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46 precision.' Referring to the Sikh War, he wrote: 'I had the good fortune to be employed and present in every affair in which there was anything to do during the late campaign, including the pursuit of Dost Muhammad and his Afgháns to the Kháibar Pass.' The notification of his promotion to a Knight Commandership of the Bath was conveyed to him in a letter from Sir Charles Napier, who said 'no man has won it better.'

At this period of his career the great wish in Colin Campbell's mind was to return to England and retire from the service, since he was now in a position to ' save his family from privation.' 'I am growing old and only fit for retirement,' he wrote in his journal on October 20th, 1849. 'I neither care,' he said to Sir Hope Grant, 'nor do I desire, for anything else but the little money in the shape of batta to make the road between the camp and the grave a little smoother than I could otherwise make it out of the profession. For I long to have the little time that may remain to me to myself, away from barracks and regimental or professional life, with the duties that belong to it in peace.' Persuaded, however, to remain a few years longer in India, he was employed for a while in the harassing work of a frontier post and in operations against the hill tribes of the Afghán border. He returned to England in the early part of 1853; but it was not to enjoy the repose to which he had been looking forward so earnestly.

In 1854, on the outbreak of the Crimean War, Sir