Johnston’s March on Kandy

‘And thus they at length reached Trincomalee, cold, wet, dirty and lousy; almost naked, many barefoot and maimed; officers and all alike starved and shrivelled, their countenances haggard, forming an assemblage of the most miserable looking men it is possible to conceive. All had to go to hospital on their arrival; their strength appeared only to have endured to this point, then to have utterly deserted them. Indeed this retreat was as fatal to the men as the massacre had been, for almost all died in the hospital; few, very few, survived.’ In these words Bombardier Alexander Alexander, who was serving in Ceylon at the time, described the end of one of the oddest, most tragic and yet most gallant colonial adventures of the British Army. A badly framed order had been the cause of a small force of three hundred British, Malay and Indian troops, accompanied by five hundred and fifty porters, mistakenly marching through enemy-held country to capture Kandy in the Ceylonese mountains.