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By Root 2781 0

Hussars on the eve of the Battle of Fatehabad; it is called ‘Ford o' Kabul River’, and has a most haunting tune. Wigram Battye's sowars did refuse to allow the stretcher-bearers to take his body back to Jalalabad, but insisted on carrying it themselves on a bier formed from cavalry lances; and when the British army pulled out of Afghanistan after the signing of the Treaty of Gandamak, his coffin was exhumed and sent by raft to India through unknown territory, where it was ambushed by tribesmen who killed several of the escort. He lies buried in the Old Cemetery at Mardan, and alongside him is the grave of his brother Fred, killed sixteen years later leading the Guides Infantry into battle during the Chitral Relief Expedition.

As for the defence of the Kabul Residency, very little is known about it, and that little is mostly based on hearsay – the evidence of those messengers who were sent to beg help from the Amir (only one of whom, the Shahzada Taimus, was actually involved in the fighting), together with a sepoy who was in the city buying flour when the attack came, and the three sowars who were out with the grass-cutters. No one else survived. The defenders of the Residency died to the last man, as is described in Henry Newbolt's poem ‘The Guides at Kabul’. All other accounts of the siege were collected over a month later from Afghans, few of whom would admit to being eyewitnesses, but who described what friends or acquaintances had, so they said, told them. For this reason I have had to make up my own mind about what really happened and fight the battle according to my own ideas – helped by the fact that the collected accounts tally to a certain extent; at least as to the order in which the various events took place.

There is a story that Walter's body was found next morning laid out on one of the guns that he tried to capture, and I have made use of it. There were also less pleasant stories, but as none of the bodies was ever found, no one knows what was done to them; except that Cavagnari's must have been burned in the Residency.

Ash's host in Kabul, the Sirdar, was a real person, and his conversations with the Envoy are on record; but as Zarin and Awal Shah are fictional characters I could not include either in the Escort, because the name of every Guide who accompanied the Envoy to Kabul is known, and the names of those who died there are engraved on the Cavagnari Arch at Mardan, where they can be seen to this day.

Finally, I would like to add that many British women and children were saved from massacre and given refuge by kindly Indians at the time of the Mutiny; and for years afterwards stories would crop up about a child rescued in this manner being brought up to think that it was a native of the country. Perhaps the best known of these tales is the one about the youngest daughter of General Wheeler of Cawnpore, who was supposed to have been discovered in the Zenana of a man who had either saved or abducted her, and when found showed no desire at all to be rescued! There are several versions of this tale, and probably none are true: but there is no reason to suppose that one or two children, orphaned during the Mutiny, did not grow up, and end their days believing that they were Indian by blood. And the story of the sepoy who accepted a drink from a little goatherd, which is also true, will be well known to many ex-Indian Army officers who were given their tale to translate either into or out of the vernacular by their munshis for their language exams.

GLOSSARY

Achkan tight-fitting three-quarter-length coat

‘Afsos!’ ‘Sorrow!’; ‘How sad!’

Angrezi English; Englishman

Angrezi-log English people

Ayah child's nurse

Baba baby; young child

Baba-log children

Badshahi royal

Bai brother

Barat friends of the bridegroom

Begum Mohammedan lady

Belait England

Beshak without doubt

Beta son

‘Be-wakufi!’ ‘Stupidity’; ‘Nonsense!’

Bheesti water-carrier

Bhoosa straw

Bibi-gurh women's house

Bourka one-piece head-to-heels cloak, with small square of coarse net to see through

Boxwallah European trader

Budmarsh