Memoirs : with a full account of the great malaria problem and its solution / by Ronald Ross.

  • Ronald Ross
Date:
1923
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Memoirs : with a full account of the great malaria problem and its solution / by Ronald Ross. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    destroying the whole army except a few who escaped on camels. This action was known as that of Churpura. At one spot the mutineers attempted a stand ; when Tytler took their guns and was dangerously wounded as described, while all the officers experienced hand-to-hand fighting, and my father broke his Wilkinson sword in a big mutineer, whose sword he took leave to keep in exchange. The Colonel gained his Companionship of the Bath, my father was made a Brevet Major, and Tytler was given the Victoria Cross. The other body of mutineers melted away when it heard the news, and in May Sir Colin Campbell recaptured Bareilly. The action had saved the hill-stations, where so many of our women, children, and sick had taken refuge. We suffered about forty casualties ; but the enemy lost heavily from the Gurkhas’ kukris (short, broad, curved scimitars kept as sharp as razors); and my father used always to tell that he saw the body of a natch girl cut absolutely in half at the waist by a single stroke of a kukri in the night charge. After the Mutiny, in 1861, my father, though only a Major, was given command of that fine new regiment the Ferozepur Sikhs (afterwards the 14th Sikhs) ; and in 1863 his corps was employed in the Ambeyla Campaign, in the mountains near Peshawur, on the North-West Frontier. He described the details of the campaign in a most interesting series of almost daily letters to my mother. The force collected at Nowa Killa, near Peshawur, in October 1863, and by 1 November began to occupy the Ambeyla (or Umbeyla) Pass. The tribes¬ men were slow in collecting, but attacked first on the 30th, and then very seriously on Friday, 13 November. My father’s account of the affair is the following : “I, as senior officer, have the command of the advanced pickets, Key’s, Brownlow’s, and my own corps. One of these pickets is on a high crag overlooking camp. I put Brownlow into it with the whole of his regiment, and 30 of mine, and the 25 [? 15] European marksmen. They were attacked incessantly all night long by the enemy, but beat them off. This morning the enemy attacked the whole of our pickets in great numbers, especially two very low down the hills and detached. As the firing got smart down there I considered it my duty to go down there and found the picket hotly engaged. When the firing slackened a little I returned, and on reaching the foot of camp you may imagine my horror to see the top
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