The Sepoy regiments having been feasted with their “favourite _mehtoys_” (sweetmeats), and the important event announced in a Government notification, the army of reserve was broken up;[347] but not before the Governor-General, moved by that characteristic admiration of gallantry, which earned for him in India the title of the “Friend of the Army,” had done all that lay in his power to reward the troops who had achieved such brilliant successes. The honours which he could not bestow he solicited from the Crown, on behalf of the brave men who had so fairly earned them; and the distribution of honorary distinctions which ensued gave almost universal satisfaction, It erred rather on the side of liberality; and, perhaps, there are some old soldiers, in the scantily-decorated Queen’s army, who think that during the last few years, honours have been bestowed so profusely as to lower their real value, by showing how easily they are to be earned. But it is better to err on the side of liberality than of chariness—better even that the unworthy should be decorated, than that the worthy should pine in vain for distinction.[348] But there was still something more to be done. The prisoners, towards whom the flood of sympathy had been setting in so strongly for many months, and whom the English in India now welcomed back with cordiality and delight, were not to be suffered all at once to sink into privacy and obscurity. Some of them were to be tried by courts-martial, or to be summoned before courts of inquiry, for abandoning their posts, going over to the enemy, or otherwise disgracing themselves. The courts sate, but they could not pronounce the officers arraigned before them guilty of any offence. Brigadier Shelton was acquitted. Colonel Palmer,[349] Captains Anderson, Boyd, Troup, and Waller, and Lieutenant Eyre, were honourably acquitted; and the court of inquiry, over which Mr. Clerk presided, must have risen from its investigation into the conduct of Major Pottinger with increased respect for the high soldierly qualities of the young officer who had beaten back the Persians at Herat, and protested against the capitulation of Caubul in the teeth of all the veterans of the force. On the 20th of January, 1843, Dost Mahomed arrived at Lahore, on his way to the frontier of Afghanistan, and was honourably received by the Sikh Durbar. The Suddozye Princes and their families, to whose reception in the British provinces Lord Ellenborough had evinced an insuperable repugnance, found an asylum in the Sikh dominions;[350] and British connection with Afghanistan was now fairly at an end.