A QUARREL WITH PERSIA

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32715, 18 September 1971, Page 10

A QUARREL WITH PERSIA

John Company's Last War. By Barbara English. Collins. 256 pp. Bibliography, notes and index.

The Anglo-Persian War of 1856-57, fought over what “The Times” called “a Persian courtier’s runaway mistress or wife,” was quickly overshadowed by the Indian Mutiny which began a few months later. That the British won the quarrel with Persia was due less to the competence of the Indian Army and its British officers than to the sheer incompetence of the Persians. At Khoosh-ab, in the Persian Gulf, where ■ one of the few important skirmishes of the war was fought, a Persian cavalry commander described later how one isolated trooper of the Bengal Lancers had charged 800 Persians alone “and, of course, we all ran away.” Barbara English has provided her account of the war with elaborate footnotes, a bibliography, maps and photographs; but the incidents she describes are of little interest in themselves, except for the picture they convey of the sad confusion in the Honourable East India Company and its armed forces in its last year of power. For as her title suggests, this was to be “John Company’s last war;” after the Mutiny, India became an Empire ruled by Queen Victoria, an affair of State, rather than of commerce.

Readers concerned with the conduct of much more recent wars will, however, find a section on the British Parliament’s reaction to the war of more

than passing interest. Lord Palmerston’s policy of war with Persia for obscure and unsatisfactory reasons was attacked by the Opposition who demanded to know who had given authority for a declaration of war. But in spite of anti-war demonstrations in Bradford and Newcastle the Government avoided debate by the simple expedient of not calling Parliament together between July, 1856, and February, 1857. By the time relevant papers on the war were available to M.P.s, the war was over. There is a contemporary ring about the lament of one Opposition member who told the House: _ "War Is declared, and of that war the House of Commons knows nothing War has been carried on, and of the mode of its prosecution we are in total ignorance. We are told that negotiations are now In progress. Of their nature this House knows nothing... If we put in a question before hostilities take place, we are told that we are too soon; it while they are in progress, we are told that we are inter-meddling; and if after they have come to a termination, we are told that we are too late." There was no Daniel Ellsbergclose to the centre of Government in Britain a little over a century ago.