of invincibles. At length, nearly all being wounded more or less, a final onset on the enemy sword in hand terminated the unequal struggle … Captain Soutar alone with three or four privates were spared, and carried off captive.63
Six mounted officers rode for Jelalabad, but only one of them, Dr William Bryden, arrived there. The brave and pious Captain Henry Havelock was a staff officer to Brigadier Robert Sale, whose own regiment, HM’s 13th Light Infantry, formed the bulk of the garrison. At about 2.00 p.m. on Sunday 13 January one of his comrades saw a single horseman approaching:
As he got nearer, it was distinctly seen that he wore European clothes and was mounted on a travel-stained yaboo, which he was urging on with all the speed of which it yet remained master … He was covered with slight cuts and contusions, and dreadfully exhausted … the recital of Dr Brydon filled all hearers with horror, grief and indignation.64
The government’s hesitant response to the catastrophe exasperated Havelock and his comrades. ‘The indignation against the Governor-General and the Government, including the Commander in Chief, but chiefly the Governor-General,’ he wrote, ‘went beyond all bounds.’65 Auckland had already been scheduled for replacement, and it was not until Lord Ellenborough arrived as governor-general at the end of February that much was done. Lieutenant General Pollock, who had been appointed to replace Elphinstone even before the news of the disaster reached Calcutta, assembled an ‘Army of Retribution’ in Peshawar and pushed up through the Khyber Pass, relieving Jelalabad on 16 April. Another force marched up through the Khojak Pass to relieve Major General Nott’s garrison of Kandahar. But Pollock was hamstrung by lack of clear orders. The Commander in Chief thought it best that he should retreat, and the new governor-general was ‘scattering military orders broadcast’ without telling the Commander in Chief what he was doing. Pollock, subjected to a near fatal combination of loose direction laced with detailed interference, wrote crossly of ‘the little points that are overlooked by men who direct operations from a comfortable office hundreds of miles away’.66
It was not until 15 September that Pollock reached Kabul after beating Akbar Khan, and Nott joined him there two days later. Pollock inflicted summary public punishment by blowing up the city’s Grand Bazaar, where the body of Macnaghten had been dragged and exposed to insult. One officer observed that collective penalties like this hurt the innocent as well as the guilty, writing that: ‘To punish the unfortunate householders of the bazaar (many a guiltless and friendly Hindu) was not distinguished retaliation for our losses.’67 The captives taken during the retreat were recovered. Young Ensign C. G. C. Stapylton of HM’s 13th wrote that the men were ‘all in Afghan costume with long beards and moustaches and it was with some difficulty that one could recognise one’s friends’. The army then withdrew through the Khyber Pass to receive a triumphal reception. A delighted Stapylton reported that:
Every regiment in Hindustan shall, on our march down, turn out and present arms to us in review order. They have also granted us six months batta, which, however, will hardly cover the losses of the officers.68
This display of gratitude was partly intended to divert attention from the fact that Auckland’s policy had foundered dismally. Shah Shujah had already been murdered by his helpful subjects, a putative replacement had wisely decided to come back with Pollock, and eventually Dost Mohammed – whose deposition had triggered the war in the first place – was allowed to return. Ellenborough announced that: ‘The Governor-General will leave it to the Afghans themselves to create a government amidst the anarchy which is the consequence of their crimes.’ The campaign sharply underlined the difficulties inherent in the existing system. Sir John Hobhouse, chairman of the East India Company, maintained, with some truth, that intervention in Afghanistan was the policy of the British government, and there is little doubt that Auckland saw it as a means of crowning his time in India with a resonant success. When the matter was discussed in Parliament in 1843 Benjamin Disraeli opined that Afghanistan, if left alone, would of itself form an admirable barrier against Russian expansion.
The soil is barren and unproductive. The country is interspersed by stupendous mountains … where an army must be exposed to absolute annihilation. The people are proverbially faithless … Here then are all the elements that can render the country absolutely impassable as a barrier, if we abstain from interference.69
These were wise words. But the linked problems of an unstable Afghanistan and an expansionist Russia were to cause more difficulties in the years to come.
Before the saga of the First Afghan War had reached its untidy end, Major General Sir Charles Napier was sent from Bombay to Karachi, without clear instructions but with the general task of ensuring that the local amirs did not take advantage of British misfortunes. Napier was a hard and abstemious sixty-year-old Peninsula veteran, a political radical and ‘a curious compound of modesty with strange alternations of self-exaltation and self-abasement’. But he was zealous, energetic, and tolerated no dawdling. A subordinate who reported that a mutiny had broken out was told: ‘I expect to hear that you have put down the mutiny within two hours after the receipt of this letter.’ ‘We have no right to seize Sind,’ he mused, ‘yet we shall do so, and a very advantageous, humane and useful piece of rascality it will be.’
And so it was. Napier fought the amirs at Meani on 16 February 1843, and when HM’s 22nd preferred to carry on an indecisive firefight rather than charge home:
Napier himself rode slowly up and down between the two arrays, pouring out torrents of blasphemous exhortation, so close to both sides that he was actually singed by powder, and yet by some miracle unscathed by either. His appearance was so strange that the Baluchis might well have mistaken him for a demon. Beneath a huge helmet of his own contrivance there issued a fringe of long hair at the back, and in front a pair of round spectacles, an immense hooked nose, and a mane of moustache and whisker reaching to the waist. But though the opposing arrays were not ten yards apart, neither he nor his horse were touched.70
He beat them again at Hyderabad in March; when they asked what terms they might be offered, he replied curtly: ‘Life and nothing more. And I want your decision before twelve o’clock, as I shall by that time have buried my dead, and given my soldiers their breakfasts. ’71 Punch magazine, in one of the two great Latin jokes of British India, maintained that he reported his success in the one-word punning telegram ‘peccavi – I have Sin[ne]d’. Like some muscular Victorian headmaster, Napier believed that the best recipe for ruling a country was ‘a good thrashing first and kindness afterwards’. When one local nobleman killed his wife and was duly condemned to death, a deputation came to protest that: ‘She was his wife, and he was angry with her.’ Napier replied: ‘Well, I am angry with him, and mean to hang him.’ He did so, and the practice of wife-murdering fell off sharply.72
With Sind duly secured, the Gwalior campaign of 1843–44 Fsaw two victories at Maharajpore and Punniar, both distinguished by brisk British attacks on larger forces. This left the Sikhs as the only rival to the Company in the whole of the subcontinent. Originally simply a religious grouping, the Sikhs had become a powerful state under Ranjit Singh, who brought together the twelve Misls, Sikh confederacies, established his capital at Lahore and annexed both Kashmir (1819) and Peshawar (1834). Auckland and his advisers recognised that on Ranjit’s death:
The whole country between the [Rivers] Sutlege and the Indus must become the scene of protracted and bloody civil war, only to be terminated by the interference of a third and stronger power, with an army and resource sufficiently strong to bid defiance to all hope of resistance, and that that army must be the British army and that power the British government, there can be little doubt.
In