The first phase had been won. By 12.15 p.m. the brigades had rounded the southern end of the hills, seized Pir Paimal, and were ready for the final advance on the enemy camp. The 3rd Brigade was ordered forward to give added weight. Ayub’s troops on the Baba Wali had so far been helpless spectators, but as MacPherson’s men advanced on them, they resisted fiercely from a long boundary ditch, a small fort in rear of the ditch and a commanding knoll on the right held in great strength. In the centre were loopholed banks supported by guns. Here the Indians and British found the ghazis resisted every inch of ground, and the Afghan regulars were well supplied with captured British rifles. It was the moment for the final effort and fittingly White, having worked his men up to a pitch of enthusiasm, led the Gordon Highlanders, 2nd Gurkhas and 23rd Bengal Native Infantry over the defences at the point of the bayonet. He was the first to reach the enemy guns, but was closely followed by Sepoy Inderbir Lama who claimed one of the guns for the 2nd Gurkhas by putting his cap over the muzzle. The last enemy resistance on the Afghan right round three guns of Ayub’s artillery was overcome by a charge of the 3rd Sikhs led by Lieutenant Colonel Money. Lieutenant Robertson noted how closely the different regiments worked together, the 2nd Sikhs and Gordons rallying one another when two companies of the former came under heavy fire, the 3rd Sikhs coming to the support of the 2nd when the danger was acute.
The Afghans were now in full retreat, and this was the point at which Gough’s cavalry should have delivered the coup de grace. His orders had taken him to the east bank of the Argandab and when he received instructions to return to the west to cut off retreating Afghans, he had to pick his way through orchards, gardens and deep irrigation canals. By the time the Brigade reached the west bank their horses were exhausted and the enemy was gone. In the early afternoon the Bombay Cavalry were ordered to advance through the Baba Wali Pass, and they pursued the enemy for some 15 miles, killing over 100 of them. Ironically, the Bombay horsemen who had not done well at Maiwand surpassed the Bengal Brigade.
Chapman wrote of the rapidity with which large numbers assembled for battle in Afghanistan were able to disperse in flight. Men who had been engaged in hand-to-hand combat disposed of their arms in the villages they passed through, and would meet their pursuers with melons or other fruit in their hands, adopting the role of peaceful inhabitants. Of the thousands with Ayub Khan, only a few horsemen and a small party of Herat infantry accompanied him in his flight. The Battle of Kandahar was, Chapman claimed, one of the rare instances in which a Muslim army had been so completely routed as to make but small effort to carry off its dead. Nearly 800 bodies were buried by the British during the following three days. Afghan dead probably numbered 1,200, the wounded another 1,200. British casualties amounted to forty killed and 228 wounded, including losses the previous day. Other than the failure of Gough’s cavalry pursuit, the victory was complete. All of Ayub’s artillery, including two guns lost by the British at Maiwand, was captured.14 The Government of India later presented these two to Roberts. Ayub’s large marquee with its fine carpets, the tents of his men and ‘all the rude equipage of a half barbarous army had been abandoned – the meat in the cooking pots, the bread half kneaded in the earthen vessels, the bazaar with its ghee pots, dried fruits, flour and corn.’15 The sick and wounded fell into British and Indian hands with all the baggage. Forty feet from Ayub’s tent was found the murdered body of Lieutenant Maclaine, Royal Artillery, taken prisoner at Maiwand, his throat cut by his captors as they fled the British and Indian onslaught. Ayub had given orders that he should not be killed, but a ghazi passing in the retreat had seen and attacked him. Lieutenant Travers of the Gurkhas was furious about this and also about the failure after the battle to attend to some of the wounded: ‘The General when he heard it was very angry. The Med[ical] arrangements were simply nil ... To think of men who had fought so well being thrown aside like dogs, and yet they were within 30 yds of a dressing station, it is too bad/16
After the battle, the battalions formed up in their three brigades and Roberts rode to each to say a few words of congratulation, particularly praising the Gordons. ‘No other troops could have done it,’ he told them. Vaughan of The Times wrote: T can never forget the cheers which each regiment, Native as well as British, gave him, and I am sure they went straight to his heart. It was a proud day for the soldiers too.’17 Roberts did not fail to commend to the Viceroy’s favour his magnificent force, saying that no troops could have done better; that there was no doubt a feeling of disappointment when the order was first received to go to Kandahar, but ‘the men soon plucked up and their enthusiasm and determination were all that could be wished’. He recommended an additional grant of batta (field allowance) and a special medal for the march and victory. ‘These are rewards soldiers really valued.’18 British observers were full of praise. ‘I cannot do justice to the great military operation which Sir F. Roberts has undoubtedly accomplished,’ said White. The Viceroy wrote to him: ‘In my last letter to you I ventured in anticipation to say that your march would be famous in military history. It has more than fulfilled my expectations, and it seems to me to be one of the most remarkable exploits of the kind upon record.’ Congratulations came from the highest quarter. ‘The Queen Empress is anxious to express personally to Sir F. Roberts her high sense of the very great service he has rendered to his Sovereign & country by his grand march & brilliant victory which came at a very critical time.’ The Commander-in-Chief, Cambridge, sent his congratulations. Donald Stewart, with much reason to be proud of his unselfish contribution, told a friend at Simla: ‘The perfect success of Roberts’ operations brings the war to a close in a way that must be satisfactory to the Government and a carping Press.’ Roberts himself wrote to his wife on 3 September: ‘All anxiety is over, and our march has ended in a manner which I hardly hoped for in my wildest dreams.’19
In the chorus of praise, there was one dissenting voice,20 and that one muffled. Throughout the 1879 and 1880 campaigns Roberts’s Chief of Staff and then Brigade Commander, Charles MacGregor, had kept a diary extremely critical of Roberts. This intelligent, courageous, ambitious, opinionated and tactless officer, in his own words, ‘a grim-faced Mephistopheles’, and in the opinion of a fellow officer, not a friend to win hearts and influence people, wrote harsh criticisms of nearly all his fellow officers: Lockhart was ‘flabby and uninteresting’; Bindon Blood ‘an ass and a sycophant’; Hugh Gough ‘is a big ass’; Stewart whom he liked at first was soon castigated, ‘very stingy and canny, but he has not much go in him, and he is not by any means so straight as he ought to be’. Roberts’s letters are full of praise for MacGregor, a leading advocate of the ‘forward school’. Of Roberts, MacGregor wrote: ‘He is fickle, like all Irishmen, lacks ballast, not much of a general, would be bowled over by a setback.’ How much of this really stands up? MacGregor often proposed action counter to what was taken, and the success of Roberts’s measures contradicted his predictions. He was against occupying Sherpur because it was too large. Of the march to Kandahar he wrote beforehand: T do not see how Bobs is to feed his force, if we go. We cannot carry large supplies with us, and as the whole country will be hostile, it will be very difficult to get enough. He is a very daring little devil, and will risk anything to get a peerage out of this.’ By 3 August, when MacGregor found Stewart poring over Robert’s memorandum, the decision to send a force from Kabul had been made. Roberts was not the only seeker of glory. MacGregor wrote: ‘Oh! If I can only go, the eyes of all Europe, and India will be on us.’ Roberts no doubt thought the same, and once the march began MacGregor noted that he was ‘energetic and pushing’.
MacGregor claimed that the march was chaotic, ‘that of a disorganised rabble’, that Roberts was reckless and no organizer. ‘Bobs has made a regular mess of it all.’ It is worth noting that the day Roberts was persuaded to try MacGregor’s ‘dodge of marching in three columns’ was the day of greatest disorganization, according to Lieutenant Travers. It may well be that the rearguard was chao
tic trying to deal with the recalcitrant camp followers. The column stretching 7 miles was not amenable to rigid control. Stewart did not press his march at speed to save a garrison and took half again as long to cover the distance. When MacGregor recorded, ‘Bobs has got a go of fever and is laid up’, he hoped ‘he will pick up, or we shall be left to the tender mercies of old Ross, and that will be awful. Bobs with all his faults is at all events, go a head [sic] and decided.’ On 29 August, he added: ‘It is a great misfortune [Roberts] being ill at this juncture, as there is no one else fit to take command.’ When Roberts had briefed his senior officers for the attack on the morning of 1 September, MacGregor claimed it was a plan which he suggested, conveniently forgetting his earlier urging for passage down the Argandab to fall upon Ayub’s rear. After the victory he crowed: ‘It has been a brilliant success, and we have got all Ayub’s guns.’21
George White who had been critical of Roberts’s tactics at Kabul in December 1879 wrote to the Viceroy: ‘Everywhere the contrast between Roberts’ work at Sherpur and what has been done here cannot fail to strike the most casual observer. The absence of all enterprise and resource on the part of the officer in command is also conspicuous.’ Buoyed up by the success he called Roberts’s achievement ‘the greatest military movement made by a British army in our day’. This was pardonable exaggeration, but it was a feat of arms to match those other Victorian triumphs: the soldiers’ battle of Inkerman, and Wolseley’s night march and surprise attack at Tel-el-Kebir. Some will attribute Ayub’s failure to withdraw to the famed ‘Roberts luck’, White told Ripon, but remember Napoleon’s dictum about lucky generals.22
The fighting over, Roberts faced the inevitable problem of supplies, especially as Phayre’s force arrived at Kandahar on the 6th. To ease the shortage, the troops were progressively sent back to India, MacGregor’s Brigade first. With it went Roberts, worn down by the mental and physical strains to which he had been subjected. A medical board recommended his immediate return to England. The findings of this board are remarkable in view of his just having brought off the greatest coup of his career.
This present illness [the board wrote] commenced from after he entered on the Cabul campaign of 1879-80. A continuous pain in his chest, a feeling of weariness and occasional passing of blood per anum ... tenderness or pressure ... sickness of the stomach, and a great disinclination for food ... have continued on and off since September, 1879, and in April last & during part of May an attack of fever which lasting some time further aggravated the primary disorder ... During the march from Cabul to Kandahar in August ‘80 Sir F. Roberts has had two attacks of fever, one about the middle of the month, slight, the other on the 28th by which he was completely prostrate for 4 days. On the latter occasion his liver was much deranged – he suffered from constant nausea, violent headache, pain in back and sleeplessness with total loss of appetite ... absolutely necessary that he should have complete rest both mentally & bodily and change of scene.
Roberts was ordered on leave ‘as otherwise I [the chief medical officer] do not think his health can be restored’. He was possibly suffering from a duodenal ulcer.23 On 15 October he handed over command to Phayre and left for Simla, where he saw Ripon and received a personal letter in the Queen’s own hand, and then sailed for England, to his wife’s undisguised pleasure. She had told Lord Melgund:
I felt quite sure you w[oul]d be glad to hear of Fred’s success. To me it has been an immense relief after 4 weeks of the most intense anxiety and suspense. I am only anxious that he sh[oul]d get away. I have been very unhappy about him lately he has been so ill & for some time was unable to answer even a telegram himself.24
With Abdur Rahman established in Kabul, fierce debate raged as to whether Britain should hold Kandahar through the Wali Sher Ali, but in November 1880 the Marquess of Hartington notified Ripon that Gladstone’s government had rejected the argument of the ‘forward school’. Britain’s ally the Wali would be abandoned. Ripon was directed to arrange for evacuation and restoration of Kandahar to Abdur Rahman. Lyall was sent to persuade Sher Ali to abdicate; it took him five days. In April 1881, the British handed the town over.
Nearly a year after Roberts’s march, at the end of July 1881, Ayub advanced again on Kandahar, defeated the Amir’s troops and seized the city. A month later Abdur Rahman took the field himself, marched with 12,000 regulars and many tribesmen and on 22 September defeated Ayub. The battle was hard fought, but decided in the Amir’s favour by the desertion of some of Ayub’s troops. He fled to Persia where he continued to be a source of trouble until 1888, when he finally gave up the contest and accepted asylum in British India. He died at Lahore in April 1914.
The conclusion of the war led to Anglo-Afghan peace lasting thirty-nine years. Abdur consolidated his rule and accepted British diplomatic aid to secure his frontiers.
The cost of the 2nd Afghan War in both gold and men was heavier than expected. There was a financial blunder over the war, estimated in October 1880 at £17.5 million, including nearly £5 million for railways, although more accurate estimates raised the figure to £19.5 million. The British government contributed £5 million and India paid the rest, a heavy burden. The mistake cost the Viceroy’s financial advisor, Sir John Strachey, his job; he resigned and returned to England. The Military Member, Edwin Johnson, whose department was directly responsible for the blunder also resigned. Total casualties are more difficult to calculate. The Indian Army lost an estimated 1,850 killed in action or died of wounds, and nearly 8,000 of disease. Afghan dead in major battles probably exceeded 5,000; deaths from wounds may have been lower because of better acclimatization.25
As MacGregor rode out of Kandahar in August 1880, he wrote of Roberts: ‘What a lucky devil he is, two or three years ago he was a Colonel, now he will be a peer, a Lieutenant-General and Commander-in-Chief of one of the Presidencies.’26 MacGregor was right about the second and third: the war had made Roberts’s reputation. In the aftermath of Maiwand, English newspapers were calling for Sir Garnet Wolseley, ‘England’s only general’, to be sent to the rescue; now they were saluting Roberts’s march and victory, and he was received in England by cheering crowds.27
Roberts learnt from his difficulties with MacPherson of the Standard – in an age of greater literacy and increased newspaper readership, the help rather than the enmity of correspondents was necessary. Other senior officers, jealous of Roberts’s success and growing fame, noted that he had the good luck to have a correspondent or two to commend his march to Kandahar. There was nothing of luck about it. Luther Vaughan of The Times wrote somewhat naively: ‘I do not remember that during my ten months’ stay at Kabul with Roberts’ army, or on the subsequent march to Kandahar, anything in the nature of a censorship of the Press existed.’ He admitted that it might have been different with more correspondents, but only Vaughan and Howard Hensman went with the column. Roberts showed them kindness and great courtesy. ‘Amongst my most cherished memorials of the period are the notes he from time to time wrote me approving my letters and telegrams,’ wrote Vaughan, ‘and the manner in which I placed matters before the English public. Nor can I ever forget his kindness in mentioning me as if I had been officially attached to his army.’
As Vaughan observed, the fame of Roberts’s march owed much to the peculiar circumstances – an army of 10,000 men setting off into the Afghan hills, being lost to view, and then found again having won a victory that ended a war and wiped out a previous disgrace.28 Colonel Hanna claimed when he wrote his history of the Afghan War that the battle at Futtehabad on 2 April 1879, in which Brigadier Charles Gough drew the Afghans from their positions by a clever ruse, was ‘the most successful engagement of the war’. Roberts himself praised Stewart’s march in the reverse direction, from Kandahar to Kabul. The public, however, best remembered the dashing attack on Peiwar Kotal, the successful defence of Sherpur against odds, and the march to victory at Kandahar.29
Chapter 11
Epilogue
Then ere�
�s to Bobs Bahadur – little Bobs, Bobs, Bobs, Pocket Wellinton.
Rudyard Kipling, ‘Bobs’
I have always regarded [Roberts] as a scheming little Indian who has acquired a great reputation he would never have had but for the necessity of setting someone up to counteract my influence in the Army.
Sir Garnet Wolseley
Ripon was greatly pleased with the success of Roberts’s march to Kandahar, a triumph despite cries of doom from those who felt that launching Roberts without a base seemed ‘to be to send him to his destruction’. He had been prepared to overrule Haines, feeling that ‘the chances of success [were] good enough to set aside the usually accepted principles of theoretical warfare.’ He published relevant papers in two volumes under the title Kandahar Correspondence with an appendix of letters from officers on his staff including White.1 Ripon’s General Order dated Simla, 12 October 1880 gave everyone, including the Viceroy himself, a pat on the back, especially Roberts and his column: ‘The enterprise could not have been prudently entrusted to a leader less able or to troops less efficient than Sir Frederick Roberts and the soldiers so worthy of his leading.’2 Roberts was not to fight a major war again for nearly two decades, although he narrowly missed action in South Africa in 1881 and was on the periphery of a guerrilla campaign in Burma. He could be justly proud of his handling of the march and battle. He had faced the toughest Afghan troops in a strong position and had deployed his men ably. The quality of his force and its superior firepower, however, virtually guaranteed victory, unless he had blundered badly.
The March to Kandahar- Roberts in Afghanistan Page 18