This article was taken from the 1882 edition of Good Words edited by Donald MacLeod, D.D.

AMID the crowd of heroic men, from Clive to Lawrence, to whom the East India Company owes what is greatest in its history, Lieut.-General Colin Mackenzie, C.B., holds a unique position. To the fearlessness of Clive, which Browning has dramatised in his latest work, and to the dash of Outram, he added the righteousness of Durand and the evangelical fervour of the Lawrences. In Colin Mackenzie Chivalry and Puritanism met. The former was the fruit of his early career, the latter was the deliberate choice of his middle and later years; both combined gave his character a charm all its own, such as has been rare since the days of Coligny. When his life is written the world will see what his comrades alone fully understood when, last November, they laid him in the Grange Cemetery of Edinburgh, beside Sir Hope Grant. Then the young Lieutenant, now General Haughton, whom forty years back he had saved from the disasters of the first Afghan war, wrote of him, referring to the death of Vincent Eyre also: “The loss of two old friends and comrades following so closely presses heavily upon me. Sir George Lawrence, Sir J. T. Airey, and myself are now the only surviving officers of the first campaign who were involved in the disasters at Kabul. He ministered to my spiritual comfort when none else attempted to do so, and I have never forgotten that I have lost the most chivalrous, the most warm-hearted, the most public-spirited, and, above all, the most earnest and Christian friend I ever had.”

Sprung from the cadet branch of the Mackenzies of Redcastle, Colin had to make his own way in the world. The beginning of the year 1826 saw him ensign in the 48th Madras Native Infantry, after an education, which made him master of his own language and of French, so that he ever wrote a pure and vigorous style, and had the poet Pope by heart. He was adjutant of his regiment when Lord William Bentinck, who could tolerate no longer the iniquities of the Rajah of Coorg, sent Sir Patrick Lindsay to remove the monster. As Deputy-Assistant Quartermaster-General, the young lieutenant served with the main column of the force in all the actions which resulted in the taking of Merkara, the capital. After ten years of incessant military experience he sought health at sea. In 1836, and long afterwards, till Rajah Brooke struck at the root of the evil, the Malay pirates were a terror to the commerce which swept to and fro through the Straits of Sunda, between China and the West. The young Highlander volunteered for service against them, with Admiral Sir H. Ducie Chads, in the Straits of Malacca and the China seas, and such were his exploits that he was specially mentioned to Lord Auckland, the Governor-General. On some of those rare occasions when Colin Mackenzie could be beguiled into speaking of himself, I have known him keep us sitting many an hour into the night while he told of adventures by sea and land, which he would not allow to be committed to record beyond the brief summary in the Admiral's despatches. When, soon after, Lord Auckland in India and Lord Broughton at home entered on the mad policy which shook the empire to its foundation, Colin Mackenzie, still an unlucky lieutenant, and Major George Broadfoot volunteered, with the result of making the Madras army as famous in the Afghan war as Colonel Neill did in the mutiny which sprang from its campaigns. Each, in 1840, became the right hand of George Clerk on the North-West frontier; Mackenzie, first in charge of the Khaibar Pass, as Assistant Political Agent at Peshawar. But, as if that duty were not full enough of danger, he did not rest until he was sent into the thick of the struggle at Kabul itself, as Assistant to the Envoy, Sir William Macnaghten. Even there his fiery spirit would allow no danger to present itself which he did not ask to share. The insurrection around Kabul had begun, and Sir Robert Sale had been sent to take the field in the hill country.

Edward Conolly, one of three noble brothers, had fallen at Tootundurrah as a volunteer, and the 13th Light Infantry had been repulsed at Joolgah. Dost Mahomed seemed to be everywhere, stirring up the tribes. Mackenzie asked permission to join the Sappers; he led the advanced guard at the forcing of the Khoord Kabul Pass, soon to become a place of terrible memory. He was summoned back only to still sterner work with the doomed force in the Afghan capital, when Dost Mahomed personally surrendered to the British Envoy, and was sent on to Calcutta, with the confession in which Macnaghten condemned the whole war—“ We ejected the Dost, who never offended us, in support of our policy, of which he was the victim.”

From this time of preparation in the young lieutenant’s career, when he was still under thirty-five, we now come to the four deeds of daring and suffering in his life, any one of which would have made him the hero of a people and the subject of their ballads in darker ages, all of which duty alone led him to face and to do, because he was not only a soldier but a saint. Fora great change had passed within Colin Mackenzie. In 1836 his first wife had died on the fourth anniversary of their wedding day, after a happy union. Gradually, and under Bibleteaching, he had come to see that of all lives life in Christ is alone worth living. His courage received a new motive; his sense of duty the highest inspiration. When he entered Afghanistan, it was without the dogmatic knowledge of Havelock in somewhat similar circumstances, though he grew into that also. In the lull before the massacre these two stood almost alone among the young officers, in the continence and purity of their lives, while Sir Alexander Burnes was at the head of those who were heaping up wrath against the whole British force, which the imbecility of its military chiefs was impotent to avert. With a perfect knowledge of Persian, moreover, and of the Afghan colloquial, Mackenzie soon became more closely associated with the natives than most of his comrades, being attached to the Kizzilbash force of Shah Soojah, the king. So, by friend and foe alike, he was known as the “Moolla,” the puritan, the priest, the doer of the law. His life was a mystery to the sensual Afghans, a silent reproach to his own comrades, whom privately he attempted to influence for good. Such was the man, when the honors of 1841—42 burst on our reduced army of occupation, and financial troubles at Calcutta led the devoted Macnaghten to cut down the subsidy of Rs. 30,000 a year given to the Ghilzai chiefs to keep the roads open. The first of his four exploits was this:—

From a photograph by Messrs Maull & Fox.

Mackenzie and Pottinger had been in vain warning the Envoy of the gathering storm, when, on the 2nd of November, a Kabul mob slaughtered Alexander Bumes and other officers in the city, and plundered the treasury within sight of a passive force of 5,000 British soldiers. Having then taken the fort in which all our commissariat supplies were stored, they besieged the camel sheds on the outskirts, where the provisions of the king’s force were kept. This so-called fort of Nishan Khan was under Captain Mackenzie’s charge. After pressure from Vincent Eyre he wrote what Sir John Kaye justly pronounced “ a very interesting and well-written report ” of the forty hours’ siege. The fort was not capable of defence ; it was choked with baggage and encumbered with a host of women and children, and the water was scarce. But he held it, a solitary European, at the head of faithful Mahomedan sepoys, whom the Afghans, firing through his own loopholes, challenged to give him up for the sake of Islam. In vain for two days did he look for help, “for the glittering bayonets through the trees.” All'the men were on duty at the same time, but “ whenever they could snatch five minutes to refresh themselves with a pipe, one or other of them would twang a sort of rude guitar as an accompaniment to some martial song, which, mingling with the notes of war, sounded very strangely.” Ever and anon there rose the wild shrieks of the women over the dead and dying.” After fighting and waiting for forty hours without rest, and on the leader’s part without refreshment, the only resource was to march the survivors by night to the British cantonments. It was the Ramadan fast; half a mile had been accomplished when Mackenzie found himself in a narrow lane, met by the cry from a party of Afghans—“Feringhee hust,” “Here is a European.” “Spurring my horse violently I wheeled round, cutting from right to left. My blows, by God’s mercy, parried the greater part of them, and I was lucky enough to cut off the hand of my most outrageous assailant. After a desperate struggle, during which I received two slight sabre cuts, and a blow on the back of the head from a fellow whose sword turned in his hand, which half knocked me off my horse, I escaped out of the crush, passing unhurt through two volleys of musketry from the whole picket.....To my horror I perceived my path again blocked up by a dense body of Afghans. Retreat was impossible, so, putting my trust in God, I charged into the midst of them, hoping that the weight of my horse would clear a way for XXlll—15 me, and reserving my sword-cut for the last struggle. It was well that I did so, for by the time I had knocked over some twenty fellows I found they were my own Juzailchees. If you ever experienced sudden relief from a hideous nightmare you may imagine my feelings for the moment. During the whole business I had under a dozen killed, whereas about thirty of the enemy had bitten the dust and gone to their place.” It was like Colin Mackenzie to spare no pains till “ the handful of brave men ” who remained faithful to him to the last, though Afghan Mahome-dans, received a public reward. Each veteran got a year’s pay when Mackenzie’s Juzailchees were disbanded at Jhelam. But before that he led the detachment, as General Elphinstone reported to Government, in almost every fight during the two months’ siege of the cantonment, his and their conduct being most conspicuous; and in the disastrous affair of Behmaroo, where he was again wounded, he was publicly thanked for his conduct.

We come to the second of the four experiences. The siege ended in the massacre of the Envoy, which Mackenzie’s knowledge of the Afghans again strove to prevent. He was to have accompanied Sir William Mac-naghten to Peshawar, when the unhappy minister had been appointed Governor of Bombay by the same irony of fate which marked the whole policy. That had ended in Macnaghten agreeing to pay Akbar Khan, the treacherous son of Dost Mahomed, 30 lakhs of rupees, and an annuity of 4 lakhs, as Wuzeer of Shah Soojah, on the plea that this would give England time to enter into a treaty with Russia, defining the bounds beyond which neither was to pass in Central Asia. On the fatal 23rd December, 1842, the Envoy went forth to meet Akbar Khan in conference on this precious treaty, attended by Mackenzie, George Lawrence, and Trevor. Mackenzie had remonstrated, with the warning that it was a plot against him. The deluded Envoy replied hastily, “ A plot! let me alone for that, trust me for that! ” and so the doomed party proceeded. Qn the slope of a hillock which hid them from the cantonment, a carpet was spread where the snow lay least thickly. They dismounted and reclined beside Akbar Khan and his chiefs. Mackenzie could hardly prevail on himself to quit his gallant Cape horse which had before carried him so well, and when on the ground, he rose up as armed men began to gather around the party. Then Akbar Khan gave the signal in the word “ Begeer 1 ” “Seize! ” and grasped the Envoy’s left hand with an expression of diabolical ferocity, while another secured the right. They dragged him down the hillock as he uttered the words in Persian, “For God’s sake !” Akbar Khan struck and then shot him with one of the very pistols which he had once presented to the traitor. Trevor too was cut down, and Lawrence was dragged past his horrified comrade.

Mackenzie had been standing apart talking with the chief of the Afghan police, an old acquaintance, who mastered his right arm, held a pistol to his temple, and amid a shower of bullets hurried him through the snow to a horse. “ As I mounted behind my captor, now my energetic defender, the crowd increased around us and the cries of * Kill the Kafir’ became more vehement.” After for some time, while at a fast canter, warding off the sword-cuts, with the aid of his followers, the Afghan wheeled his horse round, made the last appeal a Mussulman can make by taking off his turban and implored the devotee Ghazees to respect the life of his friend. The horse fell as it leaped up a high bank, when Mackenzie received a heavy blow on his head from a bludgeon and a fanatic twisted his collar to suffocation. When he recovered consciousness he was being defended by Akbar Khan himself, who then repeatedly taunted him in a tone of triumphant derision, “You’ll seize my country, will you?” Insulted and plundered by the men who had slain Macnaghten and Trevor, he and Lawrence were kept prisoners in the city, were then ordered to be blown away from a gun, and were rescued with difficulty by two chiefs. Dressed as Afghans, they were sent back to cantonments to encourage false confidence on the part of the doomed army and its leaders.

The first day of 1842 saw the beginning of the end, when the most disgraceful treaty military commanders have ever signed was ratified, and that retreat began through the winter snow and the far worse Ghilzai bullets, which only one man survived out of sixteen thousand. In all our history only Cawnpore is blacker than Khoord Kabul and Jugdulluk. Blacker, because the widows and wives and children and a few of the maimed and wounded officers were spared from Khoord Kabul to become the “ guests ” of the traitor, and, as a matter of fact, survived their captivity with honour, though at the last sent by their “ host ” to be sold as slaves in Toorkistan. To them had been added Mackenzie, Lawrence, and Pottinger as hostages, on Akbar Khan’s demand, after the first had, as Kaye’s history tells, eagerly sought to redeem the errors of Elphinstone and Shelton, as he had done to prevent the infatuation of Macnaghten. The captives, besides these three, and Elphinstone, Shelton, and Johnson, other hostages, were the widows, Lady Macnaghten, Mrs. Sturt and one child, Mrs. Trevor and seven children; Lady Sale, whose husband was holding Jella-labad with Havelock under him; Captain Boyd, wife and child; Lieutenant Waller, wife and child; Lieutenant Eyre, wife and child; Mr. Ryley, wife and child; Mrs. Mainwaring and child; Serjeant Wade and family; and the wounded officers, Colin Troup and Mein, Melville and Dr. Macgrath, —twenty-nine, and fourteen children in all. All were at first placed under the care of the one Afghan chief who had proved himself at once a patriot and a man, the “good Nawab,” as he was called, Zemaun Khan, who was moreover of near kin to Dost Mahomed, then in honourable captivity in Calcutta. To protect them he raised an army of his own, of three thousand men. For nine months they remained m captivity, hurried from place to place, sometimes for their own safety, at others according to the falling fortunes of Akbar Khan, now almost within sight of our troops at Jellala-bad, again among the fastnesses of Khoolom, to be sold to the man-stealing Oosbegs. Mackenzie’s stories of their prison life, their kindly intercourse, their hopes and fears, their trust in God, their Sunday service, and the use of the one Bible and Prayer-book picked up on the field of4 slaughter, of the gambols of the children to whose number more than one birth added, their attempts at recreation, their tricks on the 1st of April, their speculations as to relief and the course of events in India, where Lord Ellenborough was so far reversing his predecessor’s policy as to be willing to sacrifice its noble victims— all this and more he could never be persuaded to put on record, nor to allow his friends to do so. But three years after, when it was still vividly printed on the memory, he was persuaded to tell to a loving writer one episode in his “Recollection of a Journey to Jellalabad.” This is the third of the deeds to which we referred at the outset.

Major Pottinger, who had succeeded poor Macnaghten, fearing that the defeat of Akbar Khan before Jellalabad might tempt him to murder the whole party, proposed to him to send one of the captives to treat with General Pollock, who had halted at that city. Mackenzie, who was tending the dying Ephinstone in a fort in Tezeen, the only •drugs available being opium and boiled pomegranate, was sent for when the old man breathed his last, and told to prepare for a journey to Jellalabad. No one save Pottinger believed he could survive a mission of such •danger. The Afghans reasoned that if any of the captives would return in such circumstances it would be the English Moolla, whose word they could trust, for when, with some confusion, Akbar Khan asked him if he intended to return, Mackenzie answered, •“ Are you the son of an Ameer and ask me, an English gentleman, such a question?” Akbar Khan’s private request was an amnesty for himself and followers, and a grant of land, in which case he would help Pollock to reconquer Afghanistan; the public letter proposed an exchange of prisoners and the withdrawal of the English from the country. Dressed in a sheep-skin cloak full of vermin, with his white face hidden up to the eyes, and mounted on Lady Sale’s horse with a native saddle^ Colin Mackenzie set out. He was attended by two of Akbar Khan’s troopers, and guided by the notorious Buttee, “ the thief,” and three of his gang, on foot Buttee was the Rob Roy who had eased Sale of several hundreds of his camels, which he resold to the General! The three horsemen and four thieves struggled up the bed of a torrent till they came to a cascade, which barred advance. Laughing at the troopers’ abuse, Buttee guided Mackenzie up and Tound by a goat’s path till they surmounted hills “ to which Ben Lomond is a joke ! ” He knew Persian and beguiled the way with Pushtoo war-songs, till the Scottish Highlander was lost in sympathetic admiration at the man whose nostrils were not even expanded as he clomb the tremendous ascents, his heavy matchlock behind his back with the ends resting on the inside of his elbows. When the snow was reached the danger increased, for the track sloped to the torrent at an angle of forty-five. Even the Afghan troopers protested they had never seen such a road, while the perspiration streamed off them like rain in spite of the wintry wind. So they crossed the Khurkhuchar Pass; but in the easy descent on the other side the icy blast cut through them. To the left they passed the fatal barriers of Jugdulluk, where, untouched by decay, lay the bodies of Mackenzie’s brave comrades, of whom he specially mentions Dodgin as having fought so desperately, though he had but one leg, that the enemy were obliged to shoot him from a distance. As he passed along the narrow ridge in the bright moonlight, with the mangled remains below and the everlasting hills towering in front, he says, a My sense of weakness and absolute inability in any way to control the progress of events which were rapidly hurrying to a crisis, and which were fraught with safety or destruction to myself and my fellow-captives, and with honour or dishonour to my country, had the good effect of leading me to Him whose arm is never shortened to uphold and save all who put their trust in Him.” And this follows : “ Before we reached the Valley of Zinganeh we had to cross a shallow stream, whose pure waters I shall ever remember with gratitude, for my tongue clove to the roof of my mouth, and there on three subsequent journeys did it quench my thirst.” As day dawned and they came to a hostile tribe Buttee carefully smothered the white officer in the Afghan dress and mounted before him, passing him off as a sick chief of Peshawar sent home by Akbar Khan. Every eminence was topped by a robber fort, notably that of the murderer of James Skinner, whose men pursued the party. At the ford of a river, opposite the gate of the chief, Mackenzie, worn out by fatigue, fairly tumbled off among the henchmen who had rushed out with the cry of “ Strangers 1 ” M For the first time,” he said, “ I felt the anguish of mortal fear, notwithstanding the awful extremity in which I had twice stood before when surrounded by the Afghans, in cutting my way into cantonments, and again at Sir William Mac-naghten’s murder.” But Buttee, the thief, was equal to the crisis. He harangued his countrymen on the exploits of Akbar Khan over the infidels, while his followers dragged the “ sick chief” away up the mountain path. After a week of hairbreadth escapes and exhausting toil, amid the filth of Afghan surroundings, Colin Mackenzie and his horse, in a state which he used Scotch to describe, as “sair furfaughten,” rode into Pollock’s camp. So black and haggard had he become that the Sepoy vidette would not believe he was a European. He was received by the general and his old friend Sir George Macgregor as an apparition. But the camp was soon alive with the news he brought, and each little fact about the captives spread away over India into every cantonment, and tardily westward to the British homes where hope deferred had sickened many a loving heart. Mackenzie’s information helped the avenging army to the rapid success which in due time enabled the captives to free themselves. He did not need to advise Sir George Pollock to scorn all overtures from the murderer of Macnaghten. But he went further, he urged an immediate advance on Kabul as the first and only step necessary to leaving the people for ever to their own independence. And after twenty-four hours he returned into captivity, only to be sent back again on a second though less perilous mission, after seven hours’ repose, while Pot-tinger was preparing another letter to the General. The second journey resulted in an attack of typhus under which he nearly sank, so that his friend, Colin Troup, was despatched on the third and last of these missions by which Akbar Khan sought in vain to save himself from the fate which his deeds deserved. His defeat at Tezeen led the Afghan jailor of the captives, who was conducting them over the wastes of the Hindoo Koosh to be sold as slaves, to let them free themselves, on Mackenzie, Johnson, Pot-tinger, and Lawrence becoming personally bound, “ in the presence of God and Jesus Christ,” for the amount of their ransom, Rs. 20,000 at once and Rs. 1,000 a month, “In our prison at Bameean, nth September, 1842.”

To Kabul, where Pollock’s army represented at once the triumph and the atonement of British power, Sale’s 13th Regiment led the delivered ones. But work had yet to be done, and Colin Mackenzie must be at the doing of it, though hardly recovered from the Jellalabad perils. Istalif, the virgin fortress of the Afghans, still defied us, and it fell to Henry Havelock to storm it. Mackenzie was by his side at the head of a large body of Kizzilbash horsemen. Then, then at last, he sought home, where were his motherless daughters, away out of all the theatrical rejoicings of Lord Ellenborough, to whom the captives were odious. The still youthful Captain was welcomed as the hero he was, for England did not agree with Lord Ellenborough. Wedded to the eldest daughter of Admiral J. E. Douglas, the accomplished authoress, who survives him, he returned to the North-west frontier, raised the 4th Sikh Regiment in 1847, and with it kept the peace of the border during the last Sikh campaign. In him the Marquis of Dalhousie, visiting the new province of the Punjab, found a man after his own heart. “ Colin,” as the Governor-General always called him, was hastily summoned to council at that critical time when the great Proconsul could not make up his mind whether the Indus River or the base of the Sulaimans should be the limit of British supremacy. “ Don’t give up Peshawar,” said Mackenzie; “it is the gate of India.” Offered a rich civil appointment in the new province, the much-enduring soldier preferred the army still, and in 1850 the Madras Captain was appointed senior Brigadier of the Haidarabad Contingent. But a political or administrative duty of the most important kind fell to his lot. Berar, the fertile cotton valley now pierced by the Bombay and Calcutta Railway, was transferred to the British by the Nizam, and the Brigade was ordered to take it over. Mackenzie’s junior, Brigadier Mayne, was eager to provoke a collision, that they might win their spurs. Colin Mackenzie kept him in check, prepared careful statistics of the districts, advanced on his own responsibility the sums which prevented the peasantry from migrating elsewhere and the State losing a year’s revenue, and so acted that Lord Dalhousie declared he had taken possession of the province “ without losing a rupee of revenue or spilling a drop of blood.” It was at the close of six years of such service that, as if Kabul had not been enough, he was personally forced to suppress the mutiny of a cavalry regiment in Bolarum, one of several ominous mutterings of the storm which burst in 1857. This is the fourth of his great deeds of daring and devotion to duty.

In September, 1855, on the occasion of the Muharram, or ten days’ fast observed by the Shia Mahomedans, he directed that the usual orders should be issued, under which processions with music and noise were forbidden during the twenty-four hours of the Christians’ day of worship and rest. As it turned out that Sunday was the great day when alone the Muharram processions could take place that year, the Brigadier at once issued a second order permitting them, but only in the lines of their respective corps, and not in the barracks or along the roads; This “ usual” police regulation, to prevent a religious procession from interfering with the comfort of the citizens of another creed, as the press described it at the time, was deliberately disobeyed. The 3rd Cavalry Regiment, notorious for opium-eating, and for the murder of both a European and a native officer, sent a procession quietly along the road to the Brigadier’s garden, where it began making a hideous din. Mackenzie sent first his orderly and then the sergeant of his guard to warn them. They continued, when he himself went to exercise his personal authority, and, in the last resort, to prevent all bloodshed but bis own. He could not* as he afterwards said, “skulk under hatches,” that being contrary to his nature and his oath. He would not turn out his Hindoo infantry guard, for that would have led to a widespread conflict. So he walked out quietly, and only after remonstrating in vain, he returned with the small standards carried in defiance of the law. The natives, fleeing to their lines with shouts of “ Deen ! Deen ! ” (“ the faith in danger ”), returned with a mob of troopers, who broke in the gate and sprang upon him with sabres. One cut split his skull down to the brain, another severed the outer bone of the left arm, a third cut the deltoid to the bone, and two others took off* the middle finger of the right hand. The unarmed Brigadier staggered into and through the house bleeding profusely; the doctor gave up all hope of his recovery, and he himself exclaimed in the pauses of exhaustion, “ It is all God’s doing, and therefore right.” We have Henry Lawrence’s verdict on the affair at the time, given in that famous article of his in the Calcutta Review, in which he said of a general mutiny—u Come it will, unless anticipated : a Clive may not then be at hand.” That wisest and best of Englishmen who ever went to India, declared the Muharram order to be perfectly legitimate, looked on the attack as premeditated by fanatics, and, while doubting the wisdom of Mackenzie’s personal interference, said of him, “ He possesses much of the Covenanter spirit. His wounds were frightful; few men could have. survived them. His dauntless spirit sustained hir^.” Read in the light of 1857, Henry Lawrence’s eulogy may be taken even without his doubt. Then we suffered for the weakness which in 1855 sought to extenuate open mutiny, because Colin Mackenzie was a saint as well as a soldier.

The Mutiny found him in England recovering from his wounds and the counsellor of the Daily News and the authorities, on whom he urged at once the dispatch of an army of thirty thousand men—a movement too long delayed. He succeeded his frtend Sir George Macgregor as political agent at Moorshedabad, and after that held various military appointments till his promotion to be Major-General in 1871. In all he showed the same “gallantry, ability, and endurance” which Lord Dalhousie extolled in the Gazette in 1849. But he would never ask for a reward. It is a satire on the honours which are thickly showered on men now that the age of Indian chivalry is past, that Colin Mackenzie received no more than the first Kabul medal, the Companionship of the Bath, and a special annuity of £300 for his “varied and distinguished services, especially in Afghanistan.’ Wherever he went, in India, he was the warm friend of Christian missionaries and converts. Wherever he resided, in Edinburgh, London, or the Continent, he sought out Christian friends, he helped philanthropic movements, he made himself beloved by the poor, the dependent, the humble. He was a true soldier of Jesus Christ, who ever held in his heart, and rejoiced in the divine saying, “Him that cometh unto me I will in no wise cast out.” When Canon Liddon heard of his death, he wrote of Colin Mackenzie word? which might be carved on his tomb—“Simple, fearless, affectionate, chivalrous, he took possession of people’s hearts as a matter of course.”

Storms and Sunshine of a Soldier's Life
Lt-General Colin MacKenzie, C.B., 1825-1881 in two volumes (1884)
Volume 1  |  Volume 2