The Peshawar-based 51st Native Infantry, also previously disarmed, was less fortunate. A rumour that the regiment’s men had obtained arms and hidden them triggered a search. While ‘the young Afghan and Sikh levies’ directed to search the 51st’s lines were performing (25 August) ‘the congenial task of looting the huts of their hereditary foes’—this is Bosworth Smith writing—the regiment of 870 men ‘rose as one man’. Facing guns, they ran towards Jamrud, near the Khyber. All 870 were killed in pursuit or, after capture, by a firing squad. ‘The whole regiment… had ceased to exist.’115
