It was a retreat, not a rout. The brave fighters of the greatest rearguard action in history, in the present war, may well call to mind that rearguard action on a small scale, when our troops were, so to speak, pursued by defeat, fighting against it all the way. At last they fell in with Captain Cowley, in command of a small band, and, joining forces with him, they made their way to Lakhpur.
Meanwhile, General Graham, with half a battalion of the King's Royal Rifles, No. 2 Mountain Battery R.A.; two battalions 4th Gurkhas and 12th Madras Infantry, and two guns, set out from Burma to the rescue of the battered but not beaten troops. General Collett, commanding a column, also made in all haste for Lakhpur. On the arrival of these two contingents the city was speedily taken. But--and here is the pity--before they could get to Manipur, the officers above mentioned, treacherously taken, were treacherously massacred.
In the relief of Chitral a number of native regiments took part. In the spring of 1895 Britain was suddenly called to attention by the news, flashed along the cables, that hell had broken loose in Chitral. This probably meant that a few British officers, with a small band of Sikhs and other native troops, were in a most dangerous position in the capital of that state. The probability soon became a certainty, and great alarm was felt as to their safety. The next piece of bad news was that the British were hemmed up in a small fort, and, in that desperate position, were defending it against fearful odds, beating off wild hordes of tribesmen, and fighting, in grim despair, against the clock, hoping that time might bring succour and relief. And the jeopardy of this situation was not lessened by the fresh news that two little sections of the British army from Gilgit had to scale mountains more rugged than the Alps before penetrating into the lowlands of Chitral to the relief of the little garrison.
After news of an engagement on March 7th no tidings were received from Chitral Fort. Meanwhile came the official report of the defeat of Captain Goss at Mastuj, he and fifty-six men having been killed--fifty-six out of a total of seventy-one. This, with the death-like silence of Chitral, was appalling; and immediately Major-General Sir Robert Low was ordered to mobilise on the frontier of the enemy's territory, and Colonel Kelly, commanding the 32nd Pioneers in the Gilgit district, was given _carte blanche_ to plan the relief of Chitral in whatever way might seem best to him.