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Updated: July 16, 2025
So completely taken by surprise were the Afghans at the easy capture of a fort which they believed to be absolutely impregnable, that they fled without further resistance; and the British, moving quietly up the valley, occupied place after place with scarcely a shot fired until they reached Jellalabad. In the meantime, General Roberts was advancing up the Kuram Valley.
A week later an official communication was received from Cabul, signed by General Elphinstone and Major Pottinger, formally announcing the convention which the Cabul force had entered into with the chiefs, and ordering the garrison of Jellalabad forthwith to evacuate that post and retire to Peshawur, leaving behind with 'the new Governor, an Afghan chief who was the bearer of the humiliating missive, the fortress guns and such stores and baggage as there lacked transport to remove.
Herat and Candahar were wholly independent, the Ghilzai tribes inhabiting the wide tracts from the Suliman ranges westward beyond the road through Ghuznee, between Candahar and Cabul, and northward into the rugged country between Cabul and Jellalabad, acknowledged no other authority than that of their own chiefs.
Neither he nor his adviser Macgregor appears to have realised how incumbent on the garrison of Jellalabad it was to hold out to the last extremity, irrespective of consequences to itself, unless it should receive a peremptory recall from higher authority; or to have recognised the glorious opportunity presented of inspiriting by its staunch constancy and high-souled self-abnegation a weak government staggering under a burden of calamity.
It remained, however, to be seen whether any enterprise was to be permitted to him and to his brother commander lying in camp on the Jellalabad plain. Lord Ellenborough, the successor of Lord Auckland, had struck a firm if somewhat inexplicit note in his earliest manifesto, dated March 13th.
Pollock's assistance had not been needed; the garrison of Jellalabad had delivered themselves. There is no room in this story to tell of the many wars in which Havelock took part during the next fifteen years, always doing good work and gaining the confidence of his commanding officers.
The rear of the column would probably have been entirely cut off, but that reinforcements from the advance under Shelton pushed back the enemy, and by crowning the lateral heights kept open the thoroughfare. At Bootkhak was found Akbar Khan, who professed to have been commissioned to escort the force to Jellalabad, and who blamed our people for having marched out prematurely from the cantonments.
Weeks elapsed before the organisation of the force approached completion, and it was only by a desperate struggle that General Charles Gough's little brigade received by the end of September equipment sufficient to enable that officer to advance by short marches. Roberts was holding his durbar in the Balla Hissar of Cabul on the day that the head of Gough's advance reached Jellalabad.
Presently, however, Mahomed Shah Khan, Akbar's lieutenant, arrived full of courtesy and reassurance, but with the unwelcome intimation that the prisoners must prepare themselves to leave Budiabad at once, and move to a greater distance from Jellalabad and their friends. For some preparation was not a difficult task.
Sir John McCaskill was shot through the chest, and killed on the field; the gallant Sir Robert Sale, the brave defender of Jellalabad, received so severe a wound in the leg that he shortly after died from its effects; many other officers and men were killed, making in all 215; and 657 were wounded. The enemy's sharpshooters had climbed into trees, and from thence killed and wounded many officers.
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