God's Terrorists

by Charles Allen

  In mid-April 1858 five thousand fighting men gathered under cover of darkness near Hoti Mardan and set off across the plain towards the Mahabun Mountain. They were led by the local military commander, Major-General Sir Sydney Cotton, accompanied by Edwardes as his political adviser. Despite his advanced age, Cotton had learned in his five years as the area commander that frontier warfare demanded very different tactics from those he had employed as a cavalry officer in the plains. ‘Protracted warfare in the mountains has proved to be fatal to success,’ he afterwards wrote. ‘There is a sporting phrase which is very applicable to this description of mountain warfare, “In and out clever.” The proper mode of punishing the hill tribes, and that which is attended with the least risk, is to go in upon them suddenly and unexpectedly, without affording them time to assemble, or otherwise make preparation.’

  Despite their considerable numbers, Cotton’s troops moved fast and succeeded in penetrating deep into Mahabun Mountain before their presence was discovered. Soon after dawn the first column passed the village of Punjtar unopposed and started the long climb up to the main Hindustani stronghold at Mangalthana. ‘The advance reached the height about eleven a.m.,’ wrote Cotton. ‘Not a shot had been fired at us, as we laboured up the steep and wooded road, and on entering Mangul Thana we found the fort abandoned, and every sign of a hasty and recent flight.’

  Cotton was not to know that the Hindustanis’ amir, Inayat Ali, had died of fever just days earlier. The mujahedeen were leaderless and seemingly unable to offer any resistance. At Cotton’s approach they scattered into the surrounding hills and ravines. All Cotton could do was mine and blow up all the buildings at Mangalthana and return to his camp on the edge of the plains. It was put about that the raid was over, but this was a bluff. Two weeks later Cotton struck again, acting on the reports of his scouts that the Hindustanis had regrouped at Sittana together with their Sayyed allies under Sayyed Umar Shah, brother of the late Padshah of the Swatis, Sayyed Akbar Shah. This time Cotton divided his force and advanced on the Hindustanis’ lower camp at Sittana from three sides. Once in position, the three columns began to fan out until their enemy was in effect surrounded. Unable to break through this tightening ring, the Hindustanis gathered on the crest of a ridge to make a last stand. Cotton’s official report gives no numbers, but comments that their fight to the death was ‘marked with fanaticism; they came boldly and doggedly on, going through all the preliminary attitudes of the Indian prize ring, but in perfect silence without a shout or a word of any kind. All were dressed in their best for the occasion, mostly in white; but some of the leaders wore velvet cloaks.’ Sayyed Umar Shah was very probably among the dead.

  Had Cotton’s troops held their positions, every last muja-hedeen could have been finished off the next day. But with night approaching and all objectives taken, Herbert Edwardes decided that it was time to withdraw. Cotton was the senior officer and the military commander, but it was customary to heed the advice of the political officer present, and so he did – a decision both he and Edwardes came to regret. When Cotton later set down his account of the action he chose his words carefully: ‘The Commissioner’, he wrote, ‘considered that adequate punishment had been inflicted on them, and called upon me to withdraw the troops, not deeming it expedient to raise against the British Government, by further pursuit of the enemy in the hills, the Judoon and other independent hill tribes who had naturally become excited by the presence of so large a British force in and amongst their mountains.’

  Sydney Cotton could at least congratulate himself on having showed how it could be done. The hitherto impregnable mountains of Swat and Buner had been penetrated successfully by a large military force, and what had been done once could be done again – provided the force came ‘in and out clever’. It was a lesson that his successors signally failed to learn.

  But when Cotton’s army marched down from the Mahabun Mountain it left behind alive ABDULLAH ALI, twenty-eight-year-old eldest son of the late Wilayat Ali, and his three small sons. He was subsequently chosen as Inayat Ali’s successor as amir of the Hindustani Fanatics. It appears too that a number of sepoys, most likely remnants of the mutinous 55th BNI, survived. They and a handful of mujahedeen who had also escaped Cotton’s net hid out in the mountains until given sanctuary by the new leader of the Sayyeds of Sittana, SAYYED MUBARIK SHAH, son of the late Padshah of Swat. The sanctuary was an abandoned settlement named Malka, just a few miles to the north-east of Mangalthana on the northern slopes of the Mahabun Mountain, looking down on the Chumla valley and the mountains of Buner beyond. Here this last core of the Hindustani Fanatics remained in hiding, cut off from the Indian plains and entirely dependent on the charity of their neighbours.

  In November 1858 Lord Canning proclaimed an end to East India Company rule in India and the transfer of authority to the British Crown. The Company’s Bengal, Madras and Bombay Armies were dismantled and the high-caste regiments replaced by mixed corps composed of different ethnic groups, castes and religions. At the same time, so-called ‘martial races’ such as the Sikhs and the Gurkhas who had proved both their loyalty and their fighting spirit in the Mutiny were recruited in increasing numbers. In March 1862 Lord Canning went home to die and was replaced as British India’s second Viceroy by Lord Elgin, who himself sickened and died of heart failure in the Himalayas in November 1863. The office then went to John Lawrence, the hard-nosed administrator who had steered the Punjab through the Mutiny and its aftermath as its first Lieutenant-Governor. Unlike his predecessors, Lawrence knew the country and its people, but he was in England when Elgin died and it was eight weeks before he could be sworn in as Viceroy, too late to have any say in the political and military disaster that became known as the Ambeyla Campaign.

  The road to Ambeyla began with a summons sent out in the late summer of 1863 by the Hindustanis’ amir Abdullah Ali, calling on all the chiefs of the surrounding tribes to ‘quit the friendship of the unbelieving and join the would-be martyrs of the Faith’. One of these letters was received by the Khan of Amb, who promptly forwarded it to Reynell Taylor, Herbert Edwardes’ successor as commissioner in Peshawar. For some months the Hindustanis at Malka had been showing signs of renewed activity in the form of minor cross-border raids and the kidnapping of Hindus. Taylor consulted with Colonel Alfred Wilde, who had taken over the command of the Corps of Guides at Hoti Mardan from the legendary Harry Lumsden. Both agreed that action should be taken ‘to effectually rid the frontier of the chronic cause of disturbance – the Hindustani fanatics’. For the future peace of the frontier, ‘the destruction of this colony of priests and fanatics was a necessity . . . They must be removed by death or capture from the hills, and a treaty made with the hill tribes not to allow them to reside in their territories.’

  Colonel Wilde took the view that Brigadier Cotton had failed to destroy the Hindustanis back in 1858 because the survivors had been able to escape north. Wilde proposed using the same tactics of surprise but this time encircling the Mahabun Mountain, ‘the military object being to attack the Hindustanis from the north, forcing them to fight with their backs to the plains.’ Once their escape route had been closed, the Wahhabis and their Sayyed allies could be driven down to the Indus and the plains. The only means of achieving this encirclement was by way of the Ambeyla Pass.

  The Ambeyla Pass lay just over twenty miles to the north-east of the Corps of Guides Headquarters at Hoti Mardan on the Yusufzai plain (see Map 2, ‘The Peshawur Valley’). The defile leading up to the pass provided a natural gateway into the Buner country and a back door to the Mahabun Mountain range, opening up beyond the pass on to the plain of the Chamla valley, some twelve miles long and four wide. ‘The only entrance to the Chumla Valley is from Eusofzye,’ explained Colonel John Adye, a senior staff officer with the Royal Artillery, in his first-hand account of the Ambeyla campaign, ‘by a narrow gorge a few miles in length called the Umbeyla Pass, being, in fact, the rocky bed of a little stream, passing round the western side of the Maha
bun.’

  The only drawback to this plan was that it meant intruding on the territory of the Buner tribes, the Bunerwals, whose lands extended along the northern side of the Ambeyla Pass, and the less numerous Chamlawals, who occupied its southern slopes and the western end of the Chamla valley. Little was known about these two tribes by the civil authorities in Peshawar, but they were believed to be rather more peaceful than their fellow Yusufzais in Mahabun. The Bunerwals, in particular, were followers of the Akhund of Swat, Abdul Ghaffur, now in his seventieth year, who exercised a moderating influence over the Swatis and Bunerwals and had always opposed the extreme views promulgated by the Hindustani Fanatics. ‘The Bonair [Buner] people had no sympathy as a body with the Fanatics,’ was John Adye’s view, ‘being of different tenets, and forming part of the religious constituency of the Akhoond of Swat, who was known to be bitterly opposed at that time to the Fanatic body, the members of whom he denounced as Wahabees [and] whom his followers had not scrupled to stigmatise as Kaffirs.’

  To Reynell Taylor, too, it seemed that ‘nothing at that time was, to all appearance, so little probable as a coalition between the Akhoond of Swat and his adherents and the Hindostanees’. He therefore concluded that the proposed expedition could safely intrude on Buner and Chamla territory – so long as it was made quite clear to the tribesmen what the Government’s objective was, and provided this was coupled with an undertaking that the troops would be withdrawn as soon as that objective had been accomplished. Taylor passed Wilde’s plan on to Sir Robert Montgomery, the Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab, who radically altered it by insisting that the numbers of troops involved should be doubled. The last word rested with the Viceroy, but Lord Elgin was too ill with his heart condition to play any part, so it was left to his commander-in-chief, Sir Hugh Rose, to express serious doubts about the wisdom of sending what was now a large force into unknown country without proper transport or reserves of supplies, and with winter approaching. He recommended that the expedition should be postponed till the spring.

  It was precisely at this juncture that details of a remarkable supply chain linking the Hindustani camp with the plains were received by Montgomery in Lahore.

  Five months earlier an unusually sharp Pathan daffadar or sergeant of mounted police named GHAZAN KHAN had been on duty on the Grand Trunk Road at Panipat north of Delhi when he observed four travellers whose unusually dark skins and small stature made them stand out. When questioned, they revealed that they were Bengalis returning to their homeland from the frontier. Puzzled by their answers, he went out of his way to appear friendly, and eventually discovered that they were Wahhabis, and part of a supply chain smuggling men and guns up to the frontier. He promptly arrested them, whereupon the Wahhabis appealed to him as a brother Muslim to let them go, saying that a petition-writer named MUHAMMAD JAFAR from the nearby town of Thanesar would gladly pay whatever he demanded. Daffadar Ghazan Khan remained resolute, and next morning took his four prisoners before the local magistrate of Karnal – who dismissed the case, accusing his subordinate of bringing charges against the travellers in an attempt to extort money from them.

  So outraged was the daffadar by this slur on his character that he decided to prove his case, and enlisted the support of his son. Where exactly this son lived is not recorded, but the assumption is that it was in Ghazan Khan’s home village in Pathan territory. He now received a letter from his father asking him to collect evidence about the Hindustanis at Malka; in particular, how they received their supplies of men and guns. The son immediately set out on this strange quest, making his way into the mountains and presenting himself to the Wahhabis at Malka as an eager jihadi. Some months later he returned to his father in Panipat with the desired information.

  Daffadar Ghazan Khan at once took his son to the magistrate and triumphantly presented his evidence: details of the supply chain by which the Wahhabi chota godown at Patna ferried men, money and guns across northern India to the burra godown at Sittana. Included in this evidence was the statement that ‘Munshi Ja’far of Thaneswar, whom the men call Khalifa, was the great man who passed up the Bengalis and their carbines and rifles.’ The British authorities at Karnal were now forced to act, which they did by seeking the advice of the recently appointed Commissioner of Amballa (not to be confused with Ambeyla) who, by a stroke of luck, happened to be Herbert Edwardes, the former Commissioner of Peshawar. Edwardes at once informed his old friend Reynell Taylor in Peshawar – who in turn informed Sir Robert Montgomery. Fearing that the unrest the Hindustanis were provoking would spread if left unchecked, Sir Robert chose to ignore Sir Hugh Rose’s advice and to order the launch of the now greatly enlarged expedition without further delay.

  Command of the force was given to Brigadier Neville Chamberlain, another of that band of paladins who had made up the first wave of Henry Lawrence’s political officers. His appointment was received with enthusiasm by the troops earmarked for the expedition, for Chamberlain’s standing in the Indian Army was second to none. He was said to bear more wounds on his body than any serving officer in India, and his gallantry at the taking of Delhi in 1857, when he had returned to the battlefield on a stretcher to rally the troops, was still talked of as a turning point in the Mutiny. Chamberlain was only forty-three, but like his old friends and former comrades in arms Herbert Edwardes and Reynell Taylor he was worn down by years of hard service and by the malaria endemic on the Punjab frontier. Although he accepted the command, he did so without enthusiasm. ‘If duty requires the sacrifice I cannot repine,’ he wrote to his brother, ‘but . . . I have no wish for active service.’

  On 18 October 1863 Chamberlain’s force set off from its marshalling point outside Nowshera. To preserve the element of surprise Chamberlain had been ordered not to take up his command until the last moment, but when he arrived he found his troops already on the move – and hopelessly unprepared. ‘I never before had such trouble or things in so unsatisfactory a state,’ he wrote to his brother. ‘Carriage, supplies, grain-bags, all deficient. Some of our guns and the five and a half inch mortars have to be sent back as useless.’ Unlike the unencumbered and fast-moving force that had assembled under Brigadier Cotton five years earlier, this was a body twice as large and three times as slow. The column marching towards the Mahabun Mountain was swollen by ‘long lines of elephants, camels, bullocks and carts, transporting huge tents, together with tables, chairs, bedsteads, carpets, crockery, and many other unwieldy and unnecessary items of officers’ and soldiers’ equipment; and to these impedimenta must be added the hordes of native followers, who, far outnumbering the fighting men, have been and still are the invariable appendage of an Indian army.’ It took an entire day for this procession to reach the mouth of the Daran Pass, the point at which Cotton’s army had entered the hills in 1858.

  Reynell Taylor had handed over the commissionership of Peshawar to his deputy, Major Hugh James, so that he could accompany Chamberlain as the expedition’s political officer. But after consulting with Montgomery he had taken the fateful decision not to give the Bunerwals advance notice of the invasion of their lands, on the grounds that ‘our intentions would assuredly have been communicated’. Not until Chamberlain’s army was encamped in full view at the southern foot of the Mahabun Mountains did Taylor despatch envoys to the chiefs of the Bunerwals, the Chamlawals, the Swatis and all the other Yusufzai tribes in the mountains with copies of a proclamation stating that his forces were about to enter the Chamla valley. His proclamation assured them that the intrusion was taking place ‘with no intention of injuring them or of interfering with their independence, but solely because it was the most convenient route by which to reach the Hindustani fanatics, and to effect their expulsion from the Mahaban.’

  That same night the army struck its tents and marched along the edge of the plains to the mouth of the Ambeyla Pass, which the head of the column reached at dawn the following day. The Guides Infantry then begin the climb to the head of the pass, the kotal, with the rest of the army
following on behind. The response of the Bunerwals and Chamlawals was entirely predictable. As Major Hugh James, Reynell Taylor’s successor as Commissioner of Peshawar, afterwards wrote, ‘Was it likely that a brave race of ignorant men would pause to consider the purport of a paper they could not read, when the arms of a supposed invader were glistening at their doors?’

  Chamberlain’s plan was to have the bulk of his troops up and over the kotal and in occupation of the head of the Chamla valley by nightfall. Reynell Taylor’s scouts had assured him that ‘the pass presented no military obstacles’, but they were wrong: the expected mule track turned out to be nothing more than the bed of a stream ‘encumbered with boulders and large masses of rock’. Only by walking in single file was the advance guard able to reach the kotal, at which point they came under fire directed down on them from the crags above. The hills on every side were covered in low brushwood and jutting rocks and boulders – perfect cover for the tribesmen with their long-barrelled jezail flintlocks, clumsy to handle and load but remarkably accurate up to a quarter of a mile. However, the Guides and Punjab Frontier Force infantry who led the advance were adepts at just this style of mountain warfare and they skirmished forward, forcing the tribesmen back up the mountainside. By early afternoon the western end of the Chamla valley had been secured and picquets set up on all the surrounding spurs. But when night fell not a single baggage animal had reached their camp, and several thousand men were still stuck at the bottom of the pass.

  After a night made sleepless by continual sniping Chamberlain met with his senior officers to take stock of the situation. He concluded that until the mule track through the pass had been improved by his engineers it was best to ‘make no further movement in advance’. For two days his force did little but strengthen its existing positions.

  This delay was to prove fatal. The Hindustani stronghold of Malka was twenty miles away at the far end of the Chamla valley. The latest intelligence suggested that it was now garrisoned by a combined force of more than a thousand Hindustanis and their Sayyed allies, convincing proof that the supply chain was back in operation with a vengeance. ‘They were drilled in our system,’ noted the official account of the campaign of the Hindustanis, ‘and some were clothed like the sepoys of the old Indian Army. Three of their jemadars [junior officers] were non-commissioned officers of the late 55th Regiment Native Infantry . . . They numbered in the commencement about 900 men, most of whom had been wrought up to a pitch of fanaticism, and were prepared to lay down their lives.’ The Bunerwals and the Chamlawals together could muster up to twelve thousand fighting men, but they were still in disarray and remained so until their chiefs had met to decide how to respond to this armed incursion. In similar circumstances the younger, fitter Chamberlain who had shown such ‘dash’ in his earlier days would surely have pushed on with his advance column of fast-moving Punjab Frontier Force troops, as Cotton had on Mangalthana in 1858. But Chamberlain’s preoccupation with the difficulties of bringing supplies through the nine-mile stretch of the Ambeyla Pass caused him to hang back.