We trust we may now look back on by far the most disastrous passage which occurs in the military history of Great Britain, as so definitively concluded, that in the future we shall be unable to trace it as still disadvantageously operative in its effects. A series of decisive victories has neutralized, to a considerable extent, the influence of the most fatal campaign in which a British army was ever engaged. But this is all. One of our poets, in placing in a strong light the extreme folly of war, describes ‘most Christian kings’ with ‘honourable ruffians in their hire,’ wasting the nations with fire and sword, and then, when fatigued with murder and sated with blood, ‘setting them down just where they were before.’ It is quite melancholy enough that our most sanguine expectations with regard to the Affghan war should be unable to rise higher by a hair’s-breadth than the satiric conception of the poet. We can barely hope, after squandering much treasure, after committing a great deal of crime, after occasioning and enduring a vast amount of wretchedness, after a whole country has been whitened with the bones of its inhabitants, after a British army has perished miserably,––we can barely hope that our later successes may have had so far the effect of effacing the memory of our earliest disasters, that we shall be enabled to sit down under their cover on the eastern bank of the Indus, ‘just where we were before.’ And even this is much in the circumstances. 200

We have seen the British in India repeat the same kind of fatal experiment which cost Napoleon his crown, and from which Charles XII. dated his downfall; and repeat it, in the first instance at least, with a result more disastrous than either the flight from Pultowa or the retreat from Moscow. And though necessarily an expedition on a similar scale, it seemed by no means improbable that its ultimate consequences might bear even more disastrously on British power in the East, than the results of the several expeditions into Russia, under Charles and Napoleon, bore on the respective destinies of Sweden and of France. That substratum of opinion in the minds of an hundred millions of Asiatics, on which British authority in India finds its main foundation, bade fair to be shivered into pieces by the shock.

There are passages in all our better histories that stand out in high relief, if we may so speak, from the groundwork on which they are based. They appeal to the imagination, they fix themselves in the memory; and after they have got far enough removed into the past to enable men to survey them in all their breadth, we find them caught up and reflected in the fictions of the poet and the novelist.

But it is wonderful how comparatively slight is the effect which most of them produce at the time of their occurrence. It would seem as if the great mass of mankind had no ability of seeing them in their real character, except through the medium of some superior mind, skilful enough to portray them in their true colours and proportions. Who, acquainted with the history of the plague in London, for instance, can fail being struck with the horrors of that awful visitation, as described in the graphic pages of Defoe? Who, that experienced the visitation of similar horrors which swept away in our own times one-tenth part of the human species, could avoid remarking that the reality was less suited 201 to impress by its actual presence, than the record by its touching pictures and its affecting appeals? The reality appealed to but the fears of men through the instinct of self-preservation, and even this languidly in some cases, leaving the imagination unimpressed; whereas the wild scenes of Defoe filled the whole mind, and impressed vividly through the influence of that sense of the poetical which, in some degree at least, all minds are capable of entertaining.

On a nearly similar principle, the country has not yet been able rightly to appreciate the disasters of Affghanistan. It has been unable to bestow upon them what we shall venture to term the historic prominence. When one after one the messengers reach Job, bearing tidings of fatal disasters, in which all his children and all his domestics have perished, the ever-recurring ‘and I only am escaped alone to tell thee,’ strikes upon the ear as one of the signs of a dispensation supernatural in its character. The narrative has already prepared us for events removed beyond the reach of those common laws which regulate ordinary occurrences. Did we find such a piece of history in any of our older chronicles, we would at once set it down, on Macaulay’s principle, as a ballad thrown out of its original verse into prose, and appropriated by the chronicler, in the lack of less questionable materials. But finding it in the Record of eternal truth, we view it differently; for there the supernatural is not dissociated from the true. How very striking, to find in the authentic annals of our own country a somewhat similar incident; to find the ‘I only am escaped alone to tell thee’ in the history of a well-equipped British army of the present day! There occurs no similar incident in all our past history. British armies have capitulated not without disgrace. In the hapless American war, Cornwallis surrendered a whole army to Washington, and Burgoyne another whole army to Gates and Arnold.

The British have had also their disastrous retreats. 202

The retreat from Fontenoy was at least precipitate; and there was much suffered in Sir John Moore’s retreat on Corunna. But such retreats have not been wholly without their share of glory, nor have such surrenders been synonymous with extermination. In the annals of British armies, the ‘I only have escaped alone to tell thee’ belongs to but the retreat from Cabul. It is a terrible passage in the history of our country––terrible in all its circumstances. Some of its earlier scenes are too revolting for the imagination to call up.

It is all too humiliating to conceive of it in the character of an unprincipled conspiracy of the civilised, horribly avenged by infuriated savages. It is a quite melancholy enough object of contemplation, in even its latter stages. A wild scene of rocks and mountains darkened overhead with tempest, beneath covered deep with snow; a broken and dispirited force, struggling hopelessly through the scarce passable defiles,––here thinned by the headlong assaults of howling fanatics, insensible to fear, incapable of remorse, and thirsting for blood,––there decoyed to destruction through the promises of cruel and treacherous chiefs, devoid alike of the sense of honour and the feeling of pity; with no capacity or conduct among its leaders; full of the frightful recollections of past massacres, hopeless of ultimate escape; struggling, however, instinctively on amid the unceasing ring of musketry from thicket and crag, exhibiting mile after mile a body less dense and extended, leaving behind it a long unbroken trail of its dead; at length wholly wasting away, like the upward heave of a wave on a sandy beach, and but one solitary horseman, wounded and faint with loss of blood, holding on his perilous course, to tell the fate of all the others. And then, the long after-season of grief and suspense among anxious and at length despairing relations at home, around many a cheerless hearth, and in many a darkened chamber, and the sadly frequent notice in 203 the obituaries of all our public journals, so significant of the disaster, and which must have rung so heavy a knell to so many affectionate hearts, ‘Killed in the Khyber Pass.’ To find passages of parallel calamity in the history of at least civilised countries, we have to ascend to the times of the Roman empire during its period of decline and disaster, when one warlike emperor, in battle with the Goth,

or when another not less warlike monarch was hopelessly overthrown by the Persian, and died a miserable slave, exposed to every indignity which the invention of his ungenerous and barbarous conqueror could suggest.

Britain in this event has received a terrible lesson, which we trust her scarce merited and surely most revolting successes in China will not have the effect of wholly neutralizing. The Affghan war, regarded as a war of principle, was eminently unjust; regarded as a war of expediency, it was eminently imprudent. It seems to have originated with men of narrow and defective genius, not over largely gifted with the moral sense. We have had to refer on a former occasion to the policy adopted by Lord Auckland respecting the educational grants to Hindustan. An enlightened predecessor of his Lordship had decided that the assistance and patronage of the British Government should be extended to the exclusive promotion of European literature and science among the natives of India. His Lordship, in the exercise of a miserable liberalism, reversed the resolution, and diverted no inconsiderable portion of the Government patronage to the support of the old Hindustanee education,––a system puerile in its literature, contemptible in its science, and false in its religion. Our readers cannot have forgotten the indignant style of Dr. 204 Duff’s remonstrance. The enlightened and zealous missionary boldly and indignantly characterized the minute of his Lordship, through which this revolution was effected, as ‘remarkable chiefly for its omissions and commissions, for its concessions and compromises, for its education without religion, its plans without a Providence, and its ethics without a God.’ Such was the liberalism of Lord Auckland; and of at least one of the leading men whose counsel led to the Affghan expedition, and who perished in it, the liberalism, it is said, was of a still more marked and offensive character. What do we infer from the fact?

Not that Providence interfered to avenge upon them the sin of their policy: there would be presumption in the inference. But it may not be unsafe to infer, from the palpable folly of the Affghan expedition, that the liberalism in which Lord Auckland and some one or two of his friends indulged is a liberalism which weak and incompetent men are best fitted to entertain. His scheme of education and his Affghanistan expedition are specimens of mental production, if we may so speak, that give evidence of exactly the same cast and tendency regarding the order and scope of the genius which originated them. We have been a good deal struck by the shrewdness of one of Prince Eugene of Savoy’s remarks, that seems to bear very decidedly on this case. Two generals of his acquaintance had failed miserably in the conduct of some expedition that demanded capacity and skill, and yet both of them were unquestionably smart, clever men. ‘I always thought it would turn out so,’ said the Prince. ‘Both these men made open profession of infidelity; and I formed so low an opinion of their taste and judgment in consequence, that I made myself sure they would sooner or later run their heads into some egregious folly.’

It is satisfactory in every point of view that Britain should be at peace with China and the Affghans. War is an evil 205 in all circumstances. It is a great evil even when just; it is a great evil even when carried on against a people who know and respect the laws of nations. But it is peculiarly an evil when palpably not a just war, and when carried on against a barbarous people. It has been stated in private letters, though not officially, that a soldier of the 44th was burned alive by the Ghilzies in sight of the English troops, and that on the approach of the latter the throat of the tortured victim was cut to ensure his destruction. And it is the inference of an Indian newspaper from the fact, that such wretches are not the devoted patriots that they have been described by some, and that the war with them cannot, after all, be very unjust. We are inclined to argue somewhat differently. We believe the Scotch under Wallace were not at all devoid of patriotism, though they were barbarous enough to flay Cressingham, and to burn the English alive at Ayr. We believe further, that an unjust war is rendered none the less unjust from the circumstance of its being waged with a savage and cruel people. The barbarism of the enemy has but the effect of heightening its horrors, not of modifying its injustice. It is possible for one civilised man to fight with another, and yet retain his proper character as a man notwithstanding. But the civilised man who fights with a wild beast must assume, during the combat, the character of the wild beast. He cannot afford being generous and merciful; his antagonist understands neither generosity nor mercy. The war is of necessity a war of extermination. And such is always the character of a war between wild and civilised men. It takes its tone, not from the civilisation of the one, but from the cruel savageism of the other.

December 3, 1842.