The March to Kandahar- Roberts in Afghanistan Read online

  First published in Great Britain in 2008 by

  Pen & Sword Military

  an imprint of

  Pen & Sword Books Ltd

  47 Church Street

  Barnsley

  South Yorkshire

  S70 2AS

  Copyright © Rodney Atwood, 2008

  ISBN 978-1-84415-848-5

  ISBN 978-1-84468-221-8 (ebook)

  The right of Rodney Atwood to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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  Contents

  List of Maps

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction Disaster and Triumph in Afghanistan

  Chapter 1 Background: Afghanistan and Roberts

  Chapter 2 Marriage, Friends and Frontier

  Chapter 3 War in Afghanistan

  Chapter 4 Into Battle: the Peiwar Kotal

  Chapter 5 At Odds with Desperate Men

  Chapter 6 Martial Law at Kabul

  Chapter 7 Backs to the Wall

  Chapter 8 Kandahar to Kabul

  Chapter 9 Fateful Decisions

  Chapter 10 March to Victory

  Chapter 11 Epilogue

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Maps

  Map 1 Afghanistan and North-West Frontier

  Map 2 The Mutiny

  Map 3 Peiwar Kotal – 2 December 1878

  Map 4 Approach to Kabul and the Chardeh Valley

  Map 5 Plan of Action in the Chardeh Valley and the Siege of Sherpur

  Map 6 Battle of Maiwand, 27 July 1880

  Map 7 Kabul to Kandahar

  Map 8 Battle of Kandahar

  Acknowledgements

  In picking a way through a tangle of conflicting accounts and views, a historian new to the late nineteenth century finds much help. A number of historians have written extensively on the late nineteenth century Victorian Army. Brian Robson wrote a comprehensive modern history of the 2nd Afghan War. He also edited a selection of Roberts’s papers for the Army Records Society, and published articles on Maiwand, Kandahar and the Eden Commission established to reform the Indian Army (Roberts was a leading member). Tony Heathcote, historian of both Afghan Wars and the Indian Army of the Raj, led me to the translation of Major General Soboleff’s interesting account from a Russian perspective, based largely on newspapers in India and England. Dr Jacqueline Beaumont made suggestions about Roberts and the press. Professors Andre Wessels and Stephen Miller gave advice about later aspects of Roberts’s life. No one could venture into this field without acknowledging the work of Professors Ian Beckett and Edward Spiers, both of whom answered email questions and gave pointers based on their extensive knowledge. Professor Beckett kindly allowed me to present a paper on Roberts at a military history conference. Dr Stephen Badsey gave advice at that conference. Dr David Washbrook and Charles Allen answered questions about Lord Lytton’s viceroyalty. Borrowing on the work of many, my book is also based on primary sources at the National Army Museum, Chelsea, the India Office Library at the British Library, especially the letters of Field Marshal Sir George White, those of Sir Mortimer Durand at the library of the School of Oriental and Asian Studies, Lady Roberts’s letters to the later Lord Minto at the National Library of Scotland and papers dealing with Roberts at the National Archives. The staff of these libraries have been courteous and helpful throughout, particularly at the National Army Museum, where Dr Simon Moody among others has answered innumerable questions and enabled me to lay my hands on many documents.

  Colonel Will Townend, Luci Gosling, Garen Ewing and Szilvia Szabo were most helpful in finding illustrations and giving information about them. I formally acknowledge copyright permission for illustrations from the Royal Artillery Institute, the British Library, the Mary Evans Picture Library and the National Army Museum.

  I owe a particular thanks to the two who kindly read my draft: Peter Boyden and Keith Surridge, who answered many questions, gave encouragement and made wise suggestions; and to John Schofield and Nicholas Griffin who read these pages in a different form as a larger book. These four saved me from many errors of fact and judgement, and numerous faults of style and language. The faults and errors that remain are entirely my own.

  My special thanks go to Brigadier Henry Wilson, the publishers of Pen & Sword and the book’s editor, Bobby Gainher; to my daughter for drawing the maps; and to my wife for her forbearance and understanding in sharing her husband’s waking thoughts with a diminutive Victorian hero and a cast of thousands.

  Afghanistan and North-West Frontier

  Introduction:

  Disaster and Triumph in Afghanistan

  The news could not have been worse. The new Viceroy of India, the Marquess of Ripon, had expected something of the sort. For several days in late July 1880, he and his military advisors at Simla in the foothills of the Himalayas had watched with increasing concern and divided councils the advance of the Afghan Sirdar Ayub Khan and his soldiers towards the Anglo-Indian garrison of Kandahar. The year 1880 was the third in which the Indian Army had been at war in the harsh mountains and green valleys of Afghanistan. It was not a war of Ripon’s making and he was keen to negotiate peace, settle the government of the country and withdraw. The Indian Army and British regiments deployed in Afghanistan were fully stretched. The best were stationed at Kabul and elsewhere, and only a division of less than five thousand men was at Kandahar. Their commander, Major General Primrose, and his chief brigadier, Burrows, were not thought to be men of resolution or firm action and both had occupied desk jobs before the war. Ayub Khan had marched from Herat some months before, hoping to seize the Amirship, thus making himself ruler of Afghanistan. As he neared Kandahar the local ruler or Wali, a British nominee, had led out his force, but they had gone over to Ayub. Primrose had then dispatched Burrows with over 2,000 men. Ayub was known to be in much greater strength and increasing his numbers as he advanced. Local Afghan levies were untrustworthy. Ripon, the Indian Army Commander-in-Chief, Sir Frederick Haines, the Viceroy’s personal military advisor, Colonel Allen Johnson, and other senior soldiers had met to deliberate. On the morning of the 22nd, Ripon had advocated sending instructions to Primrose to risk all and advance with nearly his whole force from Kandahar to reinforce Burrows, leaving only a small garrison in the citadel. The Adjutant General, Greaves, and Colonel Allen Johnson had supported him. Haines however firmly opposed the plan, as had Sir Edwin Johnson, the Military Member, as advisor to the Viceroy senior to Allen Johnson. Ripon, relatively new to India, would not override the objections of these two powerful and experienced figures. Instead, it was agreed that Haines would send a telegram to Primrose giving him full liberty to advance and attack Ayub if he considered himself strong enough. ‘Government consider it of the greatest political importance that [Ayub’s] force should be dispersed and prevented from passing on to Ghazni.’ The vital fortres
s of Ghazni lay on the route to Kabul; its possession would give Ayub the strategic key. Primrose and Burrows must appreciate the importance of swift action. The men on the spot would decide.1

  There was for a moment relief. A letter arrived about that time saying that Ayub’s force was very small. Subsequent despatches showed his numbers were greater than advised, but no further uneasiness was felt. Then came the news of disaster.

  On 27 July, Burrows had advanced his 2,600 men and been confronted by at least 10,000 Afghans, both regular troops and irregulars including numbers of the fanatical ghazis, who would give their lives fighting the unbelievers. The battle against overwhelming odds in intense heat lasted four hours. Vastly outnumbered, Burrows’ men had also been outgunned by superior Afghan artillery. As young Indian soldiers of Jacob’s Rifles and the Bombay Grenadiers huddled together under a withering artillery fire, the enemy’s superior numbers lapped round their flanks. A host of ghazis made use of a sunken ravine to advance close to Burrows’ brigade and then burst out with their knives and swords onto the rear of the Indians and British. The defeat was catastrophic, many of the Indian soldiers simply standing in a huddled mass and being annihilated; others, both British and Indian, breaking up into small bodies and trying to escape. One hundred men of the 66th Regiment made a gallant but forlorn stand in an orchard, the last eleven dying in a sortie. Others plagued by thirst and by villagers who came out to harass and kill the stragglers made their desperate way towards Kandahar.

  ‘Then came the most awful part,’ recorded the Reverend Alfred Cane, accompanying the force. ‘Wounded men lying down & giving all up. Others getting off their ponies or camels & lying down to die. All begging for water.’ Some gathered in vain round an old well which proved to be empty.2

  At last succour came from Kandahar. On receipt of news of the defeat, Brigadier Henry Brooke led out infantry, cavalry and guns, drove off the harrying Afghans and brought the survivors safely back into the mud-walled citadel. The confusion in the citadel was intense, the feeling of defeat overwhelming and a telegram was sent to Bombay rather than Simla, as most of the defeated brigade came from Bombay, describing the defeat as ‘the total annihilation of Gen. Burrows’ Brigade’. It was sent on to London unedited and read by the Marquess of Hartington, the Indian Secretary, to the assembled House of Commons. The ‘gloomy telegram’, as Haines described it to Ripon, was reported, not just round the Empire, but all over the world.

  The Duke of Cambridge, Commander-in-Chief of the British Army, Queen Victoria’s cousin, wrote to Lieutenant General Warre, commanding at Bombay, that the defeat had ‘filled us with grief & anxiety’, wondering why so small a force had been sent with so few British troops. ‘God only knows what effect it may produce all over India & in Afghanistan.’ Warre was angry that a copy of the exaggerated telegram had been posted in the Poona Club and published in the Bombay newspapers. In England some editors demanded that England’s ‘only general’, Sir Garnet Wolseley, victor of the brilliant African campaign against the bloodthirsty Ashanti, be sent out. He alone, they asserted, was certain to redeem British honour and success. Cambridge prepared to despatch British regiments.3

  Ripon had been a radical, an anti-imperialist, opposed to the 2nd Afghan War which had led to this defeat. His appointment as Viceroy was intended by the Prime Minister, Gladstone, to get the Liberal Government out of the Afghan imbroglio in which Beaconsfieldism, the policy of Disraeli, now elevated to the Lords as Beaconsfield, had landed them. He was aware, however, that British prestige everywhere, most of all in India and Afghanistan, demanded that the defeat be avenged, and he acted resolutely. He and the soldiers on his council were equally determined that forces should be sent promptly to Kandahar, both from Quetta, the obvious route, and from Kabul.4

  Lieutenant General Donald Stewart, commanding Anglo-Indian forces at the Afghan capital, had been negotiating with another sirdar, Abdur Rahman, a former Russian pensioner, to assume the Amirship and thus give Britain a chance to conclude the costly war on a favourable note. He agreed with Ripon that Primrose should have taken his whole force. On 31 July, he told his wife he was still uncertain whether a force, fine as it would be, composed of the pick of the troops, should be sent, although two days before he had advised Ripon he was preparing one. ‘I know it would beat Ayub into a cocked hat,’ he told her, ‘but there are objections to sending a force away by itself through a country which is sure to be hostile, and we should rouse animosities, which would bring about further complications, and, perhaps, prevent our withdrawal from Kabul,’5 But Stewart’s second, his friend for nearly three decades, Major General Frederick Roberts,* shared Ripon’s certainty rather than Stewart’s doubts. The day before, 30 July, he had sent a ‘personal and secret’ telegram to the Adjutant General, strongly recommending that a force be sent to Kandahar. Rather ahead of his friend, Roberts told Greaves that ‘Stewart has organized a very complete one ... He proposes sending me in command.’ The 2nd Afghan War had seemed to the troops involved endless and difficult, and Indian soldiers were longing to be home, but Roberts said he would answer for the loyalty and good feeling of the men, promising to tell them that they would go straight back home as soon as Ayub Khan had been beaten.

  In England Ripon had been an outspoken critic of Roberts’s conduct of affairs at Kabul at the end of the previous year, 1879, but he knew a fighting general when he saw one. On 31 July he called his chief military advisors to a conference at Simla, and the following day Haines confirmed arrangements in a telegram: Roberts was to command a force of 10,000 men to march from Kabul to Kandahar. ‘Than this no better arrangement can be made,’ wrote Haines. Stewart had unselfishly but willingly stood down, allowing his good friend Roberts the opportunity to retrieve British fortunes and win life-long fame.6

  That indeed was to be the result. The march was so famous that it made Roberts a national hero almost overnight, the rival of Sir Garnet Wolseley as late Victorian Britain’s leading general, ‘our only t’other general’, as Punch was to dub him. A special medal, the Kandahar Star, was awarded to those who took part in the march, including Roberts’s grey charger, Vonolel, the only horse of thousands of animals which accompanied the march so honoured. Such was the enduring fame of the march that it was debated in memoirs and in The Times at least as late as 1929. Maud Diver, novelist, born in India, a soldier’s daughter, an officer’s wife, dedicated her Kabul to Kandahar published in 1935 ‘To the abiding memory of Field-Marshal Earl Roberts of Kandahar’. In 1944, in the midst of a much greater war, a brief book on the British Army reiterated the fame of Roberts and Kabul to Kandahar. When Britain sent troops to Afghanistan in alliance with the United States in 2001, Prime Minister Tony Blair was seen boarding an aircraft for Kabul with Roberts’s autobiography Forty-One Years in India under his arm, and he told the Daily Telegraph he was much enjoying the book. Roberts was remembered at the start of the twenty-first century, although admittedly faintly, as ‘the only general to have emerged with flying colours from an expedition into Afghanistan in the last 200 years’.7

  Ripon, who had taken sole responsibility for the despatch of Roberts, despite fears that cutting the 10,000 men adrift of a firm base would lead to disaster, proudly wrote to Roberts after the victory:

  In my last letter to you I ventured in anticipation to say that your march would be famous in military history. It has more than fulfilled my expectations, and it seems to me to be one of the most remarkable exploits of the kind upon record. The criticisms upon the despatch of your force from Kabul have been noisy and confident, both in India and in England, but you have utterly refuted them and have confounded the prophets of evil.

  Nothing is as straightforward as it seems. Roberts was a controversial figure at the time, like his rival Wolseley and that most famous of desert generals, Bernard Montgomery, a true media star. Both before and after Kandahar he was to be embroiled in all the major questions of the Indian Army -’forward’ school on the North-West Frontier versus ‘masterly inact
ivity’, recruitment of the martial races, relations with the press, accelerated promotion for his young proteges, a favouritism dubbed by his enemies ‘Bobs and Jobs’, and excessive brutality in dealing with the Afghans. Had he not redeemed his reputation by a brilliant march and victory, he would have ended the 2nd Afghan War under a cloud, perhaps his career in abeyance. If so, the history of the Indian Army of the late nineteenth century would have been completely different. Personal rivalries were strong among senior British officers, and when Roberts set a cracking pace on his march to Kandahar there were sarcastic remarks about a ‘race for the peerage’. His chief rival to redeem the situation, Major General Phayre of the Bombay Army, was widely mistrusted at Simla, otherwise he, not Primrose might have commanded at Kandahar and the whole story would have been different.8

  It was Roberts’s misfortune to be intensely disliked by the historian of the 2nd Afghan War, Colonel Henry Hanna, partly because Roberts refused to promote him, partly because they were on opposite sides in the debate on policy on the North-West Frontier, and partly perhaps because he saw Roberts at his worst at Kabul in 1879, trying to untangle the Gordian knot of Afghan politics, somewhat ineptly it must be admitted. One of Roberts’s leading subordinates, his Chief of Staff in 1879, brigade commander in 1880, fellow advocate of the ‘forward school’, Charles Metcalfe MacGregor, wrote a personal diary savagely critical of Roberts (and just about everybody else), and in 1985 the hitherto suppressed parts of this were published in a learned, but in my view misleading, edition by an American professor. Other modern professional historians, increasingly aware of the role of the press in forming Victorians’ views of their soldier heroes, have emphasized Roberts’s press contacts at the expense of his military exploits, thus endeavouring to cut down to size a man whose deeds, like Wolseley’s, were exaggerated by admirers, press and public in late Victorian England and were hymned by the Empire’s greatest poet, Rudyard Kipling.9