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By Root 2832 0

served with distinction in India's Border lands, seeing service in no less than seven Frontier campaigns, and acquiring an enviable reputation for being able to manage the turbulent tribesmen, whose various dialects he spoke with idiomatic fluency. And though as far as appearance went, the tall, bearded figure might easily have been taken for a professor rather than a man of action, those who knew him declared him to be courageous to a fault. No one had ever accused him of lack of spirit, and he combined a dynamic personality with many excellent qualities; though in common with the majority of his fellow men, these last were offset by some that were less admirable: in his case egotism and personal ambition, a quick temper and a fatal tendency to see things as he wished them to be rather than as they actually were.

Wigram Battye had only recently become aware of these failings. But then he had also had the advantage of seeing Cavagnari in action. The success of the affair at Sipri with its swift night march and surprise attack had been entirely due to the D.C.'s imaginative planning and attention to detail, and that, with several other similar incidents, had given Wigram the greatest possible respect for the man's qualities. Nevertheless, of late he had come to feel less admiring and more critical; and, it must be owned, more than a little apprehensive, for the Deputy Commissioner was a professed supporter of the ‘Forward Policy’, whose advocates considered that the only way to protect the Indian Empire from the ‘Russian menace’ was to turn Afghanistan into a British protectorate and plant the Union Jack on the far side of the Hindu Kush.

As this was also the Viceroy's view (and Lord Lytton was known to have a great regard for Major Cavagnari and to take his advice on Frontier matters in preference to that of older and more cautious men), it was not surprising that Wigram Battye should feel uneasy at hearing the D.C. declare – as he had recently heard him do at a dinner party in Peshawar – ‘If Russia gets a foothold in Afghanistan she will take over that country as she has taken over almost all the old, proud kingdoms of Central Asia; and once she has done that the road through the Khyber will be open and there will be nothing to prevent her marching her armies down to attack and take Peshawar and the Punjab, as Barbur the Tiger did three hundred years ago. I have no quarrel with the Afghan people: my quarrel is solely with their Amir, who, by intriguing with the Tsar, is playing with a fire that unless we can prevent it will destroy his own country, and from there burn its way southward until it has consumed all India…’

Cavagnari's use of the first person singular was characteristic of the man and in a different context Wigram would probably have thought nothing of it: but used in this one it dismayed him. His own interest in the dispute between the Government of India and the Amir was entirely non-political, his concern being mainly with the military consequences of a possible war with Afghanistan and the part that his own Corps would be called upon to play in it. He was, after all, a professional soldier. But he also possessed a conscience, and his fear was that the Forward Policy clique intended to embroil the Raj in a second Afghan war without any real justification for doing so – and without fully realizing the enormous difficulties that would face an invading army.

Of the two, it was the former that worried him most, for having always held the view that the Afghan war of '39 had been morally indefensible as well as totally unnecessary, it horrified him to discover that once again History seemed about to repeat itself, and in his opinion it was the plain duty of all honourable men to try to prevent it doing so; the crying need, as Wigram saw it, being for accurate and unedited information as to the true intentions of the Amir Shere Ali and his people.

If it could be proved that Shere Ali was intriguing with the Tsar and about to sign a treaty that would grant Russia military posts and a firm footing in his country,