Early History
In 1857, it was decided to augment the existing Gurkha regiments by raising another. Initially, this was known as the Extra Goorkha Regiment, before being numbered as the 19th Regiment of Bengal Native Infantry. In 1861 it was finally designated as the 4th Goorkha Regiment.
The regiment's first major action came during the Second Afghan War, although in this time it also served on the North-West Frontier and during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900.
The regiment's first Victoria Cross came during operations in Somalia during the Third Somaliland Campaign in 1903, when then Captain William George Walker risked his life in an attempt to save the life of another officer who had been wounded during earlier fighting. Walker's VC was, however, earning serving in the Somali Camel Corps, not the 4th Gorkhas.
Read more about this topic: 4 Gorkha Rifles
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or history:
“The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the alms-house as brightly as from the rich man’s abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)