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There
is today a church in Bombay, the church of St John the Evangelist,
which was a spiritual home for the Bombay Army, and for all who
made it a modern city and a safer place to trade. It was known
to many who served there as the Afghan church. It was completed
in 1857 as a memorial “to the officers whose names are written
on the walls of the chancel, and to the non-commissioned officers
and private soldiers too many to be recorded, who fell, mindful
of their duty, by sickness or by the sword, in the campaigns in
Sind and Afghanistan - AD1838 - 1843” The names on the memorial
include officers from the Queen’s and the 31st Regiments.
Both campaigns were exceptionally arduous. Both regiments served
with distinction in conditions which tested them to the full,
at least comparable to those in the Peninsula War in Portugal
and Spain which caused a distinguished modern historian, Sir Arthur
Bryant, to write: “Pride in the continuing regiment - the
personal individual loyalty which each private felt towards his
corps - gave to the British soldier a moral strength which the
student and administrator ought never to underestimate. It enabled
him to stand firm and fight forward when men without it, however
brave, would have failed. To let down the regiment, to be unworthy
of the men of old who had marched under the same colours, to be
untrue to the comrades who had shared the same loyalties, hardships
and perils were things that the least-tutored, humblest soldier
would not do. Through the dusty, tattered ranks the spirit of
companionship ran like a golden thread.”
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