Private Journal of Henry Francis Brooke / Late Brigadier-General Commanding 2nd Infantry Brigade, Kandahar Field Force, Southern Afghanistan, from April 22nd to August 16th, 1880

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FOR PRIVATE CIRCULATION ONLY.
For ................................................
From ...............................................
DUBLIN: PRINTED BY WILLIAM CURWEN, 3, NASSAU STREET.
1881.
The following Journal or Diary was written by my dear Husband—to use his own words— for you , of course, first, but written in this form specially for the dear chicks, and therefore quite simple and plain, so as to interest and amuse them; but I shall be very glad if it interests the others if you will send it the rounds, as then I need not try to write the same story over and over again, which is very tiresome.
When on the 20th March, 1880, being at the time Adjutant-General of the Bombay Army, my dear Husband, to his infinite satisfaction and delight, and full of ardour and zeal, was ordered to the Front, to take command, as Brigadier-General, of the 2nd Infantry Brigade at Kandahar, Southern Afghanistan; knowing how deeply interested we (his wife, and children, his mother, brothers and sisters) would be in all his movements and actions, he conceived the idea of writing this Journal, and most regularly week by week, as he found time to write, and as the Indian mail arrived, did I receive it, and most eagerly was it looked for and read. It will be seen that at first going off the wording of it was simple so that the children might easily understand all that their dear Father was doing, and small details describing the various stages of his journey up to Kandahar from Bombay are fully entered into with the object of amusing and interesting them, and that they might the more readily picture him both then, and when later on, having reached Kandahar, and before troubles began, he amused himself by daily rides into the neighbouring fields and orchards, and still further into the villages and surrounding districts, not always unattended without a certain amount of risk and danger, and thus became acquainted intimately with the country within 12 or 15 miles of Kandahar. But as difficulties developed themselves, and were followed, first by the lamentable defeat and retreat from the battlefield of Maiwand, of a portion of the already too small force that was holding, what appeared to him , the very false military position at Kandahar, and ended as a climax, in the Siege of Kandahar itself, the subject matter of the Journal necessarily became of such painful interest, that the language of it on many points almost went beyond the comprehension of the children, or, at any rate, was not too simple for their elders, albeit only too plain and grievous for all to read hereafter, when we remembered that He, whom we so dearly loved, had been besieged within the walls of that city, and had been in daily danger of losing that life so valuable to his wife and children, and which, alas! it was God's will—before the Kandahar garrison was relieved— should be sacrificed in the performance, in the first instance, of his duty, as a true and ardent soldier in the service of his Queen and country, during the sortie upon the village of Deh Khoja on the 16th August, 1880, while in command of the attacking party; and, more directly, in the endeavour to rescue from a cruel death a brother officer—Captain Cruikshank of the Royal Engineers—whom he found in the village severely wounded and unable to save himself! This sortie had been determined upon six days before it was actually undertaken, and strongly then objected to, for various sound military reasons, by my dear Husband, as we now know by what is written in the Journal of the events that daily occurred during the Siege of Kandahar, and also from friends who were there themselves, extracts from whose letters—giving us the sad details of that ill-fated sortie—will be found in the Appendix. These extracts speak volumes of themselves, and need no comment from me. The manner and character of my dear Husband's self-sacrificing death are indications in themselves of the ruling power which influenced all his actions.