XL. 1842. CHAP. rity would be given for the safe conduct of the troops to Peshawur. A similar answer was returned by Nott from Candahar, and when intelligence arrived of the massacre of the Cabul army in defiance of the convention, both these gallant officers held out and preserved these important fortresses for the British forces. In them, under the gallant lead of Pollock, Monteith Douglas, Sale, and Nott, began the glorious operations which redeemed the vi. 319-321; honour of the British name, and led to triumphs so transNott, i. 450, cendant as to throw all the previous disasters into the 1 Thornton, Kaye, ii. 25; 136. tion of Lord shade.1 But the return of prosperous days, however glorious to Termina- the nation, came too late to redeem the character or lighten Auckland's the load of anxiety which oppressed the Government. tion, and The mournful intelligence from Cabul reached Lord Lord Ellen- Auckland in the end of January. The previous month administra borough's appoint ment. had been one of intense anxiety, relieved only at distant intervals by gleams of hope arising from the heroic conduct of the garrison of Jellalabad, to be recounted in a future chapter; but no apprehensions could equal the terrible reality, when the dismal intelligence arrived that only one man had survived out of seventeen thousand souls who had set out on their homeward journey from Cabul. The blow was stunning to the Governor-general, and the more so that the termination of his government was drawing near, and he had no time to repair the errors of his administration. Such was the consternation which prevailed, that little or nothing except ordering up a few regiments to Peshawur was done to arrest the calamity. Lord Auckland now saw clearly the disastrous consequences of the policy which he had been persuaded to adopt in regard to Affghanistan; and he returned home, sad and dispirited, in the spring of 1842. He was succeeded by Lord Ellenborough, who had been selected as 25, 287; Governor-general by Sir Robert Peel on his accession to vi. 317,325. office in October 1841, and arrived in Calcutta on 28th 2 Kaye, ii. Thornton, February.2 XL. 1842. 137. on the in the Aff expedition. Overwhelming from its magnitude, heart-rending from CHAP. its suffering, awful from its completeness, the Affghanistan disaster is one of the most memorable events of modern times. Rivalling the first Crusade in the entire destruc- Reflections tion with which it was attended, the Moscow campaign justice of in the terrible features by which it was distinguished, it ghanistan will long rivet the attention of man. Without doubt, it must be regarded, by those who contemplate national events as regulated by an overruling Providence, as a signal example of retributive justice—as the punishment of a nation for the glaring and unpardonable crimes of its rulers. The danger against which the expedition. beyond the Indus was intended to guard, was neither remote nor imaginary; on the contrary, it was both real and pressing. Nothing could be more just or necessary than to take steps against the peril which the Russian subjugation of Persia, the attack on Herat, and the intrigues at Cabul, so clearly revealed. Policy, not less than the primary duty of self-defence, required that the British interest in Affghanistan should be strengthened, and a barrier opposed in its defiles against the oft-repeated northern invasion. But the British Government had no right, in the prosecution of this object, to overturn the reigning power in an independent kingdom-to force a hated dynasty on a reluctant people. The object might have been accomplished without the violation of any right, at scarcely any expense, and without the incurring of any risk. Dost Mahommed, the ruler of the nation's choice, was not only willing, but anxious, to enter into the British alliance, and for a comparatively trifling sum shut the gates of India for ever against the Muscovite battalions. When, therefore, instead of closing with his proposals, we resolved to dethrone him, and to force a hated king again upon the nation, in order that he might be a mere puppet in our hands, we committed as great a mistake in policy as a crime in morality. But although every serious observer must discern in the XL. 1842. 138. CHAP. fate of this memorable expedition an instance of the manner in which signal national crimes even in this world. work out their own punishment, yet, humanly speaking, it is not difficult to discern the causes to which it was imtion of the mediately owing. Conceived in injustice, it was cradled expedition. in error, and executed by incapacity. In the original Errors in the concep 139. tion of the object in plan of the campaign every military principle was violated; in carrying it out, every rule of military experience was disregarded. Throwing an expedition forward a thousand miles from its base of operations, through a desert, mountainous, and difficult country, inhabited by fierce and barbarous tribes, the Indian government repeated the error which had proved fatal to Napoleon in the Moscow campaign; but it did not, like him, seek to repair the mistake by moving up strong bodies of men to keep up the communications with the rear. The force with which the expedition was undertaken-under ten thousand fighting men, including only four European regiments—was altogether inadequate to both conquering the country, and keeping up the communications. Fifty thousand men, including ten thousand Europeans, would not have been too many for such an undertaking; and there never was a third of that number at the disposal of the commanders in Affghanistan. This deficiency of force, and its disproportion to the Dispropor- object in view, was the result mainly of the great force to the and ruinous pacific reductions which had taken place view, and during the years of political hallucination which followed its effects. the passing of the Reform Bill in England. True, the military forces were rapidly increased as the necessities of the campaign unfolded themselves, and before they were closed the forces were again restored to their old level, of whom above 40,000 were Europeans; but that only changed the quarter in which danger was to be apprehended-it did not remove it. The new recruits were very different from the old soldiers; and the infusion of a large body of these young and inexperienced men XL. 1842. into the regiments, by the augmentation of the num- CHAP. ber of companies in each, weakened in a most serious degree the efficiency and steadiness of the whole. It was repeatedly observed during the Affghanistan campaign, that the troops, both native and European, failed at the decisive moment; and people asked, Are those the soldiers of Clive and Lake, of Wellington and Abercromby? In truth, they were not the soldiers of these men, though they wore the same dress, and bore the same arms. You cannot make a civilian a soldier in a few months, by merely putting arms into his hands and a uniform on his back. Years of military life, and acting together in circumstances of difficulty and danger, are indispensable to form that coolness in peril, and that thorough confidence between officers and men, which form the strength of real soldiers. The idea that you may without risk disband a veteran force on the return of peace, because you can raise a new one in a few months when war again breaks out, is one of the most fallacious that can possibly be entertained, and to which the disasters which have uniformly befallen the British nation, in the first years of every new war for a century and a half, are mainly to be ascribed. 140. conferring military officers. Connected with this source of weakness and danger is another, which is peculiar to the Indian army, and that Injudicious is the great number of officers who, during peace, were of civil withdrawn from their regiments, and intrusted with offices on diplomatic duties as political agents. Economy, and a desire to run two services into one, was the mainspring of this system, and it is hard to say whether it proved most injurious to the civil or military service. To the former it brought an undue confidence in military knowledge, and induced a jealousy between the two services, by leading the young military political agent to assume the direction of the military movements, which he was often neither entitled nor qualified to do. To the latter it brought, without the abandonment of the mili VOL. VI. 2 U XL. CHAP. tary life, an entire ignorance of its details, and incapacity for its duties. The young political agent, accustomed to 1842. command, and to act as a sort of viceroy over some protected potentate, suddenly found himself, when hostilities broke out, recalled to his regiment, and immediately intrusted with the discharge of arduous and important military duties. He was then surrounded by soldiers to whom he was unknown, as much as they were to him. The first forenoon of real service in the field or in the trenches often revealed to the men under his command the incapacity of their new officer to direct them; and after that had been discovered, how was it possible that mutual confidence could be re-established, or either the officers lead or the men follow, in moments of difficulty or danger, as they ought? To this cause much of the errors in judgment, evinced in separate command by the officers, and of the timidity shown by the men in following their always gallant lead, is to be ascribed. The economists say that such a union of the two services is indispensable, in order to keep down the otherwise insupportable expenses with which the administration of affairs in India is attended; and possibly it is so. But that only shows that a system of government by one country at the distance of eight thousand miles from another is exposed to difficulty, and involves in itself the seeds of its own ruin, not that the system itself is not dangerous and big with future disaster. 141. Even with all these disadvantageous circumstances, Extreme although ultimate and entire success was hopeless, yet military ar- the extreme disaster which was sustained might have rangements been avoided, had it not been for the obvious and almost error in the at last. inexplicable errors committed in the military arrangements when the final catastrophe approached. The neglect to occupy and strengthen the Bala-Hissar as the centre of our military operations; the mistake in placing the troops in exposed and extensive cantonments ill-fortified; and, above all, the extraordinary fault of putting |