Changes

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.