A shudder ran through the garrison. That solitary horseman looked like the messenger of death. Few doubted that he was the bearer of intelligence that would fill their souls with horror and dismay. Their worst forebodings seemed confirmed. There was the one man who was to tell the story of the massacre of a great army.[225] A party of cavalry were sent out to succour him. They brought him in wounded, exhausted, half-dead. The messenger was Dr. Brydon, and he now reported his belief that he was the sole survivor of an army of some sixteen thousand men. CHAPTER IV. [January, 1842.] The Retreat from Caubul—Departure of the Army—Attack on the Rear-Guard—The First Day’s March—Encampment at Begramee—The Passage of the Koord-Caubul Pass—Tezeen—Jugdulluck—Sufferings of the Force—Negotiations with Akbar Khan—Massacre at Gundamuck—Escape of Dr. Brydon. The story told by Dr. Brydon was one of which history has few parallels. A British army, consisting of more than four thousand fighting men and twelve thousand camp-followers, had, as he confusedly related, disappeared in a few days. Some had perished in the snow; others had been destroyed by the knives and the jezails of the enemy; and a few had been carried into captivity, perhaps to perish even more miserably than their unhappy comrades who had died in the deep passes of Koord-Caubul, Tezeen, and Jugdulluck. In the struggle between life and death which then threatened to stifle the evidence of poor Brydon, he told but imperfectly what he knew; and but imperfectly did he know the whole dire history of that calamitous retreat. It was long before the garrison of Jellalabad had more than a dim perception of the events which ended in the annihilation of the Caubul force. No one man could speak of more than certain scenes of the great tragedy; what had happened before, behind, around him, he could only conjecture. But there were other survivors than the solitary man who was brought, wounded and feeble, into Jellalabad on that January morning; and enough is now on record to enable the historian to group into one intelligible whole all the crowded circumstances of that lamentable retreat.