Called into Action

 

Elephant and Mule Battery, Second Afghan War

 

At the beginning of 1879, after their brief and fraught interlude back home in England, Henrietta and William McKay were on the move again. This time they were off to Madras and, according to William's military record, Henrietta was finally recognized as William's wife from their date of embarkation for India. This would have made life easier for her and the children. This time one-year old Mary Ellen would have joined her siblings, Florence Annie aged 8, Henrietta Maud aged 4 and possibly their elder brother, William, who would have been 9 by this time.

 

As a wife and mother, Henrietta would have had much to do but life in India would have been different from their time in the Malta Garrison. In India the family would most likely have had their own bungalow and servants, often a welcome but troublesome source of help as, according to Annabel Venning's Following the Drum: The Lives of Army Wives and Daughters Past and Present, anything not locked up at night tended to disappear.

 

If Henrietta wasn't self-sufficient by now, she soon would have been as William McKay was called away, along with much of the military in India, to participate in the Second Afghan Campaign of 1879-80. While engineers weren't usually engaged in the fighting, their work involved keeping communications open and troops moving by putting up telegraph lines and laying roads, bridges and railway lines. In this work they were often under fire. Did Henrietta wait for news of the campaign with trepidation? At least women and children of the British Military were not directly affected by the fighting as they had been in the First Afghan Campaign which had resulted in the loss of many camp followers' lives. 

 

 

Sources:

Forbes, Archibald. The Afghan wars, 1839-42 and 1878-80. Seeley and Co. Limited, London, 1892 https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1015&context=afghanenglish

Information about engineers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Army_during_the_Victorian_Era

 Venning, Annabel. Following the Drum: The Lives of Army Wives and Daughters Past and Present. Headline Book Publishing, London, 2005.

 

Images:

This photograph of an elephant and mule battery is from an album of rare historical photographs depicting people and places associated with the Second Anglo-Afghan War.  By Burke, John, died 1900 - http://dl.wdl.org/11496.pngGallery: http://www.wdl.org/en/item/11496/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31380036