Oxford Paperbacks
2 total works
An attempt to provide a comprehensive account of the Siege of Derry, examining the historical background. The author draws on contemporary accounts, recreating the fluctuating moods of the defenders, the endless quarrelling of the leaders and the privations which left ten thousand dead. The author freely uses the doggerel verse which commemorates the siege to illustrate both the facts and the myths. Sir Patrick Macrory is an historian and the author of "Kabul Catastrophe".
In 1839 a large British army invaded Afghanistan in order to place upon the throne a ruler deemed more friendly to the British in Delhi than the incumbent Dost Mohammed. Many voices in London warned against the foolhardy enterprise, among them that of the Duke of Wellington, who foresaw shame and disaster. The enterprise started well. The army conquered all before it, including reputedly impregnable fortresses. But only two years after being established in Kabul, attached on all sides by the hostile Afghans, the British retreated in mid-winter, 1842, trying to regain India. Of the 16,000 soldiers and others who left the city, only one person survived the journey as far as Jalalabad. It was one of the worse catastrophes to befall the British Empire.