300 bayonets 1st Madras Native Infantry.[97]
200 bayonets 4th Madras Native Infantry.[98]
300 bayonets 31st Punjab Native Infantry.
Progress, via the Inzari Kandao, was very slow, the troops could move only in single file, the battery mules could hardly be got along, some baggage animals fell over the precipices and were lost, and the rearguard was sixty-seven hours in covering seventeen miles. The gorge of the Shilman Gakhe was forced after but a feeble resistance, and eventually Brigadier-General Doran was able to join Colonel Boisragon as already related; but all the baggage of the Lundi Kotal column, owing to the extraordinary difficulties of the road, did not reach the bivouac until the morning of the 18th. Meanwhile, on the 16th January, 500 men had been passed over the river on rafts and destroyed the village of Rena, whereafter the columns returned unmolested to Dakka and Lundi Kotal.
The operations, though a failure in regard to combination, had not been without effect; the tribesmen had suffered a severe defeat and had sustained many casualties; and nearly all the clans having been represented in the force opposed to us, the moral effect of the defeat was felt throughout the tribe, and for some months the Mohmands remained quiet. The success of Ayub Khan at Kandahar excited a rising which collapsed on the news of his subsequent defeat, and during the next sixteen years or more there was no recrudescence of large-scale trouble among the Mohmands on our border.
The difficulty of restraining and punishing the Mohmands had for years been intensified by the doubts which existed as to the respective spheres of influence of the British and Kabul Governments; it had been hoped that the Durand Agreement of 1893 had helped to smooth these difficulties away; but the Agreement, although apparently concurred in by the Amir, did not commend itself to his judgment on reconsideration, so far at least as the partition of control over the Mohmands was concerned. At last in 1896 the Government of India, with a view of terminating a state of indecision which had become intolerable, resolved to make an attempt to bring certain of the Mohmand clans more immediately under British control. The efforts made in this direction were so far successful that, despite certain hostile influences—religious and political—the Halimzais, Tarakzais, Utmanzais, Dawezais, and also the Pandiali sections, were held to be henceforth in British territory, and seemed themselves cordially to concur when the new arrangement was announced to them.