The March to Kandahar- Roberts in Afghanistan Page 6
At the same time as a new Viceroy there was a new Commander-in-Chief, General Sir Frederick Haines, ‘a good honest fellow... but not of the modern school’. In his fifty-sixth year, Haines had served against the Sikhs and in the Crimea, but in the Mutiny was at Madras and saw no action. He had risen largely through staff jobs. A cautious man, standing on seniority, he shared the views of the Duke of Cambridge, Commander-in-Chief at Whitehall, suspicious of Wolseley and the reformers. He was the antithesis of the younger, ambitious, less conventional Roberts, but at first pleased with his services, writing to Cambridge: ‘He [Roberts] is thoroughly master of his work, and in every way acceptable to me.’6 Differences between the two subsequently emerged over military policy on the North-West Frontier and in Afghanistan.
Lytton proposed that British India west of the Indus, including Sind, should form a new province under a Chief Commissioner, responsible directly to the Government of India and charged also with relations with Kabul; as part of the plan the Punjab and Sind Frontier Forces would be amalgamated. For the post Lytton wanted the victor of the famous Ashanti campaign in Africa, General Sir Garnet Wolseley, then Adjutant General in London. This was hardly surprising, for Lytton had brought to India as his Military Secretary and then Political Secretary the most brilliant of Wolseley’s ‘Ashanti ring’: Colonel Sir George Pomeroy Colley, former professor of military administration and law at the Staff College, and the man who had organized Wolseley’s transport in his African campaign. Wolseley accepted and then withdrew, the efforts of Lytton and Colley to prepare the way for him frustrated by an implacable alliance of the Duke of Cambridge, Army conservatives including Haines, and Indian bureaucrats. ‘The Ring’ in the person of Colley still inspired Lytton’s policy: Colley’s ‘Memorandum on the Military Aspects of the Central Asian Question’ remained with modifications the essential foundation of Lytton’s war programme.7
Lytton then offered the post to Roberts who accepted in early 1878. Lytton proposed he take command of the Punjab Frontier Force in order to familiarize himself with the geography and problems of the frontier. Although this would mean coming down in rank from Major General to Brigadier General, Roberts accepted, supported by his wife, and took up his new command in March 1878, embarking immediately upon an extended tour of all stations and their garrisons, returning to Simla in May, when Lytton conferred with him regarding details of the Commissionership.8
From a contemporary English perspective, the 2nd Afghan War had its origins in Disraeli’s foreign policy, a robust defence of British interests overseas, or dangerous adventurism, depending upon your politics. The ‘Forward School’ viewed it as stemming from the failure of the Liberal Viceroy Northbrook to grasp the hand of friendship advanced by Sher Ali, which was subsequently withdrawn and held out towards Russia. From the point of view of the Indian government, it was a consequence of Russia’s relentless advance across the Asian wastes. Following her defeat in the Crimean War, Russia had pacified the Caucasus with great brutality, and then advanced steadily into Asia in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Tashkent in 1865, Khojent in 1866, Bokhara in 1867, Samarkand in 1868, Khiva in 1873 and Khokand in 1875 had fallen successively to Russian force. Russian Army reforms emphasized the increased employment of irregular cavalry and techniques of insurrectionary warfare, foreshadowing twentieth-century ‘wars of liberation’. Possible Russian ascendancy among the Afghans, border raids on the North-West Frontier, an Afghan attack supported by Russian detachments, and arms and money, followed by penetration into the Punjab – this was the danger to British India. Russian encroachment was regarded with alarm and some dismay in India. Roberts himself wrote: ‘Thus, in a little more than twenty years, Russia had made a stride of 600 miles towards India, leaving but 400 miles between her outposts and those of Great Britain.’9
From the point of view of Frederick Roberts, Quartermaster General and now commander-designate of the Punjab Frontier Force, the war was a logical continuation of family business. His father had served in the 1st Afghan War (1838-1842), his wise advice had been disregarded and disaster had followed: the destruction of a British army in the snowy retreat from Kabul. Roberts long remembered his father’s letters, written from the Afghan campaign and read to him as a small boy, and he shared a lively and intelligent concern for India’s North-West Frontier with other imperial soldiers and administrators. The Indian government could adopt either of two possible approaches to Russia and the Asian buffer states like Afghanistan: the appeasementlike policy of ‘masterly inactivity’ officially enunciated by Sir John Lawrence as Viceroy in 1868, refusing to intervene in Afghan wars of succession, and largely applied by his successors Mayo and Northbrook; or the ‘forward policy’, which argued that disengagement deprived India of agents in these states who could provide intelligence of Russian movements and of possible help in the form of native forces, and in addition threw the rulers of these states of necessity into the arms of Russia. Salisbury, taking over the India Office in Disraeli’s government, found no agents, secret or otherwise, at Herat or Kabul providing vital information. Northbrook, then Viceroy, had refused to send them. Roberts shared an advocacy of the ‘forward school’ with two influential writers he knew well: Sir Henry Rawlinson and Colonel Charles MacGregor. Rawlinson’s England and Russia in the East published in 1875 formed one basis of Lytton’s Central Asian policy. MacGregor, who had served in the Mutiny, China, Abyssinia, and with Roberts in the Quartermaster’s Department at Army headquarters, worked hard to obtain topographical and military intelligence about potential border enemies, laid the foundations for the Indian Army’s Intelligence Department, and in 1868 published the Gazetteer of Central Asia, a huge six-volume collection of statistics about the North-West Frontier and the border states. The eye-catching adventures of soldier-explorers like MacGregor and Colonel Fred Burnaby had a serious purpose: to gather intelligence and make contacts for future use in anticipation of Russian advances beyond the Khivan Desert. MacGregor feared Russian threats to Herat, commanding all important roads to India from Central Asia and the strongest fortress between the Caspian and the Indus.10
The Russian threat to India was complicated by her advances to the south-west as ‘protector of the Slavs’, exploiting a possible collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans. A Russian attack on Constantinople threatened the eastern Mediterranean and the lifeline to the Empire. The tensions leading to the 2nd Afghan War coincided with the Eastern Crisis beginning in spring 1877. Russian armies invaded Ottoman territory to help the Turk’s Christian subject people, the Bulgarians, who had risen in revolt. Disraeli, with the backing of Queen and cabinet, ordered the British fleet to Constantinople and Indian troops under Napier to Malta. Against this background, the Russians hoped a threat to India’s North-West Frontier through Afghanistan would give a lever for negotiation. Forgotten was the assurance given to Britain in 1869 by the Russian minister Gorchakoff that Afghanistan lay ‘completely outside the sphere within which Russia might be called upon to exercise influence’. In May, General Kaufman, Governor-General of Russian Turkestan, mobilized his entire force of 20,000 men and declared he was ready to establish a Russian sphere of influence over Afghanistan. One of his more indiscreet officers boasted, ‘Now we march to India and drive out the English.’ Kaufman despatched a diplomatic mission to Kabul. Leaving Tashkent, General Leonid Stolietov with six officers and twenty-two Cossacks rode to the Afghan capital, arriving on 22 July 1878, brushing aside Afghan protests, and delivered a letter of introduction from Kaufman to the Amir. It was reported that Sher Ali received the Russian mission with all honour, sent out elephants to meet them, and, mounted on these and attended by Afghan ministers and nobles, Stolietov and his officers had ridden in state through Kabul to the Bala Hissar, the ancient citadel containing the royal palace of Afghanistan’s rulers. The purpose of the Mission was to ascertain Afghan military resources and persuade or frighten the Amir to place them at Russia’s disposal.11
Lytton came to India
with clear views based on the ideas of the forward school: build up the Afghan Amir Sher Ali and his country into a strong, stable and peaceful power favourable to Britain as the best defence against Russian expansion. He believed, from a meeting with Shouvaloff, Russian Ambassador in London that the Russian government had direct communication with Sher Ali, that the Russian General Kaufman had acquired such influence at Kabul that he could not only communicate with the Amir, but reckoned on his obedience to Russian instructions, and that Britain carried so little weight there that Sher Ali refused to receive a diplomatic agent from the Viceroy or allow the passage of a British officer through his territories. The departing Commander-in-Chief, Napier, had strengthened Lytton’s resolve to reverse this by writing that Britain’s position towards Afghanistan was ‘unsafe and humiliating’, and measures ought no longer to be delayed for improving it. Napier had adopted this stance following Russian military and diplomatic advances – previously a supporter of ‘Masterly Inactivity’, he now pointed out that the Russian encroachment in Central Asia had rendered that policy obsolete and dangerous.12
The official Indian Army history of the war blamed mutual tension on the unstable and suspicious character of Sher Ali, who fought his way to power, defeated three brothers successively in power struggles, experienced every vicissitude of an ‘asiatic’ ruler, was ‘always of a morbid temperament... suffering extremes of elation and depression ... the violent death of his eldest son giving rise to popular belief in his insanity’.13 He wished to remain balanced between Russia and British India, offending neither; but worried by British advances into Baluchistan and towards Quetta, he declined to accept a British embassy. His reply reached Lytton at the time that the Eastern Crisis had taken a dangerous turn with the despatch of the British fleet and with British occupation of Quetta. This British gain at the end of 1876 by a treaty with the Khan of Khelat roused Sher Ali’s suspicions – a strategical position of great natural strength, the city commanded the Bolan Pass, one of the gates to Afghanistan. Sher Ali could scarce forget that Quetta was the base from which a British army had marched to conquer his country in the 1st Afghan War.14
Disraeli’s strong action in the eastern Mediterranean was successful. The Russian-imposed Treaty of San Stefano, by which Russia gained Bessarabia from Rumania and Armenia from Turkey, and created a large Bulgarian state reaching the Mediterranean, was overturned by the Berlin Conference of June-July 1878, hosted by Bismarck. War and Russian aggrandisement were averted, the ‘big Bulgaria’ was broken into three parts, one of them to be returned to Turkey, Russia was excluded from the Mediterranean and Disraeli acquired Cyprus as a base. He returned to London in triumph claiming ‘Peace with honour’. In deference to British protests Stolietov was recalled, returning to Tashkent in just over three weeks, although the staff of his mission stayed on at Kabul.15
The lapse of time before news of ‘Peace with honour’ reached Kabul and before India learnt of events in the Afghan capital proved fatal. Lytton’s continued suspicion of Sher Ali was confirmed and strengthened by abortive negotiations with an Afghan envoy, who inconveniently died. Only a fortnight after the Treaty of Berlin, the news reached Calcutta that the Amir had welcomed Stolietev’s Russian mission, whilst continuing to refuse a British one. The Amir in fact had not wanted the Russians, but was angry with British approaches, and received Lytton’s request at a bad moment, when he was mourning the death of his favourite son and heir, Abdulla Jan, in August 1878. When the British emissary Ghulam Hasan Khan reached Kabul to present letters requesting that he accept a mission, Sher Ali was very angry, and announced:
I do not agree to the Mission coming in this manner, and until my officers have received orders from me how can the Mission come? It is as if they wished to disgrace me. It is not proper to put pressure in this way. It will tend to a complete rupture and breach of friendship. I am a friend as before, and entertain no ill-will. The Russian envoy has come and has come with my permission. I am afflicted with grief at the loss of my son, and have had no time to think over the matter. If I get time, whatever I consider advisable will be acted upon. Under these circumstances they can do as they like.16
His bitter reaction was also partly suspicion of a large escort which accompanied Lieutenant General Sir Neville Chamberlain, formerly commander of the Movable Column in the Mutiny and now British envoy; and partly the bribing of the Afridis of the Khyber Pass to allow the envoy and escort to pass, although they owed allegiance to the Amir. The cabinet was divided, but Salisbury did not wish Lytton to send a mission. When Salisbury moved to the Foreign Office, his successor at the India Office, Lord Cranbrook, ordered Lytton to do nothing and await orders. Lytton delayed Chamberlain’s mission at Peshawar until mid-September, and then despatched it with demands that British agents should be posted at Herat and Balkh with free access to Kabul for special envoys, in return for a subsidy, recognition of the Amir’s chosen heir and defence of his territories. Chamberlain advanced to the Khyber Pass with his staff and an escort of 250 sabres. Fearing these numbers were unduly provocative, he decided to send forward a small party to test the state of things and reduce to a minimum any indignity of an Afghan refusal to allow the British to pass. On 21 September, Major Louis Cavagnari, with Chamberlain’s advanced party of only twenty-four men of the Corps of Guides, reached the mountain fortress Ali Masjid just inside the Khyber Pass. The Afghan commander Faiz Mohammed Khan had received the stiffening of the Afghan Master of the Horse, and he made clear, in the absence of orders from Kabul to allow the mission to enter Afghanistan, that he would open fire if necessary. The exchange was as follows:
Cavagnari: T only came to get a straight answer from you. Will you oppose the passage of the Mission by force?’ Faiz Mohammed: ‘Yes, I will; and you may take it as kindness and because I remember friendship, that I do not fire upon you for what you have done already.’ The two sides shook hands and remounted, and Faiz Mohammed said, ‘You have had a straight answer.’
Rebuffed, Chamberlain withdrew to Peshawar, and wrote to the Viceroy:
Nothing could have been more distinct. Nothing more humiliating to the dignity of the British crown and Nation ... After what has taken place the status quo cannot, I think, continue without loss of dignity, if not loss of prestige, and I hope that such steps as are within our reach may at once be taken to prove to the Ameer [sic], and to the border tribes, and to our own native chiefs and people, that the British government loses no time in resenting a gross and unprovoked insult.
Chamberlain had earlier written: ‘Our great end is a peaceable solution, any other would be a great misfortune forced on us,’ but he now believed British prestige demanded a full apology. In England Lytton’s report that a British envoy had been ‘forcibly repulsed’ on his way to Kabul was widely publicized and there was an outcry, the public imagining that a friendly mission had been insulted and not appreciating that the real object of the mission was to coerce Sher Ali into subservience. Salisbury thought Lytton had blundered, but active measures had become inevitable, the cabinet after a long meeting supporting an ultimatum followed by military action if no adequate reply was received.17
On 2 November the Government of India sent a demand for an apology and for a permanent British mission at Kabul. A belated reply reached the Viceroy on 30 November, dated the 19th, and although promising Sher Ali’s acceptance of a mission, was declared to be inadequate as containing no apology. Lytton sent orders to his troops to commence hostilities by advancing along the Khyber, Kurram and Kandahar passes.
The responsibility for the war rested primarily with Lytton.18 Neglect of Sher Ali by previous viceroys, the Amir’s state of mind after his son’s death, the Russian failure to control Kaufman, the views of the Forward School and delays in communication -these all contributed, but were not main causes. Not until 20 December did Salisbury hear from Schouvaloff in London that the Russians had withdrawn Stolietov. By then it was too late. During the war, the Amir’s friendly correspondence with the Rus
sians fell into British hands, the forty-eight letters between Sher Ali and General Kaufman seeming to confirm Russian influence, but when the Amir wrote to Kaufman for help, he was told to make peace. Russian influence, real or suspected, at Kabul, did not make war necessary.
Opposition in Britain to the war was widespread. Former Viceroy Lord Northbrook said that with patience it could have been avoided. In a powerful speech, Gladstone denounced the war as repeating the errors of the previous invasion of Afghanistan. ‘May heaven avert a repetition of the calamity which befell our army in 1841!’ Disraeli’s cabinet was divided and Disraeli wrote angrily. ‘When V[ice]roys and Comms-in-Chief disobey orders, they ought to be sure of success in their mutiny. Lytton by disobeying orders had only secured insult and failure.’ The Prime Minister’s own vague reference in a speech, however, to India’s north-west ‘as a haphazard and not a scientific frontier’, hinting that steps would be taken to correct it, gave the opposition ammunition for criticism.19 In India, three members of the Viceroy’s own council strongly dissented from the policy towards Sher Ali. Lytton, however, viewed senior officials and soldiers such as Haines as unimaginative and obstructionist, and found support for his ideas among younger men, including Roberts. His key advisor was Colonel Sir George Colley, whose ‘Memorandum on the Military Aspects of the Central Asian Question’ was derived from MacGregor’s appreciation of the situation, but contained a major change since it regarded Kabul rather than Herat as the true key to India. Lieutenant General Neville Chamberlain, when acting Military Member on the Viceroy’s council, wrote in November 1878 how Colley was always present at crucial meetings as the crisis developed, sitting alone and saying nothing, but giving the Viceroy ‘the key to the discourse, and is his real military mentor ... and one cannot help admiring his reticence and apparent indifference to all that is said, and his being content to be a nobody’.20 Besides being a brilliant and dedicated career soldier, Colley had looks and charm, was intellectual, musical and artistic, all qualities which Lytton valued. Hanna blamed Colley, Roberts, Cavagnari, the Adjutant General, Lumsden, and the Viceroy’s Private Secretary, Owen Burne, for ‘fostering the Viceroy’s ignorant contempt for the danger he was preparing to run’. This ignores the limited aim of the opening campaign. There was to be no subjugation of Afghanistan, but rather a restoration of British prestige and influence. Hanna shows that MacGregor’s Central Asian Gazetteer was not made available to operational staff for the war, and he blames Roberts as Quartermaster General. The blame must surely rest with the former Viceroy, Northbrook, and his advisors, wedded to ‘Masterly Inactivity’ and against posting intelligence-gathering envoys in central Asia, and with the Indian Army’s lack of an intelligence branch, which MacGregor was forming but was still incomplete on the outbreak of hostilities.21