https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Anglo-Afghan_War#Destruction_of_Elphinstone's_army

<<The First Anglo-Afghan War (Persian: جنگ اول افغان و انگلیس‎), also known by the British as the Disaster in Afghanistan was fought between the British Empire and the Emirate of Afghanistan from 1839 to 1842. Initially, the British
successfully intervened in a succession dispute between emir Dost Mohammad (Barakzai) and former emir Shah Shujah (Durrani), whom they installed upon capturing Kabul in August 1839. The main British Indian force occupying Kabul along with their camp
followers, having endured harsh winters as well, was almost completely annihilated during its 1842 retreat from Kabul. The British then sent an Army of Retribution to Kabul to avenge the destruction of their previous forces. After recovering prisoners,
they withdrew from Afghanistan by the end of the year. Dost Mohammed returned from exile in India to resume his rule. It was one of the first major conflicts during the Great Game, the 19th century competition for power and influence in Central Asia
between Britain and Russia.

In 1843 British army chaplain G.R. Gleig wrote a memoir of the disastrous (First) Anglo-Afghan War: "a war begun for no wise purpose, carried on with a strange mixture of rashness and timidity, brought to a close after suffering and disaster, without
much glory attached either to the government which directed, or the great body of troops which waged it. Not one benefit, political or military, was acquired with this war. Our eventual evacuation of the country resembled the retreat of an army defeated."
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On 1 January 1842 an agreement was reached that provided for the safe exodus of the British garrison and its dependents from Afghanistan. The departing British contingent numbered around 16,500, of which about 4,500 were military personnel, and over 12,
000 were camp followers. Lieutenant Eyre commented about the camp followers that "These proved from the very first mile a serious clog on our movements". Lady Sale brought with her 40 servants, none of whom she named in her diary while Lieutenant Eyre's
son was saved by a female Afghan servant, who rode through an ambush with the boy on her back, but he never gave her name. The American historian James Perry noted: "Reading the old diaries and journals, it is almost as if these twelve thousand native
servants and sepoy wives and children didn't exist individually. In a way, they really didn't. They would die, all of them - shot, stabbed, frozen to death - in these mountain passes, and no one bothered to write down the name of even one of them". The
military force consisted mostly of Indian units and one British battalion, 44th Regiment of Foot.

They were attacked by Ghilzai warriors as they struggled through the snowbound passes. On the first day, the retreating force made only five miles and as Lady Sale wrote about their arrival at a village of Begramee: "There were no tents, save two or
three small palls that arrived. Everyone scraped away the snow as best they might, to make a place to lie down. The evening and night were intensely cold; no food for man or beast procurable, except a few handfuls of bhoosay [chopped stew], for which we
had to pay five to ten rupees". As the night fell and with it, the temperature, dropped well below freezing. The retreating force then learned that they lost all of their supplies of food and their baggage. On the second day all of the men of the Royal
Afghan Army's 6th regiment deserted, heading back to Kabul, marking the end of the first attempt to give Afghanistan a national army. For several months afterwards, what had once been Shuja's army was reduced to begging on the streets of Kabul as Akbar
had of all of Shuja's mercenaries mutilated before throwing them on the streets to beg. Despite Akbar Khan's promise of safe conduct, the Anglo-Indian force was repeatedly attacked by the Ghilzais, with one especially fierce Afghan attack being beaten
off with a spirited bayonet charge by the 44th Foot.

While trying to cross the Koord-Kabual pass in the Hindu Kush that was described as five miles long and "so narrow and so shut in on either side that the wintry sun rarely penetrates its gloomy recesses", the Anglo-Indian force was ambushed by the
Ghilzai tribesmen. Johnson described "murderous fire" that forced the British to abandon all baggage while camp followers regardless of sex and age were cut down with swords. Lady Sale wrote: "Bullets kept whizzing by us" while some of the artillerymen
smashed open the regimental store of brandy to get drunk amid the Afghan attacks. Lady Sale wrote she drank a tumbler of sherry "which at any other time would have made me very unlady-like, but now merely warmed me." Lady Sale took a bullet in her wrist
while she had to watch as her son-in-law Sturt had "...his horse was shot out from him and before he could rise from the ground he received a severe wound in the abdomen". With his wife and mother-in-law by his side in the snow, Sturt bled to death over
the course of the night. The incompetent, naive and gullible Major-General William George Keith Elphinstone continued to believe that Akbar Khan was his "ally", and believed his promise that he would send out the captured supplies if he stopped the
retreat on 8 January. Adding to the misery of the British, that night a ferocious blizzard blew in, causing hundreds to freeze to death.

On 9 January 1842, Akbar sent out a messenger saying he was willing to take all of the British women as hostages, giving his word that they would not be harmed, and said that otherwise his tribesmen would show no mercy and kill all the women and children.
One of the British officers sent to negotiate with Akbar heard him say to his tribesmen in Dari (Afghan Farsi) – a language spoken by many British officers – to "spare" the British while saying in Pashto, which most British officers did not speak,
to "slay them all". Lady Sale, her pregnant daughter Alexandria and the rest of British women and children accepted Akbar's offer of safe conduct back to Kabul. As the East India Company would not pay a ransom for Indian women and children, Akbar refused
to accept them, and so the Indian women and children died with the rest of the force in the Hindu Kush. The camp followers captured by the Afghans were stripped of all their clothing and left to freeze to death in the snow. Lady Sale wrote that as she
was taken back to Kabul she noticed: "The road was covered with awful mangled bodies, all naked".

In the early morning of 10 January, the column resumed its march, with everyone tired, hungry, and cold. Most of the sepoys by this time had lost a finger or two to frostbite, and could not fire their guns. At the narrow pass of Tunghee Tareekee, which
was 50 yards long, and only 4 yards wide, the Ghizye tribesmen ambushed the column, killing without mercy all of the camp followers. The Anglo-Indian soldiers fought their way over the corpses of the camp followers with heavy losses to themselves. From a
hill, Akbar Khan and his chiefs watched the slaughter while sitting on their horses, being apparently very much amused by the carnage. Captain Shelton and a few soldiers from the 44th regiment held the rear of the column and fought off successive Afghan
attacks, despite being outnumbered. Johnson described Shelton as fighting like a "bulldog" with his sword, cutting down any Afghan who tried to take him on so efficiently that by the end of the day no Afghan would challenge him. On the evening of 11
January 1842, General Elphinstone, Captain Shelton, the paymaster Johnston, and Captain Skinner met with Akbar Khan to ask him to stop his attacks on the column. Akbar Khan provided them with warm tea and a fine meal before telling them that they were
all now his hostages as he reckoned the East India Company would pay good ransoms for their freedom, and when Captain Skinner tried to resist, he was shot in the face. Command now fell to Brigadier Thomas Anquetil.

The evacuees were killed in huge numbers as they made their way down the 30 miles of treacherous gorges and passes lying along the Kabul River between Kabul and Gandamak, and were massacred at the Gandamak pass before a survivor reached the besieged
garrison at Jalalabad. At Gandamak, some 20 officers and 45 other ranks of the 44th Foot regiment, together with some artillerymen and sepoys, armed with some 20 muskets and two rounds of ammunition to every man, found themselves at dawn surrounded by
Afghan tribesmen. The force had been reduced to fewer than forty men by a withdrawal from Kabul that had become, towards the end, a running battle through two feet of snow. The ground was frozen, the men had no shelter and had little food for weeks. Of
the weapons remaining to the survivors at Gandamak, there were approximately a dozen working muskets, the officers' pistols, and a few swords. The British formed a square and defeated the first couple of the Afghan attacks, "driving the Afghans several
times down the hill" before running out of ammunition. They then fought on with their bayonets and swords before being overwhelmed. The Afghans took only 9 prisoners and killed the rest. The remnants of the 44th were all killed except Captain James
Souter, Sergeant Fair, and seven soldiers who were taken prisoner. The only soldier to reach Jalalabad was Dr. William Brydon and several sepoys over the following nights. One British NCO fled from Gandamak to Gujrat India on foot according to a source
cited from The Times of 2 March 1843 by Farrukh Husain who writes: "The oddest account of escape from Gundamuck concerns that of a dark-skinned faqir who appeared in India in rags but was in fact a Scottish non commissioned officer who fled all the way
to a British army Camp Deesa in Gujrat India, "This morning a strange man came into camp, covered with hair, and almost naked his face burnt very much; he turned out to be Lance-Sergeant Philip Edwards of the Queen's 44th Regiment who escaped the general
slaughter at Gundamuch, Afghanistan, and after travelling 15 months in a southerly direction by the sun, he found his way into camp here, not knowing where he was."
........................................................................... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1842_retreat_from_Kabul#/media/File:Remnants_of_an_army2.jpg

Lady Butler's famous painting of Dr. William Brydon, initially thought to be the sole survivor, gasping his way to the British outpost in Jalalabad, helped make Afghanistan's reputation as a graveyard for foreign armies and became one of the great epics
of empire. ...........................................................................
In August 1842 General William Nott advanced from Kandahar, capturing Ghazni and partially demolishing the city's fortifications. Meanwhile, General George Pollock, who had taken command of a demoralized force in Peshawar used it to clear the Khyber Pass
to arrive at Jalalabad, where General Sale had already lifted the siege. From Jalalabad, General Pollock inflicted a further crushing defeat on Akbar Khan. As the expedition advanced through Afghanistan, they bore witness to the countless dead comrades
who perished following the retreat from Kabul. This enraged the British who took revenge on Afghan civilians by razing villages, murdering men and raping women. Neville Bowles Chamberlain described the killings as "truly wicked." The combined British
forces defeated all opposition before taking Kabul in September. A month later, having rescued the prisoners and demolished the city's main bazaar as an act of revenge for the destruction of Elphinstone's column, they withdrew from Afghanistan through
the Khyber Pass. Dost Muhammad was released and re-established his authority in Kabul. He died on 9 June 1863. During his lifetime no Russian mission was established in Afghanistan. Dost Mohammad is reported to have said:

I have been struck by the magnitude of your resources, your ships, your arsenals, but what I cannot understand is why the rulers of so vast and flourishing an empire should have gone across the Indus to deprive me of my poor and barren country.

Many voices in Britain, from Lord Aberdeen to Benjamin Disraeli, had criticized the war as rash and insensate. The perceived threat from Russia was vastly exaggerated, given the distances, the almost impassable mountain barriers, and logistical problems
that an invasion would have to solve. In the three decades after the First Anglo-Afghan War, the Russians did advance steadily southward towards Afghanistan. In 1842 the Russian border was on the other side of the Aral Sea from Afghanistan. By 1865
Tashkent had been formally annexed, as was Samarkand three years later. A peace treaty in 1873 with Amir Alim Khan of the Manghit Dynasty, the ruler of Bukhara, virtually stripped him of his independence. Russian control then extended as far as the
northern bank of the Amu Darya.>> ----------------------------------------------------------------
Art Neuendorffer

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