The March to Kandahar- Roberts in Afghanistan

by Rodney Atwood

  Burrows’ brigade lost 969 dead and 177 wounded, the proportion of dead showing the dangers of defeat in Afghanistan. The jemadar’s report of the destruction of the whole force was unwisely telegraphed by Primrose to Bombay. Even more unwisely it was passed uncensored to London and read by Lord Hartington to the House of Commons that night. In fact, Ayub’s force had paid heavily for their victory: 1,500 regulars lost and casualties among the Ghazis had been beshumar (‘countless’), perhaps 3–4,000.4

  While Brooke brought in the survivors, Major Adam and the senior medical officer collected all stores and equipment that they could find in the surrounding cantonments. There was indescribable confusion in the Kandahar citadel that day and night, the roads were blocked with laden camels, survivors staggered in thirsty and exhausted, and everyone talked endlessly of heartrending scenes of defeat. Brigadier Brooke closed and barricaded all save one of the city gates. Broken walls were repaired, wire entanglements constructed around the perimeter, fields of fire cleared and the gates covered in sheet iron to prevent the Afghans burning them down with brushwood faggots soaked in oil, as had been done at Herat in 1842. Some 15,000 Afghans were expelled from the city to avoid treachery and to safeguard supplies, and a careful search revealed extra wells. Ayub’s tribesmen began to appear on 5 August, but the main body of his force did not arrive until 6 August. Two days later his guns opened fire. The siege had begun.

  British prestige alone demanded that the situation be retrieved; the Kandahar garrison had to be rescued. Ripon could not abandon Afghanistan and Abdur Rahman with his tail between his legs. Should the instrument of vengeance be troops at Quetta or those at Kabul? A march from Kabul to Kandahar through formerly hostile territory presented various risks and would weaken Stewart’s force preparing to withdraw. Major General Phayre, commanding at Quetta, was nearest, and his ought to have been the force to relieve Kandahar, but his troops were strung out over the lines of communication and consisted only of Indian units from the Bombay Army, apart from a battery each of the Royal Artillery and Royal Horse Artillery, but none of the best infantry and cavalry. Few transport animals were ready, Baluchistan had been suffering drought for almost two years and forage was in particularly short supply. Phayre soon concluded that he could not hope to set out for Kandahar for at least fifteen days. In the event, he was unable to leave Quetta until 21 August, further complications having arisen from the mutiny of the troops of a British ally, the Khan of Khelat, which necessitated bringing up the 78th Highlanders from Karachi. So notorious were the delays that the wife of a British officer wrote to a friend: ‘If [only] we could hear of Gen. Phayre’s army making a start – a fortnight is past & still they have not been able to move – it is these delays which are so trying.’5

  Both Haines and Stewart were at first uncertain whether to despatch a force from Kabul, although the latter made preparations. Roberts was in no doubt. On 30 July, after dining with Stewart, he wired Greaves, the Adjutant General at Simla:

  I strongly recommend that a force be sent to Kandahar. Stewart has organized a very complete one ... He proposes sending me in command ... You need have no fear about my division, it can take care of itself, and can reach Kandahar within the month. I will answer for the loyalty and good feeling of the native portion and would propose to inform them that, as soon as matters have been satisfactorily settled at Kandahar, they will go straight back to India.

  The following day, Stewart reinforced this message by wiring the Viceroy that he proposed to despatch a column without wheeled artillery, which, thus unencumbered, ‘can go anywhere, and can thrash any number of Afghans. I have made it purposely very strong, because it must depend on itself.’ The retirement from Kabul could go ahead as planned. He wrote that day to his wife that Roberts was desperately keen to go, suggesting that he had already decided who would command the relief column. The same day, 30 July, at a Simla Council meeting, the decision was made that the column organized by Stewart was to be sent from Kabul under Roberts. The critical document was a reply from Haines to Ripon the following day:

  After your Excellency’s Minute which came to me in circulation today, I no longer doubt that a force will be despatched from Kabul to Kandahar. I am also aware that if a force is to go it will be under the command of Lt Gen Sir F. Roberts; than this no better arrangement can be made; by virtue of his local rank in Afghanistan ... he will ... supersede Gen Primrose.

  The decision was Ripon’s; he was suspicious of Phayre and thought he would ‘race for a peerage’. A force from Kabul would block Ayub if he intended to march for Ghazni and thence to Kabul. Reinforcements from Quetta would not prevent this. Arriving at Kabul with a victorious army Ayub might easily defeat Abdur Rahman, thus replacing a neutral amir with an anti-British one.6 By 3 August, the force was ready to march, but firm orders were not issued until the following day, although the quartermaster, Major Badcock, already had his.7

  ‘This is a grand thing for Bobs,’ Stewart reflected. ‘If there is any fighting, he can’t help being successful, and his success must bring him great credit.’ The lucky Roberts had not gone home when he had thought of doing so. Stewart was generous in giving him the command, but judging by the Battle of Ahmed Khel, was not Roberts’s equal as a field commander. George White wrote to his brother of Stewart: ‘Now that I see more of his work I don’t think he has much genius. He is an ambitious old Scotch man and makes few mistakes but he has not half the elements of a great general that Sir F. Roberts has.’ White, judging his superiors as fighting generals, did not appreciate administrative and political gifts required for the task of evacuation, nor that Stewart would take responsibility if the march failed.8

  Roberts was given the pick of the troops, almost exactly 10,000 men, 2,835 of them British: a cavalry brigade of four regiments under Hugh Gough and an infantry division of three brigades under Major General John Ross, the brigades commanded by MacPherson, Baker and MacGregor. They included excellent Sikh, Gurkha and Highland regiments, with eighteen pack guns, 7,800 followers and more than 8,000 ponies, mules and donkeys. As many soldiers of the Indian Army who had been at war for two years were looking forward to returning home, Roberts went among his regiments and did all he could to encourage them in this last effort. Lieutenant Colonel E.F. Chapman, his Chief of Staff, later observed:

  It was not with eager desire that the honour of marching to Kandahar was sought for, and some commanding officers of experience judged rightly the tempers of their men when they represented for the General’s consideration the claims of the regiments they commanded to be relieved as soon as possible from field service ... The enthusiasm which carried Sir Frederick Roberts’ force with exceptional rapidity to Kandahar was an after-growth evolved by the enterprise itself, and came as a response to the unfailing spirit which animated the leader himself.9

  Not least he was able to promise them that they should not be left to garrison Kandahar, but should be sent back to India as soon as the fighting ended. He wired on 7 August that those men selected to march to Kandahar were as keen as possible. Anyone incapable of prolonged forced marches was weeded out. Haines reassured the Viceroy that ‘Roberts’ force is indeed a splendid one; whether as regards the quality of the troops composing it, or with reference to the officers selected for command or staff, it is unsurpassed. I don’t see a single weak link in the chain of responsibility from Roberts downwards.’10

  The young ADC, Lord Melgund, worried that although it was ‘a splendid force with a magnificent leader’, the simultaneous abandonment of Kabul absurdly left the force without a firm base, ‘chucked down in the middle of Afghanistan on a most hazardous undertaking’. Nonetheless, he had implicit faith in Roberts and his men, but there were many Cassandras predicting the worst, and others set up the cry to bring Garnet Wolseley, ‘our only general’, from England.11 One factor greatly favoured the march’s success: Abdur Rahman’s help. He had every interest in seeing the British defeat his rival Ayub. More important than the 200 camels and 300 po
nies which he sent were the proclamation reassuring the people and the address to the venerable Mushk-i-Alam to exert himself as he had promised to assist the British. Mushk-i-Alam’s change of heart was remarkable, a tribute to the astute politics of Abdur Rahman. The Mullah’s eldest son, with the headman of each tribe, was deputed to precede the force, conciliating possibly hostile enemies and arranging supplies. Several of Abdur Rahman’s officials attended the second briefing before Roberts’s march and promised to provide everything necessary. Lepel Griffin judged that Mushk-i-Alam’s co-operation had been instrumental, his son was assisting the march and that little hostility was felt now against the British ‘except by the scum of the population of Kabul’. Chapman reported how much Abdur Rahman’s aid contributed to the success of the march. Nightly camps were always pitched where fields of Indian corn existed, and the animals were well fed.

  Regarding supplies we were especially fortunate; instead of our finding the country deserted, as it was in April, we owe it to Abdur Rahman’s efforts, or to the withdrawal of Mushk-i-Alam’s fanatical opposition, that the people remained to sell their grain and flour rather than suffer loss by having it taken during their absence from home ... a very fair market was daily established.12

  Chapman, who had been Stewart’s Chief of Staff for his march, contributed much to Roberts’s success.

  On the evening of 5 August, Stewart and his senior officers, and Roberts and his brigadiers attended a dinner in the sitting room of Lepel Griffin’s political mess. Griffin spoke first: ‘I wish to propose the success and speedy return with honour of Sir Frederick Roberts and the Kandahar army ... we have given you our last bottle of champagne.’ He recited Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’: ‘Come my friends ‘tis not too late to seek a newer world.’ Roberts replied graciously to Griffin’s speech with one of his own. ‘The last bottle of champagne’ was a generous vintage of Moet and Roederer.13

  On the day that Ayub’s guns opened fire on Kandahar, 8 August, Roberts, 300 miles to the north, began his march. From the outset, with the fate of the garrison at Kandahar apparently hanging in the balance, speed was of the essence. Lieutenant Travers of the Gurkhas wrote: ‘We are going to try and reach Kandahar by the 1 September and if we do it will be indeed something to talk about ever afterwards; as it is 27 marches and we must do it in 23 days including halts.’14 Everywhere news of the march was eagerly awaited. Russian observers were convinced that ‘the Mohammedan population’ of India was ‘greatly excited by the advantages which Ayub Khan has so far obtained over the English’ and a British victory was essential. At Bombay the Commander-in-Chief, Lieutenant General Warre, surprised and indignant that the telegram incorrectly announcing Burrows’s ‘annihilation’ had been posted at the Poona Club, had ‘great faith in Roberts’ to put things right and not to fight conventionally. Luckily, as one of Warre’s correspondents wrote, ‘the regulation drill book is nothing to a man like Roberts.’15

  Kabul to Kandahar

  Chapter 10

  March to Victory

  We are marching day after day through a half-desolate land, with no supports to fall back upon in case of disaster, and uncertain of what lay before us; with nothing but thin tents to shield us from a sun which laughed to scorn 100 degrees in the shade, and with a water-supply so uncertain that we never knew in the morning where our camping ground in the evening might be.

  Howard Hensman

  Heliograph message from Kandahar (27 August 1880):

  Question: ‘Who are you?’

  Reply: ‘The advanced Guard of General Roberts’s force – General Gough with two regiments of Cavalry.’

  When Lord Ripon gave leave to his Military Secretary, Major George White, hero of the fight at Charasia, to join Roberts’s force on the march to Kandahar, it took him ninety-eight hours to cover the distance from Simla to Kabul. He was delighted to join what he described to the Viceroy as ‘the finest force I have ever served with in India; I think I might safely say the finest Anglo-Indian force that ever marched.’ The Gordons were looking very fit, and all troops, Indian and British, were soon eager for the work of wiping out Burrows’ defeat. Roberts was delighted with the quality of his regiments and with the opportunity he had been given. The worry was that Ayub might escape without a battle, and White told Ripon that it would be well to let Roberts strike the decisive blow without waiting for Phayre.1 This reflected both force morale and Roberts’s own thinking.

  The column set off prepared to fight if need be, but the support of Abdur Rahman and Mushk-i-Alam meant that there was no resistance en route. Unlike Stewart, Roberts did not have to battle his way; the 300 miles were therefore a test of logistics and endurance, not of fighting qualities – those would be needed at Kandahar. The brigades moved out on 8 August and the following morning began the march in earnest. The march from Kabul to Kandahar naturally divided itself into three parts: 98 miles from Kabul to Ghazni; 134 miles from Ghazni to Khelat-i-Ghilzai; and thence to Kandahar, a further 88 miles. Ghazni was reached on the seventh day, the daily average being 14 miles, excellent work for troops not seasoned to marching steadily, in temperatures ranging from 84 to 92 Fahrenheit in the shade. This was the Logar Valley, with its varied beauty of cornfield, palm grove and poplar, inaccessible peaks and terrific crags, the foam of torrents flowing down mountainsides. Through the magnificent defile of the Sher-i-Dahan, the advance guard could see the whole column, 7 miles long, curving and trailing behind.2 When possible they moved on a broad front, brigades and regiments leading by rotation. There was no news from Kandahar at Ghazni and therefore no halt. The steadfast march was resumed: 20 miles on the 16th, 27 miles on the 20th, the longest day. The method of marching, wrote the Chief of Staff, Chapman: ‘called on all for exertion in overcoming the difficulties of the march, in bearing its extraordinary toil, and in aiding the accomplishment of the object in view’. The ground was a stony desert compared to the fields around Kabul, reported Lieutenant Robertson attached to the column; underfoot were sand and stone and choking dust, on either hand a barren wall of mountain, above the midday glare of the sun. Despite lack of shade and water, Khelat-i-Ghilzai was reached on the eighth day from Ghazni, a daily average of nearly 17 miles. The men were coated in dust and almost constantly thirsty. ‘The worst torment that pursued us was our unquenchable thirst,’ wrote Robertson. ‘Tantalus dreams of ruby-coloured claret cup, or amber cider, used to haunt my imagination till I felt I must drink something or perish.’3

  The troops set off each day in the early hours, at 4.00 a.m., and stopped for an alfresco breakfast at 8.00 a.m. – a slice of tinned bacon (for those who ate pig) between two cakes of the unleavened bread of India, washed down with cold tea. They halted ten minutes each hour, and usually came to camp in mid to late afternoon. The rearguard, who did not leave camp until 7.00 a.m., seldom ended their march before sundown. Those men who fell out on the march were placed on spare ponies, but were unmercifully ‘chaffed’ by their comrades. The weakest links in the force were the doolie-bearers and camp followers, who lacked the stamina of the sepoys, so the chief medical officer, Dr Hanbury, gave them a small meat ration. Those followers who attempted to creep away to sleep in a nullah were swept up by the rearguard cavalry.4