Armies of the Raj

by Byron Farwell

Highlights of British rule in India and of the Great Indian Army from 1858, when the 300-year-old Honorable East India Company--a commercial enterprise that literally commanded an army in India--was absorbed into the Empire and passed into the care of Her Majesty's Government, until the last British troops departed in 1948 following Independence. Farwell (The Great War in Africa, The Great Anglo-Boer War, Eminent Victorian Soldiers, etc.) has a rousing sense of military history, the kind often parodied in British films like Four Feathers, where old Army officers begin laying out campaigns and troop deployments with saltcellars, walnuts, and napkin rings on the dinner table. Typically, we read here about the Third Afghan War of 1919, during which Brigadier-General Dyer, ""although tired and ill, pumped new life into his brigade and under a blistering sun, with forced marches on little food and water. . .pushed his own men forward to rescue Thal and send the Afghans flying homeward."" An