About the Author
George Robert Gleig was born at Stirling on 20 April 1796 into a clerical family, but his own early life took a decidedly martial course. After study at Glasgow and Balliol College, Oxford, he abandoned his academic prospects for the Army and entered the 85th Light Infantry, serving during the closing period of the wars against Napoleon and subsequently in the British campaign in North America. He saw active service under Wellington’s military generation and was wounded during the American War.
That experience permanently marked his writing.
Although Gleig later returned to Oxford, took holy orders and pursued a long ecclesiastical career, he never became an armchair military historian. He knew the march, the camp, the strain of campaigning and the habits of soldiers from personal experience. His later appointments included Chaplain-General to the Forces and Inspector-General of Military Schools, while his writings ranged widely across British military and imperial history.
Among his works were accounts of the British campaigns at Washington and New Orleans, studies of Waterloo and Wellington, histories of India and biographies of major imperial figures. Sale’s Brigade in Afghanistan, published by John Murray in London in 1846, belonged naturally within that larger military vocation. The first edition comprised ix + 182 pages and formed part of Murray’s Colonial and Home Library.
Gleig had not himself served in Afghanistan, and he made no pretence of having done so. His authority rested instead upon the evidence he assembled. In his Advertisement he explained that the narrative was drawn chiefly from the manuscript journals of officers engaged in the campaign; he also consulted the Orderly Books of the 13th and drew information from officers personally connected with the events.
This gives the book its particular character.
It is a military narrative written by a combat veteran about a campaign he reconstructed from the records and testimony of other soldiers. Gleig understood the meaning of orders, rear guards, marches, fatigue, fortification and discipline because these were not abstractions to him. His prose consequently moves with an old soldier’s instinct for the practical structure of campaigning.
At the time of publication Sir Robert Sale was already dead.
He had fallen at Moodkee in December 1845 during the First Sikh War, again serving with the Army and again at the front. Gleig closed his preliminary remarks with the knowledge that the commander whose deeds he had gathered could neither approve nor correct the finished narrative.
Yet, as Gleig wrote, “his fame survives him.”
Few episodes justified the phrase more completely than Jellalabad.