The heat, the disease, the weariness of fighting on the “cursed soil” of a foreign land: the challenges to the troops in Afghanistan are nothing new. British squaddies had the same complaints 130 years ago, and some voiced their anger in verse:
The Afghan hills resound no more
To trumpet blast or battle’s road;
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Backward the red hot march it lies,
Where many a brave heart pines and dies
A leaflet with a poem denouncing The Death March of the British from Afghanistan, AD 1879 has surfaced at Argyll Etkin, a London manuscript dealer, and it details the horrors of the barren landscape, the everyday fear of ambush, the grim spectre of cholera and the longing for home.
The author, a Sergeant J. Hoolihan of the 1-5th Fusiliers, is no Wilfred Owen. His 23 verses of doggerel are as jerky as the campaign which was led by General Sir Frederick Roberts, VC, against Afghan insurgents during the Second Afghan War.
Few of the troops, drawn from regiments in India and including a large number of Irishmen, had much idea of the confused strategy. But they were deeply distrustful of what they saw as a wily and vengeful foe who only 37 years earlier had inflicted one of the most catastrophic defeats ever suffered by the British military — when of the 16,500 troops and camp followers retreating from Kabul in 1842 all but one surviving doctor were massacred.
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Hoolihan speaks of the “glorious stand of thirty-nine”, referring to the start of the First Afghan War, when the British captured Kandahar. He refers to the Treaty of Gandamak, in May 1879, which briefly installed the pro-British Yaqub Khan as Emir and set up a British embassy in Kabul. And passing through Jelallabad, he recalls its earlier bloody history when Sir Robert Sale, trapped and besieged, led the British resistance in 1841 — “Ghilzai hordes and Cabul’s crew/Could ne’er his gallant band subdue”.
Like many foreign armies in Afghanistan, Hoolihan seems to have been misled by false hopes. Only four months after the Treaty of Gandamak, the Emir was deposed, the British Resident in Kabul was murdered, troops were sent back to reoccupy the city and two more years of debilitating warfare followed. The parallels with the turbulent politics of Afghanistan today are striking.
Hoolihan saw enough to sicken him: “A Soldier lies through the weary night/ Waging with cholera a grim death-fight,/ Comrades endeavour to soothe his pain,/ But all their efforts are in vain,” he wrote. He adds, dramatically: “Cease comrades cease, my race is run,/ Jack will never see another sun,/ My children orphans in a foreign land,/ While their father lies ’neath the Afghan sand.”
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Bodies were not brought back for burial in England 130 years ago.
The heat and the cold ravaged the march. “Onward we press unto Peshawur [now in Pakistan],/ Where chill ague carries all before.” There, at last, they find “Fair British faces come to welcome and view/ The marching ranks of the bold and true”. British cheers, he writes, “ring from the ranks”.
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Who Hoolihan was and where he came from remain unknown. It is not clear whether he joined in the later fighting — probably not, as he concludes with joy: “Now off to Albion the land of the free,/ Lo! I greet you fair isle of the sea./ Strange lands I wish to see no more,/ But calmly rest on my native shore.”
He probably published the poem privately, as it is printed in Lahore. It is hardly conceivable that the British high command would have authorised anything so filled with weary cynicism on the campaign.
The campaign he described was the centrepiece of the famous “Great Game”, the long struggle between the British and Russian empires for control of Afghanistan. The Russians were backing rival claimants to the Afghan throne, and made various alliances with local chieftains to try to tilt the balance against the British.
Hoolihan said that the treaty of Gandamak “did the Russian puzzle,/ The wily Afghan it did muzzle.” Again, he did not see the whole picture. The Russians had built a railway to the edge of their newly won Central Asian empire, and were poised to take full advantage of the British defeats in Afghanistan — cartoons predicted that the British would be “booted out”. But they never succeeded in the 19th century in subduing the country, nor did Soviet forces succeed a century later. Little changes in Afghanistan — as successive invaders have found.