No time was lost in carrying this arrangement into effect. Whatever dilatoriness may have been displayed on other occasions, there was no want of alacrity evinced when anything was to be yielded to the enemy. Our garrisons were speedily withdrawn from the forts, and the victorious insurgents duly placed in possession of them. By four o’clock in the afternoon, the Afghan conquerors were sitting on the walls of these ceded forts, looking into the British cantonments, and joking over our discomfiture.[191] A brother of the Newab Zemaun Khan was sent in as a hostage on the part of the enemy;[192] and a small supply of attah was furnished to the troops. Provisions, however, came in very slowly; and carriage was not sent in at all. There was a mixed crowd of robbers and fanatics swarming between the city and the cantonments, ever on the alert to intercept the supplies that were sent in either by the Sirdars or by private speculators. All kinds of outrages were committed, in the very face of our guards, and under the very muzzles of our guns; but not a shot was fired upon the plunderers. Our enemies, now become “our new allies,” were to be treated with all possible consideration. Nothing was to be done to interrupt the good feeling which was now said to have been established; and so, whilst our troops were starving, the military authorities suffered the grain so eagerly looked for by the wretched force to be swept away from them, under the very walls of cantonments, by a miserable rabble, whom a few rounds of grape would have scattered like a flock of sheep. This was a season of perilous procrastination. Both parties seemed anxious to postpone the day that was to witness the departure of the British force; and each was suspicious of the good faith of the other. The chiefs withheld, from day to day, the provisions and the carriage-cattle, with which they had undertaken to facilitate our escape from Afghanistan; and Macnaghten, hoping still against hope, and sanguine, even in the midst of every kind of discouragement, still thought that “something might turn up” to avert the humiliation of an enforced withdrawal from the country which we had entered with so much pomp and parade. It was still possible, he thought, that Maclaren’s brigade might make good its way to Caubul. It was not then known that it had retraced its steps to Candahar.