Oops

I don't know when the ill-fated Captain joined the 98th regiment but, by 1852, the regiment had been on an 11-year extended grand tour of some of Britain's more notorious imperial hot-spots

They were posted briefly to Ireland in 1841, where British policies had driven half the population to total dependence on the potato crop. In 1842, they moved on to Hong Kong, where they fought in the Opium Wars with China, helping to secure Britain's highly profitable drugs trade and seizing the island as British territory

In 1846, they moved on to Kolkata (then Calcutta), the headquarters of the East India Company. This was over ten years before the British government 'ruled' India in any formal, political way. British activity in India, however militaristic and dominating, was entirely under the control of the Company and entirely directed at the extraction of enormous profit for shareholders (many of whom were MPs). This regiment of the British army, then, was doing the bidding of a commercial company and, in 1848, that meant moving to the 'North-West Frontier', the Punjab, the area that includes Rawalpindi, now in the north of Pakistan, close to the Afghanistan border

At that time, the Company was at war with the Sikh empire in that area. The Sikhs were defeated in 1949, though the 98th were not directly involved. The treaty ending the war was signed at Rawalpindi, which then became a large garrison town. This was the moment when the child Maharaja of the Sikhs was duped into handing over to the British the infamous Koh-i-noor diamond that Camilla Parker Bowles was thankfully advised not to wear during the recent coronation

In 1852, after three years defending the frontier, the regiment travelled the 2000km back to the relatively calm post of Kolkata, before finally returning to England in 1855. You can't help but wonder if Captain Colby's excursion into tiger country was a last-minute attempt to bag a trophy to take back to his Pembrokeshire estate, while he still had a chance. The Captain's comrades have done their best to dignify his death, but can't entirely suppress the sense of absurdity