A brief period of peace intervened between the ratification of the treaty of Gundamuk on May 30th, 1879, and the renewal of hostilities consequent on the massacre at Cabul of Sir Louis Cavagnari and the whole entourage of the mission of which he was the head. There was nothing identical or even similar in the motives of the two campaigns, and regarded purely on principle they might be regarded as two distinct wars, rather than as successive campaigns of one and the same war. But the interval between them was so short that the ink of the signatures to the treaty of Gundamuk may be said to have been scarcely dry when the murder of the British Envoy tore that document into bloody shreds; and it seems the simplest and most convenient method to designate the two years of hostilities from November 1878 to September 1880, as the 'second Afghan war,' notwithstanding the three months' interval of peace in the summer of 1879.

Dost Mahomed died in 1863, and after a long struggle his son Shere Ali possessed himself of the throne bequeathed to him by his father. The relations between Shere Ali and the successive Viceroys of India were friendly, although not close. The consistent aim of the British policy was to maintain Afghanistan in the position of a strong, friendly, and independent state, prepared in certain contingencies to co-operate in keeping at a distance foreign intrigue or aggression; and while this object was promoted by donations of money and arms, to abstain from interference in the internal affairs of the country, while according a friendly recognition to the successive occupants of its throne, without undertaking indefinite liabilities in their interest. The aim, in a word, was to utilise Afghanistan as a 'buffer' state between the northwestern frontier of British India and Russian advances from the direction of Central Asia. Shere Ali was never a very comfortable ally; he was of a saturnine and suspicious nature, and he seems also to have had an overweening sense of the value of the position of Afghanistan, interposed between two great powers profoundly jealous one of the other. He did not succeed with Lord Northbrook in an attempt to work on that Viceroy by playing off the bogey of Russian aggression; and as the consequence of this failure he allowed himself to display marked evidences of disaffected feeling. Cognisance was taken of this 'attitude of extreme reserve,' and early in 1876 Lord Lytton arrived in India charged with instructions to break away from the policy designated as that of 'masterly inactivity,' and to initiate a new basis of relations with Afghanistan and its Ameer.

Lord Lytton's instructions directed him to despatch without delay a mission to Cabul, whose errand would be to require of the Ameer the acceptance of a permanent Resident and free access to the frontier positions of Afghanistan on the part of British officers, who should have opportunity of conferring with the Ameer on matters of common interest with 'becoming attention to their friendly councils.' Those were demands notoriously obnoxious to the Afghan monarch and the Afghan people. Compliance with them involved sacrifice of independence, and the Afghan loathing of Feringhee officials in their midst had been fiercely evinced in the long bloody struggle and awful catastrophe recorded in earlier pages of this volume. Probably the Ameer, had he desired, would not have dared to concede such demands on any terms, no matter how full of advantage. But the terms which Lord Lytton was instructed to tender as an equivalent were strangely meagre. The Ameer was to receive a money gift, and a precarious stipend regarding which the new Viceroy was to 'deem it inconvenient to commit his government to any permanent pecuniary obligation.' The desiderated recognition of Abdoolah Jan as Shere Ali's successor was promised with the qualifying reservation that the promise 'did not imply or necessitate any intervention in the internal affairs of the state.' The guarantee against foreign aggression was vague and indefinite, and the Government of India reserved to itself entire 'freedom of judgment as to the character of circumstances involving the obligation of material support.'

The Ameer replied to the notice that a mission was about to proceed to Cabul by a courteous declinature to receive an Envoy, assigning several specious reasons. He was quite satisfied with the existing friendly relations, and desired no change in them; he could not guarantee the safety of the Envoy and his people; if he admitted a British mission, he would have no excuse for refusing to receive a Russian one. An intimation was conveyed to the Ameer that if he should persist in his refusal to receive the mission, the Viceroy would have no other alternative than to regard Afghanistan as a state which had 'voluntarily isolated itself from the alliance and support of the British Government.' The Ameer arranged that the Vakeel of the Indian Government should visit Simla, carrying with him full explanations, and charged to lay before the Viceroy sundry grievances which were distressing Shere Ali. That functionary took back to Cabul certain minor concessions, but conveyed the message also that those concessions were contingent on the Ameer's acceptance of British officers about his frontiers, and that it would be of no avail to send an Envoy to the conference at Peshawur for which sanction was given, unless he were commissioned to agree to this condition as the fundamental basis of a treaty. Before the Vakeel quitted Simla he had to listen to a truculent address from Lord Lytton, in the course of which Shere Ali's position was genially likened to that of 'an earthen pipkin between two iron pots.' Before Sir Lewis Pelly and the Ameer's representative met at Peshawur in January 1877, Shere Ali had not unnaturally been perturbed by the permanent occupation of Quetta, on the southern verge of his dominions, as indicating, along with other military dispositions, an intended invasion. The Peshawur conference, which from the first had little promise, dragged on unsatisfactorily until terminated by the death of the Ameer's representative, whereupon Sir Lewis Pelly was recalled by Lord Lytton, notwithstanding the latter's cognisance that Shere Ali was despatching to Peshawur a fresh Envoy authorised to assent to all the British demands. The justification advanced by Lord Lytton for this procedure was the discovery purported to have been made by Sir Lewis Pelly that the Ameer was intriguing with General Kaufmann at Tashkend. Since Shere Ali was an independent monarch, it was no crime on his part to enter into negotiations with another power than Great Britain, although if the worried and distracted man did so the charge of folly may be laid to him, since the Russians were pretty certain to betray him after having made a cat's-paw of him, and since in applying to them he involved himself in the risk of hostile action on the part of the British. The wisdom of Lord Lytton's conduct is not apparent. The truculent policy of which he was the instrument was admittedly on the point of triumphing; and events curiously falsified his short-sighted anticipation of the unlikelihood, because of the Russo-Turkish war then impending, of any rapprochement between the Ameer and the Russian authorities in Central Asia. The Viceroy withdrew his Vakeel from Cabul, and in the recognition of the Ameer's attitude of 'isolation and scarcely veiled hostility' Lord Salisbury authorised Lord Lytton to protect the British frontier by such measures as circumstances should render expedient, 'without regard to the wishes of the Ameer or the interests of his dynasty.' Lord Lytton took no measures, expedient or otherwise, in the direction indicated by Lord Salisbury; the Ameer, as if he had been a petted boy consigned to the corner, was abandoned to his sullen 'isolation,' and the Russians adroitly used him to involve us in a war which lasted two years, cost us the lives of many valiant men, caused us to incur an expenditure of many millions, and left our relations with Afghanistan in all essential respects in the same condition as Lord Lytton found them when he reached India with the 'new policy' in his pocket.

If the Russians could execute as thoroughly as they can plan skilfully, there would be hardly any limit to their conquests. When England was mobilising her forces after the treaty of San Stefano, and ordering into the Mediterranean a division of sepoys drawn from the three presidencies of her Indian Empire, Russia for her part was concerting an important diversion in the direction of the north-western frontier of that great possession. But for the opportune conclusion of the treaty of Berlin, the question as to the ability of sepoy troops stiffened by British regiments to cope with the mixed levies of the Tzar might have been tried out on stricken fields between the Oxus and the Indus. When Gortschakoff returned from Berlin to St Petersburg with his version of 'Peace with Honour'—Bessarabia and Batoum thrown in—Kaufmann had to countermand the concentration of troops that had been in progress on the northern frontier of Afghanistan. But the Indian division was still much in evidence in the Mediterranean, its tents now gleaming on the brown slopes of Malta, now crowning the upland of Larnaca and nestling among the foliage of Kyrenea. Kaufmann astutely retorted on this demonstration by despatching, not indeed an expedition, but an embassy to Cabul; and when Stolietoff, the gallant defender of the Schipka Pass, rode into the Balla Hissar on August 11th, 1878, Shere Ali received him with every token of cordiality and regard.

No other course was now open to Her Majesty's Government than to insist on the reception at Cabul of a British mission. The gallant veteran officer Sir Neville Chamberlain, known to be held in regard by the Ameer, was named as Envoy, and an emissary was sent to Cabul in advance with information of the date fixed for the setting out of the mission. Shere Ali was greatly perplexed, and begged for more time. 'It is not proper,' he protested, 'to use pressure in this way; it will tend to a complete rupture.' But Sir Neville Chamberlain was satisfied that the Ameer was trifling with the Indian Government; and he had certain information that the Ameer, his Ministers, and the Afghan outpost officers, had stated plainly that, if necessary, the advance of the mission would be arrested by force. This was what in effect happened when on September 21st Major Cavagnari rode forward to the Afghan post in the Khyber Pass. The officer who courteously stopped him assured him that he had orders to oppose by force the progress of Sir Neville and his mission, so Cavagnari shook hands with the Afghan major and rode back to Peshawur.

The Viceroy sought permission to declare war immediately, notwithstanding his condition of unpreparedness; but the Home Government directed him instead to require in temperate language an apology and the acceptance of a permanent mission, presenting at the same time the ultimatum that if a satisfactory reply should not be received on or before the 20th November hostilities would immediately commence. Meanwhile military preparations were actively pushed forward. The scheme of operations was as follows: three columns of invasion were to move simultaneously, one through the Khyber Pass to Dakka, another through the Kuram valley, south of the Khyber, with the Peiwar Pass as its objective, and a third from Quetta into the Pisheen valley, to march forward to Candahar after reinforcement by a division from Mooltan. To General Sir Sam Browne was assigned the command of the Khyber column, consisting of about 10,000 men, with thirty guns; to General Roberts the command of the Kuram valley column, of about 5,500 men, with twenty-four guns; and to General Biddulph the command of the Quetta force, numbering some 6000 men, with eighteen guns. When General Donald Stewart should bring up from Mooltan the division which was being concentrated there, he was to command the whole southern force moving on Candahar. The reserve division gathering at Hassan Abdul and commanded by General Maude, would support the Khyber force; another reserve division massing at Sukkur under General Primrose, would act in support of the Candahar force; and a contingent contributed by the Sikh Feudatory States and commanded by Colonel Watson, was to do duty on the Kurum line of communication. The Generals commanding columns were to act independently of each other, taking instructions direct from Army and Government headquarters.

No answer to the ultimatum was received from the Ameer, and on the morning of November 21st Sir Sam Browne crossed the Afghan frontier and moved up the Khyber on Ali Musjid with his third and fourth brigades and the guns. Overnight he had detached Macpherson's and Tytler's brigades with the commission to turn the Ali Musjid position by a circuitous march, the former charged to descend into the Khyber Pass in rear of the fortress, and block the escape of its garrison; the latter instructed to find, if possible, a position on the Rhotas heights on the proper left of the fortress from which a flank attack might be delivered. About noon Sir Sam reached the Shagai ridge and came under a brisk fire from the guns of Ali Musjid, to which his heavy cannon and Manderson's horse-battery replied with good results. The Afghan position, which was very strong, stretched right athwart the valley from an entrenched line on the right to the Rhotas summit on the extreme left. The artillery duel lasted about two hours, and then Sir Sam determined to advance, on the expectation that the turning brigades had reached their respective objectives. He himself moved forward on the right upland; on the opposite side of the Khyber stream Appleyard led the advance of his brigade against the Afghan right. No co-operation on the part of the turning brigades had made itself manifest up till dusk; the right brigade had been brought to a halt in face of a precipitous cliff crowned by the enemy, and it was wisely judged that to press the frontal attack further in the meantime would involve a useless loss of life. Sir Sam therefore halted, and sent word to Appleyard to stay for the night his further advance, merely holding the ridge which he had already carried. But before this order reached him Appleyard was sharply engaged with the enemy in their entrenched position, and in the fighting which occurred before the retirement was effected two officers were killed, a third wounded, and a good many casualties occurred among the rank and file of the native detachments gallantly assailing the Afghan entrenchments.

Early next morning offensive operations were about to be resumed, when a young officer of the 9th Lancers brought intelligence that the Afghan garrison had fled under cover of night, whereupon the fort was promptly occupied. The turning brigades had been delayed by the difficult country encountered, but detachments from both had reached Kata Kustia in time to capture several hundred fugitives of the Ali Musjid garrison. The mass of it, however—its total strength was about 4000 men—effected a retreat by the Peshbolak track from the right of the entrenched position. Sir Sam Browne's advance to Dakka was made without molestation, and on 20th December he encamped on the plain of Jellalabad, where he remained throughout the winter, Maude's reserve division keeping open his communications through the Khyber Pass. The hill tribes, true to their nature, gave great annoyance by their continual raids, and several punitive expeditions were sent against them from time to time, but seldom with decisive results. The tribesmen for the most part carried off into the hills their moveable effects, and the destruction of their petty forts apparently gave them little concern. For the most part they maintained their irreconcilable attitude, hanging on the flanks of our detachments on their return march through the lateral passes to their camps, and inflicting irritating if not very severe losses. Occasionally they thought proper to make nominal submission with tongue in cheek, breaking out again when opportunity or temptation presented itself. Detailed description of those raids and counter-raids would be very tedious reading. It was when starting to co-operate in one of those necessary but tantalising expeditions that a number of troopers of the 10th Hussars were drowned in a treacherous ford of the Cabul river near Jellalabad.

General Roberts, to whom the conduct of operations in the Kuram district had been entrusted, crossed the frontier on November 21st, and marched up the valley with great expedition. The inhabitants evinced friendliness, bringing in live stock and provisions for sale. Reaching Habib Killa on the morning of the 28th, he received a report that the Afghan force which he knew to be opposed to him had abandoned its guns on the hither side of the Peiwar Kotul, and was retreating in confusion over that summit. Roberts promptly pushed forward in two columns. Building on the erroneous information that the enemy were in a hollow trying to withdraw their guns—in reality they were already in their entrenched position on the summit of the Kotul—he ordered Cobbe's (the left) column to turn the right of the supposed Afghan position, and debar the enemy from the Kotul, while the other column (Thelwall's) was ordered to attack in front, the object being to have the enemy between two fires. Cobbe's leading regiment near the village of Turrai found its advance blocked by precipices, and a withdrawal was ordered, the advantage having been attained of forcing the enemy to disclose the position which he was holding. Further reconnaissances proved that the Afghan line of defence extended along the crest of a lofty and broken mountainous range from the Spingawai summit on the left to the Peiwar Kotul on the right centre, the right itself resting on commanding elevations a mile further south. The position had a front in all of about four miles. It was afterwards ascertained to have been held by about 3500 regulars and a large number of tribal irregulars. General Roberts' force numbered about 3100 men.

His scheme of operations he explained to his commanding officers on the evening of December 1st. With the bulk of the force he himself was to make a circuitous night march by his right on the Spingawai Kotul, with the object of turning that position and taking the main Afghan position on the Peiwar Kotul in reverse; while Brigadier Cobbe, with whom were to remain the 8th (Queen's) and 5th Punjaub Infantry regiments, a cavalry regiment and six guns, was instructed to assail the enemy's centre when the result of the flank attack on his left should have made itself apparent.

The turning column, whose advance the General led in person, consisted of the 29th N. I. (leading), 5th Goorkhas, and a mountain battery, all under Colonel Gordon's command; followed by a wing of the 72d Highlanders, 2d Punjaub Infantry, and 23d Pioneers, with four guns on elephants, under Brigadier Thelwall. The arduous march began at ten P.M. Trending at first rearward to the Peiwar village, the course followed was then to the proper right, up the rugged and steep Spingawai ravine. In the darkness part of Thelwall's force lost its way, and disappeared from ken. 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. The Goorkhas and the 72d rushed forward on the first stockade. It was carried without a pause save to bayonet the defenders, and stockade after stockade was swept over in rapid and brilliant succession. In half-an-hour General Roberts was in full possession of the Spingawai defences, and the Afghan left flank was not only turned but driven in. Cobbe was ordered by signal to co-operate by pressing on his frontal attack; and Roberts himself hurried forward on his enterprise of rolling up the Afghan left and shaking its centre. But this proved no easy task. The Afghans made a good defence, and gave ground reluctantly. They made a resolute stand on the further side of a narrow deep-cut ravine, to dislodge them from which effort after effort was ineffectually made. The General then determined to desist from pressing this line of attack, and to make a second turning movement by which he hoped to reach the rear of the Afghan centre. He led the 72d wing, three native regiments, and ten guns, in a direction which should enable him to threaten the line of the Afghan retreat. Brigadier Cobbe since morning had been steadily although slowly climbing toward the front of the Peiwar Kotul position. After an artillery duel which lasted for three hours the Afghan fire was partially quelled; Cobbe's infantry pushed on and up from ridge to ridge, and at length they reached a crest within 800 yards of the guns on the Kotul, whence their rifle fire compelled the Afghan gunners to abandon their batteries. Meanwhile Roberts' second turning movement was developing, and the defenders of the Kotul placed between two fires and their line of retreat compromised, began to waver. Brigadier Cobbe had been wounded, but Colonel Drew led forward his gallant youngsters of the 8th, and after toilsome climbing they entered the Afghan position, which its defenders had just abandoned, leaving many dead, eighteen guns, and a vast accumulation of stores and ammunition. Colonel H. Gough pursued with his cavalry, and possessed himself of several more guns which the Afghans had relinquished in their precipitate flight. The decisive success of the Peiwar Kotul combat had not cost heavily; the British losses were twenty-one killed and seventy-two wounded.

His sick and wounded sent back to Fort Kuram, General Roberts advanced to Ali Khel, and thence made a reconnaissance forward to the Shutargurdan Pass, whose summit is distant from Cabul little more than fifty miles. Its height is great—upwards of 11,200 feet—but it was regarded as not presenting serious obstacles to the advance by this route of a force from the Kuram valley moving on Cabul. A misfortune befell the baggage guard on one of the marches in the trans-Peiwar region when Captains Goad and Powell lost their lives in a tribal onslaught. The somewhat chequered experiences of General Roberts in the Khost valley need not be told in detail. After some fighting and more marching he withdrew from that turbulent region altogether, abjuring its pestilent tribesmen and all their works. The Kuram force wintered in excellent health spite of the rigorous climate, and toward the end of March 1879 its forward concentration about Ali Kheyl was ordered, which was virtually accomplished before the snow had melted from the passes in the later weeks of April. Adequate transport had been got together and supplies accumulated; Colonel Watson's contingent was occupying the posts along the valley; and General Roberts was in full readiness promptly to obey the orders to advance which he had been led to expect, and on which his brother-general Sir Sam Browne had already acted to some extent.

The march on Candahar of the two divisions under the command of General Stewart had the character, for the most part, of a military promenade. The tramp across the deserts of Northern Beloochistan was arduous; the Bolan, the Gwaga, and the Kojuk passes had to be surmounted, and the distances which both Biddulph and Stewart had to traverse were immensely in excess of those covered by either of the forces operating from the north-western frontier line. But uneventful marches, however long and toilsome, do not call for detailed description. Stewart rode into Candahar on January 8th, 1879, and the troops as they arrived encamped on the adjacent plain. The Governor and most of his officials, together with the Afghan cavalry, had fled toward Herat; the Deputy-Governor remained to hand over the city to General Stewart. For commissariat reasons one division under Stewart presently moved by the Cabul road on Khelat-i-Ghilzai, which was found empty, the Afghan garrison having evacuated it. Simultaneously with Stewart's departure from Candahar Biddulph marched out a column westward toward the Helmund, remaining in that region until the third week in February. On its return march to Candahar the rear-guard had a sharp skirmish at Khushk-i-Nakhud with Alizai tribesmen, of whom 163 were left dead on the field. Soon after the return of Stewart and Biddulph to Candahar, orders arrived that the former should retain in Candahar, Quetta, and Pishin a strong division of all arms, sending back to India the remainder of his command under Biddulph—the march to be made by the previously unexplored Thal-Chotiali route to the eastward of the Pisheen valley.

Before Sir Sam Browne moved forward from Jellalabad to Gundamuk he had been able to report to the Viceroy the death of Shere Ali. That unfortunate man had seen with despair the departure on December 10th of the last Russian from Cabul—sure token that he need hope for nothing from Kaufmann or the Tzar. His chiefs unanimous that further resistance by him was hopeless, he released his son Yakoub Khan from his long harsh imprisonment, constituted him Regent, and then followed the Russian mission in the direction of Tashkend. Kaufmann would not so much as allow him to cross the frontier, and after a painful illness Shere Ali died on February 21st, 1879, near Balkh in northern Afghanistan. He was a man who deserved a better fate than that which befell him. His aspiration was to maintain the independence of the kingdom which he ruled with justice if also with masterfulness, and he could not brook the degradation of subjection. But, unfortunately for him, he was the 'earthen pipkin' which the 'iron pot' found inconvenient. There had been plenty of manhood originally in his son and successor Yakoub Khan, but much of that attribute had withered in him during the long cruel imprisonment to which he had been subjected by his father. Shere Ali's death made him nominal master of Afghanistan, but the vigour of his youth-time no longer characterised him. He reigned but did not rule, and how precarious was his position was evidenced by the defection of many leading chiefs who came into the English camps and were ready to make terms.

After the flight of Shere Ali some correspondence had passed between Yakoub Khan and Major Cavagnari, but the former had not expressed any willingness for the re-establishment of friendly relations. In February of his own accord he made overtures for a reconciliation, and soon after intimated the death of his father and his own accession to the Afghan throne. Major Cavagnari, acting on the Viceroy's authorisation, wrote to the new sovereign stating the terms on which the Anglo-Indian Government was prepared to engage in negotiations for peace. Yakoub temporised for some time, but influenced by the growing defection of the Sirdars from his cause, as well as by the forward movements of the forces commanded by Browne and Roberts, he intimated his intention of visiting Gundamuk in order to discuss matters in personal conference with Major Cavagnari. A fortnight later he was on his way down the passes.

Instructions had been given by the Viceroy that Yakoub Khan should be received in the British camp with all honour and distinction. When his approach was announced on May 8th, Cavagnari and a number of British officers rode out to meet him; when he reached the camp, a royal salute greeted him, a guard of honour presented arms, and Sir Sam Browne and his staff gave him a ceremonious welcome. Cavagnari had full powers to represent his Government in the pending negotiations, as to the terms of which he had received from the Viceroy detailed instructions. The Ameer and his General-in-Chief, Daoud Shah, came to the conference attired in Russian uniforms. The negotiations were tedious, for the Ameer, his Minister, and his General made difficulties with a somewhat elaborate stupidity, but Cavagnari as a diplomatist possessed the gift of being at once patient and firm; and at length on May 26th the treaty of peace was signed, and formally ratified by the Viceroy four days later. By the treaty of Gundamuk Afghanistan was deprived for the time of its traditional character of a 'buffer state,' and its Ameer became virtually a feudatory of the British Crown. He was no longer an independent prince; although his titular rank and a nominal sovereignty remained to him, his position under its articles was to be analogous to that of the mediatised princes of the German Empire. The treaty vested in the British Government the control of the external relations of Afghanistan. The Ameer consented to the residence of British Agents within his dominions, guaranteeing their safety and honourable treatment, while the British Government undertook that its representatives should not interfere with the internal administration of the country. The districts of Pisheen, Kuram, and Sibi were ceded to the British Government along with the permanent control of the Khyber and Michnai passes, and of the mountain tribes inhabiting the vicinity of those passes; all other Afghan territory in British occupation was to be restored. The obligations to which the treaty committed the British Government were that it should support the Ameer against foreign aggression with arms, money, or troops at its discretion, and that it should pay to him and his successor an annual subsidy of £60,000. Commercial relations between India and Afghanistan were to be protected and encouraged; a telegraph line between Cabul and the Kuram was forthwith to be constructed; and the Ameer was to proclaim an amnesty relieving all and sundry of his subjects from punishment for services rendered to the British during the war.

That the treaty of Gundamuk involved our Indian Empire in serious responsibilities is obvious, and those responsibilities were the more serious that they were vague and indefinite, yet none the less binding on this account. It is probable that its provisions, if they had remained in force, would have been found in the long run injurious to the interests of British India. For that realm Afghanistan has the value that its ruggedness presents exceptional obstacles to the march through it of hostile armies having the Indian frontier for their objective, and this further and yet more important value that the Afghans by nature are frank and impartial Ishmaelites, their hands against all foreigners alike, no matter of what nationality. If this character be impaired, what virtue the Afghan has in our eyes is lost. In his implacable passion for independence, in his fierce intolerance of the Feringhee intruder, he fulfils in relation to our Indian frontier a kindred office to that served by abattis, cheveux de frise, and wire entanglements in front of a military position. The short-lived treaty, for which the sanguine Mr Stanhope claimed that it had gained for England 'a friendly, an independent, and a strong Afghanistan,' may now be chiefly remembered because of the circumstance that it gave effect for the moment to Lord Beaconsfield's 'scientific frontier.'

The withdrawal of the two northern forces to positions within the new frontier began immediately on the ratification of the treaty of Gundamuk, the evacuation of Candahar being postponed for sanitary reasons until autumn. The march of Sir Sam Browne's force from the breezy upland of Gundamuk down the passes to Peshawur, made as it was in the fierce heat of midsummer through a region of bad name for insalubrity, and pervaded also by virulent cholera, was a ghastly journey. That melancholy pilgrimage, every halting-place in whose course was marked by graves, and from which the living emerged 'gaunt and haggard, marching with a listless air, their clothing stiff with dried perspiration, their faces thick with a mud of dust and sweat through which their red bloodshot eyes looked forth, many suffering from heat prostration,' dwells in the memory of British India as the 'death march,' and its horrors have been recounted in vivid and pathetic words by Surgeon-Major Evatt, one of the few medical officers whom, participating in it, it did not kill.