Those few first days of January were days of painful doubt and anxiety. Every preparation for the march had been made by the garrison. For some time our officers had been gathering together and securing such property as they could take with them, and destroying what they were compelled to abandon. Every night, since the commencement of the new year, they had retired to rest, believing that the army would commence its march on the following morning; but the movement was delayed day after day, because the chiefs had not completed their promised arrangements for the safe conduct of the force. At last, on the evening of the 5th of January, the engineer-officer received instructions actually to commence the work, which he had been so long in readiness to accomplish. He was ordered to cut an opening through the rampart-walls of the cantonment to allow the egress of the troops, more rapidly and less confusedly, than they could pass out through the gates. The chiefs had not sent the promised safeguard; but, contrary to the advice of Major Pottinger,[208] the military authorities determined to march out of their entrenchments. And so, on the following morning, the British force, beaten and disgraced, commenced its ill-fated retreat towards the provinces of Hindostan. I have commented upon the various incidents of the Caubul insurrection as they have arisen, one by one, to claim the attention of the reader; and little now remains to be said in explanation of the causes which conduced to the calamitous and disgraceful defeat of a British army by an undisciplined and disunited enemy, who had no artillery to bring into the field. Whatever more remote causes of this lamentable failure may be found elsewhere, it is impossible to conceal or to disguise the one galling fact, that the British army at Caubul was disastrously beaten because it was commanded by an incapable chief. Whether that chief would have beaten the enemy, if the military arrangements for which he was not responsible had been better ordered—if the site of the cantonments had been more judiciously chosen, and its defences more effectively constructed, if all our magazines and godowns had been well located and well protected,—may still be an open question; but it appears to me that there is no question as to whether a commanding officer of the right stamp would have triumphed over these difficulties, and beaten the enemy in spite of them. The Caubul cantonments were very badly situated, and very ill-constructed for purposes of defence; but if our troops had been commanded by an officer with a robust frame, strong nerves, a clear understanding, and a proper knowledge of his business, as the chief of a mixed army of British and Hindostanee troops, they would have crushed the insurrection in a few hours, and demonstrated the irresistible power of British valour and British discipline.