On 27 July 1880 a British and Indian brigade under Brigadier-General Burrows, sent out from Kandahar to stop the Afghan claimant Ayub Khan, ran into his far larger army on the plain of Maiwand. After hours of fighting the brigade's line broke, and the survivors retreated in disorder to Kandahar, which Ayub Khan then besieged. The 66th (Berkshire) Regiment lost its colonel and its colors, and a last handful of its men died fighting back to back in a walled garden.
A rival from Herat
British and Indian troops had invaded Afghanistan in November 1878, and after the British envoy and his escort were killed at Kabul the next year they occupied the country again. By July 1880 the British had offered the throne to a new emir, Abdur Rahman. But in Herat Ayub Khan, a son of the former emir Sher Ali, launched his own bid for the throne and marched on Kandahar. A brigade was sent out from Kandahar to intercept him. The Rifles Berkshire and Wiltshire Museum lists two regiments of Indian cavalry, two of Indian infantry, a battery of Royal Horse Artillery, a battery of smoothbore guns and six companies of the 66th Regiment under Colonel Galbraith. Reading Museum puts Burrows's strength at 2,565 men, slowed by intense heat and a baggage train of 2,500 animals.1
How many Afghans faced them is uncertain. The National Army Museum says Burrows's force was overwhelmed by an army up to ten times its size. The regimental museum gives 4,000 cavalry, 8,000 infantry and 30 guns, plus some 20,000 irregulars, many of them religious warriors called ghazis. Reading Museum's account gives Ayub Khan over 6,000 men.2
The plain of Maiwand
On the morning of 27 July the British cavalry advance guard reached the village of Mahmudabad on the plain of Maiwand, about 45 miles from Kandahar, and saw not the small force they had expected but a great army moving east toward the city. The regimental museum's account says that after several hours of desperate fighting the Afghans broke through to the rear of the British line, so that the 66th was fighting on two sides. The line gave way, and most of the brigade fled toward Kandahar in disarray.3
Colonel Galbraith rallied the survivors of the 66th in a dry watercourse and then tried to fall back on the village of Khig, where houses and garden walls offered cover; he was killed on the way, still holding the Queen's color. About a hundred men made a second stand in a walled garden. According to the museum they fought on until only two officers and nine men were left, who charged out of the garden, formed up back to back and kept firing until the last of them fell.4
Losses and memory
Reading Museum gives the regiment's dead as 328 and says that 44 per cent of the British force was killed. Kandahar was soon besieged by Ayub Khan's victorious army. The National Army Museum records that General Frederick Roberts marched a relief force from Kabul, covering more than 300 miles in 20 days, and defeated Ayub Khan outside Kandahar on 1 September 1880.5
The 66th received no official recognition. The regimental museum notes that no Victoria Crosses were awarded because no one qualified to recommend them had survived, and that no battle honor was granted for a defeat; it adds that the loss of the colors at Maiwand helped end the practice of carrying them into battle. In 1886 the people of Reading unveiled the Maiwand Lion by George Blackall Simonds in Forbury Gardens. The battle also has a place in fiction: Arthur Conan Doyle's Dr. Watson, in A Study in Scarlet, says he served with the Berkshires at the fatal battle of Maiwand and was wounded there by a jezail bullet.6
