A week after Colonel Kelly had reached Chitral Major "Roddy" Owen and myself, riding on ahead of the advanced parties of General Low's force arrived in Chitral. It was a bright sunny day, the country was clothed in all the fulness of spring, the young corn was waving in the fields, the blossoms were forming on the trees and all nature was smiling as we rode through the forty miles of country which separated Chitral from the advance guard which General Gatacre had just led over the Lowarai Pass. But the looks of the people were in striking contrast. Worn, trembling and utterly cowed the Chitralis shrank from even two British officers riding without an escort through their country. It was pitiable to see them. Men, whom a few months before I had seen gay as few but Chitralis in their contented moments can be, were now moving about with careworn faces, thin and exhausted. The people of Chitral had flamed up into rebellion, and were now lying burnt out like the charred remains of a firework. When I asked them why they had been so foolish as to fight us, they wrung their hands and said, "Why were we? We hate these Pathans; they have plundered our houses and carried off our women, but they were strong and close while you were far away, and we never knew you were so powerful as you are. We did not want to fight you, but we were led away." It was only very few people, however, that we met as we rode through the villages, for most had fled to the hills, believing that General Gatacre's brigade, now just over the Lowarai Pass, was to advance and exact a terrible retribution by massacring them for the space of three days. Late in the evening of the 27th of April, we rode into Chitral, and had the honour to be the first to congratulate the famous garrison and the officers of Colonel Kelly's force upon their splendid achievements. We found the officers just sitting down to dinner in the very house in which I had lived for many months, and in which Mr. Curzon and I on the previous October had entertained the late Mehtar at dinner. It was situated half-a-mile from the fort, and here we found Sir George Robertson and the other officers, recovered somewhat indeed from what Colonel Kelly's officers had found them, but still looking pale and worn, thin, and with the set, anxious look which had not yet left their faces. They were cheery; they brought out a long-treasured bottle of brandy from the reserve for hospital purposes, and they produced a Christmas plum-pudding which had only that day arrived, and insisted upon our sharing these luxuries with them; but even now they hardly realised that the struggle was yet over, and one or other of them would from time to time go round the sentries posted everywhere round the house.