nadir shah and the afghans, 1732–47When Khan Shirin Khan heard he was heading to Bamiyan, he offered
him a large sum of money to hand over the hostages. Saleh Muhammad
accepted and set out for Kabul, while Khan Shirin Khan and his Jawanshir
Qizilbash, accompanied by a number of British officers, rode out to inter-
cept him and freed the hostages. Captivity, however, had not improved
Shelton’s temper and he rebuked Captain Shakespear, who had volun-
teered for the rescue mission, for his failure to observe the proper military
protocol and present himself first to Shelton, the senior officer, when he
reached their camp.
The rescue mission came too late for General Elphinstone, for in
April he succumbed to his injuries and sheer exhaustion. Akbar Khan
packed his body in a crude coffin and sent it to Sale in Jalalabad for
burial, but the cortège was intercepted by Muhammad Shah’s Ghilzais,
who stripped the corpse, pelted it with stones and tried to burn it. Akbar
Khan’s escort managed to prevent this final insult, but they were forced to
return to Laghman where the body was repacked and this time sent safely
to Jalalabad. After her release, Lady Elphinstone had her husband’s body
exhumed and conveyed to Calcutta for a proper burial.
Another casualty was John Conolly, who died a few weeks before
Pollock reached the capital from what Lal claimed was a ‘sad pain at the
heart caused through the public misfortunes’. 40 He was buried in the
‘Mughal garden’, most likely the Armenian graveyard near the Bala Hisar.
John was the third Conolly brother to die as a direct, or indirect, result of
the invasion of Afghanistan. Another ‘loss’ (as far as the Europeans were
concerned) was Mrs Wade, the Anglo-Indian wife of a British sergeant
killed in the retreat. Unable to endure the rigours of captivity and threat-
ened with being sold into slavery, she converted to Islam and married a
Ghilzai chief.
Having secured Kabul, Pollock sent Major General McCaskill into the
Koh Daman to kill or capture the rebel leaders. His first objective was Istalif,
where ’Amin Allah Khan Logari was said to have concentrated his forces,
but the rebel chief had already fled. Despite the settlement being packed
with thousands of displaced civilians from Kabul. McCaskill ordered his
troops to attack and thousands of men, women and children were slaugh-
tered in cold blood while the houses and bazaar were set on fire. The
massacre was doubly bitter, for the elders of Istalif had provided fodder and
food to the British cantonment and the pir of Istalif had sheltered Pottinger
and Haughton the night they fled from Charikar. McCaskill’s men had so
much loot that they could not find enough pack animals to carry their
ill-gotten gains to Kabul, so any chattels they could not transport were