Death on a Pale Horse - By Donald Thomas Page 0,31

and death within twenty-four hours.

I came through the crisis without explanation but at a heavy cost. For a month, I was weak as a rabbit. I could scarcely stand, let alone walk. Every medical officer who examined me hinted that my days of soldiering were certainly done. In the end, my case was put to me bluntly. I should not recover as long as I remained in India. Indeed, there was a strong possibility of a recurrence in such a climate and, without doubt, it would carry me off.

A medical board of three officers came to examine me. One of them kindly suggested that if I went home, perhaps in time I might recover sufficiently to soldier in England. The looks of the other two said not if they knew it. It was agreed that I should be sent home and kept on the Army List for another nine months in England to see how I did. I was certain that they would then discharge me.

So I was invalided in uniform to Bombay, and my passage on the troopship Orontes was arranged. During the long sea-miles, I reflected how different this was from my mood of expectancy on the voyage out. There was precious little to look forward to. If only I had heard of Sherlock Holmes and guessed the adventures that might lie ahead!

During those months of convalescence in the hospital at Peshawar, I had been given ample time to think of all that had happened since I left Portsmouth with the cheers of the crowd in my ears. I was at first too weak to do much more than lie in the warmth of the blankets, sometimes dozing and sometimes half-awake. I had grown up at a time when children and their teachers still lived in the long glory of Waterloo. The British Army had proved invincible, and the Empire which it garrisoned now stretched across the globe. Yet as I lay in that hospital bed, my own misfortune was small compared to the calamities of empire at that time. In restless days and long nights, I had ample time to go over and over the extraordinary sequence of reverses which had overtaken our troops in Africa and Asia in the months since I left England.

Between the hot compresses and sips of water that the orderlies administered, the spoonfuls of kaolin and opium mixture, I continued to dream and think.

Soon after the terrible news of Isandhlwana there was a further tragedy. I read in the press how the Prince Imperial, claimant to the throne of France, had been entrusted to Lord Chelmsford on a visit to South Africa, only to be cut to pieces on patrol in Zululand. That was not all. To be sure, I had escaped with my life at Maiwand. Yet the British envoy and all his staff had been assassinated at the Afghan capital of Kabul. Even at Kandahar, we had had every prospect of sharing their fate, cut off and surrounded by the brigands of Ayub Khan. But for the energy and audacity of General Roberts in his dash for the city, that is just what would have happened. Lying there immobilised in my hospital bed, my throat would have been slit along with the rest.

When I had first been ordered to Afghanistan, I imagined my comrades and myself riding confidently as benevolent imperial rulers over this ill-favoured territory. There would be respect for us and our empire. In the case of a doctor, there would be particular gratitude. I did not envisage my hurried and undignified exit from military glory, slung over a pack horse by my orderly, my shoulder smashed and bleeding, the knives of the pursuing jezailchees glinting not far behind us.

I was not the only one who thought of such setbacks with incredulity. I read a report from a Court correspondent on how the news of Isandhlwana had reached Queen Victoria at Osborne, during breakfast on 11 February 1879. “How this could happen we cannot imagine,” the poor old lady wrote, describing this “great and unnatural disaster” in her journal. Among the list of the slain were several officers who had been her guests at court. More tragic still was the assassination of the Prince Imperial and the Queen’s terrible task of consoling his distraught mother, the widowed Empress Eugenie of France.

And Afghanistan? Without Lord Roberts of Kandahar, we would easily have lost our only base there. Indeed, part of India itself, including the city where I now lay,