advance proceeded uneventfully enough. Our soldiers behaved admirably
under circumstances peculiarly trying to Europeans, and experienced
by many of them for the first time. George Lawrence (one of the three
owners of a name which is a household word throughout India, at that
time a captain of the 2nd Bengal Light Cavalry) relates how he saw a
trooper of the 16th Lancers pour the contents of a soda-water bottle
half full of water, a treasure then worth its weight in gold, down
the throat of a native child on the point of perishing from thirst.
As the army neared Candahar, Soojah was moved up again to the front,
and many of the chiefs and people of Western Afghanistan hastened to
his standard. It was known that Kohun Dil Khan had fled, that there
was open dissension among the Barukzye brotherhood, and it soon became
clear that if a stand was to be made it would be made at a point nearer
Cabul. On April 25th, Shah Soojah-ool-Moolk, after more than thirty
years of exile, re-entered in bloodless triumph the southern capital of
his kingdom.
Till June 27th the army lay at Candahar, waiting the ripening of the
crops. So long a period of forced inactivity was distasteful to the
troops, while daily the conviction forced itself on the more observant
of the officers that the popularity which Soojah had claimed for
himself existed only in his own imagination. The Douranee tribes had,
indeed, long yearned to shake off the hateful yoke of the Barukzye
Sirdars, by whom they had been systematically plundered and oppressed;
but they lacked both spirit and strength to make common cause with
their promised deliverer, while both their national and religious
feelings were alike stirred by the appearance within their gates of
the accursed infidels. When the first cravings of curiosity had been
gratified, their attitude to their king was one rather of indifference
than devotion, and to us one of undisguised if not active enmity. It
needed not the warning of Soojah to remind the English that they were
no longer in Hindostan. Two young officers, Inverarity, of the 16th
Lancers, and Wilmer, were attacked at a short distance from camp;
Inverarity was murdered, and his companion escaped with difficulty.
The Ghilzyes, a fierce and lawless tribe, the original lords of the
soil, alike rejecting British gold and British promises, began, too,
to give early promise of the stern opposition that was hereafter to
be experienced from them. When, a fortnight after his arrival, Soojah
held a grand state reception, scarcely one of his subjects appeared to
do homage to their king. A royal salute of 101 guns was fired in his
honour; the British troops marched past his throne in imposing array,
and Soojah, highly elated, declared that the moral influence of the
ceremony would be felt "from Pekin to Constantinople." But in reality,
the whole affair, so far as what should have been its most important
features were concerned, was a miserable failure. Lawrence relates a
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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