Affairs of State | Page 6

state of high efficiency. The contingent which the Bombay
Presidency was to furnish to the 'Army of the Indus,' and which landed
about the close of the year near the mouth of the Indus, was under the
command of General Sir John Keane, the Commander-in-Chief of the
Bombay army. The Bombay force was about 5000 strong.
Before the concentration at Ferozepore had been completed, Lord
Auckland received official intimation of the retreat of the Persians from
before Herat. With their departure had gone, also, the sole legitimate
object of the expedition; there remained but a project of wanton
aggression and usurpation. The Russo-Persian failure at Herat was
scarcely calculated to maintain in the astute and practical Afghans any
hope of fulfilment of the promises which the western powers had
thrown about so lavishly, while it made clear that, for some time at
least to come, the Persians would not be found dancing again to
Russian fiddling. The abandonment of the siege of Herat rendered the
invasion of Afghanistan an aggression destitute even of pretext. The
Governor-General endeavoured to justify his resolution to persevere in
it by putting forth the argument that its prosecution was required, 'alike
in observation of the treaties entered into with Runjeet Singh and Shah
Soojah as by paramount considerations of defensive policy.' A
remarkable illustration of 'defensive policy' to take the offensive
against a remote country from whose further confines had faded away
foiled aggression, leaving behind nothing but a bitter consciousness of
broken promises! As for the other plea, the tripartite treaty contained no
covenant that we should send a corporal's guard across our frontier. If
Shah Soojah had a powerful following in Afghanistan, he could regain

his throne without our assistance; if he had no holding there, it was for
us a truly discreditable enterprise to foist him on a recalcitrant people at
the point of the bayonet.
One result of the tidings from Herat was to reduce by a division the
strength of the expeditionary force. Fane, who had never taken kindly
to the project, declined to associate himself with the diminished array
that remained. The command of the Bengal column fell to Sir
Willoughby Cotton, with whom as his aide-de-camp rode that Henry
Havelock whose name twenty years later was to ring through India and
England. Duncan's division was to stand fast at Ferozepore as a support,
by which disposition the strength of the Bengal marching force was cut
down to about 9500 fighting men. After its junction with the Bombay
column, the army would be 14,500 strong, without reckoning the
Shah's contingent. There was an interlude at Ferozepore of reviews and
high jinks with the shrewd, debauched old Runjeet Singh; of which
proceedings Havelock in his narrative of the expedition gives a detailed
account, dwelling with extreme disapprobation on Runjeet's addiction
to a 'pet tipple' strong enough to lay out the hardest drinker in the
British camp, but which the old reprobate quaffed freely without
turning a hair.
At length, on December 10th, 1838, Cotton began the long march
which was not to terminate at Cabul until August 6th of the following
year. The most direct route was across the Punjaub, and up the passes
from Peshawur, but the Governor-General had shrunk from proposing
to Runjeet Singh that the force should march through his territories,
thinking it enough that the Maharaja had permitted Shah Soojah's heir,
Prince Timour, to go by Peshawur to Cabul, had engaged to support
him with a Sikh force, and had agreed to maintain an army of reserve at
Peshawur. The chosen route was by the left bank of the Sutlej to its
junction with the Indus, down the left bank of the Indus to the crossing
point at Roree, and from Sukkur across the Scinde and northern
Belooch provinces by the Bolan and Kojuk passes to Candahar, thence
by Khelat-i-Ghilzai and Ghuznee to Cabul. This was a line excessively
circuitous, immensely long, full of difficulties, and equally
disadvantageous as to supplies and communications. On the way the
column would have to effect a junction with the Bombay force, which
at Vikkur was distant 800 miles from Ferozepore. Of the distance of

850 miles from the latter post to Candahar the first half to the crossing
of the Indus presented no serious difficulties, but from Sukkur beyond
the country was inhospitable and cruelly rugged. It needed little
military knowledge to realise how more and yet more precarious would
become the communications as the chain lengthened, to discern that
from Ferozepore to the Indus they would be at the mercy of the Sikhs,
and to comprehend this also, that a single serious check, in or beyond
the passes, would involve all but inevitable ruin.
Shah Soojah and his levies moved independently some marches in
advance of Cotton. The Dooranee monarch-elect