CHAPTER XX.
The Probabilities of the Revival of the Jehad—Insincerity of Native Chiefs—The Need of further Reinforcements—The Difficulties of Warfare in Afghanistan—Return of General Baker from Baba Kuch Kar—Recovery of the Bodies of Lieutenants Hardie and Forbes—Review of the Jehad—The Attitude of the Tribes on the Line of Communications—Asmatullah Khan’s Position—Failure to check our Reinforcements—The Importance of the Luttabund Post—Attack upon Jugdulluck—Repulse of the Lughmanis—Deportation of Daoud Shah to India—Military Executions.
1st January, 1880.
The New Year has come upon us so suddenly that we have had no time to cast vain regrets upon worn-out months, which have witnessed the making of important pages of history, and given us a new starting-point in our relations with Afghanistan. A month ago we were dying of weary inactivity, but this feeling was swept away by the stirring events of the Mohurrum, and we have not yet sunk back into our old state of lassitude. Our losses have been so heavy, that it behoves us to take precautions to prevent a repetition of the late investment; and we are bestirring ourselves right heartily to give the ghazi-log a reception worthy of their impetuous nature, if they keep their promise to return in March. Musa Jan, Yakub Khan’s son, is now with Mushk-i-Alam (that unsavoury moollah, whose title means “Scent of the Universe”) at Bad Mushk, twelve miles from Ghazni; and when the jehad is revived, all true Afghans will be called upon to rally round their rightful sovereign. The waverers will be wrought upon by promises of endless loot; the fanatical by opportunities of future bliss after they have died as ghazis; and the mass of the tribesmen by an appeal to their warlike instincts which lead them to fight for the sake of bloodshed. It was a grave mistake which left Musa Jan, with the women of Yakub Khan’s household, in Cabul; for now a status is given to the leaders of the up-rising which they lacked before. We have Wali Mahomed with us still; and if we so far modify our policy as to make him Governor of Cabul and the districts about,—and all things are possible in the see-saw of politics,—we could make a counter-appeal and declare Musa Jan to be merely a puppet in the hands of mischief-makers. Whether this appeal would be disregarded, one cannot say; but if it were backed by a strong display of force, say 12,000 men holding Sherpur and every post down to Jellalabad well garrisoned, it might have some effect. No faith can be put in Afghan promises; we have learned that by the falling away of Padshah Khan, if we did not already know it from past experience; and our safety from constant attack must lie in the completeness of our own preparations, rather than in contracts made with sirdars who will only serve us so long as fair weather lasts. Padshah Khan is said to have remained faithful at least until the 14th of December. When he learned that the British had been obliged to withdraw within the walls of Sherpur, and had lost two mountain guns in the day’s fighting, he may have thought that a disaster was impending, and so joined Mahomed Jan with as many Ghilzais as he could collect together. He now affirms that he was more a spectator than an active participator in the siege; and that this was so evident to the other chiefs that, after assigning him a post in the fore-front of the attack, they withdrew him from his command at the last moment, so great was their mistrust of his sincerity.
The Khyber Force will relieve us of all garrison work at Luttabund, which sets free 800 men and two guns for duty here; so that with the 1,400 men General Charles Gough brought with him we shall be over 2,000 stronger. But our losses have been heavy, and there are now 800 men on the sick list, many of whom must be sent back to India. The present campaign cannot be brought to a successful conclusion without a much greater display of force than we have hitherto made; and I believe every effort is now being put forth to collect further supplies, so that, if necessary, 15,000 or 20,000 men could be fed during February and March preparatory to our resuming the offensive in the spring. The warning of Sir Henry Durand, in his criticism of the old war, must have recurred to our leaders when contemplating a new accession of strength to the force now here. He wrote:—“Everything in the expedition was a matter of the greatest uncertainty, even to the feeding of the troops; for Afghanistan merited the character given to Spain by Henry IV. of France: 'Invade with a large force, and you are destroyed by starvation; invade with a small one, and you are overwhelmed by a hostile people.'” We have tried the latter alternative, and, after being shut in by 50,000 Afghans (for such it is now said was the numerical strength of Mahomed Jan’s following), we have no wish to repeat the experiment. To avoid it, we must have a large and handy force ready to cope with the enemy before he can reach Cabul; and here the starvation difficulty crops up. After paying fabulously high prices for everything—from a sheep to an onion—we had laid in stores sufficient for the consumption of our original division until the spring; but these will not suffice when they are drawn upon by the troops which have since joined us (9th Foot, Guides, 2nd and 4th Ghoorkas, Hazara Mountain Battery, and Sappers), apart from any others that may yet come up. The Khyber transport is not strong enough for much reliance to be placed upon it in the matter of bringing up supplies from Peshawur, and we shall probably have to requisition the country and force the people to sell their hidden stores at our own prices. We cannot starve, and the military exigencies of the position render it imperative that we should have Sherpur not only well garrisoned, but a movable force of sufficient strength to disperse all Cabul gatherings, and regiments stationed along our line of communication, equal either to punishing chiefs like Asmatullah, or moving westward to Cabul if a second jehad brings about another great combination of the people. Our latest reinforcement, which arrived here on the 24th, under General Gough, is now garrisoning the Bala Hissar; while the Guides have been attached to General Macpherson’s Brigade, and will remain in cantonments. They have done good service since their arrival, and well deserve to be attached to the army which captured Cabul single-handed.
General Baker returned yesterday from his excursion to Baba Kuch Kar, where he destroyed the forts and villages belonging to Mir Butcha. This place was demolished by Sale on the 8th of October, 1840. It was considered at that time a stronghold which would have given an army without a battering-train much trouble; but now the fortified enclosures were less formidable. They were not defended, Mir Butcha and his retainers have fled northward to Charikar when he saw how quickly we were following him after his retreat from Sherpur on the 3rd December. No opposition on the road to, or from, Baba Kuch Kar was offered to General Baker, who was only away five days. The snow-covered roads and hills were very trying to the soldiers and followers; and it was conclusively proved that camping out in this weather is likely to sow the seeds of much sickness among our men. The country visited was not Kohistan proper, which lies north of Istalif, but the Koh-Daman (“Skirt of the Hills”). The valleys were found to be marvellously fertile, the orchards and vineyards on the hill-slopes stretching away on either side for miles. Cabul is said to draw most of its delicious fruit from the Koh-Daman, the fertility of which we had every opportunity of observing. In the spring the district must be the most beautiful spot in Afghanistan, the Chardeh Valley sinking into insignificance before it. Great difficulty would be experienced by an army marching through in the face of determined opposition. Sunken roads, irrigated tracts, walled fields, and innumerable watercourses form such a network of obstruction, that if the forts and villages, with their acres of orchards and vineyards, were defended, progress would be laborious and dangerous in the extreme. For miles there is admirable cover for skirmishers to harass an army with all its impedimenta of baggage and followers; and every fort would have to be stormed, as mountain guns would make no impression on the mud walls. General Baker not only looted and levelled to the ground all forts and villages owned by Mir Butcha, but cut down his vineyards, and set the Ghoorkas to work to “ring” all the fruit trees. This will he a heavy loss to the villages, which mainly derive their local influence from the return yielded by their orchards and vineyards. Baba Kuch Kar is a little over twenty miles from Sherpur; and from it Istalif could be seen, with its white walls gleaming out on the hillsides, surrounded by orchards extending as far as the eye could reach. Istalif is about ten miles further north, and the country between is all under cultivation. Arrangements were made with local headmen to bring in supplies, and large quantities of grain and bhoosa are expected to reach us from the Koh-Daman.
The quickness with which we resumed the offensive after being besieged in Sherpur has favourably impressed all the country about. Such chiefs as were hostile to us now see that they are not safe from reprisals; and within easy marches of Sherpur many villages which turned out their fighting men during the jehad, are now being punished. One village in Chardeh was said to contain the bodies of Lieutenants Hardie and Forbes, who fell in the cavalry action on the 11th of December. On our troops visiting it, the maliks denied that the bodies had been seen. Two of the headmen were tied up and flogged, but still refused to speak; but upon a third being seized, he offered to show the officers’ graves. The bodies were exhumed, and were found to be unmutilated. The village has been destroyed on account of the contumacy of the maliks, and also because our troops were fired upon from its walls when the guns were lost. Several other missing bodies of Lancers have been found; and on New Year’s Day an impressive funeral of the bodies of Captain Spens, Lieutenant Hardie, Lieutenant Forbes, and a non-commissioned officer took place at the foot of the north-western slope of the Bemaru Heights. We have lost twelve officers killed and fourteen wounded since December 10th, which shows the severity of the fighting; while of the rank and file and camp-followers, ninety-eight have been killed and 238 wounded.
4th January.
One feature of the late investment of Sherpur cantonment which deserves considerable attention is the part played by the powerful Ghilzai tribes between Cabul and Jellalabad. Their attitude, from the 14th of December, was the same as that taken up in the war of 1841-42, and they no doubt looked for a similar result. It might have been foretold with absolute certainty that once a British army was besieged at Cabul, the tribesmen on the route to India would rise to a man and try to block the road along which reinforcements must pass. The jehad which Mushk-i-Alam headed had its origin far from the rocky barrier which shuts in the Cabul plain on the east: its birth was at Ghazni, and its growth extended on the north to Kohistan, and on the south to Logar, the two districts which furnished at the outset its principal strength. The Safis of Tagao were drawn within its influence by their close neighbourhood to Kohistan; but the Ghilzais of Tezin and the valleys about, as well as the more distant Lughmanis, held aloof at first by reason of their position between the two British forces. If Mahomed Jan had failed in his march upon Cabul, and had been driven back upon the Ghazni Road, we should probably have heard little of the hostility of the tribes westward of Butkhak; the preaching of the moollahs, which had for weeks before fallen upon the ears of the Ghilzais as the prediction of a great triumph over the Kaffir army, would have borne no fruit beyond an occasional raid upon our convoys. The local clans would have felt that, if a powerful combination, such as that which had gathered about the Ghazni priest, had failed to drive back the British army, they themselves were powerless to do so. But once the vast host of 50,000 men had occupied Cabul and the Bala Hissar, and had made it impossible for the garrison of Sherpur to move beyond its defences, the Ghilzais felt that the appeal to their fanaticism was a safe lead to follow, and they began to muster in strength. The messengers from Mahomed Jan were welcomed, and our evacuation of Butkhak proved that his promise to surround and cut to pieces the small army which had captured Cabul was not widely removed from the possible, as our leaders were concentrating their force to resist an attack. If we had not needed every man at Sherpur, why should we hurry away from our first outpost under cover of darkness? This was the argument which went home to the hearts of the men in the hills about Khurd Cabul and Tezin; and all the local chiefs, with one exception, turned out their fighting men, and thought of the slaughter of our army in the terrible defile of 1842. Padshah Khan, in his villages nearer the Shutargardan, was carried away by the same reasoning; and, with customary treachery, he hastened to Cabul to fight against the men he had pledged himself to support. His contingent was more needed there than that of the chiefs along our line of communications, who had a similar mission to perform to that so successfully carried out nearly forty years ago—to block all outlets of escape; and in addition, to drive back our reinforcements to Jellalabad. In the first flush of success it may have occurred to Mahomed Jan that he was destined to become a second Akhbar Khan, and that a siege of Jellalabad would follow the annihilation of the force at Cabul. To carry out the programme with success, it was needful that all posts west of Jellalabad should be swept away; and this work he entrusted to Asmatullah Khan, of Lughman, a chief, perhaps, more powerful than any other single tribal leader in North-Eastern Afghanistan. Asmatullah accepted the part assigned to him, and the Lughmanis were soon actively at work: the telegraph line west of Gundamak was destroyed, and then, in full confidence, the troops at Jugdulluck were attacked. But though it was easy enough in theory to lay down plans on the old lines, the Lughmanis found that, with superior weapons, our soldiers were able without difficulty to hold their own against twentyfold odds. The road might be made unsafe, and all convoys stopped; but when it came to turning out enemies snugly entrenched, and armed with breech-loaders, it was a very different story. While Mahomed Jan fondly imagined that for two or three months the Ghilzais would hold the Passes, and check the movement of a relieving force, Asmatullah Khan was not equal to keeping back the stream of men which set westwards from Gundamak, and could not even dispossess the solitary native regiment which held Jugdulluck when the small brigade under General Charles Gough had started for Sherpur. The Ghilzais of Tezin had also found themselves non-plussed by the abandonment of the old route of the Khurd Cabul, which was no longer followed either to or from Sherpur. Although Maizullah Khan and every local chief, with the exception of Mahomed Shah Khan, of Hisarak, were in arms, their tactics were so faulty that, beyond menacing Luttabund, they did nothing to harass our reinforcements. The mere fact of our being able to hold the Luttabund Kotal was so strong an evidence that the end had not yet come, that they hesitated to occupy the road between that post and the Jugdulluck defile, fearing that they might be caught between two fires. Then was demonstrated the full value of the decision arrived at by Sir F. Roberts—to hold Luttabund at all hazards until its garrison could be picked up by the column moving to his relief. The flash of the heliograph from Sherpur to the kotal where Colonel Hudson, with less than 1,000 men, was watching for the reinforcements from our eastern posts, told the tribes that the force in Sherpur, though beleaguered by an army larger than Cabul had ever seen, was still linked to its supports, and was by no means in the straits Mahomed Jan had promised. Sitting on the hills about Luttabund, the Ghilzais were too faint-hearted to attack in earnest, and Mahomed Jan was not General enough to detach one-fifth of his force to sweep away the handful of men forming our solitary outpost. Forty Sikhs of the 23rd Pioneers were enough to scatter the bands which gathered about Luttabund; and so little did the followers of Maizullah Khan prove worthy of the trust confided to them by Mahomed Jan, that from Jugdulluck to Butkhak scarcely a shot was fired upon General Charles Gough’s brigade. Mahomed Jan, holding Cabul and the Bala Hissar in his grasp, must have felt that his plans were falling to pieces when the Ghilzais were unequal to breaking up the force passing through their midst; and once our reinforcements had entered upon the Cabul plain, those plans ceased to exist. In desperation the assault upon Sherpur was decided upon, and its failure was the signal for the collapse of the jehad. Twenty-four hours after the signal light blazed upon the summit of the Asmai hill, not 1,000 men of the 50,000 who had held Cabul could be found within ten miles of the city.
I have tried to explain the course of action taken by the Ghilzais of Lughman and the Passes, and they have always been a bugbear when an advance upon Cabul was made from Gundamak. It has been clearly proved that they lack organization, and have not the resolute courage to attack entrenched positions held by even small bodies of our men. Asmatullah Khan, it is true, made a demonstration against Jugdulluck on the 29th of December, six days after Mahomed Jan’s flight; but he was beaten back with a loss, on our side, of one officer (Lieutenant Wright, 11-9th Battery), and a native gunner killed, and one man of the 51st Regiment slightly wounded. This was after eight hours’ fighting, and proves how paltry a force Lughman can send out. As this was probably Asmatullah Khan’s last attempt before withdrawing to Lughman again, I will give Colonel Norman’s (24th Punjab Infantry) account of the affair. Writing on the evening of the 29th, he said:—“At 10 A.M. to-day a party I had sent out to reconnoitre on the hills to the south was attacked in force by Asmatullah Khan. The party held its own until reinforced; but as the enemy were in great strength, I had to send out nearly all my men. One hundred and sixty of the 29th were on the kotal, and holding points on the Pass to cover the advance of the 45th Sikhs, then marching up to join me. About noon I received a telegram, saying that three companies of the 51st Foot, 360 men of the 45th Sikhs, and four guns of 11-9th Battery, were on the way up. I accordingly waited for the arrival of these troops, to enable me to act more vigorously; but it was 4 P.M. before they arrived, and before this I had driven the enemy back. The reinforcements, directly they had arrived, took up a position in prolongation of my right, to enfilade the enemy. Just as 11-9th Battery came into action, I regret to say that Lieutenant Wright was killed by a rifle bullet. The enemy had completely retired before sunset. The practice of Anderson’s guns (Hazara Mountain Battery) was splendid. Asmatullah Khan has most of the Lughman chiefs with him, and the Governor of Jellalabad Mahomed Hasan Khan.” Colonel Norman also reported that with the force at his command, he could not hope thoroughly to disperse the Lughmanis, who retired from one range of hills to another. These are the usual tactics of Afghan guerilla warfare, the tribesmen returning as soon as the pursuit is over. The punishment of Asmatullah Khan will be directed from another quarter. A flying column from Jellalabad will enter his country and devastate it, dispersing any force he may attempt to keep together. The news of this proposed expedition has doubtless hastened his steps back to his own fertile valley. The Ghilzais south of Jugdulluck will also be visited by a flying column from Gundamak, which will penetrate as far as Hisarak, and punish Maizullah Khan and the other chiefs who joined him. Each of these columns will be made up of 1,500 infantry, four mountain guns, and a squadron of cavalry, and they are to be kept always ready to move out at short notice, apart from the regular garrison of Jellalabad and Gundamak.[[37]]
Another prisoner of some importance has been deported to India: Daoud Shah, the ex-Commander-in-Chief of the Amir’s army, was sent down the line a few days ago. His honesty, which for a long time many of us believed in, seems to have been tried, and found wanting. The story that a letter was intercepted, incriminating him in the rising, is untrue; but that communications of some kind passed between him and the hostile chiefs is said to have been pretty conclusively established. The exact relations between him and Mahomed Jan may never be known; but they were probably on the basis that, if Daoud Shah would desert the British, a high command should be his under the new Amir, Musa Jan. His military experience would also have been invaluable in directing such an army as that within Cabul, and his knowledge of our cantonment and its weak points would have made him a leader whom the tribesmen would have confidently followed.
The Military Commission has had before it many of the prisoners taken after December 23rd, and five men condemned to death were hanged yesterday. Four of these were villagers of Baghwana, near which place the four Horse Artillery guns were lost on December 11th. Captain Guinness, of the 72nd Highlanders, has taken the place of Major Morgan, 9th foot, on the Commission, which, it will be remembered, originally consisted at Siah Sung Camp of General Massy, Major Moriarty, and Captain Guinness. Very few prisoners are now left for trial.