The Sepoy and the Cossack

From the sultry plains of India to the frozen peaks of Afghanistan, from the 18th to the 20th century, the British fought the Russian menace like a boxer his shadow. Lured eastward by the exotic niches of India and the promise of trade, England sought to protect the newest jewel in the Empire's crown by invading Afghanistan. For there, on the other side of the Hindu Kush, were the hated Russians. So began more than a century of struggle against an almost invisible enemy, more rumoured than real: a bloody, inept, mismanaged, and ineffectual was that drained the Crown's treasury more than its manpower. And in this game of military musical chairs neither the Sepoy nor the Cossack knew what to do sf the music stopped and one of them actually conquered the Afghans ! For when the two enemies finally met face to face at Penjdeh, each retreated — leaving Afghanistan more or lass to fend for herself, white they joined forces against Bismarck in Germany. Pierce Fredericks draws trenchant, often devastating portraits of the heroes and misfits of a blighted struggle: shahs and maharajahs, princes and politicians, murderers, marauders, and mutineers: the English blue-bloods, supping elegantly in their tents miles from the front, some too portly to sit aside a horse; the Russian generals, a bloodthirsty lot, as puzzled as some British about what they were fighting for; and the ill-equipped, exhausted, unpaid Army of the Indus, which, as it crept on camelback “at a snail's gallop” through tortuous passes in sub-zero weather, looked more as if it were retreating after a disaster than advancing as 2 conquering foe. Here is all the pomp and circumstance of the famous regiments marching to do battle against the bejewelled and often savage rulers of the Orient. Here are the Russians battling the Turkomans; the British battling the Sikhs; the Afghans in vendettas against each other; and the mountain tribesmen massacring invaders from both camps — in a military merry-go-round that spun for decades and accomplished very little. “The Sepoy and the Cossack” is at once a grand and glorious military history, scrupulous in detail, and studded with such luminaries as Lytton, Lawrence, and Chamberlain, and an ironic portrait of a war that never was.