The Dark Defile (11 page)

On 1 October, several weeks before receiving official confirmation that the Herat siege was over, Auckland issued the so-called Simla Manifesto—his justification for invasion. The document placed the entire blame on Dost Mohammed in an interpretation of events so twisted it could have been penned by the Red Queen in the yet-to-be-written
Alice in Wonderland
. According to one of the young British heroes of the campaign to follow, it used the words
justice
and
necessity
“in a manner for which there is fortunately no precedent in the English language.”

Dost Mohammed was accused of “sudden and unprovoked” aggression at Jamrud against Britain’s “ancient ally” the Sikhs—despite the fact that Ranjit Singh had been the aggressor by seizing Peshawar. In striking contrast to the reality of Dost Mohammed’s continuing solicitations of Britain as his ally in the region, he was charged with collusion with the Persians and with nurturing “schemes of aggrandizement and ambition, injurious to the security and peace of the frontiers of India.” The manifesto further declared that “he openly threatened, in furtherance of those schemes, to call in every foreign aid which he could command. Ultimately he gave his undisguised support to the Persian designs in Afghanistan.” Dost Mohammed and his Barakzai brothers—the rulers at Kandahar—had proved from their “disunion and unpopularity” that they were “ill-fitted under any circumstances to be useful allies to the British government,” and so long as Kabul remained under Dost Mohammed’s government, the British “could never hope that the interests of our Indian Empire would be preserved inviolate.”

The manifesto maintained that Britain needed an ally on its western frontier who was “interested in resisting aggression and establishing tranquillity”—identifying Shah Shuja, who, while in power, “had cordially acceded to the measures of united resistance to external enmity which were at that time judged necessary by the British Government.” The manifesto asserted in direct contradiction of all the sparse available information “his popularity throughout Afghanistan had been proved” and that “pressing necessity as well as every consideration of policy and justice warranted their espousing his cause.” The document ended on a flourish. Shah Shuja, it promised, “will enter Afghanistan surrounded by his own troops, and will be supported against foreign interference and factious opposition by a British army … and when once he shall be secured in power, and the independence and integrity of Afghanistan established, the British Army will be withdrawn.” The governor-general rejoiced that by these actions he would be assisting “in restoring the union and prosperity of the Afghan people.”

The manifesto nowhere mentioned Russia, perceived both in London and India as the real enemy behind the actions of the shah of Persia and the alleged threat from Dost Mohammed. In a private letter to the British ambassador in Moscow Palmerston had said, “
Auckland has been told to take Afghanistan in hand and make it a British dependency … we have long declined to meddle with the Afghans but if the Russians try to make them Russian we must take care that they become British
.” However, Russia was a major power, and Britain was enmeshed in a diplomatic struggle to contain its ambitions in the Caucasus, Eastern Europe and elsewhere at the expense of the Ottoman Turks. For Auckland to have cited Russia in a document attempting to justify war and invasion (although neither word is mentioned in the context of the British action) would have been embarrassing to the government in London, and the gentle and gentlemanly Auckland was not the man to embarrass them. He crafted his manifesto to cast the British action as a regional one designed to protect Britain’s regional interest and not a strategic or imperial one with global repercussions.
¹³

The contradictory and hypocritical manifesto was widely published in the British and Indian press and instantly condemned by many who understood the true situation in India and Afghanistan. The clamor intensified when official confirmation came that the Persians had withdrawn from Herat. Macnaghten hastily drafted a fresh note for Auckland, issued on 8 November, stating that the governor-general would continue “
to prosecute with vigour the measures which have been announced, with a view to the substitution of a friendly for a hostile power in the eastern provinces of Afghanistan, and to the establishment of a permanent barrier against schemes of aggression upon our north-west frontier
.”

Though the time consumed by communication and the pressure of events had prevented Auckland from obtaining prior sanction from London for each step of his strategy as it had evolved, Prime Minister Lord Melbourne and his cabinet in Britain and the governor-general and his advisers in India were in agreement about what had to be done. To Lord Palmerston it had become a question of who was to be master of Central Asia. When in December 1838 Melbourne and Palmerston received
the Simla Manifesto
that Auckland had sent home—with a humble cover letter suggesting others could judge it but he would only say, “
I could have made it stronger if I had not had the fear of Downing Street before my eyes and thought it right to avoid direct allusion to Russia
”—they approved it.

The East India Company’s Court of Directors was more nervous at the prospect of war in its name. The directors had earlier warned Auckland to make no decision on Afghanistan until he knew the outcome of the siege at Herat, but he had disregarded their advice. Now they had no choice. The British law that regulated the relationship between government and company required them to agree to the proposals put to them by the Board of Control under its president, Sir John Hobhouse. Twenty years later, he would confess to the House of Commons, “
The Afghan war was done by myself; the Court of Directors had nothing to do with it
.”

Many of the population, caught up in Russophobia, supported the invasion decision. The
Times
welcomed it as well, condemning “
the Russian fiend
” who “from the frontiers of Hungary to the heart of Burmah and Nepal … has been haunting and troubling the human race, and dilligently perpetrating his malignant frauds … to the vexation of this industrious and essentially pacific [British] empire.”

As the future prime minister Lord Salisbury wrote, opinion was polarized: “
You must either disbelieve altogether in the existence of the Russians, or you must believe that they will be in Kandahar next year. Public opinion recognises no middle holding ground.
” Among the many knowledgeable and experienced dissenters from the invasion decision as unlikely to achieve its aim of increasing the security of India’s north-west frontier, was Mountstuart Elphinstone, who, thirty years earlier had led the first British delegation to Afghanistan, and who wrote to Burnes, “
You will guess what I think of
affairs in Kabul … If you send 27,000 men up the
Durra-i-Bolan
[Bolan Pass] to Kandahar (as we hear is intended), and can feed them, I have no doubt you will take Kandahar and Kabul and set up [Shah] Shuja; but for maintaining him in a poor, cold, strong, and remote country, among a turbulent people like the Afghans, I own it seems to me to be hopeless.” He continued, not being afraid, unlike the manifesto, to mention Russia, “If you succeed, I fear you will weaken the position against Russia. The Afghans were neutral, and would have received your aid against invaders with gratitude—they will now be disaffected and glad to join any invader to drive you out.”

To
Lord William Bentinck, Auckland’s
predecessor as governor-general, the war was “
an act of incredible folly
.” To Charles Metcalfe, who had headed the administration of India in the interregnum between the two, “
We have
needlessly and heedlessly plunged into difficulties and embarrassments not without much aggression and injustice on our part from which we can never extricate ourselves without a disgraceful retreat which may be more fatal in its consequences than an obstinate perseverance in a wrong course. Our sole course is to resist the influence of Russia, and our measures are almost sure to establish it.” Lord Wellesley, also a former governor-general, dismissed what he regarded as a wild expedition into a distant region of “
rocks, sands, deserts, ice and snow
” as an “
act of infatuation
.” However, the most percipient, prophetic condemnation of all came from Wellesley’s brother, the Duke of Wellington, who predicted to one of the company’s directors that Britain’s difficulties would commence where its military successes ended: “
The consequences of crossing the Indus once, to settle a government in Afghanistan, will be a perennial march into that country
.”

Chapter Five

What is the cause of all this bustle and war I hardly know … How it will turn out I know no more than the man in the moon.

—LIEUTENANT TOM HOLDSWORTH, 1838

In late November 1838, Lord Auckland and Ranjit Singh presided over a grand ceremonial gathering, or durbar, at Ferozepore on the Sutlej River—the boundary between the Sikh and British territories. The occasion was both an affirmation of British-Sikh friendship and a demonstration of the splendors of the Army of the Indus about to depart for Afghanistan. The leaders paid reciprocal visits to each other’s camps and reviewed each other’s troops. Auckland’s sister Emily, who accompanied him, found the sights dazzling, especially the maharaja’s thousands of followers “
all dressed in yellow or red satin, with quantities of their horses
trapped
in gold and silver tissues, and all of them sparkling with jewels.
”

Sometimes the presence of so many thousands of soldiers, elephants and horses brought chaos. The British camp, Emily complained, was “
dreadfully
noisy … The cavalry have pitched themselves just behind our tents; one horse gets loose, and goes and bites all the others, and then they kick and get loose too, and all the
syces
[grooms] wake and begin screaming, and the tent pitchers are called to knock in the rope pins, and the horses are neighing all the time … Then the infantry regiment has got a mad drummer … He begins drumming at five in the morning and never intermits till seven … It was so like dear Shakespeare specifying the “ ‘neighing steed and the spirit-stirring drum.’ ”

The forces participating in the durbar were 9,500 men of the company’s Bengal army including some attached Queen’s regiments such as the Sixteenth Lancers, known as the Scarlet Lancers, resplendent in their tight-fitting scarlet tunics and plumed helmets. They were to be accompanied in the forthcoming invasion by 6,000 Indian levies, including one regiment of Nepalese Gurkhas, recruited, trained and officered by the British for Shah Shuja. The plan was that the joint force would march southwest from Ferozepore through the princely state of Bahawalpur and into Sind, where it would cross the Indus. Meanwhile, 5,600 men of the company’s Bombay army would embark in Bombay to sail five hundred miles northwest to Karachi—at that time a small fishing village at the mouth of the Indus—and thence march three hundred miles northeast up the river to rendezvous with their comrades at the town of Shikarpur, after which the whole army would move on through Baluchistan and the Bolan Pass to Quetta, Kandahar and finally Kabul.

This combined army would total just over 21,000, fewer than the number originally planned because following the Persian withdrawal from Herat its strength had been reduced by one division of 4,500 men. Auckland’s commander in chief, Sir Henry Fane, had used the reduction to suggest that he should no longer head the army, writing to Auckland, “
I do not think that for
this
my service is needed
.” Fane was anyway in poor health, doubtful of the wisdom of the mission and his tour of duty in India was soon due to end. In addition, unusually and to Fane’s displeasure, Auckland had given the task of organizing food and sufficient horse and camel transport for the advancing army not to the officers of the military commissariat but to Macnaghten and his team of political officers who would be traveling with the army. Fane foresaw that this and other delegations of authority to Macnaghten would cause friction between the military and political leaders, adding in his letter to Auckland, “I think too that your instructions to Sir William Macnaghten and to me are such as an officer of my rank could hardly submit to serve under.”

The sixty-year-old Sir Jasper Nicolls would, after much discussion in London, be selected to replace Fane and would arrive in India the following year. In the meantime, Fane planned to sail downriver for a while with his staff, keeping parallel with the Bengal force to oversee its progress. General Sir John Keane, commander in chief of the Bombay army, was to assume the supreme command after the rendezvous of the Bombay and Bengal forces.

In addition to the main Army of the Indus, the troops to be commanded by Shah Shuja’s son Prince Timur, who was to be accompanied by Claude Wade as political agent, were being assembled at Peshawar. Six thousand of the eleven thousand men would be Sikhs, but this was as far as the Sikh military contribution would go. This force was to take the most direct route to Kabul, marching through Ranjit Singh’s territories and the Khyber Pass.

Ranjit Singh, however, had announced that his dignity would be injured if the main Army of the Indus were to pass that way, hence the reason for its circuitous route through the Bolan Pass. The British were not overly concerned. As Captain Henry Havelock, aide-de-camp to Sir Willoughby Cotton, commander of the Bengal army, observed, “It was the policy of the hour to humour and caress the old ruler of the Punjab.” The British government had anyway decided that a detour through Sind might provide an opportunity to bring its still restive and resistant emirs to heel. As it advanced north through Sind, the Bombay force was to attempt to impose on the emirs a treaty of Macnaghten’s devising obliging them to allow the British unrestricted navigation of the Indus and—in return for Shah Shuja abandoning his claim to suzerainty over them or to the payment of any future tribute—to make him a large single payment to support his war effort.