THE BRITISH ARMY IN THE INDIAN MOUNTAINS.
A. FEW days ago, Sir George Campbell, in a speech to some local audience, probably not intended to be reported, told them that General Roberts's raid into the Khost Valley revived in his mind the memories of the massacre of Glencoe, that blot upon the fame of William III. The sentence seemed to us absurdly rhetorical, and indeed it was so, for the note of that massacre was not so much cruelty as treachery, and set us wondering for the hundredth time why Indian officials so able to administer are usually so incompetent to speak ; but after reading the recent accounts of that expedition, and of our general policy towards the mountaineers of the Suleiman, we are compelled to confess that the Member for Kirkcaldy had grounds for his humanitarian rage. He was less wrong in substance than in form. Things are evidently going on there which we earnestly ask Lord Cranbrook to watch and to repress, if necessary, by punishment, if he does not wish to see such an outburst of conscientious horror in this country as will render any Afghan policy, wise or foolish, impossible for years to come. The officers on the frontier have evidently worked themselves up into a mood unusual in the British Army, and hopelessly inconsistent with any policy which any British Government will permanently sanction. Irritated by the hostility of the mountaineers and their mode of making war, by their incessant raids upon convoys and murderous attacks upon camp-followers, and frequent attempts at assassination, they have evidently come to the conclusion that they must be controlled by terror alone ; that they are to be treated as criminals of the worst kind, and that any regard for their view, either of us or of our conduct, is pusillanimous surplusage. There should be an inquiry into the complaint of the Times of India, that the Ghoorkas, who in their own mountains are at least as savage as our enemies, have been less restrained than is usual in an Indian campaign, and have been suffered to do acts in the way of killing the wounded which have been unknown in our armies, and which, if continued, will compel the Pathans to make every skirmish a struggle in outranee. We noticed, a fortnight since, the terrible measure by which Major Cavagnari, following, no doubt, the precedent of the Act for the repression of the Moplahs, strikes at the souls as well as the bodies of Mussulman fanatics by burning the men just executed to ashes, so that the Angel of Death may not find them when he summons all creation to the Judgment. The practice of hanging mountaineers who cut off camp-followers, instead of shooting them, has apparently become universal, and the in- fliction of a shameful death for acts which their perpetrators consider acts of war has become so common, that the artist of the Illustrated London Hews sends home ghastly sketches of the horrible scene, for the edification of his countrymen. All these acts, and the tone of camp comments upon these acts, are evidences of the the growing callousness which these fron- tier wars produce ; of that tendency to vengeance which comes in such campaigns ; of that hardness which, when it is exhibited by Russians in the Caucasus, or Frenchmen in Algeria, strikes Englishmen as so horrible ; and they are all outdone by the scenes in the Khost Valley, which, reported by other hands, roused Sir George Campbell to his over-rhetorical burst of denunciation. Unless the correspondent of the Standard with General Roberts has, for no purpose whatever, invented a story worthy of Edgar Poe, the demoralisation in a part of that force must have gone far indeed.
The Mongols had, upon General Roberts's departure for the Kurrum, upset his arrangements for the government of the Khost Valley, and on his return to punish them showed themselves in such numbers that it was necessary to defeat them. They were attacked and defeated, in a style of which we have nothing to say, except that we do not believe such minute detail of the pride of the native-cavalry officers in their blood-dripping swords can serve any good purpose ; but when they had been dispersed, General Roberts himself ordered that the villages should be plundered by the camp-followers. This was done completely, the inhabitants in one case being turned out with fixed bayonets, and the camp-followers allowed to take what they would, to their utter demoralisation, as we shall find when we wish to protect the next villages ; and then all houses were burnt to the ground, with the whole of the peoples' stores of food. " Hundreds of tons of grain " I: ere burnt, the burning lasting for hours ; and then,—then the British marched away merrily, having abandoned, as a previous telegram informed us, all hope of conciliating the Khost Valley. Before they departed, however, an awful tragedy had occurred :—
" Some unarmed prisoners had been taken out of one of the vil- lages and confided to a Sepoy guard, who formed them into three lines and made them sit upon the ground. Each line was fastened by one rope, which was passed round each man, and then fixed in the ground by wooden pegs. A guard was placed over the prisoners, with strict orders to prevent any of them from escaping, as it was con- sidered desirable that each man should be identified, so that we might see who among them were Mongols, who Waziris, and who Khostwals. It appears that the two first shots which we heard were not fired by our sentries, but had come into the camp of the 21st from the oppo- site side of the ravine. The prisoners imagined the shots to be signals for them to attempt an escape. They accordingly jumped up from the ground at one and the same moment, and commenced swaying from side to side violently, with the object either of breaking the ropes or tearing them from their fastenings in the ground. They were all in a state of terrible excitement. The alarm was given, and a number of Sepoys rushed out to help the guard. The guard en- deavoured to keep the prisoners quiet, and to prevent them from escaping. Several of the prisoners, however, snatched at the rifles of the Sepoys, and tried to get possession of them. Hence ensued a series of desperate hand-to-hand struggles, in which two or three rifles were broken. One powerful fellow managed to get clear of his rope and the sentry who was over him. As he was running away, one of the guard bayoneted him in the leg ; but this did not stop him, for he reached the other side of the ravine in safety. He had only, however, run into the arms of the outlying pickets, who fired at and killed him. Another fellow got free of his bonds, but he had only run a few yards when he was met by a native officer, who drew his re- volver and shot him dead. The situation was now becoming desperate for the guards. They saw that unless extreme measures were taken at once, the whole of the remaining prisoners would get loose, and pro- bably escape. So, while the great mass of wild men, heaving, groan- ing, and wrenching at the ropes, was swaying, perhaps for the last time before getting free, the guard loaded their rifles, and either shot or bayoneted every man who persisted in struggling. This terrible deed had the effect desired. Sobered by the fact of men falling dead at their sides, and by the groans of comrades who were sinking severely wounded, the men who had escaped unhurt instantly became quiet, and crouched upon the ground in terror. The scene of this tragedy was appalling. The dead, the living, the dying, and the wounded were still tied together, and all were lying huddled up in one confused mass of bodies. The dead could not be told from the quick, except when some suffering wretch, sitting in a
pool of his own blood, and looking ghastly in the moonlight, groaned beseechingly for help. The uninjured men knelt and bent forward their heads, terrified to raise them up ; and they were in this position so quiet, that they appeared to be simulating death in order to escape from molestation. Therefore, as visitor after visitor came to the scene, and asked how many had been killed and how many wounded, it was impossible to give a correct answer. There lay all the bodies, tied together, but which had life in them no one could tell until some examination had taken place. The Sepoys were now busy untying the ropes, and separating the dead from the living. Each dead body was placed in the centre ; wounded men were left to sit as they were, tied to other men. It was ascertained that ten men had either been shot dead or bayoneted dead, and that twelve others had been wounded, more or less severely. Nothing could be done that night with the wounded, except rough bandaging. They were gathered together, a large tarpaulin was thrown over them to keep them some- what from the biting air, and they were left lying on the ground until the following morning. The agony of some of them, as they lay there, thinly clothed, and almost unsheltered, and with a thermometer falling below freezing-point, must have been terrible. In short, the whole affair was as horrible as unfortunate and unavoidable."
We have no wish to excite any unjust horror of the guards, who probably, in the excitement of the moment, and with strict orders not to let the prisoners escape, acted almost in- voluntarily, and we see no evidence that any British officer was present. General Roberts himself was so horrified with the whole affair, that he released all the surviving prisoners unconditionally, and forbade all further punishment of villages till he is blamed for being too lenient. But we would gravely ask the country, and especially the authorities at the India House, if they deem it well that these scenes should go on ; if they want their soldiers to acquire this temper, if they really believe that in pacifying the Highlands, it was the Duke of Cumberland who was wise, and General Wade who was foolish ? Every- telegram we receive from the Punjab points to the coming famine there, the rains having held off till hope is past ; and yet in order to punish men guilty only of harbouring our enemies—we, and not they, being the in- vaders—we burn " hundreds of tons of grain," leaving their wives and children to starve, and driving themselves to become brigands for mere subsistence. We should not dare to inflict such a sentence even upon Charles Peace. The strongest feeling of these mountaineers is their faith, yet we deliberately execute them in a way we suppose they think fatal to their souls. The next strongest is their belief in the duty of revenge, the blood-feud, the vendetta against all slayers; and we slay all we can, not in battle, but by executions, and by such horrible blunders as the one above recorded. And their next is their anxiety for their petty possessions, grain and furniture and houses ; and we send in the camp-followers, who dare not fight, to carry all away, and compel their owners to live as fighters on the hill-side. It seems to us all madness, even if it were not committed against men whose sons, and brothers, and cousins are all over India, are swarming in our own regiments, and even in this very expedition mutinied rather than desert their kinsfolk, and were hanged for the offence. The " Pathans " are everywhere throughout the huge peninsula. Such a method of making war would destroy sooner or later the discipline of any army ; how much sooner the discipline of one in which the officers, in tolerating such acts, must be suppress- ing their own consciences, and the effects of their own training in Christianity and honour. The inevitable effect must be to harden the men who tolerate such acts, until deeds may be done which will make government in these regions impossible, and rouse in England a reaction of pity before which every -other idea, policy included, will give way.
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