THEMINISTRY AND THE FRONTIER WAR.
WE are unable to believe in Lord George Hamilton as we should wish to do, his appearances in Parlia- ment always leaving on our mind an effect of want of insight. He is evidently teachable, and he gets up his briefs very well, but his imagination fails him, and he never quite sees the Empire he is endeavouring to govern. It is impossible to question, however, that if he wrote the despatch on the Indian Frontier which was signed on 'January 28th, and if the policy it indicates is his own, Lord George Hamilton has powers for which we have not hitherto given him sufficient credit. He is not only sensible but exceedingly adroit. The duty forced on him in writing that despatch was a very difficult and delicate -one. We think we may take it that he never quite approved the Frontier War, that he thought the Indian Government very badly informed, and that he was resolute to forbid any extension of Indian responsibilities, either in the way of annexations or burdensome protectorates. As, however, he had left the responsibility with Simla, and had, by not prohibiting it, sanctioned the war, he is obliged to abstain from disapproval, or even in a general though vague way to approve it, and he performs this official duty by praising the soldiers, whom nobody has blamed, and by a rather striking account of the wave of Ghazeeism or Mnssulman feeling produced on the Frontier by the Sultan's victories. He leaves it, in fact, to be assumed that the war was inevitable, as no doubt in a degree it was, and so calmly evades the whole of the really urgent questions of the scale of the war—which was at least three and a half times too big—of the indefiniteness of its objects, and of its expense. Stay, on the last point we may be doing Lord George Hamilton an injustice. There runs all through the despatch a note of complaint as to the disproportion between the objects sought and the expenditure necessary to achieve them, culminating towards the end in the very quiet but, being written by the revising authority, very severe remark : " It is not sufficient that the measures proposed should be desirable ; it is necessary that the gain should be commensurate with the expense." If Lord Elgin and the two military members of his Council had thought so too, there would have been a small, easily handled punitive expedition, but no war. It is clear, too, that Lord George Hamilton was annoyed by the want of information at Simla—as to which some very curious stories ought to come out in the debate—for he three times remarks that reassuring telegrams were " within two days " contradicted by the facts.
So far the despatch is a clever, or, as we have said, an adroit one, one that would have done credit to an experi- enced diplomatist ; but towards its close, when a policy has to be laid down and final orders transmitted, it is positively wise. The advocates of the "Forward" policy are rebuked with unexpected decision. They have been pressing all along for the occupation of strategic points, for the seizure of all the passes, for the exaction of tribute, for the total disarmament of all the tribes.
• No,' says the Secretary of State, who, be it remembered, is for modern India the true Great Mogul, ' we will have none of all that.' There are to be no annexations, or, as it is officially and most temperately put, " the two main objects to be borne in mind were indicated in my telegram of October 13th—namely, the best possible concentra- tion of your military force so as to enable you to fulfil the several responsibilities to which I have adveited, and the limitation of your interference with the tribes so as to avoid the extension of administrative control over independent tribal territory." Even interference with the tribes is to be avoided, and punishment strictly limited to the practicable. The exaction of tribute is specially forbidden in words so weighty and so grave that we must extract them at full length :—" I was un- able to give my consent to the imposition of tribute upon the Afridis and Orakzais. I recognise the force of the arguments used in favour of such a visible assertion of the responsibilities which you have incurred under the Durand Convention It is desirable to avoid giving any countenance to the idea that your Government means to administer the tribal country or to enclose it within your provincial limits. Moreover, I apprehend that the imposition of even a nominal tribute might rankle in the minds of the Pathan tribes, furnish dis- affected persons with material for imputing to the British Government designs which it does not contemplate, and, above all, might enable the tribes to choose their own time for refusing payment, and thus for openly defying your authority. In such a case the only means of en- forcing your demand, besides punitive expeditions and blockades, might be the imposition of direct administra- tive control, or, in the last resort, annexation of fresh tracts of country. But the extension of your direct administration across the border involves an increase of responsibilities which it has always been our policy to avoid ; and annexation would imply a still larger addition to your civil and military establishments, with a very serious and growing burden upon your financial resources." The alternative method, the total disarmament of the tribes, which seems to find such favour in some quarters, is equally prohibited. "Any attempt," says the Secretary of State, " to keep the tribal country, or even one section of it, permanently disarmed, involves serious consequences. In the lawless state of society which prevails across the British administrative frontier, a tribe could not exist without the means of defence. Unless we are prepared to wholly undertake their protection against their neighbours, some limit must necessarily be put on their deprivation of the means of self-defence." Disarmament—besides being impossible in such a region—implies protection, and pro- tection implies annexation, and annexation is precisely the policy which her Majesty's Government has rejected. Then what is the Indian Government to do ? " Protect the Khyber," orders Lord George. Other passes may be important, but that one certainly is. Therefore, protect the Khyber, improve the road, make a new "alignment" on it—that is, we presume, widen the space within which enemies cannot come—and therewith rest content.
We need not say that this policy is, in our judgment, the only sensible one ; and as the Government has adopted it, we heartily wish that public debate upon the war could have been averted. Unfortunately it cannot be, and if the Opposition can find an advocate who really knows the facts, and can explain them so that Members are not bewildered with despatches and geographical details, the debate will be followed by a division, which we, as Unionists, shall regard as most inopportune and unfortunate. It is impossible for any impartial historian not to decide that the war upon the scale adopted was a needless and disas- trous blunder. The truth, we suppose, was very much in this wise. The military party at Simla, full of their idea of a future Russian invasion, and restless under the total absence of opportunities for displaying their courage and their science, leaped at the rising in the Himalayas as a. grand chance of carrying their policy further, and at the same time earning distinction. They were a good deal deceived by optimist information, they were unaware of the difficulties of transport produced by the Famine, and they were strongly under the belief that if the war were waged on a large scale with liberal expenditure, it would be a rapid and successful one. They did not convince the civilian members of the Council, but they did capture Lord Elgin, who, we suspect, though we do not positively know, had been greatly i m pressed by the reports which rained in on him of general Mussulman excitement throughout Northern India. The Viceroy consequently assented to the large plans laid before him ; seventy thousand men were mobilised, thirty-five thousand were sent to the front, and then—then there was, as one letter to us describes it. " universal jam." The Transport Department, which had not been consulted, and was not ready for the movement of a great army, literally could not get its beasts and impedimenta forward over such a country, punctually to the hour, and without that punctuality Generals are almost powerless. The commissariat diffi- culties, always considerable, were immensely aggravated by the almost total want of water, which had been calculated for so far as the men were concerned, but not for all the beasts, the consequence being, first, that every delay was dangerous lest men should die of thirst ; and, secondly, that the beasts—in unusually poor condition because of the Famine—did die of thirst in numbers which would drive our Animal Protection Societies wild with pity. Then followed the scene we have all been witnessing—a great deal too close—incessant attacks on lofty "passes" or rather gorges ; incessant "retire. ments ; " incessant fightings, in which our soldiers displayed courage, and their officers audacious contempt of self ; incessant bivouacs amidst cold, rain, and sometimes hunger ; a long list of killed and wounded ; and nothing adequate accomplished. For it is useless to deny the fact that next to nothing has been accomplished. We have blown up scores of stone villages, so forcing the clansmen back to their old dens in the caves, and have cut down thousands of fruit trees—a bit of Turkish barbarism for which we see no sufficient justification—but we have not subjugated the tribes, or disarmed the tribes, or frightened the tribes, or even altered their traditional conviction that war is the most interesting and exciting of all possible sports. Some of them have yielded because they chose, and some of them are fighting still because they choose—e.g., the Zakka-khels—and all the while those who nominally submit and those who go on fighting are equally willing to take service with us, and kill our enemies anywhere in the world. We ask any expert on the Frontier whether, if we were at war in China, we could not raise at this very moment three regiments among the Zakka-khels who are potting at us, and rely on them in China as if they were Englishmen. We are sick of the House of Commons' nonsense about the road to Chitral and our broken faith, and we do not doubt that everybody responsible for the campaign acted on his sincere opinion, and would have died for it if he had got the chance ; but if this war was not from beginning to end a discreditable muddle no such thing as a muddled war ever occurred in this world. We suppose this Government or any Government must defend its agents, or nobody at a distance will have the heart to accept a grave responsibility; but we lament the necessity, and heartily wish it were possible to pass a censure which would not imperil interests greater than even those of India. It is, however, certain from the despatch that the Government has abandoned, perhaps never accepted, the only policy which could have justified the war, and that being certain, our interest in the debates has greatly died away.
Previous page
