Death on a Pale Horse

3





I need not dwell on that infamous encounter of two armies, except in so far as it affected my own future. Sufficient to say that after the death of the latest Amir of Afghanistan, his son Ayub Khan rose up against his brother, the lawful successor. His first target was the old capital, Kandahar, where our regiment had been cooling its heels. Ayub was still forty miles off, but with a growing army and a detachment of artillery. He far outnumbered us. Our own “loyal” Afghan troops were deserting to him by battalions at a time. Even so, in July we were part of a brigade ten thousand strong under Brigadier George Burrows, ordered forward to cut off our enemy’s advance. And so I came to the Helmand, the desert and scrub that lie west of Kandahar.

Two mornings later, we woke to find that our remaining Afghans had deserted, down to the last man. Our flank on the Helmand River was open to attack. General Burrows must confront Ayub that morning, before matters grew worse. So our column turned towards Maiwand, eleven miles off, rough hills on one side and the Registan desert on the other.

There were no fortifications at this site. We should have to fight in the open wherever the two sides met. And so it was. The battle lasted from just after eleven o’clock in the morning, when the artillery on both sides opened fire, until about three o’clock in the afternoon. By then, Ayub’s followers had increased to some 25,000 men, against our 10,000, and his reserves were easily able to outflank us.

General Burrows had got us into this fix, but the folly of the British Army in the east was to rely on mercenaries. Three quarters of our infantry that day were still Afghan or Indian troops. They had no taste for fighting their own people. Turning tail almost at once, they caused fearful disorder as they fell back through the ranks of the British infantry.

On every horizon, Ayub Khan’s banners flew above dark masses of his riflemen. He had lured us into terrain where there was little cover from enemy fire except among the desert thorn-bushes. The 66th Foot took shelter as best it could along the river water-courses, which were bone-dry in the summer heat. The Grenadiers crouched or lay in the open.

In my own case, our regimental field hospital was under canvas and sheltered in a shallow ravine. Two medical orderlies were my only assistants. There were so many casualties in the first hour that the best I could do in most cases was to apply temporary dressings, leaving surgery to be carried out when the firing stopped.

My own wound came towards the end of the conflict. The last time I had looked at my watch, it was half-past two. I had been on my feet for more than three hours. By this time, the jezailchees had outflanked our position. No part of the camp was now beyond the range of their rifles. Half a dozen times, a bullet entered our tent with a zippp! as it punctured the canvas. I had been advised not to flinch from this sound. At such speed, the bullet that you hear is never the one that hits you.

I was stooping over poor Major Vandeleur of the 7th Fusiliers, whose chest wound extended into his lung. Before I could do more for him, I felt as if someone had punched me hard enough in the back of the right shoulder to knock me off balance. I was about to twist round and give the offender a piece of my mind when I saw splashes of blood on my overall and collecting on the ground. What I had felt was a bullet that pierced the green canvas of the tent, smashed my shoulder bone, and grazed the sub-clavial artery.

With my right arm done for, all hope of treating my patients was gone. There were three casualties in the dressing station at the time. Two were walking wounded, and the major was stretched before me. I made arrangements for one stretcher and two pairs of sticks. Then I allowed the orderly to dress my own wound as well as time allowed. To my great sorrow, Vandeleur died of his wounds soon afterwards.

My memory of what followed is intermittent, thanks to the administration of morphine to dull the grating of fractured bone. Without the use of it, the jolting progress of forty miles to Kandahar would have been too excruciating to bear. A bugle call sounded. I recognised it as a command for the baggage train to withdraw from the field of battle while the infantry remained to cover a general retreat. In my growing confusion, I felt two bearers pick up my stretcher and begin to run with it. They were shouting that the “ghazis” were upon us. Less fortunate invalids lay about on the ground, abandoned to the hands of our murderous enemy.

Armies in retreat are seldom disciplined or resolute. In the emergency of this evacuation, supplies and equipment were abandoned everywhere. The baggage animals were being unloaded and pressed into service to carry the injured. The ground was littered with their abandoned stores, unopened boxes of ammunition, mess supplies, cases of wine, kitchen utensils, and linen sheets. I saw wounded soldiers in rags and bandages sitting astride donkeys, mules, ponies, and in one case a camel. Ammunition wagons had become makeshift ambulances. A party of officers’ servants was drunk from stolen liquor. Yet there was valour among all this. On the escarpments, the Grenadiers and the riflemen covered our retreat, sometimes forming squares and fighting to the end with their bayonets. They paid with their lives for a shilling a day.

In the camp, it seemed to be every man for himself. I should have been left to my fate had it not been for Murray, my orderly. A pack horse had just been unloaded for use as a mount. This dear brave fellow heaved me across it. Then, with my revolver in his hand to deter looters or marauders, he led me through the confusion and joined the long, miserable column of refugees to Kandahar.

I shall not soon forget the vicissitudes of that night. Stories of prisoners in the bloody hands of Ayub Khan sufficed to keep us moving. My friend Lieutenant Maclaine of the Royal Horse Artillery was less fortunate. His remains were found close to the site of Ayub’s tent, where he had been butchered as the so-called Amir looked on.

We covered the remaining miles and arrived at Kandahar in safety during the evening of the next day. Fortunately, Ayub’s men had been dazzled and delayed by the abandoned treasures of our camp. Had our enemies put their minds to it, all of us in the retreat would have been dead.

For more than a month, the white walls of Kandahar were surrounded by Ayub’s men and it was impossible to evacuate the wounded to the Indian frontier. There was a curious lack of morale among our leaders, who acted as if our present position was lost. We might indeed have been overrun, but for Lord Roberts, winner of the Victoria Cross at Lucknow. Major-General Roberts, as he still was, formed up a column of ten thousand men, plus artillery. This column marched 313 miles in three weeks, over hostile terrain, to save us. Lord Roberts routed Ayub Khan in short order, secured the high passes, and opened the route to India.

So I took my place in an ambulance convoy which made its way south through the pass and at last to Peshawar. I really believed I was doing well at the base hospital, walking about the wards and reclining on the invalids’ veranda. I should be back with my regiment before the year was out. Yet my weakness from a bullet wound put a stop to all that.

I fell prey to enteric fever, which accounts for more British lives than all the jezail bullets. It came closer to killing me than the Afghans had ever done. No one who has endured this illness and survived will need to be reminded of the ordeal. My temperature rose to 107 and I was delirious. At that point, most of the fever victims die. The lucky patient’s temperature, on the other hand, drops a degree or so, and then a slow recovery begins. My temperature remained stubbornly where it was for several days, and I lived a half-life of sleeping and waking.

I have indistinct memories of being scalded in hot baths, my limbs being rubbed as the water cooled. I was taken out only to be lowered into another bath of heat that scorched the skin. Then the process was repeated. Peritonitis was spoken of, though not in my hearing, and death within twenty-four hours.

I came through the crisis without explanation but at a heavy cost. For a month, I was weak as a rabbit. I could scarcely stand, let alone walk. Every medical officer who examined me hinted that my days of soldiering were certainly done. In the end, my case was put to me bluntly. I should not recover as long as I remained in India. Indeed, there was a strong possibility of a recurrence in such a climate and, without doubt, it would carry me off.

A medical board of three officers came to examine me. One of them kindly suggested that if I went home, perhaps in time I might recover sufficiently to soldier in England. The looks of the other two said not if they knew it. It was agreed that I should be sent home and kept on the Army List for another nine months in England to see how I did. I was certain that they would then discharge me.

So I was invalided in uniform to Bombay, and my passage on the troopship Orontes was arranged. During the long sea-miles, I reflected how different this was from my mood of expectancy on the voyage out. There was precious little to look forward to. If only I had heard of Sherlock Holmes and guessed the adventures that might lie ahead!

During those months of convalescence in the hospital at Peshawar, I had been given ample time to think of all that had happened since I left Portsmouth with the cheers of the crowd in my ears. I was at first too weak to do much more than lie in the warmth of the blankets, sometimes dozing and sometimes half-awake. I had grown up at a time when children and their teachers still lived in the long glory of Waterloo. The British Army had proved invincible, and the Empire which it garrisoned now stretched across the globe. Yet as I lay in that hospital bed, my own misfortune was small compared to the calamities of empire at that time. In restless days and long nights, I had ample time to go over and over the extraordinary sequence of reverses which had overtaken our troops in Africa and Asia in the months since I left England.

Between the hot compresses and sips of water that the orderlies administered, the spoonfuls of kaolin and opium mixture, I continued to dream and think.

Soon after the terrible news of Isandhlwana there was a further tragedy. I read in the press how the Prince Imperial, claimant to the throne of France, had been entrusted to Lord Chelmsford on a visit to South Africa, only to be cut to pieces on patrol in Zululand. That was not all. To be sure, I had escaped with my life at Maiwand. Yet the British envoy and all his staff had been assassinated at the Afghan capital of Kabul. Even at Kandahar, we had had every prospect of sharing their fate, cut off and surrounded by the brigands of Ayub Khan. But for the energy and audacity of General Roberts in his dash for the city, that is just what would have happened. Lying there immobilised in my hospital bed, my throat would have been slit along with the rest.

When I had first been ordered to Afghanistan, I imagined my comrades and myself riding confidently as benevolent imperial rulers over this ill-favoured territory. There would be respect for us and our empire. In the case of a doctor, there would be particular gratitude. I did not envisage my hurried and undignified exit from military glory, slung over a pack horse by my orderly, my shoulder smashed and bleeding, the knives of the pursuing jezailchees glinting not far behind us.

I was not the only one who thought of such setbacks with incredulity. I read a report from a Court correspondent on how the news of Isandhlwana had reached Queen Victoria at Osborne, during breakfast on 11 February 1879. “How this could happen we cannot imagine,” the poor old lady wrote, describing this “great and unnatural disaster” in her journal. Among the list of the slain were several officers who had been her guests at court. More tragic still was the assassination of the Prince Imperial and the Queen’s terrible task of consoling his distraught mother, the widowed Empress Eugenie of France.

And Afghanistan? Without Lord Roberts of Kandahar, we would easily have lost our only base there. Indeed, part of India itself, including the city where I now lay, would have followed. As the Queen said of these events, “The more one thinks about it, the worse it gets.”

There was even more to come in southern Africa. The army that had won glory at Waterloo and Sebastopol met defeat in war against the Dutch settlers. At the treaty table, we surrendered to the Boers our Transvaal with all its mineral wealth of gold and diamonds. It seemed to be the last in a series of terrible coincidences. What of our African colonies now? Indeed, what of India itself?

If only I had met Sherlock Holmes at that moment! In such matters, he was not a believer in coincidences. Reason was everything to him, causes and effects. The fine steel point of his logic probed behind the excuses of coincidence and chance until it found such causes—and, behind the causes, the perpetrators.