It was not to be expected that clemency would be extended to such men as joined in the actual attack upon the Residency, or to the leaders, who misled the sepoys afterwards, by declaring that the Amir was an unwilling prisoner in our hands, and was calling, from his captivity, upon all true Mussulmans to resist the British, and to release him from the hands of his own and his country’s enemies. As we have had daily to watch the string of men passing along under escort to the Bala Hissar, many a keen regret has been felt that leaders like Nek Mahomed and Kushdil Khan have not been in their ranks. The demeanour of the men hanged has, in all cases, been one of stolid indifference: they accepted their fate as a matter of course, and, when surrounded by the bayonets of the Highlanders, tried to keep up a semblance of soldierly bearing, by marching in time and keeping shoulder to shoulder. But that one remembers the bitter treachery we have come to punish, and can almost look down from the foot of the scaffold into the pit in which the bodies of our brave Guides are lying, one might feel pity for the wretches whose fanaticism has put their heads into the noose. There were no extra precautions taken, even when twenty-eight men had to be hanged; a small guard of fifty men under a commissioned officer was told off from one of the British regiments, and the prisoners were marched off in the usual way. They apparently never thought of attempting to escape; and Cabul is so cowed by the military law it is now enjoying, that its rabble population has not spirit enough left to cry “a rescue.” Nothing can be quieter than the city, which has always been so notorious for bloodshed and turbulence: the shadow of the scaffold is over it, and not one among the ruffians who throng its narrow streets, and hide in its filthy purlieus, but feels its influence. They have hitherto traded upon our known weakness—the worship of the quality of mercy,—and it is only now that they understand the new principle of retribution we have introduced into our policy. Like Pollock, General Roberts might have destroyed their bazaar and left Cabul to its fate; but whether we withdraw again or not, there will be the tale of lives taken by our hangmen still to be counted over in the city and the villages; and who knows yet what powerful names may not top the list?