Retreat from Kabul: The First Anglo-Afghan War, 1839-1842 (Conflicts of Empire)

by George Bruce

  Burnes eventually decided to leave and on 26 April 1838 turned his back on the capital, seeing all that he had accomplished in his career destroyed. His efforts had come to nothing, his mission had in effect been sabotaged. War had begun to threaten.

  Lord Auckland had let himself gradually be pushed from a policy of friendship with Afghanistan to a completely contrary one. Only a year before, in April 1837, he had written that ‘the British Government had resolved decidedly to discourage the prosecution by the ex-king Shah Shuja-ool-Mulk, so long as he may remain under our protection, of further schemes of hostility against the chiefs now in power in Kabul and Kandahar’.

  In repudiating Dost Mahommed’s offers of friendship and inclining himself towards Shah Shuja, Auckland had moved far from that position. He was to go farther still. His advisers, alone with him at Simla, persuaded him that the time had now come for him to ‘interfere’ — as the dispatch from the Secret Committee termed it — in the affairs of Afghanistan. The next decisive step was taken. Colvin looked after the political and Torrens the military side of plans for a projected treaty between the Indian Government, Ranjit Singh — the Sikh ruler — and Shah Shuja, whereby with the co-operation of Ranjit Singh and a parcel of Sikh troops led by British officers of the Indian army, Shah Shuja should invade Afghanistan, depose Dost Mahommed and rule in his place. William Macnaghten took the proposals to the Sikh ruler and on 26 June 1838 the treaty, guaranteed by the British, was signed.

  Burnes arrived at Auckland’s headquarters at Simla, on 20 July. He was met by Colvin and Torrens, who speaking of the Governor-General said anxiously: ‘Please don’t say anything to unsettle his judgement now that we’ve got him to go to war.’

  Burnes, who might still have been able to impress the truth of Dost Mahommed’s pro-British feelings upon the uncertain Auckland, and so avert war, unwisely said nothing to stop the military preparations. He had contemplated resigning, but a careerist first and foremost, he stayed on, co-operated, was rewarded with a knighthood. But eventually, in the disaster that was to come, he would pay for it with his life.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The sheer logic of events soon forced Lord Auckland to commit British troops to the invasion in a way he had at first never contemplated. It was intended that Shah Shuja, having no troops of his own, should be assisted by Sikhs, who were not only hated by the Afghans but also, it soon transpired, unwilling to face their bullets in the grim confines of the Khyber Pass. So it looked as though the Shah would be dependent upon untrained irregular troops recruited to march in to Afghanistan and secure the throne for him.

  Burnes, who had now joined Auckland’s Simla headquarters, assured the Governor-General and his three advisers, that this plan would surely fail — these troops would be unable to face Afghan opposition. British troops must be used to make the force effective.

  Two British regiments, he suggested, would be enough to guarantee the safe return of the deposed monarch to his former kingdom. But this scheme, which to the non-military mind looked so easy, was vetoed by Sir Harry Fane, the Commander-in-Chief in India. He went to Simla and told Auckland that he would not allow so small a force to embark upon so dangerous an expedition, and that if the British intervened at all it should be with a powerful force. Apart from restoring Shah Shuja to his throne it would later have to move against the Persian army besieging Herat.

  Auckland, who still lacked any clear-cut policy directive from England, and was in any case not the kind of man who could decide major issues for himself, now came under strong pressure from his advisers — Macnaghten, Torrens and Burnes, especially. The issue was simple, but difficult: commit British troops to the invasion, or give it up entirely. Doubtless Auckland felt he had already gone too far to retire without loss of dignity; and in any case, the voices of prudence were far away.

  So Auckland, this quiet, respectable peer, who had no taste whatsoever for war — who had been a makeshift political choice as Governor-General by the Whig government, replacing Lord Haytesbury, Ambassador in Moscow, named by their Tory predecessors — pallid Auckland then, yielded completely. He directed the assembly in India of a substantial British army for the invasion of Afghanistan — without consulting his Council in Calcutta and against the advice of Sir Harry Fane, who wanted consolidation of the British position in India before extension in the west.

  India had now been at peace for many years. Liberal-minded Englishmen had high hopes that it would continue, so that England could do more for unhappy India than she had yet attempted. By assembling a big army and embarking upon a costly war Auckland banished such hopes. Having now to justify his war plans in face of hostile public opinion, he issued with bare-faced dishonesty a proclamation pompously named the Simla Manifesto, composed mostly of lies and evasions.

  Having no genuine reasons for war with Dost Mahommed, he argued falsely that he was forced to send British troops against him because he had allied himself with the Persians in their Russian-inspired attack on Herat; because Dost Mahommed had attacked Britain’s ally, the Sikh ruler Ranjit Singh — whereas he had in fact defended himself against a Sikh attack; and because his schemes and ambitions were a danger to India’s north-west frontier.

  All these events, he said, had caused a crisis, and after serious and mature deliberation, he was satisfied that pressing necessity as well as policy and justice warranted the British Government supporting the return of Shah Shuja to the throne — who, though in fact hated by the Afghans, he claimed was popular, in contrast to the present ruler Dost Mahommed, whom he said was unfitted under any circumstances to be Britain’s ally.

  This monstrous document, practically made up of lies from start to finish, then ended hopefully: ‘His Majesty Shah-Shuja-ool-Mulk, will enter Afghanistan surrounded by his own troops and will be supported against foreign interference and factious opposition by a British army. The Governor-General confidently hopes that the Shah will be speedily replaced on his throne by his own subjects and adherents; and when once he shall be secure in power, and the independence and integrity of Afghanistan established, the British army will be withdrawal.’

  In England, a wave of indignation followed. Nearly everyone whose experience in war or politics counted, opposed it. Lord William Bentinck, Auckland’s predecessor, called it ‘an act of incredible folly’. Lord Wellesley, one of the greatest of Governors-General, pronounced ‘this wild expedition into a distant region of rocks and deserts, of sands and ice and snow’, an ‘act of infatuation’. The great Duke of Wellington declared with prophetic insight that the result of once crossing the River Indus to settle a government in Afghanistan would be ‘a perennial march into the country’.

  But Auckland, who knew nothing of war, persisted, encouraged by the three officials at his side.

  And then came an event that still could have saved the day — the news two weeks after his proclamation of 1 October that the Shah of Persia had raised the siege of Herat and that the Persian army had retreated. The immediate danger was past.

  A direct protest to Persia by the British Government and the temporary occupation by the Royal Navy of the Persian island of Karak had caused this dramatic face-about. It changed the whole situation. No need existed now for an army to do all over again what words and one minor aggressive act had achieved. Persia, notwithstanding her Russian ally, had openly acknowledged British power and faced thereby both humiliation among nations and the heavy loss of a nine months’ fruitless campaign.

  Following this, a certain amount of trust — about as much as can exist between checkmated diplomats — was restored between Lord Palmerston, British Foreign Secretary, and Count Nesselrode, for Russia. In response to a British note, Nesselrode had assured Palmerston that Russia had no offensive plans in the areas bordering on India’s north-west frontier and that he believed Britain’s and Russia’s interests there were identical — to preserve peace and to confine themselves to commercial rather than political rivalry. For what it was worth, Palmerston had accepted
this contention.

  The expectation now was that the Governor-General would breathe a deep sigh of relief, countermand the military orders, let peace prevail and India prosper.

  Not so. Auckland announced on 8 November 1838 both the raising of the siege and the continuance of the invasion ‘with the view to the substitution of a friendly for a hostile power in the Eastern province of Afghanistan, and to the establishment of a permanent barrier against schemes of aggression upon our north-west frontier’.

  Ham-handed in his attempts at statesmanship, Auckland had blundered hopelessly. First, he had made the fatal mistake of trying to play kingmaker to a warlike and turbulent race, instead of coming to terms with their ruler. Secondly, ignoring the terms of his treaty with Shah Shuja, and Ranjit Singh, the Sikh ruler, he had committed British forces, instead of Sikhs to the invasion. Thirdly, he had disregarded the prudent warnings of his own commander-in-chief.

  But Auckland and his advisers were living in a dream world. They genuinely believed that this invasion of the wild and mountainous home of a military race would be a grand tour in uniform accompanied by an eastern monarch and his court.

  Auckland informed the Commander-in-Chief that Shah Shuja would lead this grandiloquently named Army of the Indus into Afghanistan, followed by the British forces, and that both would receive a ‘welcome with general gladness’ by the people there. How different it was all to be.

  The organisation of the army went ahead. Planned to be 25,000 strong, it was composed of 14,000 of the Bengal army’s best troops, 5,600 from the Bombay army and 6,000 irregulars recruited for Shah Shuja’s own force — raw recruits mostly, trained and officered by the British. The Bengal contingent was assembled at Ferozepore in north-western India, under the command of Sir Harry Fane, who by now had serious misgivings about the entire adventure. General Nott and General Duncan were the two divisional commanders.

  But the raising of the siege of Herat had reduced the army’s objective to putting on the throne a puppet king, under the direction of William Macnaghten. Auckland decided that a smaller army was now adequate. Its strength was therefore reduced by one division, General Duncan’s 4,500 men, and at this point Sir Harry Fane could stand no more. ‘I do not think that for this my service is needed,’ he wrote with some sarcasm to Lord Auckland, ‘and I consider Sir Willoughby Cotton is quite competent to command…’

  Cotton was a cheerful old soldier of the Queen’s army who had once been aide-de-camp to King George IV, but whose long service in India had made a little dull. ‘I don’t think Cotton has a mind which carries away much of verbal instructions,’ Fane had caustically noted of him. Supreme command of the army was given to General Keane, with the Bombay force. Burnes, now Sir Alexander, in recognition of his co-operation, was appointed political assistant to Macnaghten, soon to become Sir William, on account of his having been appointed Envoy to the court of the monarch-to-be Shah Shuja.

  Unusual was the power over the army given to Macnaghten and the political officers under his command — a group of ambitious young men seconded from their regiments to administer Afghanistan until the Shah had formed his own government.

  The army, by directions of the Governor-General would first rely upon the political officers for its food, its camel and its horse transport and its fodder for them, in contrast to the normal method of supply by the military commissariat department.

  But worse still, military operations in Afghanistan would be largely in the hands of the political officers, too — most of them inexperienced or incompetent.

  The best troops would have deteriorated under this divided leadership. In time it was to become one of the main causes of the misfortunes of the Army of the Indus.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Army of the Indus now began moving towards its destiny in a cumbersome way. The 4,500 troops of the Bombay division were packed like sardines into the hellish nineteenth-century troopships at Bombay and shipped 500 miles north-west up the tropical Arabian Sea to Karachi, then a small fishing village. After a brisk naval bombardment to raze coastal forts that challenged right of entry — the area was then foreign territory, ruled by the Amirs of Sind — the force landed at Hajamro Creek near by on 3 December 1838.

  Commanded by Major-General Willshire, under the overall command of General Keane, the army’s commander-in-chief, the force was to march 300 miles north-east up the River Indus to meet at Shikapore the 9,500 men of the Bengal division, who would have marched 600 miles south-west from their depot at Ferozepore, which was barely 400 miles south-east of Kabul.

  Thus, the Bengal army was to march 600 miles in the opposite direction to its main objective, Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, and then together with the Bombay army, march back another 600 miles north west up through Afghanistan, via Ghazni and Kandahar to Kabul again, a mode of operations which would have been splendid today, in a Marx brothers war film.

  The original reason for this merry-go-round was that the southern entry into Afghanistan offered the quickest route to Herat, in the west, which had to be relieved soon, but when the Persians withdrew from this town the plans were unchanged because entry by the northern route directly to Kabul would have involved a march across Sikh territory — a move its ruler would oppose.

  With the Shah’s 5,000 ill-equipped and untrained troops included, the army now amounted to some 20,000, separated by about 800 miles of unfriendly territory.

  When about to begin his march northwards, General Keane was shocked to discover, that the political officers had failed to build up provisions dumps, or procure camels and boats for carriage of his supplies and ammunition up the River Indus. For three weeks he was delayed, waiting; and for similar reasons the army at Ferozepore was delayed as well.

  Sir Harry Fane, Commander-in-Chief India, who though not in command had remained to watch the course of events, was furious. ‘Even an hour’s delay is serious,’ he protested to Auckland, ‘and it is a great evil to the army to be delayed for want of common foresight.’ And later: ‘Supposing a reverse? What is to be the army’s line of retreat? Magazines should be collected beside it. The safety of the army should be placed beyond doubt.’

  But Auckland could only say lamely that he was concerned too, and that he had authorised General Cotton’s troops, instead of the political officers, to requisition supplies by force in case of real necessity. With this minor concession to the cause of military efficiency the Bengal army at last set out on 10 December 1838 on its 1,200-mile journey to Kabul from Ferozepore — Shah Shuja and his ragged troops leading the splendidly equipped British force, so that he would appear to be in command.

  These two armies were to be followed by a grand total of 40,000 camels and 60,000 camp-followers, that would stretch for 30 to 40 miles across country. For by custom no less than five camp-followers followed every Bengal army soldier and three those of the Bombay army.

  They included doolie (stretcher) bearers, cooks, carpenters, personal servants, grass-cutters, camel-doctors and drivers, leather-workers, grooms, milk-girls, bellows-boys, saddlers, fiddlers, nautch-girls, blacksmiths, tailors, cobblers, and of course their wives and children. When a crisis came they would gravely handicap the army.

  To carry the grain to feed 8,000 horses for one month 6,000 camels were required, but there were thousands more camels carrying ammunition and food for the troops and still more thousands carrying personal baggage.

  ‘What a sea of camels! What a forest of camels’ heads and humps and grain bags!’ cheerfully wrote Lieutenant-Colonel Burlton, Commissary-General of the Indian army at this time. ‘What plaintive moanings…! What shouts of men! What resounding of sticks as the vast mass is driven slowly along, browsing as they go and leaving not one green leaf behind them.’

  To describe this vast procession as vulnerable and unmanageable would be a truism. The system was a nightmare even for the most sybaritic commanding officer, and a few had protested vigorously, but uselessly against it. The whole system was, bag and baggage, part
of the age-old scheme of things that the British had inherited in India.

  ‘And so marched the Army of the Indus,’ remarked the contemporary historian Sir John Kaye, ‘accompanyed [sic] by thousands upon thousands of baggage-laden camels and other beasts of burden, spreading themselves for miles over the country, and making up with their multitudinous followers of the camp one of those immense moving cities which can only be seen when an Indian army takes the field and streams into an enemy’s country.’

  The well-mounted 16th Lancers led the Bengal army, in tight short tunics of light blue, the sun glinting on the silver lace facings and silver buttons, the troopers’ necks chafing in the constricting red collars. Captain Grant’s troop of the Bengal Horse Artillery followed, with four horses to each of the four rattling cast-iron 6-pounder guns and shell wagons. Then came the lumbering camel-drawn howitzers, the long columns of red-coated infantry, more artillery, cavalry again and the long procession of lurching camels.

  Sir Harry Fane had requested the officers to travel light, but General Keane had a personal baggage-train of 100 camels and Brigadier Arnold one of 60. Status, apart from that of rank, was conferred by an officer’s baggage-train. Dr. Richard Kennedy, chief of the Bombay army medical staff, was accused of false modesty because he had only five personal camels.

  ‘The officers,’ noted J. H. Stocqueler, then editor of the Bombay Times, who camped at one time with the force, ‘regarded the expedition as little else than an extensive pleasure promenade — an enormous picnic.’

  They equipped themselves suitably with large field tents, carpets, complex camping equipment, books; wines, brandies and liqueurs by the crate; jams, pickles, cheroots, hermetically sealed meats; silver plate, crystal glass, crockery, candles, table-linen and mahogany furniture. One officer circulated an advertisement for a sideboard he wished to buy from among the furniture carried by his comrades.