permitted to cloud and bewilder the intelligence of the “greatest military nation of the world.” There it stood, a humiliating spectacle; but except by new-comers, who stood in amazement before the great folly, little account was taken of it. Men’s eyes had become accustomed to the blot. And whose was this stupendous error? Are we to assign its origin to the professional incapacity of the engineer officers attached to the force; to the ignorance and carelessness of the officers commanding it; or to the wilfulness of the Envoy? Not to the engineers—Durand, who had first held the post, had urged upon the Envoy the necessity of constructing barracks and posting our troops in the Balla Hissar; and Macnaghten, yielding to these solicitations, had overcome the reluctance of the Shah—but the barracks had been afterwards given up to the accommodation of the old king’s harem; and from that time, though Sturt who succeeded Durand, insisted, with equal urgency on the expediency of locating the troops in the Balla Hissar, and strengthening its defences, all hope of securing a strong military position at Caubul was gone. The sheep-folds on the plain were built. When Brigadier Roberts, in the spring of 1840, saw that the work had commenced, and what it was proposed to do, he remonstrated against the plan; and was told that it had been approved by Sir Willoughby Cotton. The Brigadier had been connected with the Building Department in the upper provinces of India, and freighted his remonstrances, therefore, with much professional experience, bearing upon the sanatory as well as upon the defensive aspects of the question; but, although he believed at first that he had made some impression on the Envoy, his protests were disregarded. And so the cantonments had sprung up, such as we have described them; and there, in that late autumn of 1841, they stood, bare and defenceless, as sheep-pens, whilst the wolves were howling around them.[77]