In nearly all cases they have succeeded in their heroic toil.  But the work of pacification was disturbed in the year 1895 by a rising in the Chitral Valley, which cut off in Chitral Fort a small force of Sikhs and loyal Kashmir troops with their British officers.  Relieving columns from the Swat Valley and Gilgit cut their way through swarms of hillmen and relieved the little garrison after a harassing leaguer of forty-five days[351].  The annoyance evinced by Russian officers at the success of the expedition and the retention of the whole of the Chitral district (as large as Wales) prompts the conjecture that they had not been strangers to the original outbreak.  In this year Russia and England delimited their boundaries in the Pamirs.

[Footnote 351:  The Relief of Chitral, by Captains G.J. and F.E.  Younghusband (1895).]

The year 1897 saw all the hill tribes west and south of Peshawur rise against the British Raj.  Moslem fanaticism, kindled by the Sultan’s victories over the Greeks, is said to have brought about the explosion, though critics of the Calcutta Government ascribe it to official folly[352].  With truly Roman solidity the British Government quelled the risings, the capture of the heights of Dargai by the “gay Gordons” showing the sturdy hillmen that they were no match for our best troops.  Since then the “Forward Policy” has amply justified itself, thousands of fine troops being recruited from tribes which were recently daring marauders, ready for a dash into the plains of the Punjab at the bidding of any would-be disturber of the peace of India.  In this case, then, Britain has transformed a troublesome border fringe into a protective girdle.

[Footnote 352:  See The Punjab in Peace and War, by S.S.  Thorburn, ad fin.]

* * * * *

Whether the Russian Government intends in the future to invade India is a question which time alone can answer.  Viewing her Central Asian policy from the time of the Crimean War, the student must admit that it bears distinct traces of such a design.  Her advance has always been most conspicuous in the years succeeding any rebuff dealt by Great Britain, as happened after that war, and still more, after the Berlin Congress.  At first, the theory that a civilised Power must swallow up restless raiding neighbours could be cited in explanation of such progress; but such a defence utterly fails to account for the cynical aggression at Panjdeh and the favour shown by the Czar to the general who violated a truce.  Equally does it fail to explain the pushing on of strategic railways since the time of the conclusion of the Anglo-Japanese Treaty of 1902.  Possibly Russia intends only to exert upon that Achilles heel of the British Empire the terrible but nominally pacific pressure which she brings to bear on the open frontiers of Germany and Austria; and the constant discussion by her officers of plans of invasion of India may be wholly unofficial.