A British heroine in an earlier Afghan exodus

It’s likely that CNN correspondent Clarissa Ward has never heard of Lady Florentia Sale, but they are two women linked across nearly two centuries by their reporting from Afghanistan. There are differences: Ward is a professional journalist; Lady Sale was a gifted amateur, the wife of a senior British army officer, and mother of nine children. But each has distinguished herself covering a chronic occurrence in Afghanistan’s turbulent history: the final days of a defeated foreign presence.  

The United Kingdom holds the record for withdrawing from Afghanistan. The first British pullout was — disastrously — in 1842, the second and third between 1879-1880, and the fourth this summer, along with the U.S. and other Western allies. 

In 1842, about 16,000 troops and camp followers, including British families, left Kabul for Jalalabad, near the Afghan border with India, having been given safe conduct by an Afghan leader who wanted them gone. But in the rugged, snow-covered passes vengeful, hostile tribesmen ambushed and massacred the retreating garrison, and only one survivor, Army Dr. William Brydon, reached Jalalabad.

The Afghans also took about 60 prisoners, among them Lady Florentia Sale, wife of Maj. Gen. Sir Robert Sale, who was waiting for her in Jalalabad. Lady Sale managed to keep a diary of the nightmarish journey, and her subsequent captivity. When she was rescued by a British “army of retribution” led by her husband, her diary was published in England, entitled “A Journal of the Disasters in Affghanistan [sic] 1841-2.”

The 493-page dispassionate account of chaos, panic and slaughter in one of the worst British defeats of the Victorian era enraged the British public. Here is Lady Sale on the aftermath of one attack: “The road is covered with awfully mangled bodies, all naked, fifty-eight Europeans … the natives innumerable.” 

It was a time when newspapers relied for news of distant victories and defeats on official government reports and the eyewitness accounts of ordinary citizens. Florentia Sale became a publishing sensation, praised for her courage, hailed as a heroine, and invited to tea with Queen Victoria.

The British column that left Kabul consisted of 4,500 troops from British regiments and Sepoys — Indian soldiers in British service — and some 12,000 civilian followers, including army families and the conglomeration of servants, porters and other workers in the employ of the British Raj. The full impact of Lady Sale’s narrative is in its detail both of the army’s defensive efforts, and the cruel fate of individuals, including mothers and their children.

Back to the present, Clarissa Ward and scores of other professionals like her are covering a somewhat different kind of exodus involving not just the forces of the foreign power but thousands of Afghans seeking escape from their country, fearful for their lives under a restoration of the Taliban regime. In the process, their narrative of incompetence in Washington and growing despair in Kabul has made clear that the British didn’t have a monopoly on bungling in Afghanistan. 

And not much has changed in other respects, either. “Here every man is born a soldier,” Lady Sale wrote. “Every child has a knife — that weapon which has proved so destructive in the hands of a hostile peasantry incited against us by the mullahs.”   

Throughout the 19th century, the British continued to invade Afghanistan as a protective buffer against the Russian threat to India — a conflict known at the time as The Great Game. By the late 1870s, British troops were back in Kabul. In 1879, they withdrew from the Afghan capital, more or less in good order, after signing a peace treaty with the Afghans that gave London control of Afghan foreign policy. They returned briefly in 1880 when the Afghans assassinated the British representative and needed to be taught a lesson.

Florentia Sale, meanwhile, never returned to Afghanistan. She died in 1853 in Simla, India, where she had retired.

Roland Flamini is a Washington-based writer and former Time Magazine journalist.