into the mass below, and was hewn by
tulwars and charahs to pieces--literally chopped into ounce pieces.
In the desperation of their circumstances it was resolved to appeal
for succour and protection to the Ameer, who, while all this deadly
work was in progress, remained with indifference apparently in his
palace, and amid the ladies of his harem.
The ambassador, whose wound had been dressed by Dr. Kelly, desired a
moonshi to write a letter imploring royal aid, but the scribe was so
terrified by the uproar that his fingers were unable to hold the pen;
so one was written in Afghani by Taimar, the Guide, and this missive
Robert Wodrow boldly volunteered to deliver in person.
'You are throwing your life away, Wodrow,' said Colville. 'The risk
is frightful.'
'So be it, Captain Colville; but better mine than yours. You have
something to live for. What have I?'
Untwisting a couple of cartridges into a saucer, he made a species of
black paste therewith, and, blackening his face before a mirror,
contrived still further to disguise himself with some Afghan clothing
that was found in the Residency--a brown camise with loose wide
sleeves, a furred _choga_ or mantle, a _loonghee_, and armed with a
tulwar and shield, like a budmash. He placed the letter in his
pocket, and issuing from a secret underground doorway passed from the
Bala Hissar unnoticed by the crowds which surged around it, and
brandishing his weapon and shouting ever and anon like the rest,
'Deen! Deen!' he contrived to reach the Ameer, to whose hands he
forwarded the letter through Daud Shah, a friendly sirdir or general.
It was speedily brought back with a brief reply written upon it by
the prince--
'If God willeth. I am just making arrangements.'
The brave Wodrow experienced many difficulties in making his way
back, for the hostile crowds were increasing every moment, and to
reach the Residency he had at one time literally to act the part of a
leader, and risk the fire of his own friends, among whom, however, he
soon found himself, and delivered the message of the Ameer to the
half-conscious Cavagnari, who was suffering sorely from his wound.
But no succour came, and the hopeless and desperate resistance was
continued.
A second letter to the Ameer was now despatched; but its bearer, a
Hindoo, was discovered and cut to pieces.
After two hours more fighting--hours that added to the heaps of dead
and dying below the Bala Hissar walls, and to the fearful casualties
in the ranks of the small band fighting for existence within the
Residency--Lieutenant Hamilton sent out Taimar, the guide, with an
open letter promising the Ameer's mutineers six months' pay if they
dispersed.
Courageous Taimar, clad in his uniform as a guide-soldier--drab,
laced, piped, and faced with scarlet--went among them, but he was not
listened to. The letter was torn to shreds; his uniform was rent off
him; he was robbed of all he had, severely beaten, and tossed into a
vault, where he lay insensible till he made his escape under cloud of
night; and that he was not slain outright was simply due to his Usbeg
blood and features. And eventually he reached our outpost at
Lundi-Khani Kotal in the Kurram Valley.
After his return to the Residency, amid the confusion and defence of
so many points of the roof on which the whole of its slender garrison
were now gathered, Robert Wodrow for a time was unable to discover
Colville, and feared that he had fallen.
After a little time he discovered him on the summit of an isolated
tower, where, with four men, he had taken post to enfilade the fire
of the mutineers; but his four soldiers were all shot down in quick
succession. Wodrow saw him turn them on their faces, take the
ammunition from their pouches, and proceed single-handed to defend
with a musket the tower which was now in flames, and was ere long
enveloped in smoke.
When a puff of wind blew the latter aside for a moment a cry escaped
Robert Wodrow, for Colville had vanished, and in a few minutes after,
the tower fell thundering down in a mass of blazing ruins.
The assailants had now discovered that loftier buildings, as stated,
commanded the flat roof of the Residency, the upper storey of which
was open on every side, being merely a sleeping place during the hot
months of the year, and consisting of a roof, wattled and plastered,
resting on slender pillars of wood, painted and gaily gilded.
Thus the insurgents were enabled by a fire, chiefly directed from the
loftier windows and roof of the arsenal, to drive the desperate and
now despairing defenders downward from floor to floor, till they
ultimately reached the last, upon the ground; and there, for no less
than four hours more, they made a noble and heroic resistance against
the fanatical and furious multitude which hurled its strength against
them, so close at times that the young officers of Cavagnari's suite
were seen to fire their pistols right into the mouths and eyes of
their savage assailants.
Weary, breathless, and suffering from an intense thirst, incident to
hot exertion and fierce excitement--a thirst they had neither the
means nor the time to allay--their eyes bloodshot, their lips baked,
their undressed wounds in many instances streaming with blood, their
faces pale as death--the death that was so soon to overtake them
all--the handful of Europeans and Guide soldiers maintained the
unequal conflict with a heroism that mingled with despair.
It was at this crisis in their fate that Daud Shah, a fine old Afghan
sirdir, came riding from the Ameer's palace, through the crowds of
people, and called upon them 'to desist from their infamous crime!'
He was a man above fifty years of age, with a stern face of a
decidedly Jewish type, an aquiline nose, and high cheekbones, dark
and restless eyes, having beetling brows tufted with grizzly hair,
and a long grey beard that descended to his shawl-girdle.
But his appearance only added to the rancorous fury of the people and
the mutineers. Rushing on him with rage, Mahmoud Shah tore him from
his saddle; he was wounded by a bayonet, severely stoned, and borne
away to the palace, covered with blood and in a dying condition.
Two other officers of high rank--one a sirdir or general--also strove
to quell the disturbance, but were fired on and compelled to seek
safety in flight.
That portion of the Bala Hissar assigned as a Residency was far too
large for the little garrison that had then to defend it, and it was
now surrounded on its four sides by that ferocious multitude of armed
men bent on slaughter and cruelty, led on by an equally frantic band
of moollahs.
'They are flinging lighted brands on the roof from the arsenal,'
cried some one, and overhead the roar of flames was soon heard as the
open upper storey we have described became sheeted with fire.
'If that is the case, a little time will see us all gone to the
bow-wows!' cried Robert Wodrow, whom danger always seemed to
exhilarate and make more reckless.
Despairing of all succour from the false Ameer, and as if eager to
die hard, and in doing so to anticipate their doom, the few surviving
heroes of the little garrison charged out sword in hand, and
plunged--thrusting with the point, and hewing with the edge--into the
human sea that filled the court between the Bala Hissar gate, just as
night was closing, and there they all perished to a man, save
one--perished just as the roof of the Residency came crashing down
amid black smoke and crackling flames, thus preserving the bodies of
Sir Louis Cavagnari, of Dr. Kelly, and several others from the last
insults of a savage enemy.
Aided by the wild confusion, the sudden darkness of the tropical
night, and not a little by his disguised visage and native costume,
Robert Wodrow achieved a passage into the streets of the city, and
from thence, as all thoroughfares save those in the vicinity of the
Bala Hissar were deserted, into the open plain near the city, and
there he threaded his way without molestation among the apple,
citron, and olive groves, the mud forts and garden walls, till he
found a plantation of sugar-canes, and then, weary, worn, covered
with bruises, famished, and athirst--ready almost to weep--after the
past excitement of that terrible day, and the loss of all his friends
and comrades--last, not least, Leslie Colville, he flung himself on
the ground to recover breath and to think over the situation.
Day was dawning, and tipping with red and gold the summits of the
Bala Hissar, when Wodrow awoke to find that he had been asleep for
some hours, and now rose, stiff and sore in every limb. The flames
of the conflagration had died out, but a black pall of smoke overhung
the towers and battlements of the ancient and picturesque palatial
fortress, which, with a recklessness of courage for which it is
difficult to account, he actually resolved to revisit, as if to see
the last--the end of everything.
He had the caution, however, to readjust his disguise, to carefully
load his revolver, and by untwisting another cartridge and mixing the
powder in a dew-laden leaf, to carefully retouch his face, using the
case of his watch as a mirror, and to re-blacken his hands and
wrists, before he ventured near the scene of the last night's horrors.
Of the Residency, the blackened walls and smouldering ashes alone
remained, and as these furnished no 'loot,' the place was deserted by
all save the dead.
Of the latter there lay heaped over each other, and soaked in each
other's blood, some five hundred Afghans, attesting--irrespective of
wounded--of the stubborn vigour of the defence, for every cartridge
fired by the desperate few must have told more than double among the
masses.
The marble arches and pillars of the beautiful carved arcades and
open galleries, the walls and pavement, were all spotted and starred
by the bullets of rifles and carbines, and clots and splashes of
blood were everywhere, with the corpses of the Europeans and Guides,
easily distinguished by their uniforms. The solitary survivor saw
the body of the young and gallant Hamilton, stripped of his braided
jacket and woefully gashed, lying across a mountain gun, over which
he had fallen or been flung by his slayers, 'and beyond it, in a
trench which the Afghans had failed to storm, were heaped, thick and
charred by fire, the corpses of the heroic Guides. Each man had died
where he stood, and in their rear were the smouldering ruins of the
building wherein Cavagnari, Kelly, and others were lying.'
Robert Wodrow gave a glance at the blackened ruins of the tower on
the summit of which he had last seen Colville, rifle in hand,
resisting to the last, and a bitter sigh escaped him as he quitted
the city, and resolutely turned his face and steps towards the
passes, through which he hoped to reach our outpost at Lundi Khani
Kotal, more than a hundred and fifty miles distant, amid hostile
tribes and savage ways, by the Latband Pass, Jugdulluk, Gundamuck,
and the Khoord Khyber, at the very contemplation of which his heart
sank with despair.
'All about the city,' said a print of the time, 'there were Afghans
enough--the whole hive seemed restless with multitudinous motion; but
when the solitary traveller (after the hideous uproar of the past
night) had cleared the city precincts, the old desolation of the
dreary hill country lay stretched before him, and along the rugged
ways hardly a man was moving.'
Yet the rugged paths through the stupendous passes had many dangers
for the disguised hussar. Tigers, wolves, and hyenas were to be met
with, making sleep and night alike perilous and horrible; and to
these were added by day the chance of discovery by the equally savage
tribesmen, and a death by torture, such as only the Oriental mind can
conceive, at their merciless hands.
Yet, though aware of all he had to encounter, Robert Wodrow took to
the hills as a mountaineer born, and strode resolutely and manfully
on.