The Relief of Chitral

by G. J. Younghusband; Sir Francis Edward Younghusband

On the 17th he was relieved by Lieutenant Moberly, as will be subsequently told.

In concluding his report, Lieutenant Jones says that he cannot speak too highly of the steadiness and gallantry shown by the men of the detachment, whose behaviour throughout he considers above praise.

We now have to follow the fortunes of the party under Lieutenants Edwardes and Fowler, to whose assistance Captain Ross had set out. This party, as will be remembered, had marched from Mastuj on the 5th of March before any news of an outbreak of hostilities had reached that place. They were escorting ammunition and engineering stores for the troops at Chitral, and their party consisted of twenty Bengal Sappers and Miners, forty-two Kashmir Infantry, an orderly, three officers' servants, and two followers. On the 6th they reached Reshun, a large, but straggling village situated on a sloping plain between the left bank of the Chitral river and the steep mountain sides which rose behind. The houses are detached and dotted over the plain, each surrounded by an orchard. On the edge of a cliff which overhangs the river was a sangar, which the detachment now occupied, and here they stored their kit and ammunition, while a small party consisting of Lieutenants Edwardes and Fowler with twenty Bengal Sappers and Miners, and ten Kashmir Infantry started out to repair a break in the road a few miles below Reshun. Immediately after leaving the village the road to Chitral ascends a spur to a height of about 1,000 feet, and descending again to the level of the river passes for half-a-mile or so over a plain, and then enters a narrow defile with the unfordable river on one hand and inaccessible cliffs on the other.

The British officers were unaware, though the siege of Chitral had commenced three days ago, that the Chitralis had risen in arms against the British, but they saw sufficient evidence of a hostile spirit to induce them to take every precaution on entering this defile. All the hill-sides were carefully examined with telescopes, and, as some sangars were observed, Lieutenant Fowler was sent to scale the heights on the left bank so as from there to be able to look down into the sangars on the opposite bank. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Edwardes remained with the rest of the party close outside the defile. Lieutenant Fowler with some difficulty found a way up the hill-side, and was engaged in examining the opposite cliffs, when suddenly a shot came from them, and about two hundred men rushed out from a village where they had been concealed and began swarming into the sangars. Lieutenant Fowler kept up a heavy fire on them, as he was well above the sangars, and did considerable execution.

But the enemy had now begun climbing the hill-sides behind him so as to cut him off from Lieutenant Edwardes, and he was forced to retire. His position indeed was now a very precarious one, for the Chitralis had succeeded in getting above him, and were hurling down stones upon his party, besides firing upon them. Lieutenant Fowler himself was wounded in the back of the shoulder, the corporal of the party was also shot, and two other men wounded. Scrambling and jumping down he succeeded, however, in bringing his party with the wounded men down the hill-side again and on to the plain where Lieutenant Edwardes with the main body was covering his retreat. The Chitralis with Lieutenant Edwardes had been trying to induce him to enter the defile, in which case he would without doubt have suffered as Captain Ross's ill-fated party had done. But Edwardes had prudently waited till Fowler could report the hill-sides clear, and then, finding that instead of their being clear the enemy were now swarming on to them, he saw that his only plan was to retire to Reshun; and this, when Lieutenant Fowler had rejoined him, he accordingly did.

But they were nearly two miles from the village: they had an open plain to cross and the spur nearly a thousand feet high to climb. One British officer and several men were wounded, and the enemy were gaining ground along the hill-sides. Disaster seemed imminent, but by holding the crest of the spur, and by firing steadily on the enemy to keep them at a distance, the retirement was effected without serious loss, and the sangar near the village of Reshun, where the rest of the party had been left, was reached before the enemy could cut them off.

There is one little incident in this retirement which merits a very special mention. It has been said that Lieutenant Fowler was wounded. Now his pony was awaiting him in the plain at the foot of the hill-side up which he had been climbing; and as a steep hill, a thousand feet in height, had to be ascended on the way back to Reshun, it might have been supposed that Fowler would have mounted his pony and ridden up the hill. But there were also some sepoys wounded; and these in Fowler's opinion had to be looked after first. So he mounted a sepoy on his pony, and walked himself. It is not to be wondered at that when the native soldiers see their officers ready to make such sacrifices for them, they should be willing to follow them anywhere, and stand by them to the last, as indeed these very soldiers were now called upon to do.

For now the first blood was drawn the people rose excitedly and surrounded the little British party in the quarters they were occupying. The British officers found it impossible to hold the original sangar on the cliff by the river, for it was exposed to fire from the opposite bank, and had no head-cover. They therefore decided upon occupying some houses by the polo ground, the very spot where Mr. George Curzon and myself had camped without a single man as escort, only five months previously. In this batch of houses, cover and fire-wood could be obtained, and a certain amount of supplies also. The only drawback in occupying them was that they were more than a hundred yards from the river, and consequently there was considerable risk of their water supply being cut off. The officers hoped, however, to be able to keep the road to the river open by their fire.

Immediately upon returning to Reshun, the officers set to work to make the position defensible, and the following account of their brave resistance against overpowering numbers of the enemy is compiled from the report they subsequently submitted to Government. The first work to be done was the construction of sangars on the roofs of the houses (the houses being flat-roofed), the loopholing of the walls, blocking up entrances, and knocking out passages of communication. The materials available for making the sangars were the mud bricks of which the houses were built, roof timbers and other pieces of timber lying about, and boxes, grain bins, etc. An attack was fully expected that same night, and every possible precaution had to be taken before darkness set in. Before dusk the ammunition and the wounded had to be transported from the sangar near the river to the house. Some Kashmir sepoys volunteered for this work, and though they had to run the gauntlet of a heavy fire in crossing the space of a hundred yards which separated the sangar from the end of the garden-wall round the house, they carried it out without losing a single man. "Already dead tired, these men behaved splendidly," say the British officers in their report.

The enemy had been firing all day upon the party while they were at work, but at sunset their fire slackened and they went off to eat the evening meal, for this was the month of the Ramzan when Mohammedans have to fast all day and eat nothing between sunrise and sunset. Every man on the defending side was now posted in his place, and told to strengthen his cover for himself. And so the first night fell on the little party, now at bay, in the heart of an enemy's country, with their retreat cut off, and impossible defiles on either side of them. Out of the sixty-two men, they had already lost one corporal killed, two men mortally and eight others less severely wounded, and one of the two British officers was also wounded. The men had had hard work the whole day long, they had had no food and little water, and now at night they could take no rest, for the enemy commenced firing again, and the defenders had to expect a rush from the houses and garden walls close by at any moment. The defenders' position was indeed surrounded by these houses, walls, and trees, which gave ample cover to the enemy; and the demolition of these was undoubtedly a matter of the first importance. But beyond those immediately around the house, there was more cover occupied by the enemy's sharpshooters, and the British officers considered that it would have been too risky to have taken men from their places to demolish these, and so expose them where they might have been cut off at any moment. There was a difficulty, too, about burning the houses, for large quantities of kindling wood would have been required for the purpose, and from whichever side the defenders should burn fires, the enemy would attack from the other, and thus have them between themselves and the light.