Sahib: The British Soldier in India 1750–1914. Richard Holmes
Kabul and take refuge in the Sherpur cantonment, where he beat off a massed attack on 23 December.
Roberts was relieved by Lieutenant General Sir Donald Stewart, and the British agreed to accept Abdurrahman Khan, a nephew of Yakub’s, as Amir of Kabul and the surrounding area. But at the same time Sher Ali’s younger son, Ayub Khan, Governor of Herat, made his own bid for the throne, and on 27 July 1880 he trounced a British brigade at Maiwand, which ranks alongside the Zulu War battle of Isandlwana as one of the few defeats inflicted on the high Victorian army by a ‘savage’ foe. The survivors took refuge in Kandahar, where they were rescued by Roberts after a spectacular march from Kabul. Roberts went on to beat Ayub outside Kandahar, and the British eventually decided to evacuate Afghanistan in May 1881. Abdurrahman extended his rule across the whole of Afghanistan, but conducted his foreign policy in accord with the Government of India, establishing a workable balance which was to last until the end of the First World War.
However, there was often sporadic fighting on the North-West Frontier, which sometimes flared into minor campaigns, such as the Waziristan operations of 1894–95, the Chitral relief campaign of 1895 and the Tirah expedition of 1897–98. Most of these originated in what was called the ‘forward policy’, the government’s determination to make its writ run as close to the Afghan border as possible, and to mount punitive raids (the tactics of ‘butcher and bolt’ according to one critic) against troublesome tribes. The young Winston Churchill, cavalry subaltern and press correspondent, went up the Malakand Pass with Major General Sir Bindon Blood’s force in 1897. ‘We hold the Malakand Pass to keep the Chitral road open,’ he wrote. ‘We keep the Chitral road open because we have retained
Chitral. We retain Chitral in accordance with the “Forward Policy”.’118 He found the whole experience dangerously fascinating:
On the frontier, in the clear light of the morning, when the mountain side is dotted with smoke puffs, and every ridge sparkles with bright sword blades, the spectator may observe and accurately appreciate all grades of human courage – the wild fanaticism of the Ghazi, the composed fatalism of the Sikh, the steadiness of the British soldier, and the jaunty daring of his officers.119
In 1904 the British suspected that the Russians planned to establish an agent in Lhasa, capital of Tibet, then loosely under Chinese control; a small force marched there and duly imposed a treaty declaring that Tibet would have no relations with foreign powers without Britain’s consent. It was the last of old India’s little wars, whose vignettes looked to both past and future. The expedition’s political officer was Francis Younghusband, soldier and explorer, who would have fitted comfortably amongst the shirt-sleeved warrior-administrators of the 1840s. The expedition applied modern technology to warriors from an older world, with 18-pounder shrapnel bursting over the heads of masses of pig-tailed swordsmen. And it was here that the Raj’s imperium was carried up to the roof of the world by pipe-smoking norff-of-the-river boys from Stepney and Bow – for the British battalion involved was 1st Royal Fusiliers (The City of London Regiment).
It is impossible to say quite how Britain’s rule in India would have evolved had world war not broken out in 1914. On the one hand the beginnings of representative government had been grafted onto a paternalistic bureaucracy, with the Morley-Minto reforms of 1906–10 testifying to a genuine determination to give Indians a share in their own government. But on the other there were growing numbers of pro-nationalist strikes, riots and other disturbances. However, when war came in 1914 there was an astonishing sense of unity, and a wave of loyalty to the ‘King Emperor’, often inspired by the conviction that an India which made its full contribution to the imperial war effort would have proved itself worthy of self-government. And it should never be forgotten that despite serious attempts by the Turks and the Germans to shake its loyalty, the Indian army remained true to its salt during the Great War, fighting on battlefields that were to make Plassey and Assaye, Ferozeshah and Sobraon seem almost benign.
With home-bred hordes the hillsides teem.
The troopships bring us one by one,
At vast expense of time and steam,
To slay Afridis where they run.
The ‘captives of our bow and spear’
Are cheap, alas! as we are dear.
KIPLING, ‘Arithmetic on the Frontier’
WHITEHALL OFTEN has an engaging way of imagining that soldiers somehow lie at the heart of its problems. ‘The British soldier is a very expensive instrument,’ lamented Lord Cranborne, Secretary of State for India in 1866–67.
One day, it is an estimate on a portentous scale for new barracks in new places, because he cannot stand the ordinary climate of India; another day, it is estimates for gymnastic institutes to give him exercise; then, for books to amuse his leisure hours, then a lumping sum for gas, because oil tries his eyes; then, for an ice-making machine to improve his dessert; then for separate cottages for married couples, because the wives like to keep cocks and hens; and – not to enumerate more items – an enormous bill for regimental beer, because Messrs Whitbread cannot brew good enough beer for him.
He wondered whether there might not be ‘races that have neither Koran nor caste to defend, nor depraved rulers to avenge’, who could not stand in for the British soldier, for it was ‘no improbable contingency’ that recruiting difficulties and the sheer expense of maintaining 65,000 British soldiers in India would soon force a substantial withdrawal.1
The problem was simple enough. The British army and, until 1858, the Company, had to recruit, arm, equip and train sufficient officers and men to fill the ranks of HM’s regiments in India, to provide officers and specialists for locally recruited units, to ensure an adequate supply of manpower to make up for routine wastage, and to maintain some sort of reserve to meet unexpected shocks. And it had to do all this half a world away, near the very limit of Britain’s logistic reach.
Just getting to India involved a long and often perilous sea voyage. For the first century of British occupation this involved sailing round the Cape of Good Hope and across the Indian Ocean, at the mercy of the weather and, during frequent continental wars, of French warships and privateers. From the mid-eighteenth century the voyage was generally made in East Indiamen, such as the Maidstone, a four-masted sailing ship of 8–900 tons, which took the newly commissioned Ensign Garnet Wolseley of HM’s 80th Foot to India in 1852 under the command of Captain Peter Roe.
He kept up the reputation of the old class of vessels known as East Indiamen, a class then fast disappearing, and entirely unknown to the present generation. His officers were men of good manners, and the ship’s crew were all good British sailors, except the boatswain, a first-rate man all round, who was either a Dane or a Swede … 2
Colonel Arthur Wesley of HM’s 33rd left England by fast frigate in June 1796, caught up with his regiment at the Cape, and made the rest of the voyage in the Indiaman Queen Charlotte, he reached Calcutta in February 1797. Transformed into Major General Sir Arthur Wellesley, victor of Assaye, he left Calcutta aboard HMS Trident on 10 March 1805, and anchored off Dover on 10 September. The advent of paddle-steamers in the 1830s made the journey faster and less hazardous, but it was still by no means safe. The troopship Birkenhead, lost off the coast of South Africa in February 1852, was a modern iron-built steamer, but struck a submerged rock some fifty miles out from Simon’s Bay. The soldiers aboard obeyed the order ‘Women and children