Spirit of a British regiment lives on beyond the Khyber Pass

Press, 4 July 1985, Page 10

Spirit of a British regiment lives on beyond the Khyber Pass

By

BARRY RENFREW,

of

the Associated Press (through NZPA) Drosh, Pakistan Bugle-calls still echo across the mountains and soldiers in ceremonial uniform keep watch on the battlements. The Soviet Union is but 130 km away; Afghanistan is within view. This is the old fort at Drosh, once one of the most distant outposts of the British Empire. A lot of old empire survives here in the uniform of Pakistan. Perched in the mountains of the Hindu Kush, the fort stands guard over the narrow mountain pass from Afghanistan. The garrison also guards traditions and manners left by the British officers who raised their regiment and built the fort

to guard an empire at the height of its glory. Lieutenant-Colonel Nurad Nayyar lowers his voice in respect as he leads a visitor up to the portrait over the fireplace of a severe looking English colonel of the 1890 s. “The father of our regiment. They don’t make ’em like that any more,” Colonel Nayyar explains. “A splendid chap,” he adds, gazing at the crustylooking mustachioed Victorian posing stiffly with his regimental sword. The portrait looks down over the officers’ mess where the officers of the Chitral Regiment still attend ceremonial dinners and practise a rigid code of etiquette bequeathed by the English who raised the regiment, as they said then and still say now. The walls are lined with

mahogany and decorated with battle trophies from the nineteenth century, when the regiment quelled the local rebellious Pathan tribes. In the billiards room next door off-duty officers practise difficult shots or discuss the day’s duty. “Old chap,” they call each other. A good shot at the billiards table brings “jolly good show” from another player. The mess is in the colonel’s house, a white stucco cottage in the English Tudor style. From the clipped emerald-green lawn, the colonel takes the morning air as he surveys the narrow valley down below. “It’s quite wonderful up here,” he said. “Hate having to go back down to the plains where you chaps come from.” Every tradition left by

the British is prized and kept alive by the garrison, and new officers and recruits are solemnly instructed in the traditions of the regiment. But most of the recruits have never seen a foreigner before and they gape at a rare outsider. Old cannons from the last century are kept in immaculate condition and the soldiers still wear the dark green uniforms and white hats with long feather plumes of the old empire. Their silver cap-badges are of a mountain sheep’s head, emblematic of their skill as mountain troops. Guests are treated to tea in the regimental mess. Orderlies serve paper-thin English sandwiches and little raisin cakes as the officers sip tea from the regimental china. The talk is of the weather, sports, and old friends.

But Drosh is still a frontline military base and the garrison spends its days practising in surrounding meadows with very modem machine-guns and mortars. From bis lawn, the colonel can see the Afghanistan border. “The garrison,” he says mildly, “is the main defence against the war raging over the border.” In the valley below the fort a series of large craters near the fast-flow-ing Chitral River mark the spot where Afghan Air Force planes recently dropped bombs. The colonel says that his men get real firing practice whenever the Afghan planes fly over. “We fire on them and that’s that," he says matter-of-factly. Colonel Nayyar explains that the functions of the fort and its soldiers

have not really changed much since the British left. Drosh stands in the heart of the wild North West Frontier Province and the Pakistani Government has as little control over the frontier tribes as did the British. The Pathan tribes cling fiercely to their independence and every tribesman is still armed. Only now they are as likely to carry sub-machine-guns as the old rifles with which they fought the British. The fort was also part of a line of British fortifications built as a defence against the rival ambitions of imperial Russia in the last century. “Now,” says the colonel, “the Russians have come right up to the border and the fort is as necessary as ever.

“It’s very real, you know,” he says.