After the garrison of the first of the chain of forts strung along the Khyber Pass had been massacred to a man the remaining tribal levies declared themselves for Said Akbar. The Afridi lashkars then advanced unopposed to Fort Jamrud, the great fortress which sprawls rather than stands at the mouth of the Khyber – whereupon the entire country of Tirah to the south rose in support, bringing with them another forty to fifty thousand fighting men of the Orakzai and southern Afridi tribes.
The authorities responded with alacrity, and in strength. ‘Never had our frontier prestige been so menaced,’ wrote Woosnam Mills:
Never had our authority been so daringly set aside. Plunder and rapine ravaged from Ali Masjid to Landi Kotal. Insane exultancy prevailed among the frontiersmen… Can we be surprised if the Pathan, with his inordinate vanity and religious fanaticism, imagined that the Mussulman millennium was near at hand, that the days of the British Raj were numbered, and that the ‘people of God’ were once more to come into their inheritance and rule in the land of Hindustan as Conquerors.
The Tirah Expeditionary Force was the largest army raised in India since the dark days of the Indian Mutiny, made up of forty thousand fighting men. Commanded by General Sir William Lockhart, who had three decades of frontier campaigning under his Sam Browne belt, it became the first foreign army to break the purdah of Tirah, the wild country abutting the Safed Koh range (today a sanctuary for Osama bin Laden’s ‘Arabs’). This was hostile territory with a vengeance, ‘only to be approached by perilous passes and dark ravines, and only to be traversed via a network of rocky fastnesses, wooded heights, rushing torrents and dangerous defiles – a country, in short, abounding in natural defensive advantages, and full of risks to the invader, hampered as he must be, by an immense transport train, carrying supplies, baggage, hospitals, ammunition, and so forth.’
Lockhart’s strategy was straightforward: to enter the Orakzai country from the south and then strike north to reach ‘the hub and heart of the Afridi nation… in three or four easy marches’ before pushing on to reclaim the Khyber Pass. By attacking from the south he hoped to prevent the uprising spreading to Waziristan, where Mullah Powindah of the Mahsuds was already doing his best to foment jihad.
On 18 October Lockhart began his campaign with a frontal assault by the Gordon Highlanders to take the commanding heights of a five-thousand-foot ridge called Dargai. The attack was only lightly opposed and the heights were taken. The position was found to be well-nigh impregnable, consisting as it did of a series of cliffs running along both sides of an extended ridge that could only be approached across open ground offering very little cover. Yet no sooner had the Gordons taken Dargai Heights than they were withdrawn, on the grounds that insufficient supplies had been brought up to allow the position to be held. By the time the delayed supplies had arrived the ridge had been reoccupied by the Afridis, this time in strength. ‘There can be little doubt,’ commented the correspondent of The Civil and Military Gazette, ‘that the tribesmen looked upon our abandonment of Dargai – the impregnability of which they fully realised – as, to say the very least of it, a great tactical mistake… The tribesmen attributed the abandonment of Dargai by our troops to the prayers of their holy men.’ Fifteen standards were counted, suggesting that the ridge was now manned by between two and two and a half thousand men. To make matters worse, many of the enemy bore modern rifled weapons in the form of breech-loading Sniders, muzzle-loading Enfields and a number of the British troops’ own Lee-Metfords, captured or stolen.
Dargai Heights had to be retaken before the expedition could advance deeper into the Tirah country, and its retaking became, in the words of Woosnam Mills, the ‘high water-mark of British courage before the foe’. It also gave rise to a great deal of bitterness among the troops: ‘Not only were grave charges preferred of blundering and causing unnecessary loss of life, but a spirit of ill-feeling, created by invidious comparisons, was aroused in the breasts of the troops who fought that day.’
On the afternoon of 20 October a series of frontal assaults was launched, each preceded by as fierce a barrage as General Lockhart’s nineteen mountain guns could muster. ‘What appeared to the observer,’ wrote Mills, ‘was an inaccessible cliff whose top rose five hundred yards away in front… The enemy had constructed tiers of stone galleries, some of them four feet thick and proof against the seven-pounder shell from the mountain batteries. Any advance being attempted, the whole side of the cliff for a width of three hundred yards smoked and vomited forth a terrific storm of bullets.’ Four assaults were launched, the first two by riflemen of the 1st battalion of the 2nd Gurkha Rifles. Each wave was caught by concentrated fire as it tried to cross the open ground below the cliffs, to be beaten back or broken into small groups of men pinned down behind whatever scant cover they could find. Those who followed could do no better: ‘There was an indescribable confusion…Two companies of the Dorsets and Derbyshires attempted to cross and were also torn apart, then the 3rd Sikhs, who made more magnificently courageous but per-fectly useless attempts to cross the zone of fire… Nothing but a wonderful effort could save the situation.’
The Gordon Highlanders, held in reserve, were now called up to repeat their exercise of two days earlier. Once they were in position their commanding officer, Colonel Mathias, stepped forward, ordered his men to charge magazines and fix bayonets, and then addressed them in a ‘loud, clear voice: “Men of the Gordon Highlanders, listen to me. The General says this position must be taken at all hazards, and we will take it in front of the whole division.”’ After a four-minute barrage the field guns stopped firing and there was a moment of silence: ‘“Are you ready?” again rang the voice of Colonel Mathias, and a mad, wild cheer, bred of the courage which lies deep in the hearts of men, was the response. “Come on,” shouted the Colonel. Then the pipers skirled the regimental war song, “and with the lilt of a big parade” the gay Gordons stepped forth.’
The Gordons advanced to the sound of the Haughs o’ Cromdale, memorably played by Piper Findlater, who earned one of the two Victoria Crosses awarded for this action by playing on with both his legs shot through. Those who survived the first hundred yards of open ground now found themselves crammed behind a low wall of rock with survivors from the earlier charges. Colonel Mathias then waved his cork helmet and again called his men forward:
The effect was magicaclass="underline" as if by resurrection the whole space seemed alive, and a great wave of men – Highlanders, Gurkhas, Dorsets, Sikhs, and Derbyshires – came headlong over the crest. From this moment the fire of the enemy, which had been intense, slackened… A mere breathing space under the last cover – just time to brace up the muscles anew – and the mixed band of warriors again moved out to the final assault.
The battle of Dargai Heights occupies a special place in the annals of the scores of North-West Frontier campaigns that took place between 1846, when the Guides were formed, and 1947, when the British finally left India. It reversed the usual norms, by which it was the tribesmen who charged and who took the heaviest casualties. In this instance the Afridi defenders withdrew along the ridge during the last phase of the attack, taking their few dead and wounded with them. By contrast, their attackers suffered more than two hundred casualties, including four British officers, fifteen British NCOs and private soldiers, and twenty Gurkhas killed. Dargai also cemented an ‘auld alliance’ between the Gurkhas and the Highlanders stretching back to Delhi Ridge and the Second Afghan War: the men of the Gordons helping the Gurkhas bring down their dead and wounded and the Gurkhas reciprocating by putting up the Gordons’ tents when they returned late to camp. As Rudyard Kipling’s Mulvaney puts it, ‘Scotchies and the Gurkys are twins’.