Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (10 page)

As for Sleeman, he bore no grudge against the Thugs, remorselessly though he had hunted them for so many years. He was a generous soul, he was no prig or chauvinist, and his satisfaction appears to have been purely ideological. He had proved the
iqbal
of Victoria’s Empire, and deepened its roots in India. On New Year’s Day, 1833, he set out on an official tour of his territories, carried in a palanquin, wearing his gold-faced tunic and his feathered cocked hat, preceded by an elephant and escorted as usual by sepoys and cavalrymen. With him went his wife Amelie, the daughter of a French sugar-planter in Mauritius. Mrs Sleeman was far gone in pregnancy, and what with the jolting of the palanquin and the nightly exertions of setting up camp (for they travelled less sumptuously than the Edens), on the sixth day out from Saugor she was seized with labour pains.

They pitched camp as soon as possible, in a grove of lime and peepul trees beside the way, and there in the shade a boy was born. It was an apposite
accouchement
. As Sleeman well knew, the grove had been notorious for generations as a haunt of Thugs—a
bele
, a place of strangulation. In that place, over several centuries, scores, perhaps hundreds of innocents had felt the Thug knee in the small of the back, the Thug breathing behind the head, and the soft silken pull of the
rumal
around the neck. A Thug baby born in such a murder-place would be considered unclean, and would pass his contamination down the family line, but Sleeman knew better. He was a man of the imperial enlightenment, and he, his wife and the baby boy all lived happily ever after.
1

F
ORCE was ever the fuel of empires, though, and inevitably Victoria’s was very soon at war. The first Victorian punitive expedition was mounted in November, 1837, just six months after the Queen’s accession, and for the rest of the century her dominions were seldom at peace. Waterloo and Trafalgar had left Britain with the power to prevent any further global conflict for a century, but the Pax Britannica itself, the peace of Empire, was maintained only by incessant small campaigns. ‘The great principles of morality,’ the good Lord Glenelg once declared, ‘are of immutable and universal obligation, and from them are deduced the laws of war….  Whether we contend with a civilized or barbarous enemy, the gratuitous aggravation of the horrors of war on the plea of vengeance or retribution, or on any similar grounds, is alike indefensible.’ Few educated Englishmen would dissent in principle: in practice, by the nature of empire, Queen Victoria’s wars did not always lack their gratuitous aggravations, and in the scale of the imperial motives the philanthropic was nicely balanced by the belligerent. War came naturally enough to the British, after so much experience of it, and empire offered them a more or less perpetual battle-field.

There were two main imperial armies. The first was the British Army proper, with its headquarters at the Horse Guards in London. In 1838 it was about 100,000 strong, divided into three guards’ regiments, eight cavalry regiments, thirteen infantry regiments of the line, eight regiments of artillery and an incipient corps of engineers. Rather more than half of it was normally stationed abroad, and there were garrisons and contingents scattered across the globe
from Tasmania, where the Army guarded the convict settlements, to Jamaica, where a force buried deep in the queer hill-country called the Cockpit, high above Falmouth, kept watch upon those refractory aboriginals, the Maroons. As a social institution the Army had scarcely changed since Marlborough’s day. Its officers, many of them rich men of fashion, bought their commissions still, and did not generally find their duties onerous: training was minimal, and the average officer had plenty of time to spend on field sports, horse-breeding, or living it up in town. As for the rank and file, they remained Wellington’s scum of the earth, so astonishingly redeemable by discipline and dangers shared. They enlisted for twenty-one years, and a large proportion of them were Irish Catholics, supplemented by recruits from all the simpler regions of Britain—the Scottish Highlands, the West Country, mid-Wales—and by an assortment of riff-raff and pseudonymous rogues.

Professionally the Army had not much progressed since Waterloo. Tactics were still based upon the square and the thin red line, training was still a matter of rigid regulation inflexibly enforced. Marksmanship was hit-and-miss: if a soldier hit the target once in three or four attempts, he was considered a good shot. Parade orders were still those of the eighteenth century—‘The battalion will change front by the wheel and countermarch of subdivisions round the centre—Close up the supernumerary ranks—Right subdivisions right about face, the whole right wheel—Quick
March
!’ The grand bewhiskered sergeants of 1815 were still the Army’s core in 1839, and the soldiers went to war in the same long greatcoats, thick scarlet uniforms, shakos and whited bandoliers.

The Army lived ritualistically. Flags, guns and traditions were holy to it, and loyalty to one’s regiment was the emotional keynote of the service. When a soldier was sentenced to death he was paraded blindfolded before his own regiment, made to kneel upon his own coffin, and, while the band played the Dead March from
Saul
, shot there and then. An elephant who refused to pull a gun to one Indian battle was formally court-martialled, and sentenced to receive twenty-five lashes of a chain administered by a fellow-elephant.
1
Ceremony and display was immensely important to the British military ethos, and this taste for splendour was carried over to the Empire, and became an imperial technique too.

The other imperial army was a very different force. Since the seventeenth century the East India Company—‘John Company’—had maintained its own armed forces. By 1839 this army was divided into three Presidency forces, raised by the three administrative divisions of British India, Bengal, Madras and Bombay, the general commanding the Bengal Army being normally the senior officer of all. It was a force unique in the history of Asia. Though raised and paid by the Company, it was in effect at the disposal of the Crown, and formed a mercenary army bigger by far than the Queen’s own forces. There were a few regiments of European infantry, recruited mostly from Ireland or among the drifters and adventurers always at a loose end in British India, but most of the other ranks were Indian: sepoy infantrymen of all races and religions, wearing uniforms that looked more British than Asiatic, drilled to British methods, grouped in numbered regiments in the British style: colourful troopers of irregular horse, raised on a personal or family basis by individual British officers—like the celebrated Skinner’s Horse, ‘the Yellow Boys’, raised by the half-caste James Skinner, and run as a kind of club.

The commissioned officers of this curious force were all British, educated at the Company’s own military academy at Addiscombe in Surrey, where they took a two-year course in military subjects, Hindustani, mathematics and mechanics. They did not buy their commissions (though a boy could be nominated for one by a grandee of the Company) and promotion was generally by merit. The long hot years in India inevitably took their toll;many officers deteriorated before their time, or succumbed to debauch and gluttony, and the glamour of it all masked many flaws and deficiencies. Even so, John Company’s Army was a formidable machine—experienced, professional, and at some 250,000 men larger than any European army except Russia’s.

The two imperial armies did not greatly care for one another. Their styles were different, and the contrasts jarred. The Indian armies had abolished flogging in 1835; the British Army flogged
so readily that troops in the Queen’s regiments were nicknamed ‘bloody-backs’. The British private soldier generally soldiered
faute
de
mieux
: the sepoy generally came from a military caste, proud of his hereditary calling and much respected for it. British Army officers were often terrific swells, Indian Army officers were mostly middle-class career men. Contact between the armies, which frequently served side by side, was polite but not often enthusiastic: British Army officers did not much like working under the command of Company generals, and Company soldiers resented the fact that many of the best local appointments, like that of C-in-C, Bengal Army, were reserved for Queen’s officers.

But between them they were extremely powerful, and the story of Victoria’s Empire, as it unfolded during the next half-century, weaved itself around their joint existence, and often followed their trumpets.

The first big Victorian war was precipitated by Emily Eden’s brother George. In the 1830s most of the British possessions could be considered invulnerable. The Royal Navy made them so. There was a long land frontier, it was true, between Canada and the United States, but 10 million Americans with their minds on other things did not then pose any serious threat to the stability of the Empire: on the contrary, the Royal Navy was their own first line of defence, and the only real guarantor of their Monroe Doctrine. As for the scattered islands and remoter settlements of the Empire, they were either so awful as to be scarcely worth coveting, or accessible only by courtesy of the British fleet.

The one exception was India, where during the past half century British power had been extending steadily towards the north. Here the British must defend a land frontier 2,000 miles long. No foreseeable threat arose from the decadent Chinese Empire in the north-cast.
1
To the north-west, however, stood Russia, whose strength was uncertain, whose intentions were always mysterious, and whose empire in Asia had grown as fast as Britain’s. In theory at least the most vulnerable corner of the British Empire was the top left corner of India, and there lay the home ground of the Great Game, which was to share courts with the Eastern Question for much of the nineteenth century. At one time or another Turkey, Persia, Egypt and the Balkans were all considered by British strategists to be the Key to India, but the classic Great Game was played in the mountain kingdom of Afghanistan, and there more than anywhere the British repeatedly scented danger. Immediately to the north of it the Russian Empire lay, probing towards Bokhara and Khiva; immediately to the south lay the British Empire, whose influence extended, thanks to a treaty with Ranjit Singh the Sikh, to the line of the Indus river. Between the two the Afghan kingdom stood glowering and secretive, inhabited by some of the most warlike
peoples on the face of the earth, and veiled always in intrigue.

It was little-known to Europeans, except by disrepute. Its capital, Kabul, lay deep within the mountains at 6,000 feet, clustered at the foot of a mediaeval citadel, the Bala Hissar, on a desolate gravel plain: a foxy, evasive kind of city, riddled with xenophobia and conspiracy, and living it seemed always on its nerves. All around were unmapped, bald and inhospitable highlands, pierced by narrow ravines and deep river-beds, traversed only by rough tracks. The kingdom made its living by plunder and agriculture, for the Muslim Afghans thought trade an ignoble occupation, and left it to foreigners. The general character of the people was at once savagely independent and desperately unpredictable. The Afghans could be lively, humorous, courageous, even warm-hearted: but they could also be bigoted, sly, and murderous. They were uncompromisingly picturesque. The women were enveloped head to foot in the white cylinder of the
burkha
, with only a mesh at the eyes to demonstrate the human presence within. The men wore huge turbans, or satin caps with gold brocade crowns, with leather boots buttoned up to the calf, huge sheepskin cloaks over their shoulders, and shirts with wide sleeves for the concealment of daggers or poison phials.

The Afghans were not only implacably chauvinist, they also fought incessantly among themselves, for they were split into great tribal divisions—the Durranis, the Ghilzais, the Barakzais—and sub-divided multitudinously into clans—Hazarahs, Tajiks, Sadozais, Khaibaris, Afridis—not to speak of innumerable Pathan groupings on the southern border, and Tartars and Uzbegs in the north. All these groups had their own characteristics, their own traditions and their own loyalties, and they made Afghanistan extraordinarily difficult for a foreigner to understand, and almost impossible to govern. There had been eight changes of royal dynasty in the past half-century, deposed monarchs generally being murdered, but sometimes only blinded.

The British wished, on the whole, to preserve the independence of this unnerving State, as a buffer against Russian pretensions. In the 1830s, however, they had doubts. The Amir Shah Shuja-ul-Mulk, one of the flabbier of Afghanistan’s generally gristly kings, had been deposed thirty years before and had been in exile ever since,
first as an enforced guest of Ranjit Singh, then as a pensioner of the British in India. It was now rumoured that his successor, the virile Dost Mohammed, might be plotting an association with the Russians. There were whispers of Russian missions, subventions, arms supplies, and at the same time the Russians were known to be backing the Persian army which was, in a desultory sort of way, besieging the Afghan fortress of Herat in the west. These were misty, contradictory reports, but in 1837 a British agent, Alexander Burnes, went to Kabul ostensibly on a commercial mission, and confirmed that there really was a Russian mission in the city. Just what the Russians were up to, nobody knew:
1
but they were evidently up to something in the far north-west.

Lord Auckland, a weak, diligent and ordinary man, was perturbed. It took six months to get an answer from London, so the problem was all his. Burnes had recommended that the Dost, for all his flirtations with the Russians, should be regarded as a potential ally rather than a likely enemy. Auckland and his advisers in Calcutta determined otherwise. Dost Mohammed, they decreed, must be removed from office in the interests of imperial security, and the aged and compliant Shah Shuja restored to his throne in Kabul. In October, 1838, Auckland accordingly published, from his retreat at Simla in the Himalayan foothills, a manifesto of intent. The Governor-General felt the importance, it said, of taking immediate measures to arrest the rapid progress of foreign intrigue and aggression towards the imperial territories. Since Dost Mohammed and his supporters had proved themselves ‘ill-fitted … to be useful allies to the British Government’, the British proposed to restore to the throne of Kabul the exiled and rightful king, who would ‘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’.