The March to Kandahar- Roberts in Afghanistan

by Rodney Atwood

  As Commander-in-Chief, Stewart, like Roberts after him, favoured camps of exercise – i.e. extended manoeuvres – on the model of their patron Napier. The armies of Bengal, Bombay and Madras combined in January 1884 at Bangalore, with benefit to all three in their fighting readiness. ‘Roberts is full of enthusiasm and inspires every one around him with a like spirit,’ noted Stewart. ‘All are anxious to learn, and the experience gained here must be beneficial, especially to the senior officers and staff.’19

  Stewart was the last man to write himself up, or to care for praise. ‘His one idea was that a man should do his duty,’ wrote his friend and admirer Revd Warneford. ‘He was blamed I know by many for not having made more mention of his march, and of his battles.’ He did ensure, however, that when the time came to relinquish his command, his old friend put forward his bid to succeed him. On 17 July 1885, he wrote to Roberts: ‘Though I am very busy with my home letters I must write one line to urge you to put all your irons into the fire without delay if you want to succeed me.’20 Roberts’s appointment followed at the end of that month, but appears primarily to have been due to Lord Randolph Churchill, Secretary of State for India. He had been impressed with Roberts on an Indian tour and also by his forecasting the poor conduct of what seemed a very smart regiment, the 17th Bombay Native Infantry, which broke and fled at Tofrek in the Sudan fighting against the Dervishes. Roberts had reminded Churchill of his prediction in a letter of 15 April 1885.21 Stewart returned to England and joined the Council of India, old India men who advised the Secretary of State. On his death in North Africa in March 1900, while the Boer War was its height, The Times recorded: ‘While Lord Roberts of Kandahar is prosecuting a difficult campaign in South Africa with characteristic ability and energy, the great Indian soldier who sent him on his famous march from Kabul has passed away quietly in Algiers.’22

  Roberts’s career might have ended after his return from India in 1893 and his taking over the Irish command in 1895, a backwater leading to retirement. By that time, however, war with the Boers in South Africa appeared certain. Roberts, urged among others by Rawlinson, wrote to the former Viceroy, Lansdowne, now Secretary of State for War, offering his services. Instead, the former Adjutant General and commander at Aldershot, Redvers Buller, was sent out in command. Early British defeats in South Africa dismayed the Empire, the British government and Buller, who was unable to cope with supreme responsibility. Roberts was despatched to redeem British arms once again, this time in partnership with Major General Sir Herbert Kitchener as his Chief of Staff. Just before he sailed, he and Lady Roberts received news of the death of their son Freddie, mortally wounded trying to rescue guns captured by the Boers at Colenso. He was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross.

  Within nine weeks of his arrival at Cape Town and four weeks of opening his campaign, he turned the tide of war: Kimberley and Ladysmith were relieved and a force of 4,000 Boers under Cronje were surrounded at Paardeberg and captured. After a pause to bring up supplies, Roberts continued his advance in overwhelming strength, capturing Bloemfontein, capital of the Orange Free State, Johannesberg, heart of the Rand, and Pretoria, capital of the Transvaal. Following a final battle at Diamond Hill, Boer forces dispersed. Roberts had defeated but not destroyed the enemy and the commandos continued to fight on. The last of Britain’s Victorian colonial wars turned into the first of the people’s wars of the twentieth century, and the methods of the future – farm burning, hostages and concentration camps – were started by Roberts and then introduced full scale by Kitchener, who succeeded him and finally ended the war in May 1902.

  Roberts’s annexation of the Transvaal was followed by a Conservative victory in the ‘Khaki election’, and he returned to England at the start of 1901 to claim his rewards: the Garter, £100,000, and the top job he had coveted, Commander-in-Chief of the British Army in succession to his rival, Wolseley. Installed in the War Office he wrote encouragingly to Kitchener, who was chasing Boer commandos, pressed Kitchener’s claim for the Indian command and finally sent out Colonel Ian Hamilton as Chief of Staff. Despatched to co-ordinate operations in the western Transvaal, Hamilton was able to pull off a victory on the stony hillside at Rooiwal which helped convince Boer leaders to seek peace.

  Meanwhile, as Commander-in-Chief, Roberts found that he had little of the scope offered in India. Some useful reform was achieved: a new rifle, the magazine-fed Lee-Enfield, and the 18-pounder field gun were brought into service. Roberts took a close interest in the Staff College, where his proteges Rawlinson and Sir Henry Wilson both proved outstanding commandants.

  One of the reforms he initiated proved his own undoing. With his lengthy experience on the Indian Army staff, he was keen to create an army operations staff, and set Lieutenant Colonel Gerald Ellison to work. The Committee established simultaneously under Viscount Esher to reform the War Office took over Ellison’s work and finished it, the difference being that they abolished Roberts’s post of Commander-in-Chief and gave the operations staff the name ‘General Staff, rather than ‘Quartermaster General’s Staff, as Roberts would have had it following Indian Army practice. Ellison wrote, ‘The credit of creating a General Staff belongs to the Esher Committee, but to Lord Roberts is due the initiative which gave us a staff system in 1914 so widely at variance with what had obtained in the Boer War.’23

  Roberts’s removal was tactlessly handled, but he never harboured bad feelings. Esher continued to be impressed with the energy and vision of a man over seventy years old. In January 1910, he found him ageing a little, ‘but wonderfully open-minded and virile for so old a man. He is full of modern ultra radical ideas about the army and tactical fighting.’24

  In old age Roberts’s family became even more important to him, his elder daughter supporting her father at public events. For him and Lady Roberts, the young officers they gathered round them – the ‘Roberts kindergarten’ in the words of the Canadian historian Nicholas d’Ombrain – were in part a substitute for their dead son, Freddie.25 They both missed India, Lady Roberts reminiscing:

  What happy days those were – it is good to have them to look back again ... the fact is the happy life of those Indian days full too of large interests quite unfits one for the toleration of the narrow conventional life of English society where most people’s object seems to be push themselves into notoriety of some kind and no one seems to have time for or need of real friends.26

  On 23 December 1907, at a dinner for veterans celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Mutiny, with Roberts presiding, Curzon, former Indian Viceroy and guest of honour, finished a toast to those present ‘with the name of the hero of 1857, who was still their hero in 1907, endeared to the nation by half a century of service and sacrifice not one whit less glorious than that of his youth’.27 That hero’s last years were spent campaigning in vain for compulsory service and working, behind the scenes, to prevent the Army being employed to coerce the Ulster Protestants in the summer of 1914 after the passing of the Home Rule Bill. The Irish crisis was temporarily forgotten on the outbreak of the First World War. Appointed Colonel of Overseas Forces in Britain, Roberts decided to visit his beloved Indian regiments on the Western Front in November 1914, accompanied by his elder daughter. For two days, in great spirits, ‘like a boy going on his holidays’, he visited old comrades at headquarters and wounded soldiers in hospitals, stopping to speak to every Indian soldier he met. On 13 November, he climbed to the top of the Scherpenberg next to Kemmel Hill near Messines for a distant view of the trenches; the day was cold and wet and windy, and he caught a chill. It quickly turned to pneumonia, he fell very ill, and after a brief rally died at 8.00 p.m. the next day, 14 November. He was deeply mourned and seen as a splendid example, not only by former proteges, but by the whole Empire. ‘[0]ne of the saddest days of my life,’ wrote Sir Henry Rawlinson. T went in to pay my last respects to my dear chief. I could not believe that he was dead.’ Field Marshal Sir John French’s telegram to Lady Roberts summed up the Army’s view: ‘Your gr
ief is shared by us who mourn the loss of a much-loved chief ... It seems a fitter ending to the life of so great a soldier that he should have passed away in the midst of the troops he loved so well and within the sound of the guns.’ The Scottish Rifles (the Cameronians) marching to the front, swinging along to snatches of popular song, lapsed into gloomy silence when they heard that ‘Bobs, the idol of the army’ was dead. The Sunday night edition of The Times of 15 November headed its front page: ‘Sudden Death of Lord Roberts’. ‘A profound shock of sorrow will be felt by the nation at the announcement of the death of Field Marshal Lord Roberts ... One of the most famous and best beloved of British soldiers passed away in an hour of national trial, to prepare for which he had exerted himself with unsparing devotion.’28

  Frederick Roberts was a contradictory character, a mixture of cheerful kindness and ruthless ambition, a selfish careerist who warm-heartedly advanced many others who had served him, a soldier on the frontiers of empire yet a devoted father and husband, who valued home life above all else, the ruthless slaughterer of Afghans who wept uncontrollably when he heard of the courage of his mortally wounded son. In his astute wooing of the press, he strikes a modern note. By the end of his career, however, he had achieved an imperial apotheosis. He seemed to epitomize British ideals at a time when courage, duty, the Empire and the family were revered. His small stature and famous nickname endeared him to many. His reward was to be laid to rest close to the tombs of Nelson and Wellington, buried in a state ceremony at St Paul’s Cathedral, his pall bearers being admirals of the fleet, field marshals and generals, the congregation a huge uniformed throng including representatives of his many regiments. Kipling, friend of Roberts for many years and poet of empire, wrote in tribute. None of this would have been possible without the march to Kandahar, which retrieved his reputation from possible disgrace after the hangings at Kabul.

  If Roberts’s career seemed to his family and friends the proud fulfilment of his many ambitions, the fate of Afghanistan is a sad contrast. At the conclusion of the 2nd Afghan War Abdur consolidated his rule and accepted British diplomatic aid to secure his frontiers against Russia. His reign until 1901 was harsh but efficient. He crushed internal rebellion with cruelty, put robbers in cages and left them to die, while unjust tradesmen had their ears nailed to their shop entrance. Relations with India were peaceful. Nevertheless, there was scarcely a moment when the British were free from worry about Russian designs. The 2nd Afghan War coincided with the final Russian victory at Gek Tepe over Turkoman tribes between the Caspian and the northern Afghan border, so for practical purposes the Russian border was contiguous with Afghanistan’s. The Pandjeh crisis of 1885, when the Russians routed an Afghan force on the border, brought Russia and Britain to the verge of war. The Russians realized what a powerful diplomatic lever British fears about Afghanistan placed in their hands. Nicholas II boasted in 1899 that he could immobilize British policy throughout the world by mobilizing Russian forces in Turkestan. With the major tribes on the Indo-Afghan frontier between the Khyber and the Bolan Passes, there was no peace, despite the Durand Line of 1893 dividing the Pashtuns between India and Afghanistan. Mortimer Durand persuaded Abdur Rahman to accept the line in return for an increase of his subsidy from twelve to eighteen lakhs. Meanwhile the British attempted to assert their authority over the tribes on their side of the line. The Chitral campaign of 1895 led to the general Pashtun uprising of 1897 which needed a force of 35,000 under General Sir William Lockhart to quell it. Abdur Rahman and his people remained neutral.

  Afghanistan’s unhappy role as buffer between Great (and Super) Powers continued into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, periods of instability and Islamic Jihad alternating with attempts at progress. In 1919, Abdur Rahman’s grandson Amanullah declared a Holy War against India. In the 3rd Afghan War, the Indian Army deployed Rolls-Royce armoured cars and Handley Page bombers, and the war ended with a bloody Afghan repulse.29 Nineteenth-century British fears that Russia would control Afghanistan seemed to have come true when Babrak Kamal came to power in 1979 supported by the Russians, who appeared to have won the last round of Kipling’s ‘Great Game’.* The invasion of Afghanistan by the Red Army in support of Kamal followed. Tanks and helicopter gunships were no more successful at suppressing the warlike Afghans than the Indian Army had been, especially when the Mujahedin were equipped by the CIA with Stinger ground-to-air missiles. Gorbachov’s withdrawal was part of a series of policies which lead to the end of the Cold War and the break-up of the Soviet Union, an event of world history far more important than Lytton’s invasion, and Roberts’s and Stewart’s short-lived rule at Kabul.

  Even this did not end fighting in Afghanistan. American and British forces invaded in October 2001 in the wake of the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York, supporting a Northern Afghan alliance in overthrowing the Taliban. These modern equivalent of the ghazis, who had fearlessly faced Roberts’s and Stewart’s armies in 1880, have proved equally resilient. Western casualties continue to mount in what is proving an unpopular foreign war. The shades of Disraeli, Salisbury and Ripon must be pondering our rulers’ inability to learn from history. Can they find ‘a ram caught in a thicket’, a new Abdur Rahman, to lead them out of the impasse?

  * The phrase was originated by Captain Arthur Conolly, British agent murdered in 1842 by the Shah of Bokhara, and popularized by Kim.

  Notes

  Abbreviations

  BL, Add. Mss.

  Additional Manuscripts in the British Library.

  Bobs

  Roberts papers 7101-23 and 5504 at the National Army Museum. Papers catalogued under 7101-23 have been simplified so that, for example, 7101-23-139 is simply noted as ‘Bobs 139’. Those under 5504 have been left complete.

  DNB and ODNB

  Dictionary of National Biography.

  41 Yrs

  Roberts, Field Marshal Lord, Forty-one Years in India: from Subaltern to Commander-in-Chief 2 vols, London, 1897.

  Hanna

  Hanna, Colonel H.B., The Second Afghan War 1878-79-80: Its Conduct and its Consequences, 3 vols, London, 1899-1910.

  IOL, Mss Eur.

  European manuscripts in the India Office Library (British Library).

  JSAHR

  Journal for the Society of Army Historical Research.

  Kandahar

  correspondence

  Kandahar Correspondence: Sirdar Ayub Khan’s Invasion of Southern Afghanistan, Defeat of General Burrows’ Brigade, and military operations in consequence, India Office Library, Miscellaneous Public Documents, 2 vols and appendix of correspondence with Members of Viceroy’s Staff attached to Forces for the Relief of Kandahar, Simla and Calcutta, 1880-1.

  MacGregor

  MacGregor, Major General Sir CM., The Second Afghan War: Compiled and Collated by and under the orders of... MacGregor, QMG in India, 5 parts, Simla and Calcutta, 1885-6. (Official Indian Army history of the 2nd Afghan War.)

  NAM

  National Army Museum.

  NLS

  National Library of Scotland.

  Robson

  Robson, Brian, The Road to Kabul: The Second Afghan War 1878-1881. London, 1986.

  Trousdale

  William Trousdale (ed.), War in Afghanistan 1879-1880: the Personal Diary oj: Major--General Sir Charles Metcalfe MacGregor, Detroit, 1985.

  WO

  War Office papers at the National Archives, Kew (formerly the Public Record Office).

  Introduction

  1. Events at Simla: BL, Add. Mss. 43, 574, Ripon papers, ff. 141 et seq.

  2. Robson, B. (ed.), The Kandahar Letters of the Reverend Alfred Cane/ JSAHR, vol. LXIX (1991), pp. 211-12.

  3. Consequences of Maiwand and plans to send Wolseley, Kandahar Correspondence, I, pp. 53 & 74c-d; Elsmie, G.R., Field Marshal Sir Donald Stewart, London, 1903, pp. 373-4; NAM Warre papers 8112/ 54-702 & 713,30 July & 4 August 1880; ‘that gloomy telegram’, NAM Haines papers 8108/9-29, No. 52, 31 July 1880.

  4.
Wolff, L., The Life of the First Marquess of Ripon, 2 vols, London, 1921, II, pp. 26-32.

  5. Elsmie, Stewart, p. 375.

  6. Roberts to Greaves and decisions by Stewart and Ripon, Kandahar Correspondence, I, pp. 68, 83-4 & 99, and Elsmie, Stewart, pp. 372-6.

  7. The Second World War book referring to the march was Johnson, Major S.H.F., Britain’s Soldiers, Britain in Pictures Series, Collins, 1944. Modern references are from the Daily Telegraph website and, of all places, that of the American Rhododendron Society: ‘Lord Roberts’ is a species of rhododendron. Ripon’s quote in Wolff, Ripon, II, pp. 32-3.

  8. Modern controversies, see e.g. Strachan, H., The Politics of the British Army, Oxford and New York, 1997, and Streets, H., Martial Races: The Military, Race and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture 1857-1914, Manchester and New York, 2004; for hostile views of Phayre see NAM, Haines papers 8101-9/30, nos 46, 47, 49, 50.

  9. ‘Cutting Roberts down to size’; see Hanna, Colonel H.B., The Second Afghan War, London, 1899-1910 and ibid., Lord Roberts in War, London, 1895, and for modern accounts notably Trousdale, W., War in Afghanistan 1879-80, Detroit, 1985 and Pakenham, T., The Boer War, London, 1979.

  Chapter 1

  1. Sources for Afghan background include inter alia Hopkirk, P., The Great Game: on Secret Service in High Asia, London, 1990; Macrory, P., Signal Catastrophe, London, 1963; Heathcote, T.A., The Afghan Wars 1839-1919, London, 1980; Meyer, K. and Brysac, S., Tournament of Shadows: the Race for Empire in Central Asia, Washington, DC, 1999.