counting one's own life as a feather in the scales, to strike hard and
bold whatever the odds,--such are a few simple soldier lessons, learnt
not from the scribes, but from a gallant British subaltern.

* * * * *

While Lieutenant Lumsden was in England in 1853 the command of the
Guides was given to Lieutenant W.S.R. Hodson. This book would not be
complete without relating the story of at any rate one of the many
occasions on which this gallant officer, afterwards so famous, showed
his fine metal. The fight about to be described was one, too, in which
the many brave and devoted officers who have been surgeons to the corps
have displayed the greatest gallantry.

For high crimes and misdemeanours it was decided to punish the large and
important cluster of villages named Bori, in the land of the Jowaki
Afridis, not far from the present military station of Cherat. A brigade
of all arms, consisting of the 22nd Foot, 20th Punjab Infantry, 66th
Gurkhas (now the 1st Gurkha Rifles), the Corps of Guides, a squadron of
Irregular Cavalry, some 9-pounder guns on elephants, and a company of
Sappers, the whole under Colonel S.B. Boileau, was detailed for the
undertaking. The Bori villages lay in the valley of the same name
enclosed by high and rugged mountains, making both ingress and egress in
face of practised mountaineers a most difficult operation.

The advance was led by the Guides, who, themselves active as panthers in
the hills, drove the Afridis before them through the Bori villages and
up the precipitous mountains behind. The main body then set to work to
burn and destroy the villages with all the food and fodder therein, and
to drive off the cattle. So far, as is often the case in fighting these