By 9.00 a.m. Roberts was ready to continue his advance along the main ridge, and led it himself with the 29th. A mile further on they were halted by intense fire from strong enemy forces posted on the far side of a deep ravine, with dense pine woods offering good cover for the defenders. Brigadier Cobbe meanwhile had moved out at 5.00 a.m. as planned, advancing along the northern side of the valley. In his frontal assault the 5th Punjab Infantry under Major McQueen became separated from the 8th King’s. McQueen caught a glimpse of the Afghan camp through an opening in the woods and sent a messenger to Roberts, who promptly despatched two guns to the spot, their fire causing confusion and terror among the Afghan camp followers and baggage animals. The tents caught alight, terrified mules, camels and ponies, and their equally terrified drivers, fled westward. The panic spread to the troops opposing Roberts’s advance. A portion of them ceased firing and withdrew, leaving the ravine in front of Roberts’s force undefended. Meanwhile the 8th King’s Regiment led, first by Cobbe and, after he had been wounded, by their own commander Colonel Barry-Drew, worked their way from spur to spur of the Peiwar Mountain, to a point whence they could pick off the Afghan gunners on the summit of the pass. By 12.30 p.m. the Afghans’ fire was weakening and they began to fall back. Roberts took the bold decision to break off his own attack and move his force round into the valley beyond to cut off the Afghan retreat. This thrust at the enemy’s escape route was decisive. Once the Afghans saw what was happening, the retreat became general, and Roberts’s infantry and guns moved forward to seize the Kotal. The Afghan regulars fled down the main road pursued by the 12th Bengal Cavalry, while the irregulars dispersed into the hills. Limber boxes and abandoned guns littered the line of retreat. The victory had cost only twenty dead and seventy-two wounded, and had been achieved in the nick of time as Afghan reinforcements, both artillery and infantry, were moving up to the Kotal. The quantity of guns and stores seized by Roberts’s force showed that the Afghans expected to hold the position. Their force had been larger than assumed, and in regular troops alone outnumbered Roberts by about 3,500 to 3,200. The capture of the position made a strong impression on the Afghans and the surrounding tribes.
Roberts had boldly divided his force and led it personally on the flanking march. In his first battle he showed confident generalship, firstly by using surprise, secondly, by switching the direction of his attack when he saw he was making progress. ‘From the first,’ wrote Lieutenant Robertson of the King’s Regiment, ‘he inspired all under his command with supreme confidence in his judgement as a skilful general, as well as in his boldness as an intrepid leader.’ His subordinates, Cobbe, McQueen and Barry-Drew had used their initiative in pushing forward the frontal attack. By contrast, after the British attack on Fort Ali Masjid on the Khyber, Lieutenant Eaton Travers of the Gurkhas commented: ‘Sam Browne is certainly keeping up his apparently well earned reputation of being a regular old woman and quite unfit to command an army.’ Haines called Roberts’s victory ‘an exceedingly smart affair’, and the Duke of Cambridge wrote from London on 6 December to say how much officers at Whitehall were ‘gratified to hear of General Roberts’s glorious success on the 1st & 2nd, which seems to have been most complete & admirably done on the General’s part & the troops engaged under him.’ This was solid praise, as Cambridge had shared all Haines’s reservations about Lytton’s policy and the advance.9
Moreover, the timing of Roberts’s success was most advantageous for his reputation and his good relations with the Conservative government. According to Colley:
There never was such a stroke of luck for [news of the victory] was telegraphed home on the morning of the assembling of Parliament, and must have been shouted through the streets when the members were going down to the House to criticise Lord Lytton’s policy. Success always carries people with it, and I have no doubt it will materially affect the division on the big debate. We were glad to see that the Queen thoroughly appreciated it also, and sent out so congratulatory a message.10
The force remained at the Peiwar for four days, collecting abandoned guns, equipment and stores, sending wounded back to the field hospitals at Kurram fort, bringing up supplies and improving the road on either side of the Kotal. On 6 December, they moved forward again. Roberts reconnoitred to the summit of the Shutagarden Pass, finding that it was not so formidable a route as the Peiwar Kotal, but as winter was approaching he decided against occupying it. Instead, he ordered the troops to construct winter quarters on the Peiwar Kotal and in the Kurram Valley, and to explore Khost. By then the cold had deepened, bitterest at dawn when icy winds swept down the narrow gorge, and Hugh Gough in command of the cavalry later recorded that letter writing was impossible, ink freezing in the bottles. Washing was out of the question, as sponges and water were blocks of ice.11
On 23 December, in keeping with his policy of providing the best care and attention for his men, Roberts visited the wounded in their hospitals. The following day he had to confirm the sentence of a court martial convened quickly because of the shot fired by a Pathan in the 29th Bengal Native Infantry to alert the Afghan defenders to their approach. During the approach march eighteen Pathans had deserted. The man who fired the first shot was executed; a younger sepoy who fired a second received two years’ imprisonment; the Jemadar who failed to arrest them seven years’ transportation; and the eighteen deserters terms varying from ten years to one year. It was necessary that a deterrent example be made. Roberts recorded in his diary, after the hanging: T am glad it is all over,’ and commiserated on General Orders with the 29th, ‘a gallant and distinguished regiment’. The effect of the sentences prevented further desertion for more than a year, although during that time the Muslim portion of his force were severely tried by appeals from their co-religionists.12
In keeping with Lytton’s limited military objectives, Roberts was not to advance further towards Kabul. In the New Year he turned to exploring and dominating the adjoining Khost valley as an alternative line of communication, in view of possible further trouble. He had also been charged with ejecting the local Afghan ruler. This was to be difficult, in part because of terrain, in part because of the hostility of the inhabitants, and finally because of continued transport difficulties. Camels suffered in particular: in six months the Kurram Field Force was to lose 8,828 out of 10,861 hired camels.13
On Christmas Eve news reached India of the Amir Sher Ali’s flight to Russia and his son Yakub’s assumption of authority. Convinced that English policy aimed at destroying the independence and integrity of his kingdom, the Amir had decided on 10 December, contrary to previous thoughts, to travel to Russia to plead with the Tsar for help. This was in spite of letters from General Kaufman telling him not do so, but to make terms with the British. Although accompanied by the last officers of Stolietov’s mission, he was refused entry. Abandoned by the Russians, at war with the British, without friends, he died at Balkh on 21 February 1879. The Viceroy ordered Major Cavagnari to negotiate a settlement with his eldest son and successor, Yakub, British objectives having largely been achieved.14
Before proceeding to Khost, where his orders obliged him to remove the headman by whom his force was being harried, Roberts invited local Turis and Jajis who had given assistance to meet him in durbar, receive rewards for their help and be assured that they would henceforth be under the protection of the Government of India. After that he set out accompanied by Colonel Waterfield, the political officer, and 2,000 men, marching through open country and narrow defiles into the rich Khost valley, with its terraced rice fields, irrigated by numerous channels drawn from the streams that flowed down from the surrounding mountains, dotted with clean, whitewashed villages, the cottages garnished with cherry trees. On 6 January 1879, they reached Matun, the name given to three villages grouped round a small fort in the valley’s centre. Roberts had already been in communication with the Afghan Governor, who surrendered the fort on condition that he should be allowed to go safely to either Kabul or India. Over tea, the Governor
warned Roberts that he could do nothing to prevent the attack of hillmen from adjacent districts, confident that the small invading force ‘had been delivered into their hands’, and coercing the local inhabitants to co-operate. Roberts pitched and entrenched a fortified camp close to a water supply, and, sending for village headmen, informed them severe punishment would be meted out if the hillmen were allowed to attack. Rifle pits were dug, cavalry stood by their horses all night and the infantry lay down with arms beside them, but the overconfident tribesmen had put off their attack until morning. As it became light Roberts and Colonel Hugh Gough led out a reconnaissance of 255 cavalry, Punjab infantry and a mountain battery, and drove back the enemy by several bold charges against superior but less disciplined numbers. They then returned at speed to the camp which had come under attack by 4,000 assailants and scattered the enemy, the cavalry taking a hundred prisoners as well as bringing in grain and 500 head of sheep and cattle. Covered by a brisk fire from the dismounted 5th Punjab Cavalry, the 10th Hussars charged uphill into the centre of the enemy’s position, routed them and, rapidly dismounting, harassed them in retreat with fire from their carbines. Colonel Hugh Gough reported the charge ‘as one of the most gallant episodes in cavalry warfare I have ever witnessed’.
Roberts decided to take strong action: camp followers had been murdered, local levies had watched the fight, ready to join in the attack if it appeared successful, while the enemy had used the villagers to shield their advance. He ordered the destruction of the nearest hamlets where camp followers had been murdered. But the one-sided victory, with Roberts’s losses being only three killed and four wounded, did not settle things and more trouble followed that night. Some prisoners had been ransomed by agreement with the local headman, but the others held out for further payment. Soon after dark hillmen were discovered creeping up the banks of a nullah or gully at the back of the camp, where the prisoners were detained under guard. The nearest sentry fired instantly, and the piquets all round took up the firing, thinking another full-scale attack had started. The prisoners, calling out to each other in Pushtu, tried to seize the guards’ rifles and the sword of the Jemadar in command. He shouted at them to stop or be shot, and when this had no effect ordered his men to open fire. Nine prisoners were killed and thirteen wounded, five mortally. Major Colquhoun with the column noted that the last were treated with painkillers by the medical staff, the remainder were attended to and sixty-three prisoners were unhurt. Roberts ordered an enquiry, appointed a commandant of Matun Fort and began exploring and surveying. In three days he had visited the whole valley. The people of Khost and the surrounding hills remained hostile to British control and Roberts decided to make use of a certain Sultan Jan as Shahzada (local governor). Sultan Jan was the ideal candidate if anyone could hold Khost without British troops: he was an Indian Civil Servant of royal descent, with distinguished manners and appearance. Although Roberts summoned the local chiefs and addressed them, telling them that Sultan Jan and Turi levies would be left to maintain order, his appeal did not succeed. His force set out on its return march, but had to turn back to save Sultan Jan and his men from being overwhelmed by angry hillmen who simply waited until the Indian Army column had departed before descending like hornets. The Afghans then attacked the rearguard, but the cavalry under Gough kept them at bay. The historian, Colonel Hanna, blamed Roberts ‘for the costly and unsuccessful expedition into Khost’, and claimed that his force was saved from being overwhelmed only by the unusually dry conditions. Roberts would have done well to note the failure of his efforts to win over the locals and of village burning to cow them into submission. The nature of Afghan warfare and terrain made it easier to defeat than to subdue tribesmen.15
The Khost Valley venture brought Roberts into his first public controversy, which began with his sacking the only newspaper correspondent with his column, MacPherson of the London Standard. MacPherson, critical of Roberts’s conduct of both reconnaissance and battle at the Peiwar Kotal, exaggerated the dangers. He made much of the deaths of the captured tribesmen and of an alleged order to the cavalry to give no quarter on 7 January. Sacking a correspondent could well be a public relations mistake, but Roberts was prepared to run the risk rather than having a man he felt he could not trust. He enlisted Colley’s aid to get rid of MacPherson on the grounds that his dispatches were false and that he had added to a telegram after Roberts had approved it for despatch. He told Major General Martin Dillon at the India Office, London, that MacPherson was ‘an unmitigated cad’, that he had altered a dispatch after it had been passed, and that he, Roberts, had done his best to humour him, ‘knowing what damage these correspondents can do’.16 Certainly he would not have sacked him had he thought there was any alternative. The incident led to questions being raised in the House of Commons about the Khost expedition, exaggerated stories quoting that ninety prisoners had been bound hand and foot and shot. In fact, a Court of Inquiry ordered by Roberts decided that the native Jemadar in charge of the guard, a Pathan like his prisoners, had no choice and exonerated him and his men. Radical MPs asked why villages were burnt and Roberts’s cavalry ordered to take no prisoners. His written reply, that the people of Khost were distinctly warned that if the Indian Army column were attacked, every village from which his troops were fired upon would be destroyed, reflects his anxious and difficult position at the head of a small force in enemy country. The cavalry who charged numbered fewer than forty sabres, facing an enemy ten times as strong; the number killed were a tenth of that alleged in Parliament. To the ‘no prisoners’ claim, he wrote that he had instructed Major J.C. Stewart, 5th Punjab Cavalry, who asked, ‘Am I to make prisoners, Sir?’ ‘No, do not stay to do that, your party is too small. Disperse them as best you can.’ Was this justified by operational conditions? The small force was surrounded by vastly superior numbers and bold action was necessary. What Roberts did not seem to have learnt was that the Afghans remembered harsh measures – the shooting of tribesmen, burnings and the seizure of winter stores of grain; subsequent declarations of British good intentions and humanity did not change their hostility.17
Roberts read one lesson carefully: in future he took pains to ensure that war correspondents who accompanied him were on his side, properly looked after and suitably flattered. Perhaps he learnt this from Lytton, Colley and Cavagnari, all aware of ‘the importance which a well-instructed Press exerts’, as General Luther Vaughan, former member of the Punjab Frontier Force, brother of the famous headmaster of Harrow, and by then military correspondent of The Times, put it.18
Towards the end of February, Roberts was able to take brief leave and spend a week at Kohat in north-west India with his wife, who had travelled specially to see him. Meanwhile, the new Amir Yakub entered negotiations with Lytton. He did not enjoy the support his father had had from the Afghan chiefs and was prepared to compromise, but not to renounce his authority over certain territories on the Indian border. Accordingly, Cavagnari was directed to ask for an invitation to enter more detailed negotiation. Hardly had the invitation been issued on 29 March 1879 than a proclamation by Yakub addressed to the Khagianis, a tribe particularly troublesome to the British, praising and exhorting them, was intercepted and brought to Cavagnari. Roberts told Colley when the latter visited him in Kurram that this was a piece of treachery and that the Afghans had not had a sense of defeat driven into them. But Colley convinced Lytton to continue his attempts at a settlement with Yakub, for English public feeling was against carrying on the war.19 Britain was in the grips of a recession, trade stagnant, manufacturing crippled, agriculture – despite a good wheat harvest – depressed by unseasonable weather and disastrous floods. Disraeli’s government had become embroiled in a war against the Zulus, fomented by the expansionist policy of the Governor of the Cape, Sir Bartle Frere, and the muddled policy of Lord Carnarvon, Colonial Secretary. On 22 January 1879, just when Afghan opposition seemed overborne and negotiations were proceeding, events in Zululand took a disastrous turn. A massive Zulu impi,
or army, smashed into Lord Chelmsford’s camp at Isandhlwana while the main force was away, killing over 1,300 men, British and native. The subsequent heroic stand of the tiny garrison at Rorke’s Drift failed to avert a public outcry, and the cloud of mismanagement worsened when Napoleon Ill’s son, the Prince Imperial, trained and commissioned at Woolwich, was speared to death by Zulus on 1 June. Already, in the outcry following Isandhlwana, the government had decided to send Sir Garnet Wolseley as High Commissioner and Commander-in-Chief in Natal, Transvaal and Zululand with plenary powers, civil and military. He arrived too late in South Africa to snatch further honours, for on 4 July Chelmsford crushed the Zulus at Ulundi.20
In contrast to events in South Africa, those in Afghanistan seemed to be moving to a favourable conclusion. The interception of Yakub’s proclamation to the Khagianis led to fear of ambush or treachery, so he was invited to Sam Browne’s camp at Gandamak. This ill-omened place was the site of the final British stand nearly forty years before in the retreat from Kabul. The bleached bones of the remnant of the 44th Regiment were still visible.21 Tactlessly, Yakub Khan and his Commander-in-Chief arrived on 8 May in Russian uniform. His negotiations with Cavagnari as Lytton’s representative were not popular with the majority of Afghans. The British could choose either Yakub or likely partition, but the latter would bring further military involvement and expense. The terms of the Treaty of Gandamak, signed on 26 May 1879 by the new Amir and Cavagnari, seemed a favourable conclusion to the war. The Amir pledged to live ‘in perfect peace and friendship’ with India and agreed to British control of foreign policy in return for troops, arms and money in case of foreign attack. A British Agent was to reside at Kabul, British officers were to be stationed on the frontiers, and a telegraph line would run from Kabul to Kurram. Yakub agreed to promote trade and commerce with India. In return for an annual subsidy of six lakhs (600,000 rupees), the Khyber, Kurram and Afghan enclaves around Quetta and along the Bolan Pass were ‘assigned’ to the British as protectorates, rather than ‘annexed’, suggesting a chance of their being returned.22
The March to Kandahar- Roberts in Afghanistan Page 8