The campaign brought honours and promotion to many, but for me it had nothing

but misfortune and disaster. I was removed from my brigade and attached to the

Berkshires, with whom I served at the fatal battle of Maiwand. There I was

struck on the shoulder by a Jezail bullet, which shattered the bone and grazed

the subclavian artery. I should have fallen into the hands of the murderous

Ghazis had it not been for the devotion and courage shown by Murray, my orderly,

who threw me across a pack-horse, and succeeded in bringing me safely to the

British lines.

 

Worn with pain, and weak from the prolonged hardships which I had undergone, I

was removed, with a great train of wounded sufferers, to the base hospital at

Peshawar. Here I rallied, and had already improved so far as to be able to walk

about the wards, and even to bask a little upon the verandah, when I was struck

down by enteric fever, that curse of our Indian possessions. For months my life

was despaired of, and when at last I came to myself and became convalescent, I

was so weak and emaciated that a medical board determined that not a day should

be lost in sending me back to England. I was dispatched, accordingly, in the

troopship “Orontes,” and landed a month later on Portsmouth jetty, with my

health irretrievably ruined, but with permission from a paternal government to

spend the next nine months in attempting to improve it.

 

I had neither kith nor kin in England, and was therefore as free as air—or as

free as an income of eleven shillings and sixpence a day will permit a man to

be. Under such circumstances, I naturally gravitated to London, that great