The Dark Defile by Diana Preston

city on 24 July: WE RECEIVED THE MOST BRILLIANT RECEPTION. WE PROCEEDED ON ELEPHANTS WITH A LARGE ESCORT OF CAVALRY. OUTSIDE THE CITY TWO BATTERIES OF ARTILLERY, NINE REGIMENTS OF INFANTRY WERE DRAWN UP … THEIR BANDS PLAYING THE BRITISH NATIONAL ANTHEM. LARGE CROWD ASSEMBLED AND WAS ORDERLY AND RESPECTFUL. EMIR ENQUIRED AFTER VICEROY’S HEALTH AND QUEEN AND ROYAL FAMILY. EMIR’S DEMEANOUR WAS MOST FRIENDLY. Later Cavagnari telegraphed, NOTWITHSTANDING ALL PEOPLE SAY AGAINST HIM, I PERSONALLY BELIEVE YAKUB KHAN WILL TURN OUT TO BE A VERY GOOD ALLY AND THAT WE SHALL BE ABLE TO KEEP HIM TO HIS ENGAGEMENTS. On 2 September his dispatch, tinted couleur de rose in a way reminiscent of Macnaghten, was ALL WELL IN THE KABUL EMBASSY.
    Early the next day Afghan soldiers, incensed at being paid neither by the emir nor by the British, and at rumors circulated by the Kabul mullahs that the British were intent on religious conversion, attacked Cavagnari’s residence. Before midafternoon, despite desperate sorties, the residency was ablaze and all the Europeans were dead. The Afghans gave the surviving Indian troops a chance to surrender, which they refused. Instead, they made one last sally, and within five minutes they too were all killed. The only survivor was an Indian subofficer who had been away from the mission on detached duty and escaped to bring news of the massacre to the British forces.
    Immediately British troops under General Frederick Roberts—the son of Abraham Roberts who had resigned as commander of Shah Shuja’s contingent after quarreling with Macnaghten—marched on Kabul. Although outnumbered five to one, his force led by Highlanders and Gurkhas defeated an Afghan army and occupied the city on 12 October 1879. Yakub Khan abdicated at once and, like previous unsuccessful Afghan rulers, was sent into exile in India. Several of those who had paraded Cavagnari’s head through the streets were publicly executed in the burned rubble of Cavagnari’s residency. Buildings within the Balla Hissar were demolished, and probably accidentally—rumors said the cause was an artillery officer’s pipe—a main ammunition dump within the Balla Hissar exploded, causing many casualties.
    All the while, mullahs were preaching jihad against the British. Posters appeared overnight on city walls signed by “the Leader of the Mujhaddin.” In December sentries posted on top of the partially destroyed Balla Hissar saw three Afghan tribal armies approaching the city. Roberts forced them into retreat, showing a decisiveness that had been sorely lacking in Kabul four decades earlier. 31
    The next spring in Kabul, British officers debated whom to install as emir. Their choice eventually fell on Abdur-ur-Rahman, a grandson of Dost Mohammed. In London the opposition leader, William Gladstone, became prime minister in April 1880 after defeating Disraeli. His response to a report by a British journalist of atrocities committed by the country’s troops in Kohst, near the site of the future Tora Bora cave complex, was to inveigh against the results of Disraeli’s policies: “ Remember the rights of the savage as we call him … remember the happiness of his humble home … the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan among the winter snows is as inviolable in the eyes of Almighty God as can be your own. ”
    General Roberts wrote, “ [I] dreaded that a change of government might mean a reversal of the policy which I believed to be the best for the security of our position in India. ” Not long thereafter, the British indeed suffered a major setback, but not as a result of government policy. Nor was it at Kabul, but in the south on the Helmand River not far from Kandahar, on high ground near a village near Maiwand. A British force of some 2,500 men was defeated on 27 July 1880 in open battle by a much larger Afghan army, including many white-clothed ghazis . The Afghans broke the much-vaunted red British squares—just as they