The Dark Defile by Diana Preston Page A

had done at Bemaru in late 1841—and drove their soldiers back to Kandahar with nearly one thousand killed. 32 According to Afghan folklore, at the height of the battle a young Pushtun woman urged on the troops, waving her veil as a standard. “ Young love, if you are martyred in the battle of Maiwand, I will make a coffin for you from the tresses of my hair. [If you do not fall] by God someone is saving you as a token of shame. ” The Pushtun woman’s story and slogan are reportedly still being used by the Taliban to encourage their fighters.
    Kandahar prepared for a siege. As soon as Roberts in Kabul heard the news from Maiwand, he hastily put together a force of ten thousand men. Leaving behind all wheeled artillery and heavy baggage for the sake of speed, he marched the troops over three hundred miles to Kandahar in just under three weeks in the blistering summer heat. The day after he arrived, he attacked the Afghan forces. With Gurkhas and Highlanders again to the fore, Roberts and his men routed their enemy, who fled, abandoning their camp.
    In response to Prime Minister Gladstone’s command, before 1880 had ended the British army was withdrawing from Afghanistan. The only tangible benefits of their expenditure of many lives and much treasure were the installation of an emir more friendly on the surface to the British and the securing of the control of the key passes into Afghanistan from the south and east.
    BRITAIN CONTINUED TO see Russia as a threat to its Indian empire. In 1885, the year Gladstone lost office, a crisis over the Panjdeh oases on the far northwestern border of Afghanistan almost led to war—so much so that the British stationery office, planning ahead, had already printed documents declaring war before both sides pulled back from the brink. In the aftermath, the British and Russians recognized the need to delineate the boundary between Afghanistan and the Russian-held or influenced territories. After some haggling a border was agreed. In the far northeast where the Russians had been pressing forward in the Wakhan, a thin sliver of land was handed to Afghanistan to prevent the Russian border anywhere abutting that of British India.
    The British also persuaded the emir to agree to a boundary commission to fix the frontier between British India and Afghanistan. The task was given to Sir Mortimer Durand, the son of Henry Durand, the hero of Ghazni. The line he drew split in two many of the tribal areas such as Waziristan. Though the principles were agreed between the two sides centrally, the surveyors who went into the border areas to fix the boundaries on the ground met a great deal of hostility and often came under attack. This unrest built up over the next few years into a series of major conflicts with the frontier tribes, who besieged outlying British forts and attacked supply columns in Chitral, Tirah, Waziristan and the Swat Valley.
    Winston Churchill , on leave from his regiment to act as a war correspondent, observed through a German-manufactured telescope one initially unsuccessful British attack on a hilltop position in the Mamund Valley. As the soldiers rose from the shelter of the rocks behind which they had been firing, an officer spun around and fell, his face covered with blood. Two of the men ran to help him. “A soldier who had continued firing sprang into the air and falling began to bleed with strange and terrible rapidity from his mouth and chest. Another turned on his back, kicking and twisting.” Others began to pull the injured away, “dragging them roughly over the sharp rocks in spite of their screams and groans.” Another officer was immediately shot. Several Sikhs ran forward to help him. Suddenly, a mob of “howling” Afghans emerged over the crest of the hill thirty yards away and “charged sword in hand, hurling great stones.” Those carrying them dropped one officer and two wounded sepoys. “The officer’s body sprawled upon the ground. A tall man in dirty