Transcriber’s Note:
The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
FROM
THE BLACK MOUNTAIN TO WAZIRISTAN
BEING AN ACCOUNT OF THE BORDER COUNTRIES AND THE MORE TURBULENT OF THE TRIBES CONTROLLED BY THE NORTH-WEST FRONTIER PROVINCE, AND OF OUR MILITARY RELATIONS WITH THEM IN THE PAST
PREFACE
This book is the outcome of my own experience ofthe want of something of the kind in the earlyautumn of 1897, when the Second Battalion of myold Corps, the Sherwood Foresters, Nottinghamshireand Derbyshire Regiment, then serving at Bareilly,was ordered to join the Tirah Expeditionary Force.The Battalion had then been in India for nearlyfifteen years, but only one or two of the officers, andnone of the other ranks, had ever been west of theIndus, and few of us therefore knew anything ofthe wild men against whom we were to fight, or ofthe equally wild country in which the operationswere to be conducted.
The fault for such ignorance cannot fairly be saidto have been ours. There was at that time no singlebook, generally procurable and of an up-to-datecharacter, describing the country immediately beyondthe North-West border, the men who inhabited it, andthe campaigns which, since the decline of the Sikhpower, have there become our natural and ourtroublous inheritance. Paget and Mason’s monumentalwork, Expeditions against the North-WestFrontier Tribes, published in 1885, was whollyadmirable, but much of it was ancient history; it wasviiian enormous volume; it had for long been “confidential,”and had never been placed on general sale.Mr. Oliver’s most fascinating book, Across the Border,or Pathan and Biluch, had been published in 1890,but