The Campaigns in Retrospect
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| Private of the Grenadier Company, 31st Regiment. (Click to enlarge) |
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| Corporal, Light Company 2nd or Queen's. c1839, (Khelat). (Click to enlarge) |
There is today a church in Bombay, the church of St John the Evangelist, which was a spiritual home for the Bombay Army, and for all who made it a modern city and a safer place to trade. It was known to many who served there as the Afghan church. It was completed in 1857 as a memorial “to the officers whose names are written on the walls of the chancel, and to the non-commissioned officers and private soldiers too many to be recorded, who fell, mindful of their duty, by sickness or by the sword, in the campaigns in Sind and Afghanistan - AD1838 - 1843” The names on the memorial include officers from the Queen’s and the 31st Regiments.
Both campaigns were exceptionally arduous. Both regiments served with distinction in conditions which tested them to the full, at least comparable to those in the Peninsula War in Portugal and Spain which caused a distinguished modern historian, Sir Arthur Bryant, to write: “Pride in the continuing regiment - the personal individual loyalty which each private felt towards his corps - gave to the British soldier a moral strength which the student and administrator ought never to underestimate. It enabled him to stand firm and fight forward when men without it, however brave, would have failed. To let down the regiment, to be unworthy of the men of old who had marched under the same colours, to be untrue to the comrades who had shared the same loyalties, hardships and perils were things that the least-tutored, humblest soldier would not do. Through the dusty, tattered ranks the spirit of companionship ran like a golden thread.”
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