' A remarkable illustration of 'defensive policy' to
take the offensive against a remote country from whose further confines
had faded away foiled aggression, leaving behind nothing but a bitter
consciousness of broken promises! As for the other plea, the tripartite
treaty contained no covenant that we should send a corporal's guard
across our frontier. If Shah Soojah had a powerful following in
Afghanistan, he could regain his throne without our assistance; if he had
no holding there, it was for us a truly discreditable enterprise to foist
him on a recalcitrant people at the point of the bayonet.
One result of the tidings from Herat was to reduce by a division the
strength of the expeditionary force. Fane, who had never taken kindly to
the project, declined to associate himself with the diminished array that
remained. The command of the Bengal column fell to Sir Willoughby Cotton,
with whom as his aide-de-camp rode that Henry Havelock whose name twenty
years later was to ring through India and England. Duncan's division was
to stand fast at Ferozepore as a support, by which disposition the
strength of the Bengal marching force was cut down to about 9500 fighting
men. After its junction with the Bombay column, the army would be 14,500
strong, without reckoning the Shah's contingent. There was an interlude
at Ferozepore of reviews and high jinks with the shrewd, debauched old
Runjeet Singh; of which proceedings Havelock in his narrative of the
expedition gives a detailed account, dwelling with extreme disapprobation
on Runjeet's addiction to a 'pet tipple' strong enough to lay out the
hardest drinker in the British camp, but which the old reprobate quaffed
freely without turning a hair.
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