The March to Kandahar- Roberts in Afghanistan

by Rodney Atwood

  When he boarded ship for England he was dangerously thin and suffering from ‘constant nausea, violent headache, pain in the back and sleeplessness with a total lack of appetite’.3 He was also the happiest man in India – gone were worries about the radical press, Massy and his friends, and the reaction of the Duke of Cambridge, who even then was writing to Haines to say that all Europe was complimenting Roberts’s operations ‘which they conceive have been conducted with the greatest vigour & sound judgement’.4 In England, he was lionized as the Empire’s newest hero. His last leave had been twelve years before when he had been an obscure artillery major. Now he was famous. Despite terrible weather at Dover, a large crowd waited to see him disembark. He and Nora were the Queen’s guests at Windsor, Victoria being impressed with his ‘very keen, eagle eye’;5 he was presented with swords of honour by Eton and the City of London; Oxford conferred an honorary degree. A special medal was struck and came to be called the Roberts Star, awarded to all those who made the march from Kabul to Kandahar including his grey, Vonolel. Nonetheless, he was soon bitterly disappointed with the rewards for the Afghan War compared with those for other Victorian campaigns. He and Stewart were made baronets and each given £12,500, but Wolseley had received twice that and promotion for the Ashanti campaign which, in the unkind words of the United Service Gazette of 4 June 1881, had resulted in ‘the capture of an umbrella’.6 He and Wolseley were soon to become rivals, not just in the public eye, but in the imperial strategy they espoused, each zealously backed by a circle, or ‘ring’, of admirers.

  Lack of commensurate reward for Roberts was ungrateful, for he had retrieved Britain’s reputation, but reflected Liberal feelings towards a Conservative war which they had been only too glad to finish. Radicals in Parliament had not forgotten the hangings at Kabul the previous year and opposed the vote of thanks to him on the ground of ‘atrocities’. Childers as Secretary of State for War said that the charges were without foundation. Lord Hartington added, ‘rarely, if ever, had a war been conducted with such strict regard to the principles of humanity and honour, and with such a total absence of excess of any kind/ a reply that would have brought wry smiles to the faces of MacGregor, White and Durand. The vote in Parliament on ‘Kabul to Kandahar’ was carried by 165 votes to 76. Roberts told Lytton that he would not be a party man; he had taken Kabul under the Conservatives and relieved Kandahar under the Liberals; but lack of reward rankled, and to the Governor of Madras he wrote that he had ‘never anticipated that, after an arduous campaign which lasted 2 years, and which was brought to a successful conclusion by the decisive action at Kandahar, my services would be weighed in the somewhat fickle scale of politics’.7

  The Kabul executions did not dog Roberts’s future career. There had been no television cameras in Afghanistan in 1879, and only one of the beautifully produced black-and-white photographs by J. Burke now in the National Army Museum shows the gallows; it is captioned ‘The Gate & the Gallows where several of the murderers of Sir L. Cavagnari and party were executed’. Ripon had been a fierce critic of Roberts while in England, but once in the Viceroy’s seat, he had employed the best fighting soldier available to defeat Ayub Khan. Roberts did not mention the executions in his autobiography. Biographies of George White and Mortimer Durand quote their letters in bowdlerized form: Durand wrote White’s on Roberts’s recommendation and could hardly damn him; Sir Percy Sykes, Durand’s biographer, composed his with Roberts’s elder daughter looking over his shoulder. MacGregor, a fierce critic in the privacy of his journal, edited the official history of the 2nd Afghan War, but the section on the hangings is taken verbatim from Howard Hensman’s dispatches. Hensman defended Roberts throughout. The official history was shortly suppressed, not by Roberts with a guilty conscience, for he had no need to worry, but by the Government of India who did not wish it read during their diplomatic wooing of Abdur Rahman in the 1880s. Indian Army men said that the Afghans got their deserts for the treacherous massacre of Cavagnari and his men and the disfiguring of the corpses of British and Indian soldiers. Brigadier Charles Gough spoke for others when he wrote: ‘They are the most bloodthirsty villains going, such is the case with all Orientals, War with them means Death & Destruction to their Enemy.’8

  Roberts’s fame as ‘our only t’other general’ in Mr Punch’s words led in time to a rift with Wolseley and the famous clash of the ‘rings’ – ‘Ashanti’ and ‘Indian’. Roberts entered the lists against Wolseley in a speech on the question of long- and short-service enlistments. Short-service enlistments were a feature of the Cardwell reforms. Edward Cardwell, Secretary of State for War in Gladstone’s first government, had instituted a famous series of reforms which did much to establish the nature of late Victorian Britain’s Army in the wake of Prussia’s smashing victories over Austria and France. Cardwell’s measures were striking but incomplete. He moved the reluctant Commander-in-Chief, the Duke of Cambridge, from his separate offices in the Horse Guards to the War Office in Pall Mall, emphasizing the constitutional supremacy of the secretary of state over the Commander-in-Chief. The Army Enlistment Act of 1870 provided for service of six years with the colours and six with the reserve with the option of only three years service with the colours for recruits to home regiments; it attempted to create a reserve of 60,000 men to be mobilized in a great European war, but provide six years’ long service for men garrisoning India and the rest of the Empire. Without, however, an increase in pay and expensive improvements in service conditions, changes which a parsimonious Gladstonian administration was unlikely to agree to, recruitment remained a problem. A second reform, the ‘linked-battalion’ system, had to wait until 1881 and another reforming Secretary of State, Hugh Childers, to take the final step of forming two-battalion regiments, one battalion at home, one for overseas service. Purchase of commissions, which seemed to epitomize control of the Army by a narrow and incompetent landed elite of nobility and gentry, stood in the way of reform and a professional army. There was a violent Parliamentary struggle over abolition and the House of Lords threw out the bill. Cardwell turned the diehards’ flank in July 1871 by inducing the Queen to end purchase by royal warrant. The abolition neither altered the social composition of the officer corps nor infused the Army with a new professional spirit; it could not do so unless officers’ salaries were increased and promotion made dependent upon merit in action and passing examinations. Both Wolseley and Roberts found accelerated promotion for their ablest followers difficult in the face of the dominance of seniority. Cambridge and his allies continued to resist change, and the War Office became a byword for compromise and dithering. A proper assessment of Britain’s strategic needs had to wait until the Stanhope Memorandum of 1891, soon to be rendered obsolete by events.9

  For service in India, not young recruits but seasoned men were needed. Therefore, Roberts was not alone in being unhappy with short service and its effect on esprit de corps. On 14 February 1881 he was guest of honour at the Mansion House, London, with the Duke of Cambridge in the chair. In his speech Roberts protested against short service: ‘What is it that has enabled a comparatively small number of British troops, over and over again, to face tremendous odds, and win battles against vastly superior numbers? The glorious annals of our regiments give the answer – discipline, esprit de corps, and powers of endurance -the three essentials which are absolutely wanting in the young soldier.’ Roberts argued for Britain having two armies – a home army and a foreign service army, the latter ‘always be in the most perfect state of efficiency, ready to take the field in our distant possessions on the shortest possible notice’.

  Among the listeners at the Mansion House, Lord Melgund praised the speech as ‘the best I ever heard ... The speech has been received with rapture by nearly every soldier.’ The Duke of Cambridge echoed this, writing to Haines: ‘we have had a great speech by Sir Frederick Roberts at the Mansion House dinner last Monday [which] has had a great impression ... certainly the public have taken the subject up very warmly & I am not so
rry they should have done so whatever may come of it.’10 Cambridge was an opponent of short service and pleased that a younger general shared his views. Roberts’s words had a lasting impact and in 1903 his admirers were still quoting them.11 Wolseley, a partisan of Caldwell’s reforms, took the opposite view. He replied to Roberts in the March 1881 issue of The Nineteenth Century in intemperate language, castigating the critics of short service as chronic grumblers and whining pessimists. He argued that armies and navies were by their very nature conservative, opposed to the Liberal government’s reforms. The rivalry between Roberts and Wolseley was based, not just on differences over terms of enlistment, but on differing strategies and competition for top army jobs. Wolseley wished to make the home army, with the mobility which sea power conferred upon it, the basis of imperial defence; Roberts advocated a continental policy in which the Indian army played the key role. Their ‘rings’ competed in the last years of the nineteenth century in ‘a deadly game of musical chairs’ for the key commands in Ireland and India, at Aldershot and the War Office.12

  Roberts’s career flourished in India where he was Commander-in-Chief first at Madras and then at Calcutta and Simla. His influence was far reaching, partly because of excellent relations with Viceroys Dufferin and Lansdowne, and with Military Members of their council, Major Generals George Chesney and Henry Brackenbury, the latter a follower of Wolseley, won over to the ‘Indians’. Roberts continued to develop links with newspapermen, notably with Hensman, now Simla correspondent of the Allahabad Pioneer, reputed to know all the army secrets (‘Roberts made him, and he made Roberts,’ it was alleged).13

  While Roberts was Commander-in-Chief, MacGregor took over the Intelligence Department, which he dramatically improved in efficiency. He prepared plans to mobilize an army corps quickly in the event of sudden emergency. In 1884 his comprehensive and exhaustive treatise, The Defence of India: a Strategical Study, was privately published, but its characteristically outspoken and alarmist views on British strategy in the event of Russian attack led to its suppression by the imperial authorities. When MacGregor was appointed to command the Punjab Frontier Force, his health broke down and a few days after his promotion to major general, he died of peritonitis at the age of forty-six.14 After his death, Roberts became main spokesman of the ‘forward school’, arguing for readiness on the North-West Frontier against possible Russian invasion. His advocacy of the ‘martial races’ of northern India, and especially the Gurkhas, those bullet-headed, broad-chested, loyal paladins of empire, had an effect which has continued today. He was popular with soldiers both Indian and British, noted for his care for young recruits, but tough on those two idols of the enlisted man, drink and sex. He was Commander-in-Chief for an unusually long time, nearly eight years, and he engineered the appointment of George White as his successor, over the heads of senior men. Roberts was not alone in pushing for his appointment, however, as he had the support of Lansdowne, then Viceroy, and Sir Henry Brackenbury, the Military Member. White was a convert to Roberts’s ‘forward policy’, and had made his reputation in Burma in 1885-7 by excellent leadership and administration. He had always ‘liked the little man’ and was immensely grateful when he gained him his major generalship in 1889. There was also someone else to be thanked. To his wife White wrote: ‘Don’t neglect to call upon Lady Roberts and remember to go out of your way to be grateful to Sir Fred. His kindness & interest in me has been something that I have not been accustomed to and I have enlisted more thoroughly than ever under his standard. Find her out and call upon her.’15

  In 1893 Colonel Henry Hanna was busy on his history of the 2nd Afghan War. He had been denied promotion by Roberts when the latter was Commander-in-Chief, and to frustrated ambition he added disagreement over relations with Afghanistan and the frontier tribes. Despite successful advances made in Baluchistan by Robert Sandeman and George White, and British consolidation of Quetta, Hanna was a convinced opponent of the ‘forward policy’. He claimed that since the war one tribe after another had come to view the Indian government with growing mistrust and that this was the fault of the government’s policy, a policy inspired by Roberts. His building of strategic railways and stationing troops on the frontier against possible Russian incursion was disastrous, thought Hanna, who was determined that his history of the 2nd Afghan War would show this.

  He wrote to Brigadier Charles Gough, who was still sore at Roberts for his telegrams in December 1879 asking him to march through snow and Afghans to Sherpur. Repeating his charge that Roberts ruled at Kabul with a harsh and not always just hand, Hanna continued, ‘In my opinion Gen[era]l Roberts is in all public matters the most dangerous & unscrupulous man I have ever known. He would not hesitate to sacrifice any man to save his own reputation, or to pander to his personal ambition.’ Hanna hoped to draw Gough on the question of whether he had been in a race with Roberts to reach Kabul after Cavagnari’s murder in 1879, just as he maintained that there had been ‘a race for the peerage’ to Kandahar the following year. Gough, whose victory at Futtehabad on 2 April 1879 Hanna was to praise as ‘the most successful engagement of the war’, did not agree. He reminded Hanna that Roberts’s reputation for self-advertisement was well known, but he would not engage in public denigration of the victor of Kandahar, whose reputation then stood high on the eve of his leaving India.

  Hanna did not let the matter drop. Two years later the North-West Frontier was in the news again, as the ruler of the border state of Chitral was murdered, Afghan tribesmen invaded from the north and a British garrison was surrounded Beau-Geste-style in the loop-holed fort. Hanna published an angry pamphlet entitled Lord Roberts in War, full of interesting insights into the 2nd Afghan War designed to prove that Roberts’s success at the Peiwar Kotal had been luck, that Massy and MacPherson had saved him in the Chardeh Valley, that he had selfishly called Charles Gough to his succour at Sherpur and had not properly thanked him in his despatch. Alone of Roberts’s deeds in Afghanistan, the march to Kandahar escaped criticism. ‘I have no wish to depreciate Lord Roberts’ one great achievement,’ wrote Hanna, mixing praise with damnation. ‘The advance on Kandahar was a splendid soldiers’ march, fully testing the endurance and spirit of the veteran troops who took part in it; and the battle of Kandahar was the battle of a good tactician.’16

  Another two years passed, and in 1897 the embittered Hanna was back to his theme, emphasizing in a letter to Gough how the writing of his history had enabled him to form strong views on the North-West Frontier, contrary to those of Roberts, needless to say. He was, however, trumped in true literary style by the intended object of his criticism. The year was Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, a festival of rejoicing, both domestic and imperial. In January, with impeccable timing, there appeared in the London bookshops an exciting new account of army life in Britain’s Indian Empire, written by none other than Roberts himself. Forty-One Years in India: From Subaltern to Commander-in-Chiefwas a runaway best-seller. On 9 January, five days after the book’s appearance, one reviewer commented: ‘There has only been one thing to do in London this week – to go to India with Lord Roberts. No autobiography has been so run after for years, and novel-reading is in abeyance.’ In just over a year twenty-eight editions were published; eventually there were thirty-five and the book was translated into Braille, German, Italian and Urdu. ‘Few young officers will rise from the story of [Roberts’s] life,’ The Times stated, ‘without feeling that they would like to serve under such a chief.’ Roberts’s proteges agreed wholeheartedly. Colonel Sir Henry Rawlinson, who had served on Roberts’s staff, congratulated him on The Times review. Colonel Sir Reginald Pole-Carew, veteran of Kabul and Kandahar, told Roberts he was giving away copies and growing in popularity. The book became standard reading for young men thinking of an Indian career. The young Winston Churchill’s mother sent him a copy. The descriptions of India, the tribulations of army life there in the 1850s and 1860s, daring deeds on the Afghan frontier, the support of Lady Roberts, the cheerful and encouraging s
pirit of the writing – these all contributed to the image of Frederick Roberts as a chevalier sans peur et sans reproche, and set the seal on the image of ‘Bobs Bahadur’, ‘Bobs the hero’, the five-foot-four-inch pocket Wellington.17

  That a talent for spectacular, well-publicized victories, contacts in many high places and an ability to woo the press outweighed diplomatic and administrative capacity is shown by the subsequent careers of the two British heroes of the war, Roberts and Stewart. Following the 2nd Afghan War, Stewart was first Military Member of the Viceroy’s council, and then succeeded Haines as Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army. Understandably he kept a keen eye on the North-West Frontier, and approved Abdur Rahman’s victory over Ayub in August 1881. T have always considered the Amir to be by far the astutest politician and statesman in Afghanistan,’ he wrote, ‘but I did not credit him with energy and high military qualities. So far, however, the Afghan policy of the present government has been a success, and every one must rejoice that it is so, whether they approve or disapprove of it.’ He believed that although the Amir could not injure friends who had sheltered him and treated him generously during years of exile – i.e. the Russians – Abdur would realize that Russia was an aggressive power in central Asia in a way that Britain was not. That was in October 1883. The following year, Russia’s capture of Merv about 150 miles from the Afghan border raised British fears. The Liberals accused the Conservative government of obsessive anxiety, ‘mervousness’ as the Duke of Argyll called it, but the attack of the Russian general Komaroff on Afghan troops at Pandjeh seemed to show they were right. The crisis occurred when Abdur was visiting the Viceroy, Dufferin, and meeting again British commanders of the war that brought him to power. Abdur’s cool nerve and Dufferin’s tact avoided the crisis deepening. Russia kept Pandjeh, exchanged for other territory. Stewart gave evidence of the Amir’s clever calculation when in March 1885 the latter produced a Martini-Henry rifle which his country had been manufacturing. A British officer asked about ammunition, whereupon, recorded Stewart: ‘The Amir, with an intelligent and significant look on his face, said: “I did not attempt to manufacture the arms until I succeeded in making the ammunition.”,18