lery, the relinquishment of all the treasure, augmented by a considerable personal ransom, and the evacuation of Jellalabad by General Sale. Six English officers were left as hostages in the hands of Akbar Khan.

The caravan set out on the 6th of January, 1842. It consisted of four thousand five hundred soldiers, most of them. Asiatics, and twelve thousand English or Indian camp-followers. Some officers' wives and a number of children made part of this sad band. The Afghans had at first proposed to retain the women as hostages, but the officers, who had accepted so many humiliations, refused this in set terms. Fate, however, was soon to triumph over even this last resistance.

Akbar Khan had required fresh hostages, which had been given him; he now followed the march of this disorderly and despairing band, who were pressing on unaware into new dangers. The tribe of the Ghilzyes occupied the pass of Koord Cabul, a gorge five miles in length, between precipitous cliffs of great height, and traversed by a mountain torrent. From the rocky sides of the pass a shower of balls rained down upon the human mass struggling in this defile. Akbar Khan, it is said, strove to put an end to this fire, but he was utterly powerless to do it; and when the English column emerged from the pass, three thousand dead bodies lay upon the ground. The women shared in the common fate; many of them were in camel-panniers, a few among them Lady Sale — on horseback. The latter was severely wounded, and her son-in-law was killed. The Afghan chief from time to time appeared in the midst of the confusion. Finally he announced, says Lady Sale, "that he had a proposal to make, but that he did not like to do so, lest his motives might be misconstrued; but that, as it concerned us more than himself, he would mention it; and that it was that all the married men with their families should come over and put themselves under his protection,

he guaranteeing them honorable treatment and safe escort to Peshawur. He added that it must have been seen from the events of the day previous - the loss of Captain Boyd's and Captain Anderson's children-that our camp was no place of safety for women and children." The women were not consulted. "There was but faint hope," says Lady Sale, "of our ever getting safely to Jellalabad, and we followed the stream. But although there was much talk regarding our going over, all I personally know of the affair is that I was told we were all to go, and that our horses were ready, and that we must mount immediately, and be off."

The column continued to advance, the Asiatic soldiers dropping behind and falling under the severity of the cold. Finally the English gave way, one after another, until in the pass of Jugdulluk, barricaded by branches and trunks of trees, and held by the enemy, a massacre so horrible ensued that but twenty officers and twenty-five soldiers emerged alive. The following morning this little handful was again attacked; they refused to surrender, a captain and a few men were made prisoners, others perished on the spot, six only reached Futtehabad, sixteen miles from Jellalabad, and before the last stage of the journey was completed, five of these six had perished.

General Sale meanwhile was at Jellalabad, ignorant of what had befallen his comrades and his family at Cabul. Common rumor had already announced some great danger, when a letter arrived from General Elphinstone declaring that in virtue of a treaty made with the Afghans, the entire territory of Cabul was to be abandoned. General Sale was not sure that he should be able to lead his troops to Peshawur, and he resolved to disregard the instructions of Elphinstone and hold the position in which he was. On the 13th of February, a sentinel on the walls of Jellalabad perceived a man advancing in the distance whose. horse seemed almost too fatigued to walk. They hastened out

to meet him. Wounded, famished, worn out with suffering, Dr. Brydon brought news of the disaster which had overwhelmed the English column. Alone of all who had left Cabul on the 6th of January, he remained alive and at liberty, and he brought word to the English general that his wife and daughter were in the hands of Akbar Khan.

In a soldier's heroism General Sale found what consolation was possible. "I propose," he said, "to hold this place on the part of government until I receive its order to the contrary." Akbar Khan immediately laid siege to the town, seconded by successive earthquakes which destroyed a portion of the ramparts. But the English stood firm, repairing their walls and repulsing the enemy's attacks. They knew that General Pollock was on his way to their relief, and they decided to come out and attack the Afghans, without waiting for his arrival.

On the 7th of April, three columns of infantry with a little force of cavalry made a sortie from Jellalabad. At the head of one of these columns marched Captain Havelock, as tranquilly resolute as when, later, he came to the deliverance of Lucknow. The Afghans were completely defeated, notwithstanding their superior numbers. On his part General Pollock had carried the Khyber Pass, where General Wild had been destroyed. Foreseeing that the enemy would, in accordance with their custom, occupy the heights, he had posted his own forces on still higher elevations; the Afghans tried vainly to dislodge them, and in their turn perished by the same fate that they had designed for the English. The two victorious corps met at the gates of Jellalabad. The fortune of war had shifted, and English courage was in the ascendant. For a moment the vague hope had spread among the native populations of India that foreign dominion was approaching its end in their country. Shah Shooja was assassinated in Cabul; Lord Auckland, however, published a proclamation full of courage and hope: the

calamity which had overtaken the British arms was, he said, "a new occasion for displaying the stability and vigor of the British power, and the admirable spirit and valor of the British Indian army."

This was the brave adieu of the governor-general to a country which he had inconsiderately involved in a disastrous war. Lord Auckland had just been superseded by Lord Ellenborough.

The first instinct of the new governor was to recall the troops at the earliest possible moment from Afghanistan. Lord Ellenborough was a man of much intellectual ability; he was an orator, and extremely well informed in respect to Indian affairs, but he was often carried away by a love of rhetoric and theatrical effect into contenting himself and seeking to satisfy others with mere words. The brilliant style of his proclamations did not suffice to content the English generals, eager for vengeance, and burning to wash out the shame of their defeats. The military commanders gathered together their forces, and marched against the enemy. One by one, the cities which had fallen into the hands of the Afghans were retaken; on the 15th of September, 1842, General Pollock entered Cabul, and, a few days later, set fire to the grand bazar where Akbar Khan had displayed to the Afghan populace the body of the murdered Macnaghten.

The English hostages meantime remained in the hands of the Afghan prince; the conquerors were not forgetful of them, however, and Sir Robert Sale was appointed to attempt their deliverance. Whether he should find his wife and his daughter alive he did not know. From fort to fort, from defile to defile, the unhappy prisoners had been hurried by their keepers; they had been shut up in the most horrible recesses, deprived almost of the necessaries of life, overwhelmed by physical and mental sufferings of every kind. Lady Sale in her journal relates the

history of this captivity which lasted eight months. General Elphinstone very early succumbed under the hardships of the imprisonment. The women had preserved their strength wonderfully, and the health of the children seems not to have suffered. A hope of deliverance supported the prisoners, for signs of weakness were evident in the position of Akbar Khan. The same conviction made its way among the inferior chiefs, to whom the custody of the English prisoners was confided. They allowed themselves to be won over by the promise of a heavy ransom, and the whole party were on their way towards General Pollock's camp when they met General Sale, coming in search of them. "Our joy was too great, too overwhelming for tongue to utter," wrote one of the rescued prisoners. "We felt a choking sensation which could not obtain the relief of tears."

Other captives who had fallen into the power of the Ameer of Bokhara, to whom they had been sent as an embassy, were meeting with a very different fate. The feeble attempts that were made to deliver them ended only in establishing the certainty that death has been to them a relief from insupportable sufferings.

The intervention of the government of English India in the affairs of the native princes had borne bitter fruit. A proclamation by Lord Ellenborough announced that this course had been definitively abandoned. "To force a sovereign upon a reluctant people," wrote Lord Ellenborough, on the 1st of October, 1842, four years after Lord Auckland's proclamation in favor of the Shah Shooja, "would be as inconsistent with the policy as it is with the principles of the British government." He added that any government freely recognized by the Afghans themselves would be accepted by Great Britain; that the English troops would be withdrawn from Afghanistan; and that the English power in India would content itself with the limits which nature appeared to have assigned to it.