Preface to First Edition
Washington, D.C., 1987
The genesis of the present work was in a personal need to identify several hundred persons mentioned by two participants in the Second Afghan War whose diaries I edited for publication in the mid eighties. This task, not in every instance resolved thoroughly or accurately, was complicated by my diarists' habit of supplying surnames only. It took me the better part of a year to complete this work, and even then there remained a considerable number of unidentified people. By the time I had reached the seeming end to my ability to shed light on the remaining mysterious names, I had a file of over one thousand names inscribed on cards. Since most of the names I needed to identify were officers who had served in Afghanistan during the war, I relied heavily on the volumes of Sydney Shadbolt who published, in his history of the war, lists of all (or so I then thought) the British officers who had served with the staff, regiments, brigades, corps, and departments, of the British and Indian armies. A few men from the Other Ranks who had distinguished themselves in the prosecution of the war were also included by Shadbolt in his first volume entitled "Historical Division." But these lists are, for the most part, not in alphabetical order, and there is no index. Instead, Shadbolt recorded most (but hardly all, I later discovered) of those regiments, brigades, corps, and departments, employed in Afghanistan during the war, and the officers were thus included in these regimental lists, but not in alphabetical arrangement. Since the citations in the diaries I was editing rarely identified the regiments with the their names, and sometimes without clear indication as to whether the number had reference to the British or the Indian army (or to the 1861 designations, or 1881 reorganization of the Order of Precedence of British Army) many frustrating hours were spent paging through Shadbolt's compilations searching for particular individuals. The process was further complicated by the frequency of identical names in different regiments, necessitating further research to determine the specific individual to which my authors referred. Of course, my task would have been made easier if I had had had during the course of my labors ready access to the annually published army lists. But copies of these are extremely rare in the United States. At any rate, these are concerned with officers only, and my need quite exceeded such limitations.
When I had completed the annotations to the diaries I published, I determined to compile an alphabetical list of all the officers contained in Shadbolt's volumes as I had reason to believe that I would have future need for these names and I did not look forward to paging slowly through Shadbolt's work each time I required a new identification. Furthermore, most of the names in Shadbolt are cited by surname only, with initials only of the Christian names. This common practice in British publications can be quite tiresome when one requires full and precise documentation and considers the frequency with which one encounters such surnames as, for example, Smith and Jones.
At the conclusion of my editing of the diaries I began, for my own purposes, to compile an alphabetical list of the officers contained in Shadbolt's useful volumes, and by May 1987 I had completed this work. The list contained approximately five thousand names. Ten copies of this work were printed and presented to individuals and organizations I presumed would find the work of some value for their own purposes. As a result, I received a number of comments on how the list might be improved and augmented. One suggestion, which I chose to heed, was that the work be expanded to include not just the officers who had served in the war, but everyone who had crossed the frontier into Afghanistan during the period of the war and who may or may not have been connected in some way with the prosecution of the war, but who would probably not otherwise have been in Afghanistan at that time. Apart from constituting a task of prodigeous proportions, it would also prove to be an impossible one, for many persons crossed the vaguely defined frontier into Afghanistan (especially merchants), for whom no easily accessible records are available. Indeed, there is every likelihood that no such records exist. But such a work would, in fact, approximate the implicit claim set forth in the title of this book.
Grateful acknowledgment is particularly owed to Brian Robson, CB, himself an outstanding authority on the Second Afghan War (as well as the First and Third), for his many helpful suggestions on the organization and presentation of the list, and for several names that were not found in official sources. I am further obliged to him for agreeing to the arduous task of carefully looking through large portions of the completed manuscript for consistency and accuracy. John Falconer, of the National Maritime Museum, provided valuable data on Surgeon Benjamin Simpson, one of the two important photographers in Afghanistan during, and immediately after, the war. I am indebted also to Jonathan Lee and to Omar Khan for helpful leads on my many searches through printed and manuscript records.
I do not presume the present list to be complete, especially in the area of biographies or personal memoirs. Many merchants, civilians, adventurers, and even tourists, entered Afghanistan during the years of the war and very few of these could be included for lack of tangible record. While it might, with great effort and much time, be possible to add some insignificant proportion of these names from widely dispersed records in India and England, I shall leave this task to whomever may wish to assume it. The present list is primarily restricted to the military because the records were initially fairly well kept and are, for the most part, preserved. To the military establishment have been added a few citations to journalists, photographers, and members of the Civil Service, frontier police, and civilians of various positions within India who were called upon to serve in Afghanistan. No attempt has been made to recover all citations to officers who served in the war; these are readily available in the various histories and memoirs of the period. For these, only basic citations have been included when I noted them in the course of compiling the list. The list is intended only as a point of departure for researches.
I cannot claim either that, in spite of considerable effort and devotion, it is an accurate list. It perpetuates most of the errors inherent in its sources, and doubtless fresh ones have been introduced for which I alone am responsible. The present list I consider to be little more than a skeleton, one which I sincerely hope will be nourished by future researchers.