The command of the Shah’s troops was vested in Brigadier Anquetil, a native of one of those lovely islands in the Channel which have sent forth so many brave men to fight our battles by sea and land. He was esteemed a good soldier; and I believe that Macnaghten found him a more pliant colleague than the “alarmist” whom he had supplanted. The controversies between Brigadier Roberts and the Envoy had ended in the departure of the former. His advice had been resented; his warnings had been scouted. His clear insight into the dangers which were beneath our feet had been regarded as idle and imbecile fear; and the unwelcome declarations of his honest convictions as little short of rank mutiny. He had done his duty; he had spoken the truth; and he had paid the inevitable penalty of his unwillingness to make an easy and a prosperous present at the cost of a tumultuous and disastrous future. He had returned in disgrace to the British provinces; but he had left his predictions behind him, and he knew that, sooner or later, History would do him justice. The main body of the British troops were in the new cantonments. These works had been erected in the course of 1840. They were situated on a piece of low ground open to the Kohistan road. They were extensive and ill defended. They were nearly a mile in extent, and were surrounded by ramparts so little formidable that they might be ridden over.[76] Near the cantonments was the Mission compound, occupying an extensive space, and surrounded by a number of houses and buildings belonging to the officers and retainers of the Mission. There was here, also, a weak attempt at defence; but the walls were beyond measure contemptible; and the whole expanse of building, the entrenched camp and Mission compound together, were so planted, as to be swept on every side by hills, and forts, and villages, and whatever else in such a country could bristle with armed men. No such works were ever known—so wretched in themselves, and so doubly wretched by position. If the object of those who constructed them had been to place our troops at the mercy of an enemy, they could not have been devised more cunningly in furtherance of such an end. They were commanded on every side; and so surrounded with villages, forts, gardens, and other cover for an enemy, that our troops could neither enter nor leave the camp without exposing themselves to a raking fire from some one of these points of attack. And to crown the calamity of the whole, the Commissariat supplies, on which our army depended for its subsistence, were stored in a small fort, not within, but beyond, the cantonments. The communication between the two places was commanded by an empty fort, and by a walled garden, inviting the occupation of an enemy. Human folly seemed to have reached its height in the construction of these works. There stood those great, indefensible cantonments, overawed on every side, a monument of the madness which Providence, for its own ends, had