by George Bruce
The quantities of these good things were beyond belief. Stocqueler offered to leave a few boxes of cigars as a gift for the officers’ mess in which he had stayed. He was politely advised that they would scarcely be valued. ‘Our mess has two camel-loads of the best Manilas,’ his informant said.
Stocqueler noted: ‘Many young officers would as soon have thought of leaving behind them their swords and double-barrelled pistols as march without their dressing-cases, perfumes, Windsor soap and eau-de-cologne.’
General Fane, trying to reduce a camel train that stretched more than from London to Brighton, and having scant success with the officers, had ordered the infantry to carry their own packs instead of following the custom, in the killing heat, of clubbing together to hire baggage camels. But the exhaustion and sickness caused by this misguided order far outweighed the small saving on transport.
Beyond belief were the privations of the ordinary British soldier in India and of those who marched with the Army of the Indus to Afghanistan. They certainly contributed to the army’s downfall. The soldier’s pay was 7s. 6d. a week, less 1s. 10d. a week for his maintenance, laundry, his ‘necessaries’ and 3s. 6d. for his food. The remaining 1s. 8d. was doled out to him in daily instalments of 2½d.
His uniform might have been designed to hinder and oppress him. In the stifling heat he wore a stiff, black leather stock round his neck to keep his head erect and his gaze ahead, a swallow-tailed coatee of heavy red serge with a tight collar and a hard black leather shako, or hat, tied firmly on by a tight chin strap.
Over his right shoulder hung a wide leather belt decorated with a regimental plaque and whitened with the same pipe clay with which he plastered his white trousers. From this belt, hung his bayonet, 16 inches of fluted steel. A cartridge belt attached on his right side to a waist-belt contained normally sixty 1⅓-ounce balls for his Brown Bess musket, each ball wrapped in stiff black paper holding 4½ drams of black gunpowder. In action, he tore the paper open with his teeth, primed the musket-pan with the powder, rammed home the ball, fired and reloaded.
He carried in the grey canvas haversack which General Fane ordered him to carry across Afghanistan’s scorching deserts a towel, soap, razor, a pair of boots, two leather neck stocks, two shirts, two pairs of marching socks, a pair of trousers, boot blacking, pipe clay, cooking utensils and enough bread when available to last him for a day or two. Compared with today’s infantryman a light load, but only rarely is he unfortunate enough to have to march to the battle-front.
The British troops were mostly barely literate young countrymen, preferred because they were stronger and more docile than urchins from the industrial slums. Their daily ration abroad was one pound of bread and three-quarters of a pound of meat — generally beef, but occasionally mutton or salt pork — an unhealthy diet. Through drinking infected water and eating the unwashed fruit they bought to supplement the monotonous boiled beef, they frequently suffered and died from dysentery, cholera and other diseases.
The War Office provided regimental canteens where the soldier could drink himself half crazy on raw alcoholic drinks like arrack — distilled from the coco-palm — sold at prices that brought a profit of more than £50,000 a year, but instead of being spent on the soldier’s welfare this useful sum was seized by a greedy Treasury.
Discipline was harsh, often cruel and inhuman. Flogging with the cat-o’-nine tails was commonplace — nine cords 18 inches long, each about a sixteenth of an inch in diameter and each knotted at precise intervals with nine knots. Spread-eagled naked on the crossed halberds, a soldier was flogged for entering the barrack-yard drunk, even though drunkenness was unavoidable on the fiery liquor sold in the canteen; he was flogged for the insubordination that boredom and drunkenness caused — for being absent without leave, for selling his equipment and for untidy equipment. He even could be flogged for marrying without his C.O.’s permission.
Most officers disliked inflicting this punishment, but Queen’s Regulations laid down when it was to be administered, as well as the number of lashes. If a soldier fainted or was said by the medical officer to be unfit for more, he was taken to the punishment cells and when he had improved, two or three days later, he was given the remainder.
Frederick, Duke of York, Commander-in-Chief in England, had in 1812 ordered regimental courts-martial not to award more than 300 lashes under any circumstances. Yet District and General Courts Martial were still free to award more than this — it could be as few as 25 or as many as 500, 1,000 or even the maximum of 3,000. Occasionally the victims died, but most recovered, became hardened to it and proudly boasted of their endurance. One drummer claimed to have received 4,000 lashes in twelve months and a total of 26,000 in fourteen years’ service, which his officers confirmed.
The penalty for striking an officer, or for cowardice, or for refusing to carry out an order in face of the enemy was to be shot by a firing party of the soldier’s own comrades. And though by no means as commonplace as flogging, this punishment was not at all rare.
Discipline then, was based on punishment for misbehaviour; and not until well into the nineteenth century was the system of good conduct badges and medals gradually introduced to encourage good behaviour and confer status. But it brought no more pay to the soldier as a reward and an inducement. A social outcast at home and abroad his life demanded rare fortitude to be endurable.
Why, then, was his morale so high in battle? What made him fight so doggedly? Iron discipline and very often the sheer love of fighting — for the soldier was a primitive man — but strangely enough patriotism as well. He had a pride in being British, in showing what he was worth, often a persistent obsessive belief that the enemy were a set of rascals who deserved punishment.
Officers in those days purchased their commissions, the cost depending upon the rank. It was established that after deducting the interest at five per cent a year upon what it cost to buy the commission, as well as regimental expenses, and income tax, an infantry ensign’s annual pay came to £73; a lieutenant’s to £85; a captain’s to £108; a major’s to £93 (despite his seniority) and a Lieutenant-Colonel’s to £114. An ensign had at once to spend almost his entire first year’s salary upon his uniforms and equipment.
Mostly officers were younger sons of country landowners, serving officers and clergymen, who generally, though not always, had some small private income. Without powerful friends or the money to purchase a higher rank, promotion was tediously slow.
Should a senior captain, for example, die or be killed, the next in order of seniority moved up one, or sold the vacancy to someone else, and stayed put. In the artillery, where promotion depended upon seniority alone, the average time taken to reach captain’s rank was forty years. The artillery officer in supreme command of the guns at Waterloo was still only a major twenty years later.
These, then, were the men and the conditions under which they served in the Army of the Indus. Troops of the Queen’s army, they were taking their turn of service abroad in the empire. Their comrades-in-arms, the locally recruited sepoys, or Indian troops, both Moslem and Hindu, were by contrast all East India Company troops, organised in regiments commanded by the Company’s British officers.
Hindu troops, it was agreed, should not be sent beyond the borders of India, or over the sea, since this entailed for them loss of caste; nor should they be given beef as part of their rations — not even when it was called ‘red mutton’. And in the 1830s Lord Bentinck, then Governor-General, had ruled that the sepoys were henceforward not to be flogged, though their British comrades could be — a ruling which caused furious resentment.
Normally, by respecting each other’s attitudes and beliefs, the British and sepoy troops got on remarkably well together. It was usual to have mixed forces — the sepoys were believed to fight better alongside British troops, though this was a matter of argument.
Both races however, being men of little education, depended on good leadership. Without officers who were skilled, brave and deter
mined, their courage failed. The destiny of the army of mixed British and sepoy troops which invaded Afghanistan in December 1838 was to be ruled by this last need above all; for the power of the political officers over the military soon became apparent.
The columns moved slowly south-west across fine open country, presumably happy to have escaped the grim barrack rooms for a war which promised light-hearted adventure and loot. There were minor problems — some camels died through eating tamarask leaves — the grain dumps were always short — some of the camel drivers vanished overnight with their baggage. But General Cotton finally reached the town of Rori where he intended to cross the River Indus during the third week of January with the force in good shape.
But for two weeks he was delayed while the rulers of this territory, the Amirs of Sind, were intimidated into agreeing to a treaty that squeezed huge sums from them by way of tribute to the puppet Shah Shuja and at the same time guaranteed they wouldn’t harry the army’s lines of communications.
Cotton set his columns moving again in mid-February, now facing the crossing of the swift-flowing Indus, some 500 yards wide at the point he chose. There seems in this force to have been an odd mixture of grave administrative incompetence and remarkable practical ability. No arrangements of any kind had been made in advance to get it across this challenging river. It arrived before the banks with no single thing except the drive of its junior engineer officers to help it across, the General seemingly being unaware of the vast problems of supply and transport.
The engineer officers, starting from nothing, organised the felling of timber and the weaving of rope for the construction of seventy-four large bridge boats, hundreds of wood platforms and anchors to hold the contraption in place across 500 yards of swirling water. Several times it was nearly swept away by a sudden rise in the river, sometimes the cables snapped, but finally some 38,000 troops and camp-followers, 30,000 camels, several thousand horses and cattle, the artillery and a long train of bullock carts crossed without loss of life. Captain Thomson, the chief engineer, ‘was justly praised’, as well he should have been.
The Bombay troops, marching north were delayed by similar lack of military foresight, lacking both reliable maps of the region — they did not exist — and knowledge of the terrain ahead through reconnaissance. They advanced and hoped for the best, and consequently were often delayed when the track had to be made passable for heavy guns. But eventually Keane reached Larkhana on 2 March and spent nine days resting. It was at Shikapore, a town of 6,000 mud houses and 30,000 people 40 miles north-east that General Cotton was to wait until Keane arrived to take command of the whole army.
Keane had become anxious about supplies and as early as 22 January had written to Auckland suggesting that Burnes and the political officers having failed to build up dumps of grain and forage and arrange water supplies, the advance from Shikapore to Quetta should be delayed until this had been done, but his wish was to be frustrated.
In the region beyond Shikapore, known as the Pat, there was no water and no grass, not even the cicada singing in the infrequent dry scrub, only the barren salt-packed sand glittering in the hot sun like hoar frost, leading on to the dead mountains of the Bolan pass.
It was into this region, that General Cotton, disregarding his instructions, was now to launch his army and camp-followers — with barely enough food for the journey, no organised water supplies and practically no reserves of forage for his transport animals.
CHAPTER SIX
Cavalry covering the rear of the Bengal force walked at a snail’s pace behind the rattling black-barrelled guns and camped, on 20 February outside the unromantic town of Shikapore. Here it was that the Bengal force was to await the arrival of General Keane and the Bombay force, so that the army could finally be united.
But these plans went by the board. Sir William Macnaghten produced a bombshell — he had just received the news that the ‘friendly’ Afghans were about to occupy the Bolan Pass, which dominated the route ahead to Kandahar, and ambush the British. He urged General Cotton to march at once across the intervening desert to frustrate this action.
Major Parsons, the Deputy Commissary-General, warned of the food and forage shortage and pleaded with General Cotton to keep the force at Shikapore for at least twenty days, living as best it could off local provisions, while water supplies and forage dumps were built up ahead.
One infantry brigade and a few guns could have held the pass against the Afghans with little difficulty while the main force waited at Shikapore, but Cotton seems to have overlooked this.
He hastily issued orders for the force to divide into eight columns and march two days later, on 22 February, at the rate of one column each day, entering Afghanistan during the 171-mile journey to Dadar, and thence onward another 86 miles through the blistering heat to Quetta.
The destiny of this expedition might well have seemed to be pre-ordained among many of its God-fearing Victorian critics. For error followed upon error, the generals seemingly bent upon bringing it to disaster.
Macnaghten, having frightened General Cotton into an advance that endangered his entire force and its transport now announced that he, Shah Shuja and that monarch’s troops would after all wait and go forward through the Bolan Pass with General Keane and the Bombay army.
General Cotton marched with provisions for six weeks, leaving the same quantity stored at Shikapore for Keane’s troops. Local chiefs had promised ten days’ food at Dadar, at the head of the Bolan Pass, and twenty days’ more at Quetta, on the far side of it, but these promises could not be relied on. And there were almost no reserves of food and fodder for the 3,000 horses and 30,000 camels. As Lieutenant Henry Durand, an engineer officer with the force remarked — ‘They were marched into this tract of country as if possessed of miraculous powers of abstinence.’
In a temperature of 100 degrees Fahrenheit hundreds of horses, camels and cattle died soon from hunger and thirst. The Afghans launched night attacks on the camp-followers and the baggage train — every camel lost deprived the force of a day’s food for 160 men.
Cotton had fallen in with the wish of the politicals that his men should merely defend themselves, not counter-attack the raiders, frustrating as this was. But when the tribesmen grew bolder and attacked a hospital wagon, killing and wounding sick men, Cotton at last woke up and ordered the escorting troops to shoot the raiders on sight. In a protest symptomatic of the axiom of the politicals — that they were in friendly country — Burnes called this order ‘bloodthirsty, and calculated to bring on a blood feud’ — an outburst that Cotton was wise enough to ignore.
General Keane, when the Bombay force, too, endured these murderous attacks, would complain later to Lord Auckland: ‘The political officers led me — and I suppose you — to believe that we should find the country friendly from Shikapore to Kandahar… There was no hint that it was full of robbers, plunderers and murderers, brought up to it from their youth.’
Over the barren desert Cotton’s force struggled forward, the host of half-starved camp-followers with the baggage-train now in hopeless confusion. The advance guard reached Dadar sixteen days later, on 10 March, but instead of ten days’ supplies there was hardly enough for one day.
The food situation had become really worrying, but now, near to the mouth of the 60-mile-long Bolan Pass, General Cotton was obliged to order five days’ rest to revive the weakened animals enough to tackle the cruel march ahead — for without capable transport animals the force would have been immobilised, like a modern army lacking petrol for its vehicles.
The passage of the pass was costly. Hundreds of camels dropped and died of starvation in the narrow track, or fell in the wayside stream, tainting the water for those following. And all the time hostile tribesmen staged ferocious night attacks on the baggage trains, reaping a golden harvest. Finally, on 7 March, the first column camped in a plain south of Quetta and waited for the rest of the force to join them.
A final count showed the loss of ove
r 2,000 camels, carrying rather more than a month’s food — a serious loss, for almost none of the twenty days’ provisions promised the political officers by local Afghan chiefs were available at Quetta, nor were there any for sale locally.
General Cotton was now gravely embarrassed, for General Keane had peremptorily ordered him on no account to march beyond Quetta until he himself arrived — and the cause of his embarrassment — Macnaghten’s warning of an ambush in the Bolan Pass — had proved false. Yet instead of pushing on to Kandahar, where there was more likelihood of obtaining provisions, he had now to wait in enforced idleness for Keane, with his army eating its remaining provisions.
On 28 March, nine days later, he was faced with the stark fact that there were only ten days’ rations in the camp and almost no hope of obtaining any more. He had already sent Major Craigie, Adjutant-General, to Keane — still several days on the far side of Dadar — to tell him of the danger in which his orders to wait at Quetta had put the force. He probably hoped that Keane would undertake a series of forced marches so as to reach Quetta in a few days. But he was disappointed.
Keane wrote to say there was no object in leaving Quetta until Shah Shuja — whose column he had joined the day before, a day’s march from the head of the Bolan Pass — arrived to lead the force into Kandahar. To have the Shah at the head of the force was now vital.
The route up into Kandahar led over the Khojuk mountain range — 10,000 feet high and crossed by three passes. Cotton had many energetic officers who during these days of enforced waiting could thoroughly have reconnoitred them and returned, before Keane arrived, with information about the most practicable one to enter. But Cotton neither took such action himself, nor assigned his officers to it. And the force paid for this inactivity.
With less than nine days’ food in camp Cotton now had no alternative but to give his men short rations, but this he drew back from doing. He was, he said, ‘frightened of causing discontent’. Captain Thomson the engineer officer, very alarmed now, went to the General and insisted that this was the only thing that would save them all from starvation.
