Under Siege
With his carefully laid plans now compromised, Roberts ordered a withdrawal, and by December 14 all his troops were ensconced in the cantonment and the forts on the Bimaru heights. Four months' worth of supplies and munitions were on hand, and the troops' morale remained high. Although the telegraph line had been cut, on a clear day Roberts could make use of the heliograph and, on December 21, he received news that 1,500 men led by Brig. Gen. Charles J.S. Gough were on the way.

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The Afghans, buoyed by their recent success, planned to make a head-on assault before Roberts' reinforcements arrived. On the night of December 23, a mullah lit a signal beacon on a nearby hillside and hordes of Afghans streamed forward, screaming their war cries. British cannons fired star shells into the air, casting a weird light upon a terrifying scene of fearless men rushing to their deaths in a lethal hail of lead. Some Afghans managed to scale the battlements, only to be brought down by bayonets. By morning the snow around the cantonment was stained with blood and littered with the dead and dying.

At 10 a.m. the Afghans launched one last attack. By now Roberts had placed a number of cannons on the eastern side of the fort. Their enfilading fire ripped through the advancing columns–any survivors were scythed down by rifle fire. By 1 p.m. the fight had petered out, and Roberts delivered a coup de grâce. His cavalry, the 5th Punjabis and the 9th Lancers, galloped out of the cantonment around the Afghan flanks and began to hack down any enemy too slow to reach the safety of Kabul. The victory had been total. The British and Indian army had lost 30 men killed, while one estimate suggested that well over 1,000 Afghans had perished. On the next day, Roberts received a very welcome Christmas present–Gough's column arrived.

Maiwand
After the Treaty of Gandamuk, Sir Donald Stewart's force had remained in Kandahar because of supply problems and poor health. Over the following months the British had regained their strength. Stewart, the senior general in the theater, was now ordered to take a further 3,000 troops from Kandahar with him to Kabul, where he would take over and prepare for the important negotiations with the emir-to-be, Abdur Rahman, a nephew of Sher Ali's. The responsibility of protecting Kandahar and its environs now fell to Lt. Gen. J.M. Primrose.

On arrival in Kabul, Stewart was given a warm welcome by Roberts, who was quite pleased to hand over such a difficult political responsibility. Stewart also brought news that Gladstone's government was back in power and that the tempestuous Lytton had been replaced by George Frederick Samuel Robinson, first Marquess of Ripon. With a less aggressive foreign policy governing Britain's relations with Afghanistan, Roberts hoped to return home to his beloved wife sooner rather than later. But the cruel lesson of Afghanistan, then and now, is to always expect the worst. In July 1880 in the northwestern city of Herat, the brother of Yakub Khan, Ayub Khan, proclaimed himself emir. He knew that the British had reduced their presence in Kandahar and was confident that if he were to take the fortress town and successfully defeat the British, the Afghan people would rally to his cause and reject Abdur Rahman.

The British were aware of Ayub Khan's intentions. To smash his army of an estimated 7,500 men with a good number of quality guns (and a countless number of irregulars), General Primrose had sent out a woefully small force of 2,734 soldiers. Their leader, Brigadier George Burrows, while capable, was way out of his depth. On July 27, the British and Indian troops were pounced upon by Ayub Khan's army on the open plains near the village of Maiwand. After four hours of sterling defense in the midday heat against impossible odds, Burrows' men broke and the inevitable massacre began. Only 1,595 managed to return to Kandahar, including Burrows, who after having fought bravely from the saddle all day, arrived crying uncontrollably and no longer able to speak. It was something of an irony, but on that same day Abdur Rahman officially accepted the throne of emir to grand declarations of peace between Afghanistan and Britain.

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