nadir shah and the afghans, 1732–47of 9,500 troops of the Bengal and Bombay army and 7,000 mostly Indian
levies recruited by Shah Shuja‘. Meanwhile in Peshawar, Wade, who had
been promoted to the local rank of Lieutenant Colonel, commanded some
eight hundred British troops and a motley assemblage of Sikhs, Afghans
and mercenaries. On paper the invasion force was formidable, but there
was dissent within the chain of command and it lacked appropriate military
experience and training for the Afghan campaign. Wade was so disgruntled
by the minor role he had been given that he had even tendered his resig
nation, only for Auckland to reject it. The three most senior commanders
- Fane, Keane and Elphinstone – were in their late fifties or early sixties,
long past their military prime, and all were in ill health. Fane, commander
inchief of the India Army, was so sick that he was about to return to
England, but since his replacement had not arrived he was ordered to
cancel his plans. Many of the most senior officers had little or no campaign
experience in India and for some their last military engagement had been
during the Napoleonic Wars, more than two decades earlier (see Table 8).
Disputes over areas of responsibility and personal animosities were
rife. Military commanders complained that the political officers interfered
with their decisionmaking, while political officers accused their military
counterparts of exceeding their orders, acting against government policy
and even incompetence and cowardice. The more junior Indian officers
had fought in India and Burma, but when they tried to advise their senior
commanders on strategy their advice was more often than not ignored.
This dysfunctional command structure was exacerbated by the rigid
English class system. The officers of the Queen’s regiment, which were
composed solely of British troops, were all aristocrats while the officers of
Indian regiments were mostly members of the middle or artisan classes
who had been educated privately or in grammar school rather than the
great English public schools. The Indian army officers had won their cadet
ships by dint of hard study and had worked their way up through the ranks,
rather than securing commissions by virtue of an accident of birth. The
Queen’s officers regarded their Indian army counterparts as inferior and
some even refused to obey their orders, even when they were outranked.
Shah Shuja‘, not to be outdone, treated his subordinates ‘like a pack of
dogs’ and insisted on arcane court protocols that offended many British
officers. 65 Such were the men entrusted with the occupation of a kingdom
whose tribes had one of the most fearsome martial reputations in the
subcontinent and who were masters of mountain warfare.
The Southern Field Force was a slowmoving juggernaut encumbered
by an entourage of some 30,000 camp followers and a vast baggage train.