John Shelton

Brigadier General John Shelton (1790/91 – 13 May 1845) was an officer of the British Army who commanded the 44th (East Essex) Regiment of Foot during the First Anglo-Afghan War and was second-in-command to Major General Sir William Elphinstone. He was one of only a small number of British soldiers to survive the disastrous 1842 retreat from Kabul, in which a British army column of 4,500 men and 12,000 civilians was massacred by Afghan tribesmen as it attempted to march to Jalalabad. He was widely disliked as a tyrannical and ineffective commander whose failures led to the annihilation of his regiment and whose accidental death was cheered by his men, but he also had a deserved reputation for great physical bravery.

Early career

Shelton was commissioned into the army as an ensign in the 9th (East Norfolk) Regiment of Foot on 21 November 1805. Two years later he became a lieutenant. In 1808 he saw action at the battles of Roliça, Vimiero and Corunna in Portugal. The regiment was subsequently recalled to Britain. Shelton took part in the disastrous Walcheren expedition of 1809 before returning to the Iberian Peninsula in 1812–13. During those years he participated in the battles of Badajoz, Burgos, Salamanca and Vittoria before being severely wounded at the siege of San Sebastián, losing his right arm. It was said that he stood unmoved outside his tent while a surgeon amputated the limb.

In 1817 Shelton transferred to the 44th (East Essex) Regiment of Foot and was posted to India in 1822. He treated his men harshly and was seen as "a tyrant to his regiment".

Uprising in Kabul

On 2 November 1841 an uprising broke out in Kabul which claimed the lives of the senior British officer Sir Alexander Burnes and his aides. Shelton was encamped two miles east of the city. He failed to take any action to defend another fort containing the British garrison's food supplies, despite having 5,000 men who could have been used for the task. The Kashmiri Mohan Lal, who had been Burnes's munshi or secretary, wrote later that Shelton "appeared from the commencement to despair of success, which produced a baneful effect in every fighting man."

The commissariat fort was duly lost and on 10 November Shelton led an attack on another fort, the Rikab Bashee, which the insurgents had also occupied. It took two rallies and cost over a hundred casualties before the 44th Foot took the fort. After the Afghans placed two artillery pieces on the Bimaru Hills half a mile north of the cantonment, Shelton led an attack to drive them out. It was initially successful but the hills were soon reoccupied. To make matters worse, Shelton adopted a formation that was wholly unsuited to the situation, as Lieutenant Vincent Eyre recalled:

Captain Colin Mackenzie, who took a bullet in the shoulder during the battle, wrote:

The front ranks had been literally mowed away ... Our ammunition was almost expended and by one pm the men were faint from fatigue and thirst. But no water was procurable and the number of killed and wounded was swelled every instant. I tried to persuade Shelton to effect a retreat only to be told: 'Oh no, we will hold the hill some time longer.' On Shelton's refusal to retire, Colonel Oliver, who was a very stout man, remarked that the inevitable result would be a general flight to cantonments, and that, as he was too unwieldy to run, the sooner he got shot the better. He then exposed himself to the enemy's fire and fell mortally wounded. He was bitterly critical of "the total incapacity of Brigadier Shelton, his reckless exposure of his men for hours at the top of a high ridge to a destructive fire, and his stubborn neglect to avail himself of the several opportunities offered to him throughout the day" which, in Lawrence's view, showed him to be "incapable to command."

Johnson accompanied Shelton and Elphinstone to a negotiation with the Afghan leader, Wazir Akbar Khan, but all three men were taken prisoner. A furious Shelton demanded that he should be allowed to return to his men and die fighting, but was refused.

Aftermath

Shelton was one of 32 British officers and a larger number of captured soldiers, women and children who were detained by Akbar Khan for several months after the battle. Although the captives were treated considerately, Shelton appears to have taken his captivity poorly. He soon came to be detested by his fellow captives for his quarrelsome nature Elphinstone died in captivity, leaving Shelton as the highest-ranking British survivor.

The captives were freed on 21 September but Shelton was placed under arrest by Lord Ellenborough, the Governor-General of India. He was court-martialled at Ludhiana on 31 January 1842, charged with four counts. The first stated that he had "prematurely, and without authority" ordered ammunition wagons to be emptied and filled instead with provisions for the retreat from Kabul, without Elphinstone's authorisation. The other three, less serious, charges were that he had used disrespectful language about Elphinstone in front of the troops, that he had procured fodder for his horses from Akbar Khan and that he had allowed himself to be taken prisoner at Jagdalak. Despite Shelton's obvious failures he was acquitted of three out of the four charges. He was convicted on the least serious of the four, that of having illicitly procuring food for his horses, but escaped punishment as the court considered that he had been adequately censured at the time by "competent authority", i.e. Elphinstone. The text of his memorial tablet was taken largely from the 1845 edition of Hart's Annual Army List and read: