Sahib (11 page)

On 9 January many women and children were handed over to the safe-keeping of Akbar Khan, who maintained that the tribesmen were beyond his control, but there was no relief for the rest of the army. HM’s 44th, with some cavalry and horse artillery, held together well, but the native infantry were too tired, cold and hungry to care. On the 10th they were attacked where the road passed through a gorge, as Eyre related:

Fresh numbers fell with every volley, and the gorge was soon choked with the dead and the dying; the unfortunate sepoys, seeing no means of escape, and driven to utter desperation, cast away their arms and accoutrements … and along with the camp-followers, fled for their lives.
⁶²

There were further ambushes, and more fruitless negotiations with Akbar Khan. By the 13th only a handful of soldiers were left, and the last of HM’s 44th made their final stand at Gandamack, twenty-nine miles from Jalalabad and safety. There was a brief parley, and then:

The enemy, taking up their post on an opposite hill, marked off man after man, officer after officer, with unerring aim. Parties of Afghans rushed in at intervals to complete the work of extermination, but were as often driven back by that handful of invincibles. At length, nearly all being wounded more or less, a final onset on the enemy sword in hand terminated the unequal struggle … Captain Soutar alone with three or four privates were spared, and carried off captive.
⁶³

Six mounted officers rode for Jelalabad, but only one of them, Dr William Bryden, arrived there. The brave and pious Captain Henry Havelock was a staff officer to Brigadier Robert Sale, whose own regiment, HM’s 13th Light Infantry, formed the bulk of the garrison. At about 2.00 p.m. on Sunday 13 January one of his comrades saw a single horseman approaching:

As he got nearer, it was distinctly seen that he wore European clothes and was mounted on a travel-stained yaboo, which he was urging on with all the speed of which it yet remained master … He was covered with slight cuts and contusions, and dreadfully exhausted … the recital of Dr Brydon filled all hearers with horror, grief and indignation.
⁶⁴

The government’s hesitant response to the catastrophe exasperated Havelock and his comrades. ‘The indignation against the Governor-General and the Government, including the Commander in Chief, but chiefly the Governor-General,’ he wrote, ‘went beyond all bounds.’
⁶⁵
Auckland had already been scheduled for replacement, and it was not until Lord Ellenborough arrived as governor-general at the end of February that much was done. Lieutenant General Pollock, who had been appointed to replace Elphinstone even before the news of the disaster reached Calcutta, assembled an ‘Army of Retribution’ in Peshawar and pushed up through the Khyber Pass, relieving Jelalabad on 16 April. Another force marched up through the Khojak Pass to relieve Major General Nott’s garrison of Kandahar. But Pollock was hamstrung by lack of clear orders. The Commander in Chief thought it best that he should retreat, and the new governor-general was ‘scattering military orders broadcast’ without telling the Commander in Chief what he was doing. Pollock, subjected to a near fatal combination of loose direction laced with detailed interference, wrote crossly of ‘the little points that are overlooked by men who direct operations from a comfortable office hundreds of miles away’.
⁶⁶

It was not until 15 September that Pollock reached Kabul after beating Akbar Khan, and Nott joined him there two days later. Pollock inflicted summary public punishment by blowing up the city’s Grand Bazaar, where the body of Macnaghten had been dragged and exposed to insult. One officer observed that collective penalties like this hurt the innocent as well as the guilty, writing that: ‘To punish the unfortunate householders of the bazaar (many a guiltless and friendly Hindu) was not distinguished retaliation for our losses.’
⁶⁷
The captives taken during the retreat were recovered. Young Ensign C. G. C. Stapylton of HM’s 13th wrote that the men were ‘all in Afghan costume with long beards and moustaches and it was with
some difficulty that one could recognise one’s friends’. The army then withdrew through the Khyber Pass to receive a triumphal reception. A delighted Stapylton reported that:

Every regiment in Hindustan shall, on our march down, turn out and present arms to us in review order. They have also granted us six months
batta,
which, however, will hardly cover the losses of the officers.
⁶⁸

This display of gratitude was partly intended to divert attention from the fact that Auckland’s policy had foundered dismally. Shah Shujah had already been murdered by his helpful subjects, a putative replacement had wisely decided to come back with Pollock, and eventually Dost Mohammed – whose deposition had triggered the war in the first place – was allowed to return. Ellenborough announced that: ‘The Governor-General will leave it to the Afghans themselves to create a government amidst the anarchy which is the consequence of their crimes.’ The campaign sharply underlined the difficulties inherent in the existing system. Sir John Hobhouse, chairman of the East India Company, maintained, with some truth, that intervention in Afghanistan was the policy of the British government, and there is little doubt that Auckland saw it as a means of crowning his time in India with a resonant success. When the matter was discussed in Parliament in 1843 Benjamin Disraeli opined that Afghanistan, if left alone, would of itself form an admirable barrier against Russian expansion.

The soil is barren and unproductive. The country is interspersed by stupendous mountains … where an army must be exposed to absolute annihilation. The people are proverbially faithless … Here then are all the elements that can render the country absolutely impassable as a barrier, if we abstain from interference.
⁶⁹

These were wise words. But the linked problems of an unstable Afghanistan and an expansionist Russia were to cause more difficulties in the years to come.

Before the saga of the First Afghan War had reached its untidy end, Major General Sir Charles Napier was sent from Bombay to Karachi, without clear instructions but with the general task of ensuring
that the local amirs did not take advantage of British misfortunes. Napier was a hard and abstemious sixty-year-old Peninsula veteran, a political radical and ‘a curious compound of modesty with strange alternations of self-exaltation and self-abasement’. But he was zealous, energetic, and tolerated no dawdling. A subordinate who reported that a mutiny had broken out was told: ‘I expect to hear that you have put down the mutiny within two hours after the receipt of this letter.’ ‘We have no right to seize Sind,’ he mused, ‘yet we shall do so, and a very advantageous, humane and useful piece of rascality it will be.’

And so it was. Napier fought the amirs at Meani on 16 February 1843, and when HM’s 22nd preferred to carry on an indecisive firefight rather than charge home:

Napier himself rode slowly up and down between the two arrays, pouring out torrents of blasphemous exhortation, so close to both sides that he was actually singed by powder, and yet by some miracle unscathed by either. His appearance was so strange that the Baluchis might well have mistaken him for a demon. Beneath a huge helmet of his own contrivance there issued a fringe of long hair at the back, and in front a pair of round spectacles, an immense hooked nose, and a mane of moustache and whisker reaching to the waist. But though the opposing arrays were not ten yards apart, neither he nor his horse were touched.
⁷⁰

He beat them again at Hyderabad in March; when they asked what terms they might be offered, he replied curtly: ‘Life and nothing more. And I want your decision before twelve o’clock, as I shall by that time have buried my dead, and given my soldiers their breakfasts. ’
⁷¹
Punch
magazine, in one of the two great Latin jokes of British India, maintained that he reported his success in the one-word punning telegram
‘peccavi –
I have Sin[ne]d’. Like some muscular Victorian headmaster, Napier believed that the best recipe for ruling a country was ‘a good thrashing first and kindness afterwards’. When one local nobleman killed his wife and was duly condemned to death, a deputation came to protest that: ‘She was his wife, and he was angry with her.’ Napier replied: ‘Well, I am angry with him, and mean
to hang him.’ He did so, and the practice of wife-murdering fell off sharply.
⁷²

With Sind duly secured, the Gwalior campaign of 1843–44 Fsaw two victories at Maharajpore and Punniar, both distinguished by brisk British attacks on larger forces. This left the Sikhs as the only rival to the Company in the whole of the subcontinent. Originally simply a religious grouping, the Sikhs had become a powerful state under Ranjit Singh, who brought together the twelve
Misls,
Sikh confederacies, established his capital at Lahore and annexed both Kashmir (1819) and Peshawar (1834). Auckland and his advisers recognised that on Ranjit’s death:

The whole country between the [Rivers] Sutlege and the Indus must become the scene of protracted and bloody civil war, only to be terminated by the interference of a third and stronger power, with an army and resource sufficiently strong to bid defiance to all hope of resistance, and that that army must be the British army and that power the British government, there can be little doubt.

In the wake of the annexation of Sind it was unlikely that the Company would let legal quibble stand in its way: ‘The East India Company has swallowed too many camels,’ wrote Auckland’s military secretary, ‘to strain at this gnat.’
⁷³

Ranjit ruled in the best tradition of oriental despots. He bore the insults offered him by his
Akali
regiments of religious extremists with indifference, ‘until they are involved in any great crime, such as robbery or murder, when he shows no mercy, and they are immediately deprived of either their noses, ears, arms or legs, according to the degree of their offence’. One man thought that it would be amusing to look into Ranjit’s
zenana –
the women’s quarters – from a mango tree, and was ‘in a few minutes dismissed without either ears or nose, and died in a few hours’.
⁷⁴
Already old and unwell, Ranjit did not improve matters by drinking ‘wine extracted from raisins, with a quantity of pearls ground to powder mixed with it … ’. This brew was:

as strong as aquafortis, and as at his parties he always helps you himself, it is no easy matter to avoid excess. He generally,
on these occasions, has two or three Hebes in the shape of the prettiest of his Cachemiri girls to attend upon himself and his guests, and gives way to every species of licentious debauchery.
⁷⁵

When Ranjit died in 1839, to be accompanied to the funeral-pyre by four of his wives and seven slave girls, his eldest son took over, only to be poisoned in 1840: his own son was ‘accidentally’ killed when his elephant collided with a gateway on his way home from the funeral. Sher Singh, the army’s nominee, was head of state until his assassination in September 1843. Dalip Singh, Ranjit’s youngest son, then ascended the throne, though power lay in the hands of his mother, the Maharani Jandin. She was described by Sir Henry Hardinge, who replaced Ellenborough as governor-general, as ‘a handsome debauched woman of thirty-three, very indiscriminate in her affections, an eater of opium’.
⁷⁶

But it is more true to say that, while this lethal dynastic merry-go-round spun on, the real power was the
Khalsa,
the Sikh army. Ranjit had created the most powerful native force in India by welding together disparate elements, including Sikhs, Hindus and Moslems, and using foreign military experts to train them. In 1822 two Napoleonic veterans, Jean François Allard and Jean Baptiste Ventura, brought infantry and cavalry training manuals with them, and Henri Court, another Frenchmen, cast guns at Lahore arsenal and trained some of Ranjit’s gunners. Although many foreigners left, or were dismissed, in the disturbances following Ranjit’s death, as late as 1844 there were twelve Frenchmen, four Italians, one Prussian, two Greeks, seven Eurasians, one Scotsman, three Englishmen, three Germans, two Spaniards and a solitary Russian attached to his forces.

Perhaps the most spectacular of the whole polyglot crew was Paolo di Avitabile, a tough Italian soldier of fortune who went up to govern Peshawar. Captain Osborne, who breakfasted with some of them, thought that ‘they do not seem very fond of his [Ranjit’s] service, which is not to be wondered at, for they are both badly and irregularly paid, and treated with little respect or confidence’.
⁷⁷
By the time Ranjit died his regular army numbered some 70,000 horse and foot, supported by over 300 cannon, cast in six arsenals. Some of these were good copies of Mughal pieces, and others were modelled
on cannon presented to Ranjit by the East India Company.
⁷⁸
In addition to its regular troops, the
Khalsa
had irregular
gorchurra
cavalry and perhaps 3,000
Akali
religious zealots.

But if the
Khalsa,
with its smart uniforms and well-drilled infantry, looked like a European army, it did not behave like one. Regiments had all-ranks committees called
panchaychats,
which met to form an army council most concerned with that thing so dear to soldiers’ hearts: substantial and regular pay. Hardinge, a high-minded and paternalistic Tory, would have avoided involvement in the Punjab if he could, for he had ambitious social and economic projects and was anxious to avoid another ‘Sind scrape’. However, some Sikhs favoured a plundering raid across the Sutlej, and were encouraged by the Maharani Jandin, because this would at least get the
Khalsa
out of Lahore. When a Sikh emissary tried to persuade some of the sepoy garrison of Ferozepur to desert, Hardinge did not rise to the bait, but he moved more troops to the frontier and travelled there himself. He reached Ambala on 3 December 1845 to hear that the Sikhs had crossed the Sutlej, violating the provisions of their 1809 treaty with the British: he declared war at once.