living and the dead, assisted by their womenfolk.
Rudyard Kipling has this chilling advice for a young British soldier who found himself in this situation:
‘When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
An’ the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.’
Murray threw Watson over the back of a pack-horse and joined the retreat to Kandahar. It was itself an ordeal. Exhausted men and horses, suffering from heat and thirst and sniped at by Afghans as they passed their villages, straggled back along the fifty-mile desert tract to Kandahar, the gun-carriages loaded with those dead and wounded they had managed to save from the ghazis’ knives.
Kandahar was a walled town and Lieutenant-General James Primrose, in charge of the garrison, decided to defend the whole perimeter. Breaches in the walls wererepaired, gun emplacements set up and every Afghan man of fighting age, 13,000 in all, was expelled from the town as the British prepared for the coming siege. Food was not short and there were fresh-water wells. But morale was low and the garrison too small to hold off the Afghan forces whose casualties, compared to the British losses, had been light.
Watson says nothing about the siege, merely stating that he was taken safely to the British lines. For this reason, some commentators have assumed he was not at Kandahar. But there was nowhere else Murray could have taken him. Watson’s intention was to give only an abbreviated account of this period in his life, not a full autobiography, and anyway he was too seriously wounded to take much notice of what was happening around him at the time. He must have received medical treatment, however, during which it is possible not enough attention was paid to the wound in his leg.
On 5th August an advance guard of Ayub Khan’s army arrived at Kandahar, to be joined two days later by the main Afghan force, which set up camp outside the town. The siege had begun. It lasted for twenty-four days and was lifted on 31st August when Major General Frederick ‘Bobs’ Roberts, after a march of 320 miles across the mountains from Kabul, arrived with a relieving army of 10,000 and attacked Ayub Khan’s camp, killing thousands of his men and putting the rest to flight. British losses were 58 men killed and 192 wounded.
These casualties, together with those from the battle ofMaiwand, Watson among them, were transferred to the base hospital at Peshawar, the capital of the British north-west Indian possessions. Here Watson began to recover from his wounds and was eventually fit enough to walk about the wards and sunbathe on the verandah. It was then, when he was convalescent, that he received a further setback. He was struck down by enteric, or typhoid fever, an infectious disease which causes a high temperature and debility and can, in its more serious form, lead to pneumonia and thrombosis.
There is no doubt Watson was gravely ill, but his statement that ‘for months my life was despaired of’ is again a little exaggerated. Typhoid fever usually lasts about five weeks and the time scale will not allow for a protracted illness. No doubt the weeks he suffered seemed like months to him. In fact, he was in the Peshawar hospital for less than two months, for by the end of October he was back in Bombay, having in the meantime been examined by a medical board, which decided that in view of his ‘weak and emaciated condition’ he should be repatriated to England straightaway. In addition, he had to make the 1,600 mile journey south by train and boat in time to embark on the troopship SS Orontes which sailed from Bombay on 31st October 1880.
Thanks to the researches of Mr Metcalfe, the ship’s movements have been exactly established. Having left Bombay, she called at Malta on 16th November and finally arrived at Portsmouth on the afternoon of Friday 26th November, ‘bringing home the first troops
Rudyard Kipling has this chilling advice for a young British soldier who found himself in this situation:
‘When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
An’ the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.’
Murray threw Watson over the back of a pack-horse and joined the retreat to Kandahar. It was itself an ordeal. Exhausted men and horses, suffering from heat and thirst and sniped at by Afghans as they passed their villages, straggled back along the fifty-mile desert tract to Kandahar, the gun-carriages loaded with those dead and wounded they had managed to save from the ghazis’ knives.
Kandahar was a walled town and Lieutenant-General James Primrose, in charge of the garrison, decided to defend the whole perimeter. Breaches in the walls wererepaired, gun emplacements set up and every Afghan man of fighting age, 13,000 in all, was expelled from the town as the British prepared for the coming siege. Food was not short and there were fresh-water wells. But morale was low and the garrison too small to hold off the Afghan forces whose casualties, compared to the British losses, had been light.
Watson says nothing about the siege, merely stating that he was taken safely to the British lines. For this reason, some commentators have assumed he was not at Kandahar. But there was nowhere else Murray could have taken him. Watson’s intention was to give only an abbreviated account of this period in his life, not a full autobiography, and anyway he was too seriously wounded to take much notice of what was happening around him at the time. He must have received medical treatment, however, during which it is possible not enough attention was paid to the wound in his leg.
On 5th August an advance guard of Ayub Khan’s army arrived at Kandahar, to be joined two days later by the main Afghan force, which set up camp outside the town. The siege had begun. It lasted for twenty-four days and was lifted on 31st August when Major General Frederick ‘Bobs’ Roberts, after a march of 320 miles across the mountains from Kabul, arrived with a relieving army of 10,000 and attacked Ayub Khan’s camp, killing thousands of his men and putting the rest to flight. British losses were 58 men killed and 192 wounded.
These casualties, together with those from the battle ofMaiwand, Watson among them, were transferred to the base hospital at Peshawar, the capital of the British north-west Indian possessions. Here Watson began to recover from his wounds and was eventually fit enough to walk about the wards and sunbathe on the verandah. It was then, when he was convalescent, that he received a further setback. He was struck down by enteric, or typhoid fever, an infectious disease which causes a high temperature and debility and can, in its more serious form, lead to pneumonia and thrombosis.
There is no doubt Watson was gravely ill, but his statement that ‘for months my life was despaired of’ is again a little exaggerated. Typhoid fever usually lasts about five weeks and the time scale will not allow for a protracted illness. No doubt the weeks he suffered seemed like months to him. In fact, he was in the Peshawar hospital for less than two months, for by the end of October he was back in Bombay, having in the meantime been examined by a medical board, which decided that in view of his ‘weak and emaciated condition’ he should be repatriated to England straightaway. In addition, he had to make the 1,600 mile journey south by train and boat in time to embark on the troopship SS Orontes which sailed from Bombay on 31st October 1880.
Thanks to the researches of Mr Metcalfe, the ship’s movements have been exactly established. Having left Bombay, she called at Malta on 16th November and finally arrived at Portsmouth on the afternoon of Friday 26th November, ‘bringing home the first troops
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