GREEN
Beyond the North-West Frontier of British India lay Afghanistan: mountain kingdom, strategic barrier and one of the great contested spaces of the nineteenth-century struggle later remembered as the Great Game. Into that country went the Kabul Field Force under Sir Frederick Roberts. Joshua Duke went with it.
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Joshua Duke, 1847–1920, entered the Bengal Medical Service and spent much of his professional life within India and its frontier regions, later holding appointments in Central India and Kashmir. After retirement in 1902 he returned once more to medical service during the First World War, serving again between 1914 and 1917.
His writings extended beyond military recollection into questions of diet, cholera, snakebite and other practical problems encountered during a long medical career in India, yet it was the Afghan campaign of 1879–1880 that furnished the experience from which his most enduring book arose.
Duke began working from his notes in 1881 at Gilgit, close to the extreme northern marches of British India, and completed the manuscript after his return to Amritsar. A privately printed version appeared in 1882; Sir Frederick Roberts annotated a copy, and a number of those observations were incorporated into the London edition issued by W. H. Allen in 1883.
The recollections were therefore written while the campaign was still close enough for its ground to remain more than geography and its dead more than names upon monuments.
The surgeon occupies a singular place within an army: he belongs wholly to the force, moves with its columns, shares its risks and depends upon its military success, yet those who arrive before him wounded continually strip the language of campaigning back to physical fact.
The volume stands beneath the memory of Lieutenant-Colonel Francis Brownlow, C.B., commanding the 72nd (Duke of Albany’s Own Highlanders) Regiment of Foot, killed at Kandahar, and Brevet-Major John Cook, V.C., of the 5th Goorkha Regiment, mortally wounded during the fighting before Kabul. Duke remembered both men as companions taken by the campaign.
