Page:Our Indian Army.djvu/569

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OUR ANGLO-INDIAN ARMY.
545

them sustained injury, excepting Lady Sale, who received a ball in her arm.

"After passing through some very sharp firing," says this heroic lady in her most interesting journal, "we came upon Major Thain's horse, which had been shot through the loins. When we were supposed to be in comparative safety, poor Sturt[1] rode back (to see after Thain, I believe): his horse was shot under him, and before he could rise from the ground he received a severe wound in the abdomen. It was with great difficulty he was held upon a pony by two people, and brought into camp at Khoord Cabul. The pony Mrs. Sturt rode on was wounded in the ear and neck. I had fortunately only one ball in my arm; three others passed through my poshteen near the shoulder without doing me any injury. The party that fired on us were not above fifty yards from us, and we owed our escape to urging our horses on as fast as they could go over a road where, at any other time, we should have walked our horses very carefully."

Akbar Khan, it will be remembered, had promised protection, and several of his adherents rode forward with the advance, exhorting the occupants of the heights to desist from firing. But their admonitions were unheeded; the balls fell thickly among the throng laboriously struggling onwards, and fearful was the slaughter. "To maintain," says our excellent historian,[2] "order and regularity under a murderous fire, which those sustaining it have no power to return with effect, may be regarded as one of the highest triumphs of discipline; but the force exposed to this severe trial in the Pass of Boothauk had become dreadfully deteriorated in moral as in physical strength; and it will excite no surprise that among men who for several days had been strangers to both food and repose, and who, for a much longer period, had been gradually losing the sense of duty, and with it that of self-respect, panic should arise, and spread with

  1. Lieutenant Sturt, of the Engineers, her son-in-law.
  2. Thornton. "History of British India."