The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [526]
‘It was learned afterwards, so my cousin told me,’ said Zarin, ‘that the enemy's strength had been greatly increased by the arrival of four regiments and six guns from Kabul, so that they numbered close on five thousand men with seventeen guns. Moreover they fought, he said, with great valour and fury, repulsing us again and again and inflicting such heavy losses that it took our army close on two days to capture the Peiwar Kotal. Wherefore the victory when it came proved a most costly one, both in blood and the materials of war.’
Even making allowances for the boastful talk he had heard in Kabul and Charikar, Ash had suspected that all was not going too well for the forces of the Raj; and most of what Zarin told him confirmed this. The victorious advance upon Kabul appeared to have ground to a halt for lack of transport, while the troops encamped in Jalalabad and the Kurram were suffering from sicknesses brought on by the severe cold – the hardest hit being the British regiments and those from down-country, who were unaccustomed to such freezing temperatures. There was also a chronic shortage of pack-animals, and so little fodder in the Khyber that for weeks past the chief Commissariat Officer had been complaining that unless he could send his camels back to the plains for a fortnight's grazing, he would need new ones in the spring to replace the thousands that would be dead, and whose rotting carcasses were bound to breed a pestilence.
Similar complaints, said Zarin, had come from the Kurram front; and also from Kandahar, where that part of General Stewart's army that had occupied Khelat-i-Ghilzai had been forced to fall back and were now encamped. The other part, which had been advancing on Herat, had been brought to a stop on the Helmand – as had General Sam Browne in Jalalabad. Zarin had been told by the men of a new draft that had arrived a few days ago that at Dadar, Jacobabad and Quetta there was the same crippling lack of transport, and that the desert and the passes were strewn with dead camels and abandoned stores…
‘Were I a superstitious man,’ said Zarin, ‘which, by the mercy of the All-Merciful, I am not, I would say that this year is an ill-omened one, and that we have entered it under an evil star, not only here in Afghanistan, but eastward also. For there is news that throughout Oudh and the Punjab and the North-West Provinces the winter rains have again failed, and thousands are dying of famine. Had you heard this?’
Ash shook his head and said that he had not; but that what he did know was that here in Afghanistan the entire population were confident of victory, and that Shere Ali had issued a Royal Firman in which he spoke of the defeats and casualties suffered by the invaders and the victories gained by his own ‘lion-devouring warriors’, who in fighting the armies of the Raj displayed such bravery that of those who died, not one of them went to Paradise until he had slain at least three of the enemy. Both sides always spoke like that in time of war: it was only to be expected. Yet because of the nature of the country and the lack of communication between tribes – and because they had not yet suffered a major defeat – there was no Afghan who was not convinced that their forces could easily prevent an advance on Kabul…
‘They must know well that we have captured Ali Masjid and the Peiwar Kotal,’ put in Zarin grimly.
‘True. But the men who fought against us there have given such a one-sided account of the fighting, boasting of the losses they inflicted upon us and minimizing their own, that it is not surprising that those who hear their talk still look for another Afghan victory such as their fathers won close on fifty years ago, when they destroyed an entire British Army in the space of a few days. They have