Battle of Maiwand
The Battle of Maiwand, fought on 27 July 1880 near the village of that name in Kandahar Province, saw an Afghan army of some twenty-five thousand men under Ayub Khan shatter a British and Indian brigade of about 2,500 troops under Brigadier-General George Burrows. It was the worst open-field defeat British arms suffered in Afghanistan, and it set the stage for the war's final act at Battle of Kandahar (1880). The battle was part of the Second Anglo-Afghan War.[1]
From Girishk to the field
Ayub Khan, a son of the late Amir Sher Ali Khan, had stirred Herat to anti-British revolt and marched east in June 1880. At Girishk on the Helmand, the two thousand infantry of the British-backed Wali of Kandahar mutinied and went over to him, carrying off a battery of guns. Burrows, sent out from Kandahar with a scratch force — the 66th Foot, two Bombay infantry regiments, two cavalry regiments, and E/B Royal Horse Artillery — pursued, and in a sharp action on 14 July his cavalry and guns drove off the mutineers and captured their battery: four 6-pounder smoothbores and two 12-pounder howitzers, crewed by hurriedly trained men of the 66th. A week later Ayub's main army — regulars with modern Armstrong guns plus swarms of white-robed ghazi volunteers — barred his way near Maiwand.[4][2][1]
The battle
Contact came about ten in the morning. What followed opened with a three-hour artillery duel at roughly seventeen hundred yards, then turned when the captured smoothbore battery drew back to replenish its ammunition: the Indian infantry on the left, already hard hit, broke, and the collapse rolled across the line like a wave. The 66th, nearly intact on the right until that moment, was swept up in the general rout. A remnant rallied around the colours in a mud-walled garden at Khig, where — by the testimony of an artillery colonel of Ayub's own army — about a hundred men fought until only eleven remained, and those eleven charged out and died with their faces to the enemy. "Their conduct was the admiration of all who witnessed it," the officer reported; no Englishman survived to tell the tale of the Last Eleven himself.[1][3] The 66th's last stand at Khig garden became one of the most quoted episodes of the battle, though modern historians note that the "Last Eleven" legend was embellished in British accounts — the actual number of survivors who broke out may have been somewhat higher, but the core fact of their heroic resistance remains uncontested.[2]
The retreat
The survivors fell back through the Mundabad ravine and retreated through a summer night toward Kandahar, reaching the Arghandab late the next day and the citadel by evening — a forced march of some fifty miles. Accounts of the cost differ: one gives 970 killed and 166 wounded of the 2,476 engaged; another counts 962 dead among the 2,566 present, with only 161 wounded reaching Kandahar. The Grenadiers and the 66th each lost over sixty percent of their strength. Afghan losses are even harder to fix — estimates run from about 2,500 killed and wounded to claims of several thousand ghazis dead — but no source disputes that the price was extraordinary.[1][2] The retreat itself was a remarkable military feat: the survivors, many of them wounded, covered roughly fifty miles through difficult terrain in a single night and day, maintaining enough cohesion to reach the safety of Kandahar's citadel.[3]
Legacy
The Afghans buried the fallen Anglo-Indian soldiers and raised a monument over them, and poems celebrating the victory passed quickly into Pashtun folklore. Folk legend added Malalai, a young woman who rallied the faltering line beneath her veil and became one of Afghanistan's most quoted heroines. Rudyard Kipling alluded to the defeat in his verse, and the victory entered Pashtun oral tradition as "Maiwand day."[1][5] The monument at Maiwand, erected by the British Indian government after the war, still stands near the battlefield as a reminder of one of the Empire's most costly defeats. Strategically, Maiwand decided little on its own: Ayub followed it by besieging the garrison in Kandahar, and Roberts' relief march ended his campaign six weeks later. But it compelled the eventual British withdrawal from Kandahar, and it remains the battle Afghans remember.[1][5]