Chapter V: 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.