Through Three Campaigns: A Story of Chitral, Tirah and Ashanti

by G. A. Henty

From the moment when the troops fell in on the 10th, till they reached Barkai on the 14th, there was a general action from front to rear. The advance guard marched at half-past seven. At eight o'clock flanking parties were engaged with the enemy in the hills and spurs. Serious opposition, however, did not take place until five and a half miles of the valley had been passed.

Here the river turned to the right, and the front of the advance was exposed to the fire of a strongly-fortified village, nestling on the lower slope of a hill, on a terrace plateau. The village was furnished with no fewer than ten towers, and from these a very heavy fire was kept up.

The battery shelled the spur; while the Sikhs, in open order, skirmished up the terraces to the plateau and, after a brisk fusillade, took the village and burnt it.

A mile farther, the head of the column reached the camping place, which was a strong village built into the river cleft. On the left the 36th Sikhs and part of the Ghoorkhas cleared the way; while the Bombay Pioneers, and the rest of the Ghoorkhas, became heavily engaged with the enemy in some villages on the right. All along the line a brisk engagement went on. The camp pickets took up their positions early in the afternoon, and a foraging party went out and brought in supplies, after some fighting.

Kempster's Brigade had not been able to reach the camp, and settled itself for the night three miles farther up the valley. It, too, had its share of fighting.

All night it rained heavily, and the morning of the 11th broke cold and miserable. It was freezing hard; the hilltops, a hundred feet above the camp, were wrapped in snow; and the river had swollen greatly. The advance guard waded out into the river bed, and the whole of the brigade followed, the Ghoorkhas clearing the sides of the valley. In a short time they passed into the Zakka-Khel section of the Bara Valley.

Curiously enough, the opposition ceased here. It may be that the enemy feared to show themselves on the snow on the hilltops; or that, being short of ammunition, they decided to reserve themselves for an attack upon the other brigade. Scarcely a shot was fired until the valley broadened out into the Akerkhel, where some small opposition was offered by villagers on either bank. This, however, was easily brushed aside.

The advance guard of the 3rd Brigade almost caught up the rear guard of the 4th and, by four in the afternoon, its baggage was coming along nicely, so that all would be in before nightfall. The rear guard of the brigade, consisting of the Gordons, Ghoorkhas, and 2nd Punjab Infantry, had been harassed as soon as they started and, as the day wore on, the enemy increased greatly in numbers. As the flanking parties fell back to join the rear guard, they were so pressed that it was as much as they could do to keep them at bay.

When about three miles from camp, the baggage took a wrong road. In trying a piece of level ground, they became helplessly mixed up in swampy rice fields. The enemy, seeing the opportunity they had waited for, outflanked the rear guard, and began pouring a heavy fire into the baggage. The flanking parties were weak, for the strain had been so severe that many men from the hospital escort and baggage guard had been withdrawn, to dislodge the enemy from the surrounding spurs.

The Pathans were almost among the baggage, when a panic seized the followers. As night began to fall, the officer commanding the Gordons, with two weak companies of his regiment, two companies of the Ghoorkhas, and a company of the 2nd Punjab Infantry and some Ghoorkhas, found himself in a most serious position. The guns had limbered up and pushed on, and the rear guard remained, surrounded by the enemy, hampered with its wounded, and stranded with doolies. As the native bearers had fled these doolies were, in many cases, being carried by the native officers.