Red with the slaughter of their enemies, and faint from their own wounds, the wearied band of soldiers, under Sale, threw themselves into Jellalabad. Then burst the startling intelligence over the plains of India that an insurrection had broken out amongst the far-distant mountains of Afghanistan, and that our fellow-soldiers were ill provided with sustenance, short of ammunition, and enveloped amongst countless swarms of enemies. I will not enter minutely on the details of that insurrection, which shook the fabric of our Eastern power to its centre, brought unmerited obloquy on the British name, and entailed the most harrowing series of disasters on the hapless army in Afghanistan that England's history can record in her military annals. The task of recapitulating the succession of horrors which took place in Caubul has been undertaken by eye-witnesses and sufferers from the small remnant of the Caubul garrison who escaped. Amongst that catalogue of miseries and massacre we have the consolatory reflection that the Afghans found no grounds to assert that the British, though worn with toil, and pierced by incessant cold, derogated in aught from their national fame. From the first struggle on leaving the entrenched camp at Caubul, unto the final catastrophe at Gundamuk, the Afghans were cautious of meeting our fellow-countrymen at close quarters. When they tried the experiment, led by the alluring satisfaction of revelling in Feringhee gore, they found that, although heart-broken and disorganized, the Briton was ever ready to die facing his enemy. Peace to the manes of those maligned and hapless warriors, whose bones are bleaching on every height and valley of that rugged desolation (fit scene for such a catastrophe) which disfigures the face of the country, from the gates of the Bala Hissar to the walls of Jellalabad! And, peace to the ashes of the worthy and amiable Elphinstone! It rested not with him that, suffering under bodily weakness and worn by mental anxieties in his arduous command, he should have lived to end his honourable days in an enemy's camp. The soldier has no choice but to obey the authority which places him in command, and those authorities are answerable to their countrymen for the selection. But the British power fell not with her general and his army. Kandahar was held with security in the iron grasp of Nott.[1] The little garrison of Khelat-i-Ghilzie held resolutely their post against the repeated and determined attacks of their blood-thirsty foe; and the haughty Akbar, with the bravest of his mountain tribes, was checked in his murderous career under the walls of Jellalabad. The "illustrious garrison" maintained their isolated post against cold, starvation, the overwhelming mass of vaunting Afghans, and against the convulsions of nature when an earthquake cast down their fortifications and left no artificial barrier, beyond their weapons, between the hordes of Afghanistan and Sale's devoted band.