| caption: |
Chapter Twelve. Towards Unknown Country |
| caption: |
description of punitive expeditionary column |
| text: |
Twelve men marched ahead forming a kind of advance guard. Mills, Williams, and I followed with the main body; then came Smith in front of the porters, interspersed with a few of the sepoys, and a small rear-guard concluded the column, which drew out over a mile. The sepoys of the Assam Rifles, most of them Gurkhas, wore light-blue flannel shirts, shorts, and hats with broad brims, and they carried bayonets, and large curved bush-knives indispensable for camp-building and clearing the way through thick jungle. |
