As the year 1842 progressed, the state of Afghanistan still remained critical. In July Candahar and Jellalabad were still our advanced posts, and all the intervening valleys and defiles were in the hands of the Afghans. Behind, in the Punjaub and in Scinde, the spectacle of delay and indecision on the part of our generals was spreading wider the area of disturbance. Clearly some real chief was wanted to hold together all this wavering discontent which was seething from the sources of the Sutlej to the sea at Kurachee. At last the order came to move to Scinde. Napier received it on the anniversary of the battle of the Coa, fought thirty-two years earlier. At first the recollection that he is now in his sixty-first year, and that he has to leave behind him all he holds dear in life to go out to incessant action in a terrible climate, damps his spirit, but he quickly rallies. He will not even depend upon the advice of the "politicals," as he calls the Civil Servants in Scinde, who for once are to be subject to his orders. These men may be useful, he thinks, but that usefulness "cannot be as councillors to a general officer who should have none but his pillow and his courage." And so with these sentiments and a thousand others equally characteristic of indomitable resolution, courage, and self-dependency, he sets out for Scinde on September 3rd, 1842. "Old Oliver's day," he writes; "the day he won Dunbar and Worcester, and the day he died; and a very good day to die on, as good as the second or the fourth--'_a crowning victory_,' strange."