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On the 16th a dull report was heard in the Siah Sung camp, followed immediately by the rising above the Balla Hissar of a huge column of grey smoke, which as it drifted away disclosed flashes of flame and sudden jets of smoke telling of repeated gunpowder explosions. The 67th, powdered with dust, escaped all but scathless; but the Goorkha regiment had been heavily smitten.
Soon the point of a musket, then a head and long neck appeared: the Goorkha sprang up, and seizing him by the locks, which clustered out of the back of his pugarie, he cut off his head with his cookri, ere the Brahmin could invoke Mahadeo. The little man was brought along with his trophy by the rifleman, to receive the applause of his comrades.
There was an Afghan force still in arms at Istalif, a beautiful village of the inveterately hostile Kohistanees; a division marched to attack it, carried the place by assault, burnt part of it, and severely smote the garrison. Utter destruction was the fate of Charikar, the capital of the Kohistan, where Codrington's Goorkha regiment had been destroyed.
Further on a couple of shots were fired by disaffected Pathans in the ranks of the 29th N. I. That regiment was promptly deprived of the lead, which was taken by the Goorkha regiment, and the column toiled on by a track described by General Roberts as 'nothing but a mass of stones, heaped into ridges and furrowed into deep hollows by the action of the water. Day had not broken when the head of the column reached the foot of the steep ascent to the Spingawai Kotul.
"And yet sometimes, when I oiled the brasses in the engine-room of the Goorkha, I have wondered if our priests were so wise so wise. The day is coming, Sahib. They will be gone by the morning." A yellow light broadened in the sky, and the tone of the river changed as the darkness withdrew. Suddenly the Elephant trumpeted aloud as though man had goaded him. "Let Indra judge.
I perched myself high up on the flying-bridge and watched the busy scene below. In the next dock was the Goorkha, into whose commodious maw were pouring the 2nd Lincolnshire Regiment, the 9th Field Company Royal Engineers, the 14th Brigade Staff, the Cavalry Brigade Field Hospital, the Fifth Division Field Hospital, and No. 12 Company Army Medical Corps.
Charlie Thurkow led the way to a ward which we had never used a ward I had set apart for infectious cases. A man was dozing in a long chair in the open window. As we entered he rose hastily and brought a lamp. We bent over a bed the only one occupied. The occupant was a man I did not know. He looked like a Goorkha, and he was dying. In a few moments I knew all that there was to know.
In the desperately-contested battle which ensued the victory was decisive, and the Goorkha king at once sued for peace, which was readily granted, as the Chinese had attained all their objects, and Sund Fo was beginning to be anxious about his retreat owing to the approach of winter.
In 1760 the king of Bhatgaon, one of the divisions of Nepal, being threatened by his rival kings, begged aid from the Goorkha chief. It was readily given, and with such effect as to win the allies a signal triumph.
And now, on the 15th, there rode wearily into cantonments two wounded men, who believed themselves the only British survivors of the Charikar force. Pottinger was wounded in the leg, Haughton, the adjutant of the Goorkha corps, had lost his right hand, and his head hung forward on his breast, half severed from his body by a great tulwar slash.
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