Major General William Elphinstone is considered by some
military historians to be “the most
incompetent soldier who ever became a general”, possessed of “the
leadership qualities of a sheep.”Elphinstone’s road to disaster, however, was well paved and made broad
by others.
In 1838, Afghanistan
was a buffer state between British India and
the expanding Russian Empire. Energized
by real or imagined Russian plots in the country, the British rallied support behind
a prince favorable to British interests, marched into the country, and after a
short campaign installed a puppet king in Kabul
on August 6, 1839.
Many in British India now
felt that the mission had been accomplished.
It was time to bring the troops home.
Most of the victorious army marched home, but a permanent British
garrison was established in Kabul
to prop up the new regime. It needed
propping up. The British had replaced a
relatively popular ruler with a weak puppet. Scattered fighting erupted in the
surrounding countryside.
Increasingly frustrated with the costs of maintaining a
large garrison in Kabul, the British government eliminated the subsidies being
paid to the various tribes in the area around Kabul to keep the peace. Once the
subsidies ended, hostile activity increased even more.
Into this rapidly
deteriorating situation stepped Major General William Elphinstone, who
was assured by all, “You will have nothing to do here; all is peace.”
When Elphinstone arrived in Kabul his command consisted of
some 4,500 troops (British troops and Indian sepoys). Additionally, there were 12,000 army
dependents such as wives, children, and servants, living in the British
cantonment just outside of Kabul.
The military situation on the ground when Elphinstone
arrived was a tragedy waiting to happen.
The British had abandoned the city’s fortified citadel, the Bala Hissar,
to the puppet king and built the British cantonment some 1.5 miles outside of
the city in a low area surrounded by Afghan forts occupying the high
ground. These forts had been neither occupied
nor destroyed.
The cantonment itself was indefensible. According to
contemporary witnesses there had been, “a pretense of rendering the cantonments
defensible by surrounding the great parallelogram with the caricature of an
obstacle in the shape of a shallow ditch and feeble earthwork over which an
active cow could scramble.”
Elphinstone now nearly sixty was racked by gout and
rheumatism. He was soon unable to mount his horse un-aided. He was incapable of
reaching clear cut decisions and vacillated depending on the opinion of the
latest person with whom he spoke. One
officer wrote, that Elphinstone was “fit only for the invalid establishment on
the day of his arrival.”
On 2 November 1841 a revolt broke out in Kabul. A mob of insurgents stormed the house of one
of the senior British civilian officers and murdered him and his staff. Elphinstone took no action, which encouraged
the insurgents to press the British further.
The Afghans next stormed the poorly defended supply fort where the
British garrison’s provisions were housed.
After furious fighting around the small fort and repeated
calls for help, Elphinstone finally realized that he should do something. The relief force was surprised, however, to
find the survivors of the supply fort, having abandoned all hope of relief,
making a hasty retreat toward the cantonment.
Elphinstone’s inaction had resulted in the loss of most of the army’s
food and supplies.
A council of war proposed, as the winter was coming on,
either to retreat to the British stronghold of Jalalabad some ninety miles
away, or to move to the Bala Hissar, Kabul’s strong bastion. Elphinstone overruled the move to the Bala
Hissar and settled on retreat.
On the Afghan promise of a safe retreat, Elphinstone
capitulated on January 1, 1842, handing over the army’s gunpowder reserves,
most of the cannon, and all of the newest muskets.
The troops and twelve thousand civilians began the march to
Jalalabad on January 6. The sick and
wounded were left behind with a guarantee of their safety. They were murdered as soon as the last of
Elphinstone’s soldiers left the cantonment.
The retreat of
the column was an unmitigated horror.
Weather conditions were extreme, and the column was continually harassed
by the fire of Afghan tribesmen. The
first night, the column halted six miles from the city. The road was already strewn with the dead and
dying.
By the evening of January 9, some 3,000 of Elphinstone's
column had died due to enemy action, the freezing weather, or even
suicide. Elphinstone had ceased giving
any orders.
On the evening of January 11th, the wives of the British
officers accepted being taken hostage by the Afghans who anticipated a large
ransom for their release. The wives and
children of the Indian troops were all to die since they would not bring a
ransom.
Elphinstone and his
second in command also allowed themselves to become hostages, while the column
struggled on against certain death.
Elphinstone died of dysentery on April 23, 1842, while in captivity.
Only one British officer managed to reach Jalalabad.On 13 January, Assistant Surgeon William
Brydonrode through the gates of Jalalabad on an exhausted horse. Part of his
skull was sheared off by a sword.When
asked what happened to the army, he answered “I am the army.”
Shortly before his murder in 1890, Sitting Bull said
to his biographer:
“When I was a boy, the Sioux owned the world.The sun rose and set on their land; they sent
ten thousand men to battle.Where are
the warriors today?Who slew them?Where are our lands?Who owns them? …. Is it wrong for me to love
my own?Is it wicked for me because my
skin is red?Because I am Sioux.Because I was born where my fathers
lived?Because I would die for my people
and my country?I wish it to be
remembered that I was the last man of my tribe to surrender my rifle.”
James Barroll Washington was born in
Baltinore, Maryland in 1839.His father,
Colonel Lewis Washignton was a grandson of General George Washington’s brother,
John Augustine Washington.James entered
West Point in 1859 and was a classmate of George Armstrong Custer.
When the Civil War broke out, young
Washington left West Point and joined the staff of Confederate General Joseph
E. Johnston.On May 21, 1862 at the
Battle of Seven Pines, while delivering orders from General Johnston to General
Longstreet, Lieutenant Washington was
captured by a company under the command of Captain George Armstrong
Custer.Custer took the opportunity to
have a picture taken with his old classmate before sending him the rear as a
prisoner of war.Washington was
subsequently exchanged and continued to serve in the Confederate army until the
end of the war.
“I went over
the battlefield carefully with a view to determine how the fight was
fought. I arrived at the conclusion I
have right now-that it was a rout, a panic, till the last man was killed; that
there was no line formed.
“There was no line on the battlefield.You can take a handful of corn and scatter it
over a floor and make just such lines.There were none. The only approach to a line was where five or six
horses were found equal distances like skirmishers.Ahead of them were five or six men about the
same distances….That was the only approach to a line on the field. (This was on
Calhoun Hill).
“There were more than twenty killed there to the
right; there were four or more all within a space of twenty to thirty
yards.That was the condition all over
the field.Only where General Custer was
found was there any evidence of a stand.
“ I counted seventy dead horses and two Indian
ponies.I think, in all probability,
that the men turned their horses loose without any orders to do so.Many orders might have been given, but few
obeyed.I think they were panic stricken;
it was a rout….”
“The battalion
organization was made after we had marched about four hours. I think at the first halt an orderly came to
me with instructions for the officers to assemble. General Custer told us that he had just come
down from the mountain; that he had been told by the scouts that they could see
a village, ponies, tepees and smoke. He
gave it to us as his belief that there were no Indians there; that he had
looked through the glasses and could not see any, and did not think there were
any there.
“Now, in 1875, I had a
very similar experience with Indians in Dakota, and as the statements of the
Indians then were absolutely confirmed by what was afterward proved, I was
strong in the belief that the Crow Indians only reported what was shown them by their superior keenness
of vision, and that the hostile village was where they located it; but as no
opinions were asked for, none were given.”
On June 25, 1876, at theBattle of the Little Bighorn, five
companies of the U.S. Seventh Cavalry, under the direct command of George
Armstrong Custer were wiped out.
Many artifacts initially lost on the
battlefield were to have a strange after life.Take for example, the engraved pocket watch of George Armstrong
Custer.There are at least two stories
regarding the odyssey of the watch.
In Son of the Morning Star, historian Evan S. Connel relates that in
1906 a Montana saloon keeper bought the watch from a Sioux Indian.The watch waslost in a dice game, exhibited in a
travelling show, and finally turned up in California before being purchased for
the Don and Stella Foote Collection in Billings, Montana. The Foote’s
would eventually offer their Treasures of the West collection to the city of
Billings, which rejected the gift because the city did not want to pay to have
the collection insured.The collection
was sold off and the whereabouts of Custer’s watch is now unknown.
In his book, The
Law Marches West, a Canadian Mountie named Cecil Denny claimed that he
retrieved the watch from Sitting Bull and sent it to Libbie Custer.
Custer’s final message to Captain Benteen to “Come quick,
bring packs”, written down by Adjutant Cooke went missing for decades.
In the 1920’s one of Custer’s early biographers, William
Graham tried to locate the missing document, only to be told by Benteen’s son
thatall his father's papers had been destroyed when their
house had burned down many years before.This turned out to by incorrect.
Captain Benteen had given the famous
message to an army officer friend, Captain Price. The message finally came to
rest in the hands of a New Jersey collector for fifty years, before being put
up for auction.By a happy circumstance Colonel Charles Francis Bates learned of the
existence of the message and secured it for the museum at West Point, where it
resides today.
The medals of Captain Miles Keogh tell an
interesting story. The senior captain among the five companies wiped out with
Custer, Keogh's body was found at the center of a group of troopers that
included his two sergeants, company trumpeter and guidon bearer.
Keogh was
stripped but not mutilated, perhaps because of the "medicine" the
Indians saw in two Papal medals he wore on a chain around his neck. Vatican records confirm these two medals were
given to Keogh during The Papal War of 1860.
Captain Benteen secured the medals which were
sent to Keogh’s sister in Ireland.They
remained in the family until 1988 when they passed into the hands of a well-known
collector.The medals were recently
auctioned off for $35,000.
2nd Lt.
John James Crittenden of Kentucky received a gold watch from his father on his
twenty first birthday.Crittenden was 22
years old when he died at Little Big Horn. His body was identified because of
his glass eye.
His watch
was missing.In 1880, E.F. Gigot was
working in a Canadian trading post when a trapper came in with furs, blankets,
and a watch.Gigot bought the watch of
$2.This was a gentleman’s watch and
Gigot began to research.He wrote to the
watchmaker in London, providing the serial number.The watchmaker confirmed that the watch had
been sold to a man named Crittenden.Gigot wrote to the U.S. Army which confirmed that the watch belonged to
2nd Lt. John James Crittenden.The watch
was returned to the family, which loaned the artifact to the Kentucky Historical
Society in 1949 where it remains to this day.
In the early days of the American Civil
War, George Armstrong Custer wore his hair long, and wore a braided black
velvet jacket and a flaming red necktie.When a female friend asked Custer why he had dressed in such a fantastic
manner he replied:
"I was but a boy, just from West
Point and I felt young and insignificant. There were men in my brigade old
enough to be my father. I wished them to know and recognize me at once from any
part of the battlefield. I chose a uniform that would catch their attention and
individualize me."
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