GEOGRAPHICAL SURVEYS AND EXPLORATIONS. 139 



to carry Iris own camp equipage and make it impossible for him to join a mess, is 

 400 lbs. 



The above recommendations were influenced by the protracted 

 military occupation of Afghanistan ; much valuable work in the way 

 of military survey and reconnaissance may of course be done by 

 officers equipped more lightly with fewer and smaller instruments ; 

 indeed in rapid marches through an enemy's country it would be 

 necessary to restrict the equipment of each survey officer to what 

 he and one or two attendants could carry. Much depends on 

 the character of the surveying to be done : the geographical and 

 smaller scale survey being more valuable for rapid strategical 

 movements over a large area of country, while the topographical 

 survey of the military roads and lines of communication, and of the 

 ground in the immediate neighbourhood, is usually to aid a general 

 officer in determining the best disposition of his troops in action or 

 wherever liable to be attacked by an enemy. 



In the first Afghan war a large amount of route surveying was 

 executed, mostly on the scale of one inch to one mile, and some was of 

 very good quality, but few, if any, attempts were made to carry 

 on a general geographical survey of the country pari passu with the 

 military route surveys. Thus when the latter came to be combined 

 together, large gaps were found to exist, and even what had been 

 done could not be accurately combined, the result being that Kabul 

 and Kandahar were shown on the maps as 7 and 15 miles west 

 of their true positions. 



In the next Afghan war (1878-79) the survey officers were 

 directed to obtain as much information as possible respecting the 

 country at large, and not merely to operate on the military lines 

 of communication. For this they were directed more especially 

 to make general maps of the country on scales of half an inch or 

 quarter of an inch to the mile, by plane-tabling on a trigonometrical 

 basis, also to carry route surveys on the 1-inch scale with the most 

 suitable instruments available over the principal routes traversed 

 by the troops. It was arranged that larger scale work should be done 

 by some of the numerous field engineers and staff officers attached 

 to the army. Such were the general lines and general division of 

 labour laid down for the Afghan campaign, and the system was 

 found to work well. 



From the invasion of Afghanistan in 1878 the area surveyed 

 in more or less detail by the officers of the Department amounted to 

 39,500 square miles, while a further area of 7,000 square miles was 



