John seemed a capable man, but was occasionally muzzy. After visiting Simla, the headquarters of the Viceroy, I started for the frontier, where the army was mustering. On the way down I spent a couple of days at Umballa, to buy kit and saddlery. The train by which I was going to travel up-country was due at Umballa about midnight. I instructed John to have everything at the depôt in good time, and went to dine at the mess of the Carbineers. In due time I reached the station, accompanied by several officers of that fine regiment. The train was at the platform; my belongings I found in a chaotic heap, crowned by John fast asleep, who, when awakened, proved to be extremely drunk. I could not dispense with the man; I had to cure him. There was but one chance of doing this. I gave him then and there a severe beating. A fatigue party of Carbineers pitched my kit into the baggage car, and threw John in after it. Next day he was sore, but penitent. There was no need to send him to Dwight, even if that establishment had been in the Punjaub instead of in Illinois. John was redeemed without resorting to the chloride of gold cure, and in his case at least, I was quite as successful a practitioner as any Dr. Keeley could have been. John de Compostella, &c., was a dead sober man during my subsequent experience of him, at least till close on the time we parted.
“EXTREMELY DRUNK.”
And, once cured of fuddling, he turned out a most worthy and efficient fellow. He lacked the dash of Andreas, but he was as true as steel. In the attack on Ali Musjid, in the throat of the Khyber Pass, the native groom, who was leading my horse behind me, became demoralised by the rather heavy fire of big cannon balls from the fort, and skulked to the rear with the horse. John had no call to come under fire, since the groom was specially paid for doing so; but abusing the latter for a coward in the expressive vernacular of India, he laid hold of the reins, and was up right at my back just as the close musketry fighting began. He took his chances through it manfully, had my pack pony up within half an hour after the fighting was over, and before the darkness fell had cooked a capital little dinner for myself and a comrade, whose commissariat had gone astray. Next morning the fort was found evacuated. I determined to ride back down the pass to the field telegraph post at its mouth. The General wrote in my notebook a telegram announcing the good news to the Commander-in-Chief; and poor Cavagnari, the political officer, who was afterwards massacred at Cabul, wrote another message to the same effect to the Viceroy. I expected to have to walk some distance to our bivouac of the night; but lo! as I turned to go, there was John with my horse, close up.
“JUST AS THE CLOSE MUSKETRY FIGHTING BEGAN.”
In one of the hill expeditions, the advanced section of the force I accompanied had to penetrate a narrow and gloomy pass which was beset on either side by swarms of Afghans, who slated us severely with their long-range jezails. With this leading detachment there somehow was no surgeon, and as men were going down and something had to be done, it devolved upon me, as having some experience in this kind of work in previous campaigns, to undertake a spell of amateur surgery. John behaved magnificently as my assistant. With his light touch and long lissom hands, the fellow seemed to have a natural instinct for successful bandaging. I was glad that we could do no more than bandage, and that we had no instruments, else I believe that John would not have hesitated to undertake a capital operation. As for the Afghan bullets, he did not shrink as they splashed on the stones around him; he did not treat them with disdain; he simply ignored them. The soldiers swore that he ought to have the war medal for the good and plucky work he was doing; and a Major protested that if his full titles, which John always gave in full when his name was asked, had not been so confoundedly long, he would have asked the General to mention the Goa man in despatches.
“THERE WAS JOHN WITH MY HORSE.”
John liked war, but he was not fond of the rapid changes of temperature up on the “roof of the world” in Afghanistan. During one twenty-four hours at Jellalabad, we had one man killed by a sunstroke, and another frozen to death on sentry duty in the night. On Christmas morning, when I rose at sunrise, the thermometer was far below freezing point; the water in the brass basin in my tent was frozen solid, and I was glad to wrap myself in furs. At noon the thermometer was over a hundred in the shade, and we were all so hot as to wish with Sydney Smith that we could take off our flesh and sit in our bones. John was delighted when, as there seemed no immediate prospect of further hostilities in Afghanistan, I departed therefrom to pay a visit to King Thebaw, of Burmah, who has since been disestablished. When in his capital of Mandalay, there came to me a telegram from England informing me of the massacre by the Zulus of a thousand British soldiers at Isandlwana, in South Africa, and instructing me to hurry thither with all possible speed. John had none of the Hindoo dislike to cross the “dark water,” and he accompanied me to Aden, where we made connection with a potty little steamer, which called into every paltry and fever-smelling Portuguese port all along the east coast of Africa, and at length dropped us at Durban, the seaport of the British colony of Natal, in South Africa, and the base of the warlike operations against the Zulus.