by John Buchan
When not employed in reconnoitring the country his time was passed in organizing sports, paper-chases, horse shows, and speculating on the probable news from Kabul. Melgund was keenly alive to beautiful scenery and his letters are full of vivid pictures. Nestling in a valley between Kurrum and Haleb Ketla, below the long range of the snow-covered Safed Koh, lies Shalozan, a village famed for the beauty of its women: Melgund describes the chenab trees, a ruined tomb, and the picturesque appearance of a troop of native cavalry, with their red puggarees, halting on the village green. Thirty years later, when Viceroy of India, he visited Peiwar Kotal, motoring sixty miles from Kohat over a specially prepared road to revive the memories of his campaigning days. From his camp at Parachinar he rode to Shalozan, the beauty of which, amid its desolate environment, had never faded from his memory. While riding through the village he met a tall bearded Pathan about whose appearance there was something familiar, and he observed to Mr. Merk, the Commissioner, that this man reminded him of the boy who had run messages for Sir Frederick Roberts in 1879, and who, as he ran, had a trick of brushing his ankles together till they bled. The man was stopped and questioned, his sandals were instantly flung off to disclose the old scars, and in wild excitement he prostrated himself at the feet of the great Lat Sahib who deigned to remember his unworthy errand boy.
In his long delightful letters to his mother, which for this year took the place of his journal, Melgund gives the gossip of the camp, vivid little sketches of places and personages, and much half-chaffing abuse of the follies of the stay-at-home politicians. “I long to encamp the British public in a place like Ali Kheyl for one night, with Gladstone, Chamberlain, Dilke, and a few others on outpost duty. I would join the Mongols for the night, and I think there would be some fun! I dare say it wouldn’t do old Peter (his brother Arthur) any harm to do sentry-go for the public for an hour or two. I expect he’s got a few ‘humane’ ideas in his head too!”
He expounds at length his views on the frontier question, which are interesting in the light of his later problems as Viceroy: —
“The more I see of this country, the more difficult the new frontier line appears to organize. I was always for a new frontier, and for occupying advanced posts at the other side of the passes leading into India, and I am still sure that this is right, though the difficulties in the way are far greater than I supposed. The fact is, we want to have a stronger frontier in case of a Russian invasion or demonstration against India, such as they certainly meant to make if we had fought them in Europe, and it is very short-sighted to say that they will not attack us for years. Neither do I think it should be allowed to stand over for future years, when we might be very hard pressed in Europe and unable to alter our frontier even if we wished it. It is nonsense shutting our eyes to the fact that it is Russia that one is afraid of, and justly so, though I think the day the Russian and English outposts touch the more chance there will be of a permanent peace. The scientific soldiers ought to be able to decide on the frontier line, and we ought to take it and have done with it, and not scream and howl every time Russia advances in Central Asia. With the old frontier we should have fought an invading army as they debouched from the passes, i.e., we should have been fighting inside our own doors, and on a powder magazine, which the slightest reverse would have set in a blaze; besides which we should have been fighting with the Indus behind us and a scarcity of bridges over which to retreat. One is bound to consider a retreat as on the cards, though when I said this to some one at dinner at Government House at Calcutta I was told that we here could never think of a retreat.
“If we are not to advance to strengthen our frontiers we could do so by retiring behind the Indus, so as not to massacre armies with the river behind us, simply keeping advanced posts to watch the mouths of the passes. This, I think, would be an immensely strong frontier, but it would be retiring, and goodness knows what the effect would be in India as to loss of prestige. I have no doubt that the right thing to do is to occupy places like Kandahar, Kurrum, and Jalalabad. You then have two lines of defence, and if beaten at the first you fall back upon the second — the southern mouths of the passes; but your first fight would be outside your own door instead of inside, which, in a country like this, must be of the greatest importance.
“There is, however, an immense difficulty regarding these new advance posts — their lines of communication, which must run through a country inhabited by wild, uncivilized races. Therefore, to make the advance posts really safe, we should have to be able thoroughly to depend on the tribes in no case molesting our communications. This is the great difficulty I see in the new frontier, and I am afraid the English public will not realize until too late its value, and will not be willing to supply the men and money that would be necessary to secure the roads to the advance posts. The thing will probably be done by halves; we shall occupy the places we want, and leave the country behind them altogether unreliable, and let the matter drop. Then some day the attack we have always been fearing and preaching about will come, we shall fight under frightful disadvantages, lose no end of men and money, and when we are utterly at our last gasp pull ourselves together and win, as we always have done.”
The monotonous waiting came to an end in the latter part of May, when Yakub Khan, one of Shere Ali’s sons, was recognized as Amir and concluded the treaty of Gandamak, which conceded the establishment of a British agent at Kabul and placed the foreign affairs of Afghanistan under the control of Britain. Melgund left the frontier and hastened home to his Border Mounted Rifles: he was anxious to be back in time for the summer inspection. His passion for active service, however, was wholly unsatisfied. He decided against going to the Zulu War, for he was weary of scratch campaigns. “A good European War,” he wrote, “would be the thing, if there was a chance of our army existing over a fortnight.” But his journey had not been fruitless, he had made many friendships, and had developed a profound admiration for Sir Frederick Roberts, from whom he learned much of the detailed business of war; and though he was for the moment inclined to take the high-handed Bismarckian view in foreign politics, he had learned invaluable lessons — the difficulties of the “man on the spot” and the need of sympathy and imagination in harmonizing his urgent needs with the preconceptions of the public at home. He loved to flutter the Whig dovecotes of his family by talking at random, but his matured opinions were full of wary good sense.
On his way home he spent a few days at Simla, and there an offer was made him which caused him acute perturbation. Cavagnari, the British envoy-designate to Kabul, asked him to accompany him, and the Viceroy pressed him to accept. The proposal was that he should go to Kabul, and then go on with Yakub Khan to the Uxus; from there he would carry a dummy dispatch from the Amir to the Russians, and somehow or other get to Samarkand. The notion fired his imagination: he liked and believed in Cavagnari, he wanted to see Kabul, and in journeying thence to Samarkand through the Russian outposts he would be undertaking not only a daring exploit but an important piece of public service. In the end he declined, principally because there was a chance of the Mission being shut up in Kabul for some time, and since he would have no official status he felt that it was too much in the nature of an escapade, and that duty called him home to his Volunteers. Cavagnari acquiesced in this view: probably he felt that the way was very dark before him and did not want to involve more lives than were necessary in a desperate venture, for he told Lady Roberts, “I feel I am going amongst the most treacherous people under the sun, but if anything happens to me it will make the course the Government ought to pursue very much easier, and I feel great satisfaction in that.” “When I left him,” Melgund records in his journal, “I said ‘good-bye, and good luck to you,’ and it came across my mind at the moment that he thanked me as if he thought there was need for the good luck.”
When Melgund was back in Roxburghshire, busy with his Volunteers, there came the news that the treaty of Gandamak was waste paper, and that once more the fires of war blazed on t
he frontier. In September Cavagnari and his staff and escort were murdered in Kabul, and it was a solemn reflection for Melgund that he had come within an ace of sharing their fate. It is possible that, even had he gone, he might have escaped, for the man who carried the message from Yakub to Balkh got through, and that was to have been his job, though it is questionable whether a European in the same task would have succeeded. Reviewing the incident in his journal he writes: “The chief reason that I settled not to go with Cavagnari was that it appeared to me that I should be doing better by going home and looking after my Volunteer corps, which was a thing I had taken up and wanted to succeed, than by starting on a mission the success of which seemed doubtful. I thought that the corps might deteriorate, and that an expedition through Central Asia might be looked upon as flighty while the alternative was sticking to business. I also wanted to get to know more people in England, and to do some reading. I have had many doubts about it, but still think that even if I had succeeded in getting through I did better by giving it up.” Twenty-seven years later, as Viceroy of India, he visited the Guides at Mardan, and saw the obelisk erected in memory of the Kabul victims on which his own name might so easily have been inscribed.
Lord Melgund in the Uniform of the Border Mounted Rifles, 1883.
He was very unsettled that autumn and winter, and his letters and journals contain little beyond speculations on frontier policy and the Afghanistan campaign. Sir Frederick Roberts sent him a postcard, written in the train near Loodiana, inviting him to rejoin his Kabul column. “Pretyman and I are now on our way back to Kurrum, accompanied by Baker, Brab, Hugh Gough, ‘Polly’ Carew, and a few more of the right sort.” He could not go, and even if he could it is hard to see how he would have caught up with the active British commander. Roberts entered Kabul in October, and in December came the rising of the tribes, and he and his force were cut off from the world, till Sir Donald Stewart arrived from Kandahar. Next year came the settlement with Abdur Rahman; but in the summer the battle of Maiwand was lost by the British, and Roberts had to march in haste the three hundred miles from Kabul to Kandahar to take order with the pretender Ayub Khan. Not till September 1881 was Abdur Rahman able to assert his kingship and give his country peace, and meantime a new frontier policy had been adopted by Simla and Whitehall.
During the whole of 1880 Melgund was at home, and it is clear from his journal and his letters that he was restless. His thoughts were on the frontiers of India, his reading chiefly in Indian history, his correspondence mainly with soldiers. The care of his Border Rifles was not enough to fill his mind, and his eye was roaming the world in quest of active service. One piece of useful work he was able to perform early in the year.
There had been a good deal of trouble in both the Afghan and Zulu Wars with press correspondents, for the vicious system of employing serving soldiers for the purpose had not been abandoned, and there had been much partisanship shown, newspapers ranging themselves for or against particular generals. As a remedy for such abuses the military authorities framed a set of rules to regulate the work of the press, and these were strongly criticized in the January number of the Nineteenth Century by Mr. Archibald Forbes, the most distinguished living war correspondent. Melgund replied to him in the March number of the review in an article which was his first excursion in literature. He put the common sense of the matter very clearly and trenchantly. He sympathized with both sides, for he had been himself a war correspondent, and had been invited to write for the Times and Daily Telegraph while in Afghanistan. He believed that the journalist in a campaign was necessary, not only to the public at home but to the army in the field; but he saw that the delicate mission of war correspondents, unless it was to become a public danger, must be under certain reasonable restrictions. It may fairly be said that to-day his views would be accepted as they stand by both journalists and soldiers. In this, his first literary effort, Melgund revealed not only a judicial mind, but a real vigour of style: —
“The next war may not give us quite so much pleasant reading. We may miss a little of the seasoning of bygone days. We shall not suffer by it. About a year ago a British force was crossing one of our Indian rivers on its way to the front. With it was the usual representative of the press, and he had written his usual letter. He tells how crocodiles and palm trees people the water and adorn the banks, and hands the eloquent production to a prosaic English officer, who remarks that neither crocodiles nor palm trees are within many miles. Matter-of-fact man! The correspondent is describing India, and he replies-the best answer ever made, and the secret of much of the discussion, the essence of what our soldiers have long known to be true—’What does that matter? The British public must have its crocodile, and it must have its palm tree.’” The Nineteenth Century article brought him many congratulations — from Lord Chelmsford, who had suffered from an unfair press; from Admiral Sir Charles Elliot; and notably from his old Lincolnshire friend, the hunting parson, Mr. Southwell. “I suppose I may regard you as dead to the witcheries of women,” added that mentor, “and that the rest of your mortal life is to be devoted to the interests of your country. ‘Sporting with Amaryllis in the shade,’ etc., has given place to the more laudable desire for fame. Now for Parliament. Suppress your thirst for adventure and excitement and go into the House. You’ll soon be getting old — I mean too old to care about or indeed be capable of active life, and in Parliament as long as your head is clear it matters little if your legs are slow.” But Melgund was at the moment very little in love with Parliament and politics. His journal of 1880 records, indeed, his pleasure at his brother Arthur’s success in Roxburghshire, where he was returned by the narrow majority of ten; but his political comments are acrid and he had small regard for the Prime Minister. “Arthur arrived to-day, having been sailing about on the West Coast of Scotland with Gladstone! Oh dear! Oh dear!” Some months later he and that eminent man met at dinner with the Fitzwilliams. “He has a wild look in his eye, and his appearance would never inspire me with confidence,” says the journal.
As for Amaryllis, it would seem that for the moment Mr. Southwell’s guess was right. “Lots of pretty people, but don’t care for balls,” is a common entry. One name begins to appear occasionally — that of Mary Grey, whom he was constantly meeting. But though he hunted and visited about the land, and took his full share in social life, he was profoundly dissatisfied. His note on some famous party is only of a talk with Sir Garnet Wolseley, who “promised me a knife and fork with him in the next war. . . . He thinks we may have a blow-up in Europe any day, and he says he will take me with him to the German manoeuvres in September if our authorities will allow me to go.” He is more interested in discussing Afghanistan with Lady Lawrence than in dancing with the reigning beauty: the kind of country house he likes is Crabbett, where he could inspect Wilfred Blunt’s Arabs; when he sits up at night it is to read confidential papers on the Greek frontier lent him by Sir John Ardagh. He goes to the most brilliant ball of the season—”I am almost ashamed to say I never danced once, but met Knox, the gunner, looked on with him for some time, and then went down to supper with him instead of a lady, and fought the actions of Ali Musjid and Peiwar Kotal over again. I am sure we sat through I don’t know how many dances, and drank I don’t know how much champagne, and agreed we were both longing to be off somewhere, and came away together. He has seen more service perhaps than any young soldier: viz., Abyssinia, Ashanti, Afghanistan, and Zululand, and also seen much fighting with the Turks in the Russo-Turkish War. / do wish I were off somewhere!”
The cri du coeur of the last sentence is the index to his frame of mind, a frame of mind which made him curiously intolerant of all sedentary life at home. At the age of thirty-five he had a violent fit of that fever which commonly takes a man at an earlier stage, a desire for a rough life in wild places and an impatience of a cosseted civilization. His natural inclination was for the hard-riding, forthright type of man he had known in his Lincolnshire days, and his experience on the Indian f
rontier had taught him that the same qualities could be conjoined with excellent brains and used for high public duties. Hence he moved in London drawing-rooms like Marius among the ruins of Carthage: vehemently critical, tantalized by ambitions which seemed infinitely far from realization. Occasionally in the journal he permits himself an outburst which the reader must take as an undress expression of a mood and not as a considered verdict: —
“Dined with the Derbys: took in the daughter of the house, a very nice girl. A regular London society dinner: i.e., every one on their p’s and q’s. The politicals seemingly oppressed with their own importance; the Duke of . . . trying to wind a fox all the evening in the neighbourhood of the ceiling, at least I’ll do him the credit to hope it was a fox — head up, stern down! Why is it that these sportsmen in London (upon my word the men are almost as bad as the women) cannot be natural? They are never their bona fide selves, if they possess such a thing. From the time you enter before dinner till the time you come away it is all manière. When you get with first-rate soldiers it is different. Sir Garnet Wolseley is natural the instant he speaks to you: the men on the turf are natural: men who have gone in for riding, or soldiering, or any manly amusement are natural: they talk to the point and are unaffected, but I’m damned if these London sportsmen are! And when you see young men reared in London society, when it has been their only world, when they haven’t been knocked about and made to feel what’s what, but have been traditionally brought up as lawgivers, what can you expect of them except that society manners should become their second nature, and that their politics in after life will, as a rule, be unpractical? At least their foreign ones are likely to be so, for as regards home politics they will be much steered by the common sense of the nation, which is very great, and has time to collect itself over any home question of importance. But in foreign politics or in military affairs, when we are required to act quickly and to show common sense at once, preserve me from the politicals! There is not one of them fit to take a horse to a second-class metropolitan meeting and look after him. He would do something silly if he mingled on an equality with his fellow-men! . . .
