The Dark Defile Page 9

  To Lord William Bentinck, Auckland’s predecessor as governor-general, the war was “an act of incredible folly.” To Charles Metcalfe, who had headed the administration of India in the interregnum between the two, “We have needlessly and heedlessly plunged into difficulties and embarrassments not without much aggression and injustice on our part from which we can never extricate ourselves without a disgraceful retreat which may be more fatal in its consequences than an obstinate perseverance in a wrong course. Our sole course is to resist the influence of Russia, and our measures are almost sure to establish it.” Lord Wellesley, also a former governor-general, dismissed what he regarded as a wild expedition into a distant region of “rocks, sands, deserts, ice and snow” as an “act of infatuation.” However, the most percipient, prophetic condemnation of all came from Wellesley’s brother, the Duke of Wellington, who predicted to one of the company’s directors that Britain’s difficulties would commence where its military successes ended: “The consequences of crossing the Indus once, to settle a government in Afghanistan, will be a perennial march into that country.”

  Chapter Five

  What is the cause of all this bustle and war I hardly know … How it will turn out I know no more than the man in the moon.

  —LIEUTENANT TOM HOLDSWORTH, 1838

  In late November 1838, Lord Auckland and Ranjit Singh presided over a grand ceremonial gathering, or durbar, at Ferozepore on the Sutlej River—the boundary between the Sikh and British territories. The occasion was both an affirmation of British-Sikh friendship and a demonstration of the splendors of the Army of the Indus about to depart for Afghanistan. The leaders paid reciprocal visits to each other’s camps and reviewed each other’s troops. Auckland’s sister Emily, who accompanied him, found the sights dazzling, especially the maharaja’s thousands of followers “all dressed in yellow or red satin, with quantities of their horses trapped in gold and silver tissues, and all of them sparkling with jewels.”

  Sometimes the presence of so many thousands of soldiers, elephants and horses brought chaos. The British camp, Emily complained, was “dreadfully noisy … The cavalry have pitched themselves just behind our tents; one horse gets loose, and goes and bites all the others, and then they kick and get loose too, and all the syces [grooms] wake and begin screaming, and the tent pitchers are called to knock in the rope pins, and the horses are neighing all the time … Then the infantry regiment has got a mad drummer … He begins drumming at five in the morning and never intermits till seven … It was so like dear Shakespeare specifying the “ ‘neighing steed and the spirit-stirring drum.’ ”

  The forces participating in the durbar were 9,500 men of the company’s Bengal army including some attached Queen’s regiments such as the Sixteenth Lancers, known as the Scarlet Lancers, resplendent in their tight-fitting scarlet tunics and plumed helmets. They were to be accompanied in the forthcoming invasion by 6,000 Indian levies, including one regiment of Nepalese Gurkhas, recruited, trained and officered by the British for Shah Shuja. The plan was that the joint force would march southwest from Ferozepore through the princely state of Bahawalpur and into Sind, where it would cross the Indus. Meanwhile, 5,600 men of the company’s Bombay army would embark in Bombay to sail five hundred miles northwest to Karachi—at that time a small fishing village at the mouth of the Indus—and thence march three hundred miles northeast up the river to rendezvous with their comrades at the town of Shikarpur, after which the whole army would move on through Baluchistan and the Bolan Pass to Quetta, Kandahar and finally Kabul.

  This combined army would total just over 21,000, fewer than the number originally planned because following the Persian withdrawal from Herat its strength had been reduced by one division of 4,500 men. Auckland’s commander in chief, Sir Henry Fane, had used the reduction to suggest that he should no longer head the army, writing to Auckland, “I do not think that for this my service is needed.” Fane was anyway in poor health, doubtful of the wisdom of the mission and his tour of duty in India was soon due to end. In addition, unusually and to Fane’s displeasure, Auckland had given the task of organizing food and sufficient horse and camel transport for the advancing army not to the officers of the military commissariat but to Macnaghten and his team of political officers who would be traveling with the army. Fane foresaw that this and other delegations of authority to Macnaghten would cause friction between the military and political leaders, adding in his letter to Auckland, “I think too that your instructions to Sir William Macnaghten and to me are such as an officer of my rank could hardly submit to serve under.”

  The sixty-year-old Sir Jasper Nicolls would, after much discussion in London, be selected to replace Fane and would arrive in India the following year. In the meantime, Fane planned to sail downriver for a while with his staff, keeping parallel with the Bengal force to oversee its progress. General Sir John Keane, commander in chief of the Bombay army, was to assume the supreme command after the rendezvous of the Bombay and Bengal forces.

  In addition to the main Army of the Indus, the troops to be commanded by Shah Shuja’s son Prince Timur, who was to be accompanied by Claude Wade as political agent, were being assembled at Peshawar. Six thousand of the eleven thousand men would be Sikhs, but this was as far as the Sikh military contribution would go. This force was to take the most direct route to Kabul, marching through Ranjit Singh’s territories and the Khyber Pass.

  Ranjit Singh, however, had announced that his dignity would be injured if the main Army of the Indus were to pass that way, hence the reason for its circuitous route through the Bolan Pass. The British were not overly concerned. As Captain Henry Havelock, aide-de-camp to Sir Willoughby Cotton, commander of the Bengal army, observed, “It was the policy of the hour to humour and caress the old ruler of the Punjab.” The British government had anyway decided that a detour through Sind might provide an opportunity to bring its still restive and resistant emirs to heel. As it advanced north through Sind, the Bombay force was to attempt to impose on the emirs a treaty of Macnaghten’s devising obliging them to allow the British unrestricted navigation of the Indus and—in return for Shah Shuja abandoning his claim to suzerainty over them or to the payment of any future tribute—to make him a large single payment to support his war effort.

  There was thus only rejoicing at Ferozepore and a mutual exchange of gifts. Ranjit Singh gave Auckland a bed with gold legs and encrusted with rubies and emeralds, while Lord Auckland presented him with a portrait of Queen Victoria in a solid gold jeweled frame painted by his sister Emily. A British officer captured the magnificence and chaos as the maharaja made a courtesy visit to the British camp: “From beneath a massive canopy of dust emerged the motley array of Ranjit’s elephants and cavalcade. Now hundreds of gaily-clad Sikh horsemen—some in bright chain armour, others in various coloured silks and cloths of gold, brandished their long spears, flung back their brass embossed shields, and galloped with headlong fury around the maharaja’s elephants,” which were covered with “gorgeously-embroidered gold cloth” and on whose backs swayed howdahs inlaid with ebony and ivory. The red-robed and turbaned Ranjit Singh himself was wearing the fabled Koh-i-Nur diamond on his arm. To the watching officer, the red and blue uniforms of the British looked somewhat dull by comparison. In Auckland’s durbar tent, Ranjit Singh reclined on a sofa. To Emily Eden’s artist’s eye he looked “exactly like an old mouse, with grey whiskers and one eye.” An English officer thought him “slight in form, and his face expressive of the shrewdest cunning. The leer that occasionally escaped from his single optic seemed to tell a clear tale of his debauchery.”

  In his own durbar tent of cashmere cloth supported by silver poles and with furniture “of frosted silver, inlaid with gold,” Ranjit Singh gave lavish parties for the British grandees, treating them to fireworks and performances by hoards of female singers and dancers. Emily wrote, “I could not help thinking how eastern we had become, everybody declaring it was one of the best-managed and pleasantest parties they had seen. All
those screaming girls and crowds of long bearded attendants, and the old tyrant drinking in the middle—but still we said; ‘What a charming party!’ just as we should have said formerly at Lady C.’s or Lady J’s.” Ranjit Singh, whose own “unbridled devotion to ardent spirits” was obvious to all, pressed her to taste the fiery brew of pounded emeralds, brandy and oranges—a “horrible spirit, which he pours down like water. He insisted on my just touching it … and one drop actually burnt the outside of my lips. I could not possibly swallow it.” Yet at the military reviews she noted how the Sikh soldiers outshone the British in both dress and discipline: “Nobody knows what to say about it, so they say nothing except that they are sure the Sikhs would run away in a real fight. It is a sad blow to our vanities!”

  On 10 December 1838 the Bengal army under Sir Willoughby Cotton set out on the twelve-hundred-mile circuitous trek to Kabul via Quetta, with Shah Shuja and his levies for symbolic reasons keeping two or three marches ahead. Cotton was a stout, good-natured, not overly bright man, of whom Fane had written, “I don’t think Cotton has a mind which carries away much of verbal instructions.” Macnaghten, who remained with Auckland, was to catch up with them later. The 9,500-strong column with its thousands of bullock carts, horses and mass of camp followers—an average of at least three for every soldier—stretched nearly forty miles. There were also thirty thousand camels. “What a sea of camels! What a forest of camels’ heads and humps and grain bags!” wrote one officer of the procession. “What resounding of sticks as the vast mass is driven slowly along, browsing as they go and leaving not one green leaf behind them.” Each camel took up fifteen feet of road and could advance at a speed of only two miles an hour, making them, as events would prove, easy targets for raiding tribesmen.

  Fane’s request to his officers and men to travel light was comprehensively ignored. Cotton, riding in a horse-drawn buggy, had 260 camels for his baggage, making Sir John Keane’s personal baggage train of 100 camels as he later advanced up the Indus from Karachi appear quite modest. J. H. Stocqueler, editor of the Bombay Times who for a while traveled with the Bombay troops, thought the officers “regarded the expedition as little else than an extensive pleasure promenade—an enormous picnic” and that many “would as soon have thought of leaving behind their swords and double-barrelled pistols as march without their dressing-cases, perfumes, Windsor soap and eau-de-cologne.” The Sixteenth Lancers, who were leading the Bombay force, even brought a pack of foxhounds so they could go hunting. When Stocqueler offered the officers’ mess some boxes of fine cigars, he was politely rebuffed on the grounds that they already had two camel-loads of the best Manilas.

  This was still a time when officers in the British, or “Queen’s,” army purchased their commissions and often their promotions. Officers paid for their own uniforms and equipment, making it almost impossible to be an officer without at least a modest private income. A young ensign had to spend almost all his first year’s pay to rig himself out. The arrangements, however, differed for the officers of the East India Company’s army. The company had its own military academy at Addiscombe in Surrey in England, where potential officers spent two years studying military matters, Hindi, mechanics and mathematics. They did not purchase either their commissions or their promotions. They were career soldiers mainly from middle-class backgrounds, in contrast to many of the Queen’s army officers who were often from more wealthy and aristocratic families and served for shorter periods. Queen’s army officers tended to look down on their East India Company colleagues, who were excluded from some of the highest-level posts in India such as that of commander in chief. Unsurprisingly, many company officers considered the Queen’s officer “always a mere bird of passage” who “should never command in India.”

  The comforts of an officer’s life contrasted sharply with the lot of the private soldier, whether in either the British or the company army. Despite the heat, each European or Indian infantryman was required to wear a rigid leather stock around his neck to keep his head up and his eyes ahead. On his head was a tall shako of black cloth stretched over a wicker or wire frame with a leather visor and secured by a chin strap. He wore stiff white trousers whitened with pipe clay, his “red coat”—a serge swallow-tailed garment buttoned to the throat—and a white cross belt from which hung his sword and sixteen-inch steel bayonet. His cartridge belt held sixty musket balls, each an ounce and a third in weight, for his “Brown Bess” flintlock musket. A muzzle-loaded weapon, it was unchanged since the Battle of Waterloo and had an effective range of only up to 150 yards.14 On his back—unless he paid to have it carried by camel as some members of the Army of the Indus did in contravention of their orders—he carried a heavy rucksack holding the rest of his equipment.15

  The private soldier was subject to harsh discipline—death by firing squad for striking an officer, refusing to obey orders or for cowardice, and public flogging with a knotted cat-o’-nine tails for lesser offenses. Although in 1812 the commander in chief of the army, Frederick, Duke of York, had ordered that no man should receive more than three hundred lashes, military courts retained powers to inflict up to three thousand. If a man fainted during punishment or was considered by doctors to be unfit to endure any more blows, he was given a few days to recover before the rest of the lashes were delivered. However, as recently as 1835, the then governor-general Lord William Bentinck had ordered that sepoys should not be flogged—a concession greatly resented by their British army brothers-in-arms, who were still so regularly flogged that the East India Company soldiers nicknamed them “bloody-backs.”

  In Afghanistan, the soldiers of the Army of the Indus would encounter a very differently armed and equipped enemy. Dost Mohammed’s forces consisted primarily of mail-clad, metal-helmeted irregular cavalry armed with sword and lance. The standard firearm of both horsemen and foot soldiers was the long-barreled matchlock jezail, which not only was more accurate than the Brown Bess but fired a heavier bullet and had more than four times its range. A British officer examining a captured jezail was surprised to find that “the ramrod, when put down the barrel, extended fully a foot from the muzzle. There must have been four or five times as much powder in the charge as is contained in one of our cartridges.” The jezail took two or three minutes to fire and reload, compared with the British musket’s more rapid rate of fire of two, even three, rounds a minute when in practiced hands. The jezail was thus an ideal weapon for a long-range sniper on a hillside but less suited to conflict on the open battlefield, where its bearer would be unable to withstand the more frequent disciplined volleys from the Brown Bess musket. Afghans usually carried two, even three, loaded weapons with them. Having fired them, rather than stand and reload, they either retreated or advanced to fight hand-to-hand with sword and small, round shield.

  Morale was high as Cotton’s forces passed into Bahawalpur, whose ruler Alexander Burnes, traveling in advance of the army, had persuaded to cooperate. However, as the terrain changed from tamarisk bushes to sand and date palms and the Indus drew nearer, some of the sepoys became unsettled. Sita Ram, a high-caste Brahmin of the Bengal Native Infantry seconded to Shah Shuja’s levies, explained why in his memoirs of the campaign: “[To cross the Indus] is forbidden by our religion and the very act means loss of caste. Consequently many sepoys obtained their discharge and many deserted.” He was also speaking for many of his countrymen when he wrote that the people of Sind, whose lands they would soon be entering, “were all Mohammedans whose language we did not understand and everything belonging to them was unclean.” Lieutenant Tom Holdsworth expressed doubts of another kind that were probably also quite typical. Though he wrote to his father, “I should like very much to see Kabul, Kandahar and all that part of the world, which so few Europeans have visited,” he added, “What is the cause of all this bustle and war I hardly know … How it will turn out I know no more than the man in the moon.”

  From Bahawalpur, the Bengal force crossed into northern Sind, where, in late December, Burnes and
Mohan Lal pressured the elderly and reluctant ruler of the rocky fortified island of Bukkur in the middle of the Indus into allowing the British forces to occupy it. Meanwhile, on receiving the not entirely unexpected news that the emirs of Sind were rallying their forces at their capital of Hyderabad and intending to oppose Keane’s advance through their lands from Karachi and the mouth of the Indus, Fane, still accompanying the force, ordered Cotton and the bulk of his Bengal troops to move down to support the Bombay army.

  This show of force backed up by stern diplomatic threats was enough to convince the Sindi emirs to accept the imposition of Macnaghten’s treaty obliging them to let the British troops pass through their territories, to permit free navigation of the Indus and to make the required large payment to release themselves for all time from any claim from Shah Shuja of suzerainty or for tribute. When the emirs had rightly remonstrated that these demands ran counter to an agreement made only a year earlier, they were informed that “neither the ready power to crush and annihilate them, nor the will to call it into action, were wanting, if it appeared requisite, however remotely, for the safety or integrity of the Anglo-Indian Empire or frontier.” Cotton, like many of his officers and men, had hoped for prize money from the capture of wealthy Hyderabad, whose treasuries were reputed to contain 8 million pounds sterling in coin. Instead, he returned disappointed to Bukkur to oversee the construction of boat bridges to enable the army to cross the Indus.