and how they are the heroes
of so many a frontier epic. A Sikh soldier is always ready to talk on
religious matters, and delights in singing the beautiful theistic hymns
of Kabir and Nanak and others of his countrymen; and they will sit
round untiringly, listening with unflagging interest for hours, while
I talk or read to them from the Christian Scriptures. In the frontier
war of 1897 no Sikh regiment covered itself with greater glory than the
36th, which was quartered at Fort Lockhart when the Afridi rising first
broke out. I was in camp on the Samana Range, outside Fort Lockhart,
that August just before the outbreak, and these fine soldiers used
to sit round me on the rocks outside the fort while we talked of the
teachings of our Lord Jesus Christ, and of those of Guru Nanak, which
present so many points of resemblance to them. A few weeks later,
and many of those very men had died fighting bravely on the rugged
mountains and defiles of Tirah, on which we were then looking down.

One incident will bear repetition, as possibly some of the very men
to whom I was then speaking were the heroes of it. A few hundred yards
from Fort Lockhart is a small fort called Saraghari, which commands one
of the eminences of the Samana Range. This was occupied by a handful
of these Sikhs under a native officer. Looking down westward from the
Samana Range are the terraced valleys and a labyrinth of the rugged
mountain ranges of the Afridis; and so suddenly did these tribes
respond to the tocsin of war when Seyyid Akbar and his associate
Mullahs sounded it all through Tirah that the various forts on the
Samana were surrounded by the lashkars before it was possible to
reinforce or withdraw the little garrison of Saraghari. The garrisons
of Forts Lockhart and Gulistan had, in fact, their hands full with the
tribesmen who had entrenched themselves in sangars all around, from
which they kept up such a fire that no one could show himself. The
Afridis saw that the post of Saraghari was the most easily won; the
fort itself was smaller and less strongly built, and contained only
a small garrison of their hereditary enemies, the Sikhs.

There was a signaller in the little garrison, and he signalled over
their dire straits to Fort Lockhart, but from there the answer was
returned to them that it was impossible to send reinforcements--they
must fight to the end. For them to retreat was impossible, for the few
hundred yards between the two forts was