The March to Kandahar- Roberts in Afghanistan Read online

  This is not an account of the now mostly forgotten 2nd Afghan War, but of the part in it played by the future Field Marshal Earl Roberts. It is always difficult to catch the drama and excitement of events which have passed from popular memory, or to judge the importance of historical characters whose ideas and beliefs are so unlike our own, and in many cases antipathetic to them. Roberts was an unabashed imperialist who believed, with Curzon, that British greatness depended on holding the Indian Empire. He accepted the racial and class prejudices of his age, and concealed the mixed origins of his family, which today would carry no stigma. He married a forceful woman whose role in furthering his career had to be concealed at a time when women’s aspirations were frustrated or sublimated into acceptable channels; today she would be a Virago heroine. This book is based largely on research for a biography of Roberts which I hope one day to publish. His fame firstly rested on the special achievement of Kabul to Kandahar. Subsequently he wielded great influence as a famous general, as an imperial symbol and as a man who quickly came to understand the importance of the press. This influence was not sufficient for him to convert a Liberal Government and a British people to accept compulsory military service in the years before 1914, but the outbreak of the First World War was held by Roberts’s many admirers to vindicate his position.

  The Mutiny

  * Local rank of Lieutenant General.

  Chapter 1

  Background:

  Afghanistan and Roberts

  We have men, and we have rocks in plenty, but we have nothing else.

  Amir Dost Mohammed of Kabul

  The country ...is a very wild one... the houses are towers built as little Fortifications ...The people are robbers and cut-throats, and are only kept in awe by their great fear of our reprisals.

  Major George White

  There was something of immense strength, talent and resolution in his whole frame and manner, and a power of ruling men on high occasions which no one could escape noticing. His imperial air never left him.

  Description of Brigadier John Nicholson

  You have no idea what nasty fighting we have. No quarter is given on either side. We bayonet all their wounded, and they cut up ours with their tulwars [swords].

  Lieutenant Thomas Cadell writing from Delhi, 1857

  It was Ahmed Shah who had welded Afghanistan out of a host of petty states, some of them the nominal vassals of the Great Mogul in Delhi, others owning a vague allegiance to the Shah of Persia. A soldier of genius, he styled himself ‘Durr-i-Durran’, the pearl of the age, and renamed his tribe the Durani. Ahmed’s boundaries ranged beyond those of modern Afghanistan, over Scinde, Baluchistan, Kashmir and Peshawar. To north and east his empire was bounded by immense mountain ranges, to south and west by vast sandy deserts, a country for the most part wild and forbidding, of rock-strewn passes and lonely valleys. Savage was the landscape and fierce could be the people, ‘a nation of tigers’ when invaded, which was often. For a time Ahmed Shah’s genius held together his kingdom and an army which was based on a feudal levy, the Duranis, Ahmed Shah’s own tribe, for example, contributing a horseman for each parcel of land requiring a single plough. The tribal system was strong, each one led by a sirdar, equivalent to a European duke or count. The support of the sirdars was vital to a successful Amir. A weak one could fall to their intrigue and rivalry.

  In 1773 Ahmed Shah died. His son Timur who succeeded had a famous name but lacked his father’s genius, and outlying provinces seethed with revolt. Scinde was lost. When he died he left behind twenty-three sons, who entered with ferocious zest upon a struggle for the succession. A period of intrigue and struggle followed. Eventually Dost Mohammed emerged as ruler over a much-reduced kingdom; his brothers had Kandahar, the outer territories were independent, and the Sikhs held Peshawar and Kashmir. His main rival, Shah Sujah, went into exile under British protection in India.

  Afghanistan occupied an unenviable position between rival great powers: Persia to the east, Ranjit Singh and the Sikhs in the Punjab to the south, the British successors of the Moguls in Delhi and Russia to the north. To the British the Russians seemed an ever-growing threat as they advanced eastward. The Indian government endeavoured to prevent a possible war between Dost Mohammed and Ranjit Singh, leader of the Sikhs, for Peshawar. Russia, meanwhile, took advantage of the tense situation to fish in troubled waters. At the very end of 1837, Captain Vitkievitch, a young Cossack officer from the staff of the Governor of Orenburg, arrived in Kabul with messages of goodwill from the Tsar to Dost Mohammed. In spring 1838, Shah Mohammed of Persia, at the urgings of Count Ivan Simonich, laid siege to Herat, one of the keys to western Afghanistan. He had the assistance of a Polish officer and a battalion of Russian deserters, but an attempt to storm the city walls on 24 June was badly mauled. British diplomatic pressure caused the Tsar’s government to repudiate Simonich and recall Vitkievitch to St Petersburg. By then, however, the Governor-General of India, Lord Auckland, had taken a fateful step. He launched the Army of the Indus of 9,500 men with a vast baggage train and 38,000 camp followers to restore British influence by deposing Dost Mohammed and replacing him with Shah Sujah as Amir, which led to the 1st Afghan War of 1838-1842.

  After initial success and the occupation of Kabul, a series of incredible blunders by the British commander Elphinstone and the political agent Macnaghten undid all that had been achieved. Macnaghten was murdered at a conference with the Afghans and on 2 January 1842, Elphinstone signed a treaty of evacuation. The Anglo-Indian army attempted to return to India through the snowy passes to Jalalabad; everywhere Afghans lay in ambush and every hut poured forth its inhabitants to slay and plunder; at Gandamak the last remnant of the 44th Regiment made its final stand, Captain Souter wrapping the regimental standard round his waist; the bones of those killed remained a grisly reminder of Afghan prowess. A week after the army left Kabul the sole survivor, Dr Brydon, arrived on a sorely wounded pony, narrowly escaping the knives and treachery which had claimed nearly all the remainder; a handful of prisoners remained in Afghan captivity. The British appearance of invincibility was destroyed. Auckland resigned, and his martial successor as Governor-General, Ellenborough, sent invading columns to avenge the defeat, destroying villages, slaughtering stock, burning crops, razing Ghazni to the ground, freeing the few prisoners and demolishing the bazaar at Kabul. The Afghans remembered the British invasion with deep hostility. It was an inauspicious warning in the Great Game, the struggle between Britain and Russia to secure dominance in central Asia. Shah Sujah, unable to sustain his rule without British support, was murdered by a nephew in April 1842 and Dost Mohammed returned. He reasserted his authority, ruling until 1863, but always having to deal with potential rivals. At the age of eighty he had just recovered the city of Herat from one of these, when he died. His ablest son, Sher Ali, succeeded, but three brothers rose successively in revolt and threw the country into disorder. By 1868 Sher Ali had secured his rule and recognition by the Indian government.

  By this time, too, the Russian advance into Asia had been revived. In 1844, Russia had agreed with Britain that the central Asian Khanates would be a neutral zone between the two empires, enabling Britain to reach out diplomatically to Dost Mohammed. Russia’s ambitions lay south-west towards Constantinople and the Mediterranean, but the Crimean War checked that advance. At the same time the understanding over the Khanates was broken when Russia began her Asian advance again; the Muslim princedoms, poor and depopulated, were too weak to resist, and in 1868 Bokhara became Russia’s subordinate and ally. Further Russian strides in the late 1860s and 1870s would lead again to British fears of Russian encroachment and intervention in Afghanistan.

  Despite the defeat of the 1st Afghan War, British India continued to expand. The conquest of Sind to the north-west in 1843 and the annexation of the Punjab in 1849 after two fierce wars with the Sikhs added 80,000 square miles to Britain’s dominions and advanced their borders to the mountains of Afghanistan and Kashmir.1

  E
xpansion was paralleled by reform, carried out in a highhanded and autocratic manner. After 1818, the old policy of allowing Indian ways to continue was changed under the influence of Radicals and Evangelicals to one of westernization. Bentinck, Governor-General from 1828 to 1835, introduced Western learning and education in the English language, English replacing Persian as the official state language and in the higher law courts and Western medicine in the teaching of the Calcutta Medical College; the law was codified; sati, the burning of widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands, and thuggee, ritual murder and robbery in the name of the goddess Kali, were suppressed; missionaries were encouraged to proselytize.

  Dalhousie, most ambitious, energetic and westernizing of British Governors-General, ruled India from 1848 to 1856, believing profoundly in Western moral superiority. He reformed many aspects of Indian life, as he saw it, for the good of the people he governed. In the Punjab, administered by the young men of the famous Punjab school under the direction of John and Henry Lawrence, roads, bridges, schools and courthouses sprang up. In time, irrigation made it prosperous. Under the controversial policy of ‘lapse’, Indian princedoms which lacked a male heir were annexed. So too were those like the great Muslim state of Oudh, allegedly corrupt and ill governed. Dalhousie told the aged Mogul Emperor Bahadur Shah that his title would lapse at his death. The continued introduction of Western education and the preaching of Christian ministers seemed to attack Hindu orthodoxy. The arrogance and certainty of the British and the activities of the evangelical missionaries aroused Indian fears that their way of life would be destroyed or remade in a Western image. White officers and bureaucrats segregated themselves from their former social equals among the Indians.

  Frederick Roberts, future hero of the 2nd Afghan War, arrived in 1852 to a land in which Western innovations threatened traditional ways, or brought progress, depending upon one’s viewpoint. Dalhousie introduced the civil engineer to India -military engineers had already been present – created a Public Works Department; introduced the telegraph speeding communications, some 4,000 miles of telegraph lines being built; and completed the Grand Trunk Road from Calcutta to Peshawar. But his greatest innovation was the railway. Railways would bring famine relief, develop trade and profitable crops, and improve the condition of the people. In April 1853, the first train of fourteen carriages with 400 guests set off on the Great Indian Peninsula Railway from Bombay to loud applause and a field-gun salute. In a society as complex and traditional as India, these striking changes spread dismay and fear.2

  Roberts’s birth and family background placed him firmly in early nineteenth-century British India. He was born at Cawnpore, on 30 September 1832, the son of General Abraham Roberts, a long-serving officer of the East India Company who came from an established family of Huguenot descent in County Waterford, Ireland. Between them, Abraham Roberts and his son Frederick served nearly a century in the armies of India, from 1805 to 1893. Abraham Roberts was not wealthy, although he enjoyed a wide range of contacts in the Indian Army. The difference between father and son illustrates how British attitudes changed in India. Abraham Roberts’s first three children were all born to an Indian woman, either wife or mistress. William became a colonel in the army of the native ruler of Oudh. His brother John, a devout Muslim known as Chote Sahib, manufactured gun-carriages there. Eleven years after William’s birth Abraham Roberts married Frances Isabella Ricketts. She died after seven years of marriage, and Frederick Roberts’s mother was Abraham’s second English wife, Isabella, widow of Major Hamilton Maxwell. According to Geoffrey Moorhouse, Isabella’s mother was a Rajput. There were thus mixed relations on both sides, not unusual for those days. Roberts said nothing of these later in his autobiography – in race-obsessed late Victorian India, being dubbed a Eurasian could damn a man’s career. Isabella Roberts had two children from her first marriage. Frederick Roberts was the eldest child of the new marriage, with two others rapidly following. In contrast to his father, Frederick was to be married to one woman, an archetypal memsahib, for fifty-five years.3

  Isabella Roberts and her children were settled in 1834 into a modest establishment at Clifton in Bristol while her husband fought on the frontiers of British India and narrowly avoided the disasters of the 1st Afghan War. Abraham served on the Quartermaster General’s staff and then commanded the Bengal European Regiment in the East India Company’s army. He saw much action, and his greatest feat was to lead his brigade in the storming of Ghazni on 23 July 1839. Frederick was nearly seven at the time. Many years later he told his own family of the children crowding round their mother to hear father’s letters read, and of how stories of Afghans and fighting were woven into his early memories. Throughout his life close family was a constant theme. Life for young children born in India in the nineteenth century was harsh, Victorian families in India knew separation and early death; Roberts himself lost brothers and sisters in infancy, and three of his six children. There is no reason to doubt the genuine affection of the young Frederick for his mother and father. He was small and delicate, nearly died from an attack of brain fever (presumably meningitis), and although he survived, the illness deprived him of the sight of his right eye. He was never more than 5’ 4” and would have failed a physical examination for today’s army. His mother was determined to provide the best education, sending him to a small school at Hampton and then at the age of thirteen to Eton. His father knew the low pay and uncertain prospects of an army career, and wrote, ‘If Freddy is clever I hope he will not think of the army.’ His mother wanted him to go to Oxford or Cambridge and enter the Church. Roberts by contrast wrote later: T had quite made up my mind to be a soldier, I had never thought of any other profession.’ He left Eton after a year and was sent to Sandhurst at the age of fourteen, coming second in the entrance examination. Cost was to change things and his father decided he must enter, not the Queen’s Army, but that of the East India Company. The course for East India Company cadets at Addiscombe was briefer and cheaper than that at Sandhurst, officers in the Company’s army could live off their pay and a commission in the Indian service would allow young Fred to be self-supporting within a year. In a dutiful letter to his father of October 1848, he admitted the disadvantages of a soldier’s career, but told his father that he would not like the Church or Law. He finished respectfully: ‘If you and Mamma wish me to go to Addiscombe, I will go there willingly, and after all the advantages you have given me by the best education I should be ashamed of myself were I not to get the Engineers.’4

  Roberts left Sandhurst for Stoton’s Preparatory Military Academy at Wimbledon, and then, once a space was available, on 1 February 1850, he entered Addiscombe near Croydon, the East India Company’s academy. After two years of a Spartan regime he passed out ninth of a class of forty, with marks insufficient to gain a place as an engineer, but good enough to be a gunner, received £50 and a gold watch from his proud father, and was commissioned on 12 December 1851 in the Bengal Artillery. He was poor, ambitious, affected a dapper appearance and loathed cats; his reports were good, but not outstanding. He embarked at Southampton for Calcutta in February 1852. As he later noted, in those days leave could only be taken by a young officer after ten years spent in India. ‘Small wonder, then, that I felt that I were bidding England farewell for ever.’ Of the forty young men commissioned from Addiscombe, only a handful survived fever and battle to the age of thirty5

  He landed in April 1852, and after four months of unspeakably dull service at Dum Dum, persuaded his father to take him as an ADC and battery officer at Peshawar on the North-West Frontier. Despite the beginning of transformation wrought by Dalhousie, the journey to Peshawar was long and slow, by barge, by dak-tonga, a horse-drawn mail vehicle, and finally in a palanquin. The three months it took would be reduced to a couple of days by the building of the railways.

  In Peshawar he held a privileged position as ADC to his father who commanded a division, but entered into garrison life and became popular as a vigorous rider and spor
tsman. Throughout his life he remained an outstanding horseman. After two years’ service, he was accepted into the elite Bengal Horse Artillery, whose jacket was the coveted prize of many young officers. On duty with the Peshawar Mountain Train raised in 1853 he saw action on the North-West Frontier between Peshawar and Kohat against border tribes in three successive campaigns, in 1854 and twice in 1855. Roberts served thirteen months as a lieutenant in the Mountain Train, and the introduction to the North-West Frontier was the beginning of a long and adventurous association. On the Frontier infantry adopted loose, flexible formations and took the inconspicuous khaki for their dress; mountain guns broken down into small loads could be carried by pack mules. Frontier troops enjoyed greater mobility, dispensing with cumbersome supply trains, and camps were fortified against snipers.6

  Equally important was the offer from the Quartermaster General, Colonel Becher, an Anglo-Irishman, to serve as his deputy. To secure the position he had to learn Hindustani. Roberts always attributed his rapid rise in the Army to his position in the Quartermaster General’s Department. The QMG’s department did not deal only with boots and socks in India, but was the operational staff of the East India Company’s army.7 At the start of 1857 Roberts was at Peshawar for the colourful visit of the Afghan Amir, Dost Mahomed, to sign a treaty of friendship between Afghanistan and British India.

  The year 1857 was a fateful one for both Roberts and British India, being the year of the sepoy mutiny. British power rested on the loyalty of their Indian soldiers – sepoys (foot soldiers) and sowars (cavalry troopers) – trained and equipped as Europeans. Of the army of 278,000 which held India, all but 45,500 were Indians. The westernizing of Governors-General like Bentinck and Dalhousie, the suppression of traditional customs, the arrogance and certainty of the British aroused Indian fears that their way of life was threatened. When Dalhousie’s successor Canning arrived in 1856, rumours abounded among sepoy battalions that he had been sent by Queen Victoria to convert all her Indian subjects to Christianity. The sepoys of the Bengal army were more susceptible to such stories than those on the frontier, whose officers lived alongside their men and endured a Spartan, active life. Bengal officers were too often aloof and treated their men, including native officers, with contempt. The high-caste Brahmin sepoys were sensitive to any threat to distinctions of caste, diet and religion. The immediate cause of the revolt was the adoption of the new Lee-Enfield rifle: its paper cartridge, ripped open with the teeth before loading, was rumoured to be greased with animal fat, both from cows, sacred to Hindus, and swine, anathema to Muslims. The high-caste sepoys were convinced they would be defiled. The authorities were caught by surprise with British forces, denuded for the recent Crimean War, outnumbered eight to one. In May 1857, clumsy attempts to introduce the new rounds at Meerut, a garrison in northern India between the Ganges and the Jumna near the Grand Trunk Road, lit the touchpaper of revolt. On 9 May, Colonel Carmichael-Smyth, the tactless and short-tempered commander of the 3rd Bengal Light Cavalry, held a punishment parade for eighty-five of his sowars before the entire garrison. They had refused an order to take the cartridges. The men’s sentences to ten years’ imprisonment with hard labour were read out, and iron fetters were hammered onto their feet. The evening of the next day, a Sunday, as some Englishmen and their wives were preparing to attend Evensong, mutiny broke out among the native regiments and the badmashes (‘bad hats’) of the bazaar. Scenes of arson, looting and murder followed, among the victims being women and children. The gaols were broken open and prisoners released, including the eighty-five whose fetters were knocked off. The mutineers left Meerut during the dark hours of that night and made their way to the old Mogul capital, Delhi. A feeble attempt to pursue them was unsuccessful. At Delhi the same scenes of arson, murder and looting occurred. By evening the British survivors had fled and the mutineers had secured the Mogul Emperor, Bahadur Shah II, aged eighty-two, who was powerless but a figurehead of resistance.8