ABSTRACT
This short story was first published in the Pall Mall Magazine in 1897. This was a monthly magazine that appeared between 1893 and 1914 and was a competitor for the same audience as The Strand Magazine. It was an offshoot of the Pall Mall Gazette. Rudyard Kipling and Jack London also published their stories in this publication. It was republished in a collection published after Flora Annie Steel’s (1847–1929) death in 1931. Steel wrote many novels and stories about India, offering a female view of governance in India, having spent 22 years in the Punjab region of the country acting as a school inspector. As Julie Shields has noted, ‘While Steel was by no means free of the racial prejudices common to Victorian Britons, the challenges she posed to patriarchal authority opened new opportunities life for British and native women in late nineteenth-century India’. 1 Among her best-known works are a mutiny novel, On the Face of the Waters, her autobiography titled The Garden of Fidelity and Tales of the Punjab, a collection for children. Among the themes in her novels is the inability of Eurasians to progress in professional society in India as they do not fit into either European or ‘Hindu’ categories. Her short stories also appeared in Macmillan’s Magazine. This story concerns a dissolute private in the British army who is dismissed from the service due his habits. He has, however, defended his manservant Peroo from violent attack by another soldier. In return for this, Peroo conceives a plan to have Private Alford take the dress of a sergeant and make his way to the front to show his capabilities as a soldier, which he does, but perishes in action. This short story is therefore a tale of redemption and understanding between the British private and the Indian servant.
