The March to Kandahar- Roberts in Afghanistan Read online

  Roberts’s service in 1857 was drawing to a close. The recapture of Delhi and relief of Lucknow broke the back of the Mutiny, but Sir Hugh Rose still faced a difficult campaign in central India against Tatya Topi and the Rani of Jhansi, the ablest of rebel leaders. The British enjoyed better leadership, the superiority of Enfield rifles against the sepoys’ muskets, reinforcements brought by steamer, the loyalty of the Madras and Bombay armies and of many princes, and useful intelligence from the banking Seth family and other important Indian merchants. Divisions among the mutineers at Delhi were equally vital to their defeat; while clashes between the Hindu sepoys and Muslim jihadis, looting of the Delhi-wallahs who had originally welcomed the rebellion, and the aged emperor’s failure to provide leadership weakened their cause. Had the Mutiny been a truly national uprising, British rule would have been overthrown. The Raj had been shaken to its core and the effects were to be long felt.

  Heat and disease took a heavier toll of casualties than battle and Roberts did not escape. The doctors put him on the sick list for a rest from exhaustion and the affects of the climate, and insisted on leave in England. On 1 April 1858, the sixth anniversary of his arrival in India, his post passed to Garnet Wolseley, although the two officers did not meet for many years. Towards the middle of the month he left Lucknow for Calcutta, but his trials were not quite over: travelling with Captain William Peel who was recovering from a wound, he soon found Peel in a high fever and with strange-looking spots on his face. He had contracted smallpox and died on the 27th. Roberts embarked alone at Calcutta on P & O steamer Nubia. He had won the Victoria Cross and £500 of prize money, and been mentioned in dispatches seven times, several times narrowly escaping death. He had gained a reputation, and not just for courage and luck. Captain Oliver Jones of the Naval Division wrote: ‘[Roberts] is one of those men who to uncommon daring and bravery in the field and unflinching hard-working discharge of duty in camp, adds the charm of cheering and unaffected kindness and hospitality in the tent, and his acquaintance and friendship are high prizes to those who obtain them.’19

  Chapter 2

  Marriage, Friends and Frontier

  Campaigning on the Indian frontier is an experience by itself. Neither the landscape nor the people find their counterparts in any other portion of the globe.

  Winston Churchill, My Early Life

  Luck, the attribute Napoleon always demanded in his generals. The Indian subcontinent – and the Frontier in particular – is littered with half-forgotten graveyards filled with the bones of the unlucky, their lives extinguished before they had a chance to shine.

  Charles Allen, Soldier Sahibs

  The Mutiny had a profound influence on Roberts’s thinking and his future. For most of his life his closest friends were those who had served with him in 1857. With many others he knew that British rule in India hung by a thread, and in his memoirs forty years later he included a special chapter on how to avoid a second Mutiny. Even without Nicholson’s teaching, he must have learnt that harsh and determined action paid rewards. Blowing mutinous sepoys from the mouths of cannon and hanging traitors proved decisive in the Punjab: securing Sikh loyalty was as essential as Gurkha recruitment to British victory. While British vengeance in the mutiny is now thought by historians to have been excessive – more perceptive Englishmen like Governor-General Canning and the journalist W.H. Russell saw it as such at the time – the threat to their rule and to British womanhood had been deemed so great that at home as well as in India Englishmen applauded brutal methods. But Roberts had another side. Early in his career, he records, he had hated watching, for the only time in his career, a flogging parade in which two soldiers were punished. ‘They were fine, handsome young Horse Artillerymen, and it was hateful to see them thus treated. Besides, one felt it was productive of harm rather than good, for it tended to destroy the men’s self-respect.’ Roberts relates how they had committed the same crime again, but when about to be punished in the same way with a further fifty lashes, the Battery Major promised to remit the flogging if they gave their word to behave in the future. They appreciated the act of clemency and they kept their word. Roberts followed their careers in which their conduct was uniformly satisfactory, and they became good, steady soldiers.1 His mercy extended further, at a time when few granted it. Captain Oliver Jones tells how as Assistant Quartermaster General Roberts was ordered by Brigadier Hope Grant to see about burning part of a town that had been stormed.

  An old, infirm man, who was sitting at the door of a house, entreated him to spare it saying ‘that yesterday morning he was the happy father of five sons; three of them lie there, pointing to three corpses; where the other two are God only knows; that he was old, and a cripple, and that if his house was burned he would have nothing left but to lie down and die.’ Roberts, who is as good as he is brave, gave directions for sparing the old man’s house; and I hope the two missing sons have escaped, and have returned to comfort his few remaining days.2

  En route to Ireland Roberts bought new clothes in London before proceeding to Waterford on leave, writing to his sister, ‘Major Fred Roberts V.C. must cut a dash you know, Harriet.’ He was still a captain, but keen on promotion. He had written the previous year: ‘your brother Fred, Harriet darling, has no end of ambition ... It will be doubly sweet going home when all is over. You must look out for some nice girl with “blue eyes and yellow hair” ... for me, Harriet dearest, who will console me for having to return to the gorgeous East.’3

  The girl with ‘blue eyes and yellow hair’ whom Roberts wooed at Waterford in Ireland was Nora Henrietta Bews, the tenth and youngest child of John Bews, retired Black Watch officer. The town at that time was a regimental headquarters, and the playing of the band made the drill ground a fashionable promenade for chaperoned young men and women. In such circumstances, Roberts first met his future wife, who was then living with a married sister not far from the home of Roberts’s parents. They were married at Waterford Church on 17 May 1859; she was twenty, he was twenty-six, and they were to be together for fifty-five years. Their honeymoon was in Scotland. Among Nora’s proud early moments of her marriage was when she was called to Buckingham Palace on 18 June where Roberts received his VC. Three weeks later they sailed to India together. If he took three months’ extension of leave, he would lose his post in the Quartermaster General’s department, so he and Nora agreed that they would return, despite this being the hottest time of the year. It was not exceptional for Victorian soldiers’ wives to sacrifice their wishes and comfort to their husbands’ careers, but in supporting and advancing her Fred, Nora Roberts was to be exceptional. From the start of their marriage she was conscious of her husband’s prospects, and prepared to subordinate her own desires to his ambition. Almost their first visits in India were to the battlegrounds of the Indian Mutiny where Roberts had fought, Nora showing a keen interest. Roberts had hoped to accompany Hope Grant on the Anglo-French China expedition launched by Palmerston when Chinese officials seized the Arrow, a ship technically British because it was based on Hong Kong. In deference to Roberts’s new bride, Colin Campbell, now Commander-in-Chief as Lord Clyde, kept him back from the expedition and told Mrs Roberts that he had earned her gratitude by not sending her husband away as he was a newly married man. The outspoken future Lady Roberts said she could not be grateful as she felt she was ruining his career. ‘Well, I’ll be hanged if I can understand you women!’ exclaimed the astonished Campbell. ‘I have done the very thing I thought you would like, and have only succeeded in making you angry.’4

  Although later the pain of childbearing, the loss of children in infancy, the climate of India, and supporting her husband through thick and thin took the flush of youth from her cheeks, early photographs of Nora Roberts show a comely enough young woman. In the winter of 1862-3, Owen Burne on the Viceroy’s staff wrote of her as ‘a charming bride ... not only handsome, but full of goodness and brightness’. He described Roberts as ‘a slim, active fellow, full of life, quick of thought, and a
n exceptional organizer’5

  In his autobiography Forty-One Years in India Roberts recounts how some of the early bloom of youth may first have gone from his young bride’s cheeks. In October 1866, he took her from Calcutta to Allahabad, her first experience of a hot season in the plains. Cholera was rife and the garrison had to be sent away into camps, all to be visited by Roberts and other staff officers once or twice daily. People seen alive and well one day were dead and buried the next, and in the midst the officers:

  had constantly to get up entertainments, penny readings and the like to amuse the men and keep their minds occupied. My wife usually accompanied me to the cholera camps, preferring to do this rather than be left alone at home, on one occasion just got into a carriage after going round a hospital when a young officer ran after us to tell me a corporal in whom I was much interested was dead. The poor fellow’s face was blue, and he had the cholera panic. ‘He will be dead the next,’ I said to my wife. I had no sooner reached home than I received a report of his having been seized.

  In an age of evangelism – although less encouraged after the Mutiny than before – Roberts’s Christian faith sustained him, strengthened by the example of the garrison chaplain, later Bishop of Lahore. The Revd Matthews and his wife, only lately come to India, never wearied, Roberts wrote, in doing all that was possible for the soldiers. Three of the Roberts’s six children did not survive infancy. Their first, a baby girl, died at Simla within one week of her first birthday – ‘our first great sorrow’. In the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century it was estimated only one white child in five born in India lived to the age of six.6

  Roberts and his new bride had returned to India at a time of momentous change. Widespread and savage reprisals by the British were ended, fortunately, by the wisdom of Governor-General Canning – damned in the eyes of the diehards as ‘Clemency Canning’ – and the strength of men like Sir John Lawrence. An amnesty was declared, to extend to 1 January 1859, for rebels who surrendered, except the leaders and those involved in the worst crimes. Tatya Topi, held responsible for the tragic events at Cawnpore, was betrayed by the Rajah of Narwar and hanged; Nana Sahib disappeared; the Rani of Jhansi was killed in battle. After a trial of doubtful legality, the Emperor Bahadur Shah was exiled to Rangoon where he died in 1862.

  Among those who benefited from the amnesty was Roberts’s half-brother, John Roberts, known as Chote Sahib, a devout Muslim who wore Indian dress having adopted Indian habits and had worked in the state of Oudh manufacturing gun-carriages, which were used against the British in the Mutiny. In 1860 his father Abraham Roberts wrote an angry letter to John, who had asked him for money, but did not cut him out of his will, confirming that his part in the Mutiny was at most peripheral. John Roberts continued to draw an annual pension from the old General’s estate until his own death in 1892.7

  On 2 August 1858, Queen Victoria signed the Government of India Act abolishing East India Company rule, replacing the President of the Company’s Board of Control with a Secretary of State for India who sat in the cabinet and was advised by a Council of India. The Governor-General continued to rule, aided by an Executive Council, its members now holding ‘portfolios’ of responsibility. To him was added the honorific title Viceroy as the personal representative of the Crown. The Indian government’s finances, running at a deficit of £7 million per annum, were reorganized: reforms included a uniform tariff of 10 per cent, a convertible paper currency and additions to the salt duty. By 1864 the deficit disappeared. One of the poor Indian’s complaints was that improved farm production was taken by the zamindars, the tax collectors, and in 1859 an attempt was made to remedy this with the Bengal Rent Act, which applied to the whole of north-west India as well as Bengal itself. In an effort to keep in touch with Indian opinion, aristocratic Indians were added to the existing Legislative Council, set up in 1853. The British wooed by conciliation and rewarded the princes and landed classes. The Queen’s Proclamation of 1 November 1858 promised to respect the ‘rights, dignity and honour of the native princes’. Instead of being seen as anachronistic, they became an integral part of the British Empire, props of imperialism. The thrusting, reforming style of Bentinck and Dalhousie was abandoned for respect for ‘ancient rights and customs’. Missionary proselytizing was replaced by religious toleration, all faiths alike enjoying ‘the equal and impartial protection of the law’. India was thought to be slow in responding to change – if it was not transformed quickly, British trusteeship might be expected to continue almost indefinitely. This vision of a changeless India of princes, peasants, castes and temples led the British rulers to neglect to their cost the new rising westernized middle class. India with its teeming millions was run by an elite of 1,000 senior men of the Indian Civil Service (ICS), renowned for being impartial, high-minded, conscientious and incorruptible. District officers were in charge of a million people and 4,000 square miles. In their districts they were omnipotent, responsible for everything from administering justice to sanitary conditions, dealing with the plague of snakes that killed 10,000 people in Bengal in 1878 and with that recurrent disaster, famine.

  While some aspects of Indian life remained, it seemed timeless. British engineers, amongst whom the Scots took the lead, transformed communications. The railway system planned in 1853 was virtually complete by 1900, giving India the best system in Asia. Irrigation, begun by repairing Mogul canals, pushed forward by Dalhousie and continued under succeeding viceroys, reached its apogee in the Punjab and Sind. By 1947 one-fifth of the cultivable area was under irrigation and so immune from monsoon fluctuations. Steamships via the Suez Canal shortened the journey to England, and they and new harbours encouraged the rise of industries: jute and cotton, coal and iron. They also brought Englishmen’s wives and enabled them to travel home more frequently; relations with Indians, once close, changed to stand-offishness and a belief in racial and moral superiority. The work of the ICS became more bureaucratic, less in touch with the people, the British creating the mountain of paperwork by which India is still governed.8

  The key reform was reorganization of the Army. The Queen’s proclamation of November 1858 converted former Company troops into servants of the Crown. European soldiers were to join the Queen’s regiments, while sepoys were to form the Indian Army under the Crown. Many British soldiers objected that they should not be switched from one to another without prior consultation, and asserted that they should have been discharged and offered a bounty to re-enlist. During May and June 1859, rumours of discontent spread and became so serious that the Government permitted NCOs and men to take their discharge and return to Britain at government expense. Re-enlistment was not permitted. As the soldiers eagerly claimed their discharge, the protests known as the ‘White Mutiny’ petered out and died. The only serious incident, the refusal of the 5th European Regiment at Barrackpore ‘to do any duty’ was promptly crushed without bloodshed by the despatch of 500 men. Of the 15,000 men of the old Company regiments, 10,116 claimed their discharges and returned to Britain. Henceforth, British regiments stationed in India would belong to the British Army. Their strength was 60,000, roughly three times that pre-Mutiny.

  The newly created Indian Army remained separated in the three forces of Bengal, Bombay and Madras, each with its own Commander-in-Chief and its own traditions; their distinctness had prevented the spread of the Mutiny from Bengal. This division and potential rivalry was reflected at the top – the Commander-in-Chief was an ‘extraordinary member’ of the Viceroy’s Council, but his proposals could be disputed by the Military Member, a senior officer on the Council, who advised the Governor-General. The latter’s military and political secretaries, usually serving officers, also had an influence. Of the Bengal Army, 120,000 out of 128,000 sepoys had mutinied and most had been scattered or killed. Only eleven loyal regiments and some fragments remained. The proportion of Indian troops was reduced to about double the English. Throughout the sub-continent Indian troops were to total about 190,000:45,000 in each of Bom
bay and Madras, which had remained loyal, and 100,000 in Bengal. Indian artillery was transferred to British hands, except for a few mountain batteries. Everywhere two Indian battalions were brigaded with one European so that no important station would be without its European contingent. Regiments were either ‘class’ regiments (Sikhs or Gurkhas), or were divided into companies of different ‘class’ to lessen the threat of mutiny. The number of Gurkhas, Sikhs and Punjabis was increased, and these ‘martial races’ of the north came to predominate.9

  When Roberts returned to India in mid-1859, he served under Sir Robert Napier, then a brigadier general at Gwalior. He was known to successive commanders-in-chief: Campbell (Lord Clyde), Sir Hugh Rose (Lord Strathnairn) and Sir William Mansfield. His first major task on return was to organize logistics for Lord Canning’s and Lord Clyde’s tour of Oudh, Punjab and the northern provinces to heal the wounds of the Mutiny. On Clyde’s retirement he became private secretary to Rose and he was to remain in the Quartermaster General’s department, a shrewd career move, suggested by his father because this was in effect the operational staff of the Army. He was to be at the centre of planning throughout the 1860s and 1870s, and able to catch the eye of men in power.10

  In 1863 he was promoted Assistant Quartermaster General and at the end of the year saw active service on the North-West Frontier against the Bunerwals. At one point Roberts and six other British officers found themselves surrounded by hundreds of potentially hostile Buner warriors, and could easily have been murdered, had it not been for the intervention of an old chief with one arm and a grey beard who protected them, saying that his word had been pledged.11 In 1867 an expedition to Abyssinia was mounted from India under Lieutenant General Sir Robert Napier, now Commander-in-Chief at Bombay, including a brigade from Bengal under Roberts’s good friend Donald Stewart. The Commander-in-Chief, Mansfield, recommended Stewart take as his quartermaster, Roberts, ‘eminently qualified for the appointment by his activity and well-known military qualities, as well as by his experience in the Quartermaster General’s Department in peace and war for nearly ten years’. Napier was to rescue sixty British and other European captives held by ‘mad’ King Tewodros (‘Theodore’) of Abyssinia, in the prisons of his capital, Magdala, diplomacy having failed.