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The whole British army, which had to pass through the Kurd-Cabul Pass, was destroyed by cold and hunger, and by the harassing attacks of the mountaineers . It numbered forty-five hundred fighting men and twelve thousand five hundred camp-followers. Another British army, under Gen. Pollock, forced the Khyber Pass, and took vengeance on Cabul.
The next you shall hear of your Captain King of the Khyber Rifles he will be leading a jihad into India. You would have better trusted me. Yasmini." "Too bad about your brother," said the general. "The body is buried. How much is true about the head?" King told him. "Where's she?" asked the general. King did not answer. The general waited. "I don't know, sir."
Had Kipling met Hawk he would have worked him into a book of Indian soldier life; for Hawk was full of jungle adventures and stories of the Indian Survey Department and the Khyber Pass; while his descriptions of Kashmir and Secunderabad, with its fakirs and jugglers, monkey temples and sacred bulls, were superb.
The Indian government, being in an unusually affable mood, gave orders that he was to be civilly treated, and shown everything that was to be seen; so he drifted, talking bad English and worse French, from one city to another till he forgathered with her Majesty's White Hussars in the city of Peshawur, which stands at the mouth of that narrow sword-cut in the hills that men call the Khyber Pass.
The remembrance of the disaster in the Khyber Pass in 1841 haunted them, as it had done their predecessors, like a ghost, and scared them from the course of action which might probably have led to the conclusion of a close offensive and defensive alliance between India and Afghanistan. Such a consummation was devoutly to be hoped for in view of events which had transpired in Central Asia.
With two other English officers he had taken his share in the difficult task of ruling that regiment of wild tribesmen which, twice a week, perched in threes on some rocky promontory, or looking down from a machicolated tower, keeps open the Khyber Pass from dawn to dusk and protects the caravans.
Solemn, almost motionless, squatted on their hunkers, they looked like two great vultures watching an animal die. "What have they done that they should be sent away?" asked Ismail. "What have they done that they should be sent to the fort, where the arrficer will put them in irons?" "Why should he put them in irons?" asked King. "Why not? Here in the Khyber there is often a price on men's heads!"
But that the man was short and stout of build and that the fugitives had a down-hill start, both would have died that night. As it was, within ten seconds, a tremendous sweep of the heavy blade of the long Khyber knife caused Private Gosling-Green to lose his head completely and for the last time.
"If I remember rightly they arrived, without having met with any opposition worth mentioning, at Kandahar, and occupied the whole of Afghanistan. But, in spite of this, they finally suffered a disastrous defeat. Of their 15,000 men only 4,500 succeeded in returning in precipitate flight through the Khyber Pass back to India." Prince Tchajawadse laughed ironically. "Fifteen thousand?
The Guides were daily expecting orders to advance into the Khyber Pass at the head of an army, and would thus at the very outset be fighting against some of the men's own relations and friends. Amongst these men was a young Afridi soldier, who was sore puzzled what to do.
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