RAIDERS OF THE SARHAD Being the account of a Campaign of arms and Bluff Against the Brigands of the Pers**n-Baluchi Border During the Great War

The name of Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer is still execrated in India as the author of the infamous 1919 ‘Amritsar Massacre’ in which troops under his command opened fire on a crowd who, unaware of Dyer’s declaration of martial law, had gathered in a park. Reports indicate that more than a thousand people may have died. Though an official report exonerated Dyer, an Indian Army officer who had served in the subcontinent all his life, his career was finished and he returned from India to England to be greeted in some quarters as hero and in others as a butcher. In his retirement he wrote this account of a campaign he had led into Persia (modern Iran) during the Great War. The campaign was aimed at curbing the Islamic tribesmen of the Sarhad who had been incited by German agents to rise against the British Raj in India. Dyer’s book, illustrated by photographs taken on his expedition will interest anyone studying the British Raj, the Amritsar Massacre or the subcontinent during the Great War – the background to John Buchan’s novel ‘Greenmantle’.