TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE PROSPECT IN AFGHANISTAN.
SIR FREDERICK ROBERTS, in the early days of the new year, with the snow still thick upon the ground, will be compelled to fight his way through the Afghan forces to Jellalabad. He will have with him 2,000 Europeans in good fighting trim, 4,000 natives half paralysed with cold and dysentery, a transport train wretchedly deficient, and scarcely any effective cavalry. He will have against him 10,000 Afghan soldiers, the fighting men of Cabul, and the whole armed population of the hills and plains between Cabul and Peshawur. That is the best and most deliberate judg- ment we are able to form of the situation, and we would ask those of our readers who condemn it as too gloomy to pause until they have carefully weighed the reasons by which it is supported. We plead, not for our own sake, but for the sake of our opinions, a right to be heard. When Louis Cavagnari's now famous letter describing his reception in Cabul was published in the Times, we pointed out that he had said nothing of the one serious point,— the feeling of the people. The ink was scarcely dry, when he was murdered ; and since then, week after week, with endless* reiteration, we have presented the same beliefs,—that General Roberts's skilfulness and audacity were not supported by adequate force, that every man in Afghanistan was a deadly enemy of the British, that the idea of Afghan cowardice was an illusion founded on a series of accidents, that on the slightest check the kingdom and its capital would rise, and that the British General would then " have to fight for his life." It has all happened, and it is in a spirit of utter sadness and depression that we continue to perform our duty to our constituents, and express a view which no man in the Empire will be more delighted to see falsified by events, or by the audacious cleverness of the brilliant though, we fear, merciless General now shut up in Shirpore.
We left the story last week with the Afghans masters of the hills above the Bala Hisser, and General Roberts intent by dashing charges on " clearing" away the enemy, who he evidently believed would, if defeated at isolated points, retreat and disperse. It was a reasonable belief, for throughout the fighting of the last fifteen months they had always done so ; and General Roberts, though carefully warned by his Persian news-writers, disbelieved their stories, and was utterly incredu- lous of the universal insurrection of Afghans so imminently at hand. It was not till the 14th that the cloud fell from his eyes, and some incident not reported, but probably, as he him- self hints, news of the rising in the city, woke him to the con- sciousness of a desperate situation. He was four miles in front of the city, with his troops scattered upon the slopes, his food exhausted, an immense army of insurgents, calculated by him- self at 30,000 men, and probably far exceeding that number, all around him, with the capital in insurrection—he mentions this—and with all his supplies concentrated in the distant cantonment of Shirpore, on the other side of the city. If they were lost, his destruction, for mere want of food and powder, would be a question of hours. The instant this was perceived, the General, with characteristic audacity and decision, deter- mined to fight his way round the city to his supplies,—a most dangerous and difficult, but unavoidable operation ; and after a whole day's " continuous fighting," during which he lost 105 men and " many " officers—sixteen or seventeen, probably, reckoning by the previous proportion observed in this affair—he effected his object, and concentrated his whole army in his walled cantonment. He found Shirpore safe, and there rested, with an utterly wearied force of, the Viceroy declares, 7,000 men. Cabul, of course, passed to the insurgent leader, Mahommed Jan, who has taken possession of the Bala Hissar—this is telegraphed—and possibly of Shere Ali's great stock of cannon there, and has, as we read the in- telligence received rid Candahar, summoned the regular army of Shere Ali from Herat. Ayoub Khan, the Governor there, full-brother of Shore Ali, and full of the pride of a Prince and Barukhzye, rejected the order, and was summarily deposed by his troops, who raised a low-born but presumably efficient officer to the command. Without his aid, however Mahom- med Jan has 10,000 regulars—this has been officially tele- graphed—the Ghilzie clan, counting 30,000 fighters at least, the fighting ruffians of Cabul, and the capital and entire country for supplies. A suggestion is offered that he may not have powder, but Ghnznee is his, and in Afghanistan there is powder everywhere. It is evident, from General Roberts's orders and telegrams, that he has no hope of suppressing the revolt or restoring his force to activity until he receives reinforcements ; and that,. deceived by the easy journey of the Guides from Gundamuck„ he expected their speedy arrival. He will, we fear, be fatally disappointed. This rising was so far planned,. that every chief with armed men behind him was warned, and the instant the facts were known, within forty hours of General Roberts's retreat, Asmutoollah Khan and the Ghilzies had barred the Jagdalak Pass in such strength that General Gough, old V.C. as he is, decided that advance was impossible without reinforcements, which cannot as yet be obtained. He was, indeed, compelled to " con- centrate" in the fort of Jagdalak with only six days' food. General Arbuthnot, at Jellalabad, has no trans- port, and has besides that city to hold down, the native. Governor, who was so " friendly," having fled, with the. treasure ; so that he has taken on only " a wing " of a Sikh regiment, say 350 men, and a " detachment of Goorkhas." General Bright, with the Khyber column, is " unwilling to weaken his line," expecting to be attacked in force by the- Mobmunds, the great clan whose hereditary leader,. Yahiya Khan, was carried off by the British when they spirited the Amcor away to Lahore. He has sent only three- companies of her Majesty's olst. It is practically impossible,. therefore, that a man should reach Shirpore until a new column is formed at Peshawur, where the garrison must be kept strong—it is the most dangerous city in India, except Hydera- bad, and choked with Afghans,—and is sixty miles distant from the nearest railway terminus to the south, where, again, trans- port has been entirely exhausted. There are not the means of moving 1,000 men ready. It will be at least a month before a strong column can be mobilised at Peshawur, and six weeks- before it can relieve General Bright sufficiently to allow him to begin a march in force sufficient to beat down all resist- ance and, even if the regulars have arrived from Herat, to regain Cabal. He could do it as well as General Pollock, if he had the transport, but he has not, and he has to encounter a resistance to which General Pollock was not exposed. The are no better soldiers than they were, but they• have better arms, have found, as every message from the- front repeats, an able leader, and are, we fear, under a belief, caused by the execution of the Moollahs, that the. British have declared war on Islam. The Viceroy quite per- ceives the difficulty of sending reinforcements speedily, and it is to break that fact to the British people, according to his invariable and most childish practice, that ho dwells on. General Roberts's stores, repeating statements about five months' supply which every commissariat officer knows to be impossible, and makes the naif suggestion, worthy of a Micawber, that if the tribes do not disperse of themselves a strong force will be organised to force a passage. Why should they disperse? They have just gathered their har- vest, have placed their women and children in safety, and are at liberty to enjoy themselves,—and their enjoyment is guerilla. fighting—till the spring.
There is, therefore, no sufficient reason to expect that General Roberts can be relieved till February. The tribes may, of course, disperse, or may fall to fighting among themselves, or General Stewart may execute an almost miraculous march. eastward from Candahar, or some wholly unexpected in- cident may occur, but there is no kind of calculation which leads to any other result than that we have already stated. If that is accurate, all depends on General Roberts's ability to hold on, and we do not believe that England yet realises the difficulty of his.position in Shirpore. He has there, according to the Viceroy, 7,000 men—the number is the number inclu- sive of wounded, foot-sore, and sick—and a fortified canton- ment which no Afghan will attack, and, Lord Lytton says, five months' supply of " most " necessaries. Those statements are possibly true, if we halve the number of months, but they require supplements. General Roberts may have 7,000 men with him for fighting, though we believe the true num- ber to be nearer 6,000, but he has at least 12,000 men and 6,000 beasts with him for feeding. The able military writer in the Times calculates on 4,000 camp-followers, but he apologises further on for under-assessing them, and the estimate we have taken (5,000 men) is far below all precedent. The feeding of 12,000 men in a fortified square yielding nothing, supplied with water only from wells, and hampered by the caste feeling which will compel two-thirds of the men to have separate wells or to drink the dysenterio water from the river-course, reported to the Lancet as very bad, is an im-
mense operation. Then General Roberts has only " most " necessaries ; and it is well understood that among the necessaries wanting is forage for the beasts, which he was trying to collect by requisitions on the surrounding vil- lages. He must by degrees kill his animals—as was done in Ekowe—thus depriving himself of transport, and afterwards his horses, and he must ration his men severely, an arrange- ment easy with Europeans, difficult, though not impossible, with his native soldiers. If, when this is done, he has two months' food, sufficient water—not supplied by any breakable watercourse—and firewood for cooking, he is safe from all but attack and epidemic sickness. The latter danger is, we hope and believe, barred. by the extreme cold, though cold will not prevent dysentery from the hill water, everywhere so choked with vege- table particles, that at Simla it is carried up from the plains ; but about attack we are not so confident. The cantonment is completely commanded, as General Elphinstone's cantonment was, from the Behmaroo Hills, which actually form its fourth wall ; and although we possess the face of the hills and the Sepoys are hutted upon them, we distrust the power of native troops to resist, amidst ice and snow and under terrible cold—for there is certainly no firewood, except for cook- ing—continuous attacks from clouds of mountaineers, born in the climate, expert cragsmen, and familiar with every path. It is said that General Roberts must know all that, but General Roberts, like Shore Ali, was intent, when he chose Shirpore, on guarding himself against attack from the city, not against an insurrection of mountaineers ; he chose the cantonment for its buildings, and he had, when he re-
treated to it on the 14th, no option whatever. He may be able to keep the cliffs clear, having, let us hope, rockets, but he is utterly daring and utterly con- temptuous of Hill-men, and will, as the days go on, be greatly shocked to find that no relief approaches. If his position be- comes untenable, or from sickness or losses too costly in lives, he will, we believe, dash out before he kills his cavalry horses ; and after desperate fighting to get round the city, will commence a fighting march to reach Jellalabad. He is a very different man from his predecessor in 1842, and has very different men under him—for Elphinstone's troops were all out of heart—and he will, we believe, reach his goal, though after cruel losses, but with an organised army at his back. And then the endless work must be begun again. It is the final horror of this wretched war, that even those who most resisted it can see no way of abandoning it without victory, can suggest no course which must not be pre- ceded by the retaking of Cabul. We ourselves, if we were responsible for the Empire, could resolve on no other policy, even though we knew, as the orders were given, that it was utterly wasteful both of life and treasure, and would be utterly sterile.
We have abstained altogether in this article from any criti- cism on the Government under which these perils have arisen. Destiny, as Mr. Grant Duff said, is writing its criticism on their incapacity in characters before which ours are watery and pale. Nor have we, like most of our contemporaries, any advice to offer. The only advice worth hearing, to replace Lord Lytton by the most energetic Indian on the spot, Sir Richard Temple, will not be acceptable to Lord Beaconsfield, who selected Lord Lytton himself, and who, on November 10th, burst into a hymn of praise over his Viceroy's merits. There is, we believe, no need of reinforcements, except to fill up weak battalions. If there is no mutiny within India itself, the Viceroy's force is ample, for reinforcements will not supply either brains or transport ; and if there is a mutiny, India must be reconquered by an army, not by a supplement- ary regiment or two. There is, however, little danger of mutiny in war-time, all Natives waiting to see on which side Destiny declares ; and the Government will best do its duty by making preparations here for all contingencies, and if they will not remove Lord Lytton, ordering the Governor of Bombay to see that as regards Candahar, at least, the State shall take no harm.
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