Page:McClure's Magazine volume 10.djvu/310

whaleboats up the Nile. With their Egyptian laurels still fresh upon their brows, the first battalion of the Gordons returned to India. It was a Colin Campbell who had led them, after the storming of Delhi, to the relief of Lucknow; and now, in turn, they were called upon to hurry to the succor of another Colin Campbell, who, with other members of a British mission, was closely besieged in the old hill-fort of Chitral, among the mountains of India's north-western frontier. It was a Scotsman, Dr. (now Sir George) Robertson, who was chief of this political mission; it was another Scotsman, Sir Robert Low, who was appointed to command the expedition despatched for his relief; and the backbone of the little army, which mustered with such magnificent promptness and precision, consisted of the Gordons, the Seaforth Highlanders, and the Scottish Borderers.

Swiftly advancing from the muster-ground at Peshawur, and heading for the hills, General Low found the fierce and warlike hordes of Umra Khan crowning the entrenched mountain-brows of the Malakand Pass—a defile by which it is supposed that Alexander the Great had led his conquering legions down into the plains of India. After shelling for some time the heights occupied in such force by the fierce Pathan tribesmen, Low ordered an attack, the Gordons being on the right, and the Borderers in the center of the assaulting line.

With their pipes playing their most martial pibroch, the Brigade sprang up the mountain side, and soon reached the enemy's "sangars," or loose stone-parapets, one of which the Gordons took in flank, and bayoneted its holders. The last climb was precipitous. Lieutenant Watt, of the Gordons, was the first to top the ridge, and several Pathans rushed at him with their flashing tulwars. Two he brought down with his revolver, and then used his claymore. Inspired by his example, his men clambered and pushed each other up, and delivered a bayonet charge which practically won the day.

But, brilliant as was their storming of the Malakand Pass, the same Gordons were still to surpass themselves in their next and latest feat. With their old cattle-lifting comrades from the Scottish border, they were ordered to join the expedition with which Sir William Lockhart was sent last autumn to reduce to submission the unruly and rebellious Mohammedan tribes inhabiting the wild, mountainous region between India and Afghanistan—tribes second to no race of men in the world in respect of their martial qualities. The brave and dogged tribesmen were gradually pushed back before Lockhart's advancing battalions—British and native—until at last, after varying fortune, they determined to make a stand on the summit of the Dargai ridge of the Chagru Kotal—a hill about 1,000 feet high and crowned with precipitous rocks. From this natural fortress Lockhart resolved to drive its defenders coûte que coûte.

A battalion of Ghurkas, than whom India contains no braver men, first tried it, but failed. The Dorsetshire regiment then made a dash across the fire-zone, but the dominating fire of the Afridi rifles, which swept the unsheltered area across which the stormers had to rush before gaining the ridge, was also too much for them, and they, too, fell back. Then the men of Derbyshire essayed the murderous task, but recoiled before the deadliness of the Afridi aim. Three hours had been thus consumed, and still the standards of the fierce tribesmen waved triumphantly and defiantly on the summit of the ridge in spite of the shell fire which, at long range from an opposite height, had been rained on their position. The general sent to Colonel Mathias, commanding the Gordons, who had meanwhile pushed up to the front and were marshaled in front of the Afridi position under cover

COLONEL H. H. MATHIAS, C. B., WHO LED THE GORDONS IN THE CHARGE AT DARGAI; HE IS COLONEL OF THE FIRST BATTALION.