Second skirmish at Hafiz Kor

On 5 September 1915 British and Indian troops clashed with the Mohmands at Hafiz Kor for the second time, at the foot of the hills north of Peshawar. In April the first skirmish had been the brief repulse of a raid. This time the chronology’s label of “skirmish” greatly understates the scale of events. Contemporary and later writers agree that it was the largest battle on the North-West Frontier of India since the great tribal rising of 1897.

The frontier had been in ferment since mid-August. Mullahs were calling the Pashtun tribes to jihad against the infidels, and news of Turkey’s war with Britain gave them a hearing. On 17 August several thousand Bunerwals came down from the hills towards Rustam and were driven back. At the end of the month an even larger gathering of tribes moved into the Swat valley, where it was stopped on the Landakai ridge by the Malakand Movable Column. As ever more alarming reports came in from the Mohmand country, the command of the 1st (Peshawar) Division brought two infantry brigades with cavalry and artillery up to the fort at Shabkadar, and a second movable column to Abazai.

At the beginning of September the Mohmands came down to the foothills and began building stone breastworks (sangars) near Hafiz Kor. The British deliberately let them come down from the hills onto the plain, where it was easier to fight them. Estimates of their strength vary greatly: from about 2,500 warriors seen on the hills on 4 September to 10,000 or even more according to accounts of the time. On the morning of 5 September the tribesmen advanced across open ground almost up to the village of Shabkadar itself and threatened the left flank. Major-General Frederick Campbell, in command of the troops, accepted battle. The artillery opened fire, and the infantry, including British and Indian battalions, among them the 36th Sikhs, occupied the hills north of the village.

The best-known episode of the day was the charge of two squadrons of the 21st Lancers, the same regiment that had charged at Omdurman in 1898. The squadron led by the regiment’s commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel John Scriven, ran into a deep ravine hidden in the scrub and was scattered, and the Mohmands fell on it from the maize fields. The second squadron covered it with fire and helped it withdraw. The regiment lost several killed, including Scriven and two other officers, and a dozen or so wounded. The regimental farrier, Charles Hull, carried the adjutant, Captain Learoyd, whose horse had been killed, out of the fire, and for this deed was later awarded the Victoria Cross. After several hours of fighting the Mohmands gave way, and the cavalry pursued them as far as the hills. Their losses were heavy, but we have no reliable figures.

The victory did not end the unrest. The mullahs gathered the tribes again, and at the beginning of October, according to British accounts, about 9,000 men assembled at Hafiz Kor. Only another defeat, in which the British used armoured cars in battle for the first time in India, quietened the Mohmands for longer. For the authorities in India, stripped of regular troops sent to the fronts in Europe, Mesopotamia and Africa, the September battle was proof that the border with Afghanistan remained dangerous, even though the Emir, Habibullah Khan, kept to neutrality.