The road to Ambeyla began with a summons sent out in the late summer of 1863 by the Hindustanis’ amir Abdullah Ali, calling on all the chiefs of the surrounding tribes to ‘quit the friendship of the unbelieving and join the would-be martyrs of the Faith’. One of these letters was received by the Khan of Amb, who promptly forwarded it to Reynell Taylor, Herbert Edwardes’ successor as commissioner in Peshawar. For some months the Hindustanis at Malka had been showing signs of renewed activity in the form of minor cross-border raids and the kidnapping of Hindus. Taylor consulted with Colonel Alfred Wilde, who had taken over the command of the Corps of Guides at Hoti Mardan from the legendary Harry Lumsden. Both agreed that action should be taken ‘to effectually rid the frontier of the chronic cause of disturbance – the Hindustani fanatics’. For the future peace of the frontier, ‘the destruction of this colony of priests and fanatics was a necessity… They must be removed by death or capture from the hills, and a treaty made with the hill tribes not to allow them to reside in their territories.’
Colonel Wilde took the view that Brigadier Cotton had failed to destroy the Hindustanis back in 1858 because the survivors had been able to escape north. Wilde proposed using the same tactics of surprise but this time encircling the Mahabun Mountain, ‘the military object being to attack the Hindustanis from the north, forcing them to fight with their backs to the plains.’ Once their escape route had been closed, the Wahhabis and their Sayyed allies could be driven down to the Indus and the plains. The only means of achieving this encirclement was by way of the Ambeyla Pass.
The Ambeyla Pass lay just over twenty miles to the north-east of the Corps of Guides Headquarters at Hoti Mardan on the Yusufzai plain (see Map 2, ‘The Peshawur Valley’). The defile leading up to the pass provided a natural gateway into the Buner country and a back door to the Mahabun Mountain range, opening up beyond the pass on to the plain of the Chamla valley, some twelve miles long and four wide. ‘The only entrance to the Chumla Valley is from Eusofzye,’ explained Colonel John Adye, a senior staff officer with the Royal Artillery, in his first-hand account of the Ambeyla campaign, ‘by a narrow gorge a few miles in length called the Umbeyla Pass, being, in fact, the rocky bed of a little stream, passing round the western side of the Mahabun.’
The only drawback to this plan was that it meant intruding on the territory of the Buner tribes, the Bunerwals, whose lands extended along the northern side of the Ambeyla Pass, and the less numerous Chamlawals, who occupied its southern slopes and the western end of the Chamla valley. Little was known about these two tribes by the civil authorities in Peshawar, but they were believed to be rather more peaceful than their fellow Yusufzais in Mahabun. The Bunerwals, in particular, were followers of the Akhund of Swat, Abdul Ghaffur, now in his seventieth year, who exercised a moderating influence over the Swatis and Bunerwals and had always opposed the extreme views promulgated by the Hindustani Fanatics. ‘The Bonair [Buner] people had no sympathy as a body with the Fanatics,’ was John Adye’s view, ‘being of different tenets, and forming part of the religious constituency of the Akhoond of Swat, who was known to be bitterly opposed at that time to the Fanatic body, the members of whom he denounced as Wahabees [and] whom his followers had not scrupled to stigmatise as Kaffirs.’
To Reynell Taylor, too, it seemed that ‘nothing at that time was, to all appearance, so little probable as a coalition between the Akhoond of Swat and his adherents and the Hindostanees’. He therefore concluded that the proposed expedition could safely intrude on Buner and Chamla territory – so long as it was made quite clear to the tribesmen what the Government’s objective was, and provided this was coupled with an undertaking that the troops would be withdrawn as soon as that objective had been accomplished. Taylor passed Wilde’s plan on to Sir Robert Montgomery, the Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab, who radically altered it by insisting that the numbers of troops involved should be doubled. The last word rested with the Viceroy, but Lord Elgin was too ill with his heart condition to play any part, so it was left to his commander-in-chief, Sir Hugh Rose, to express serious doubts about the wisdom of sending what was now a large force into unknown country without proper transport or reserves of supplies, and with winter approaching. He recommended that the expedition should be postponed till the spring.
It was precisely at this juncture that details of a remarkable supply chain linking the Hindustani camp with the plains were received by Montgomery in Lahore.
Five months earlier an unusually sharp Pathan daffadar or sergeant of mounted police named GHAZAN KHAN had been on duty on the Grand Trunk Road at Panipat north of Delhi when he observed four travellers whose unusually dark skins and small stature made them stand out. When questioned, they revealed that they were Bengalis returning to their homeland from the frontier. Puzzled by their answers, he went out of his way to appear friendly, and eventually discovered that they were Wahhabis, and part of a supply chain smuggling men and guns up to the frontier. He promptly arrested them, whereupon the Wahhabis appealed to him as a brother Muslim to let them go, saying that a petition-writer named MUHAMMAD JAFAR from the nearby town of Thanesar would gladly pay whatever he demanded. Daffadar Ghazan Khan remained resolute, and next morning took his four prisoners before the local magistrate of Karnal – who dismissed the case, accusing his subordinate of bringing charges against the travellers in an attempt to extort money from them.
So outraged was the daffadar by this slur on his character that he decided to prove his case, and enlisted the support of his son. Where exactly this son lived is not recorded, but the assumption is that it was in Ghazan Khan’s home village in Pathan territory. He now received a letter from his father asking him to collect evidence about the Hindustanis at Malka; in particular, how they received their supplies of men and guns. The son immediately set out on this strange quest, making his way into the mountains and presenting himself to the Wahhabis at Malka as an eager jihadi. Some months later he returned to his father in Panipat with the desired information.
Daffadar Ghazan Khan at once took his son to the magistrate and triumphantly presented his evidence: details of the supply chain by which the Wahhabi chota godown at Patna ferried men, money and guns across northern India to the burra godown at Sittana. Included in this evidence was the statement that ‘Munshi Ja’far of Thaneswar, whom the men call Khalifa, was the great man who passed up the Bengalis and their carbines and rifles.’ The British authorities at Karnal were now forced to act, which they did by seeking the advice of the recently appointed Commissioner of Amballa (not to be confused with Ambeyla) who, by a stroke of luck, happened to be Herbert Edwardes, the former Commissioner of Peshawar. Edwardes at once informed his old friend Reynell Taylor in Peshawar – who in turn informed Sir Robert Montgomery. Fearing that the unrest the Hindustanis were provoking would spread if left unchecked, Sir Robert chose to ignore Sir Hugh Rose’s advice and to order the launch of the now greatly enlarged expedition without further delay.
Command of the force was given to Brigadier Neville Chamberlain, another of that band of paladins who had made up the first wave of Henry Lawrence’s political officers. His appointment was received with enthusiasm by the troops earmarked for the expedition, for Chamberlain’s standing in the Indian Army was second to none. He was said to bear more wounds on his body than any serving officer in India, and his gallantry at the taking of Delhi in 1857, when he had returned to the battlefield on a stretcher to rally the troops, was still talked of as a turning point in the Mutiny. Chamberlain was only forty-three, but like his old friends and former comrades in arms Herbert Edwardes and Reynell Taylor he was worn down by years of hard service and by the malaria endemic on the Punjab frontier. Although he accepted the command, he did so without enthusiasm. ‘If duty requires the sacrifice I cannot repine,’ he wrote to his brother, ‘but… I have no wish for active service.’