Cirrus@Austlit

Author's note: The narrator is Major Cyril Oxley, charged with command of the remnants of the 129th Baluchis, victims of the first gas attack of the Great War in the spring of 1915. Before the war both he and his companion Major 'Freddy' Mannsteim were in special ops run out of Whitehall during the great flurry of espionage in the decade leading up to the War, the experience of which underpins the sonorous tone of much of Cyril Oxley's narrative. The 129th Baluchis, a much lauded and highly decorated outfit composed of Sikhs, Kaparthalas, Gurkhas, Punjabi Muslims, Pathans, Mahsuds and the greatly vilified Afridis from the Afghan border, are destined to be re-deployed to the East African front once the Western Front settled down after the spring assaults. In its first ten days in the line it lost half of its British officers, nearly a third of its Indian officers and other ranks and was thus no longer deemed capable of holding its section of the line.