General Elphinstone has left upon record a declaration of his belief that if he had been more worthily supported he would not have been beaten at Caubul. So long as he held the chief command in his own hands, he—and he alone—was responsible for all the operations of the army. He never relinquished the command. Though he did not take the field in person, every order emanated from him. To him the Envoy addressed himself; with him the Envoy took counsel. It is possible that if the second-in-command had been an officer of a different stamp, the army would not have been so disastrously and ignominiously beaten; but this admission does not affect the question of responsibility. Brigadier Shelton, throughout the siege, held a subordinate situation. He was immediately under Elphinstone’s orders; and though he may be chargeable with certain individual miscarriages—with certain errors in the executive management of details—he is not chargeable with the great comprehensive failure which has plunged his country into such a sea of disgrace. Of Shelton’s faults I have not been unmindful; but when I have admitted all his perverseness, his arrogance, his contumacy, and expressed my belief that there was not another man in the British army so unfitted by nature for the post he occupied under such a General, the admission amounts to little more than this: that Brigadier Shelton was not the man to supply the deficiencies of General Elphinstone. It is only because General Elphinstone was so incapable himself that we come to canvass at all the merits of his second-in-command. History does not trouble itself much about seconds-in-command, when the chiefs are fit for their posts. Unquestionably Elphinstone was not well supported. Macnaghten, in emphatic language, described the troops as “a pack of despicable cowards.” On more than one occasion they forgot that they were British troops, and turned their backs upon the enemy. They did not fight, as they would have fought if they had been well commanded. But the commander had less reason to complain of his troops than the troops had to complain of their commander. It was the faint-heartedness of the commander, at the outset of the insurrection, that dispirited and unnerved the troops. If Elphinstone, on the 2nd of November, had struck a vigorous blow at the then incipient rebellion, and proved himself, by his energy and resolution, worthy of the confidence of the troops, they would have had confidence in him and in themselves. But they were held in restraint by the backwardness of their leader; the forward feeling that then inspired them was crushed and deadened. There was nothing to encourage and to animate them, but everything to dishearten and depress. They saw that the enemy were suffered to triumph over and insult them—that the worst indignities were unresented, the vilest outrages unpunished. Thus abased they soon lost their self-respect, and forgot what was due to their colours and their country.