The quickness with which we resumed the offensive after being besieged in Sherpur has favourably impressed all the country about. Such chiefs as were hostile to us now see that they are not safe from reprisals; and within easy marches of Sherpur many villages which turned out their fighting men during the _jehad_, are now being punished. One village in Chardeh was said to contain the bodies of Lieutenants Hardie and Forbes, who fell in the cavalry action on the 11th of December. On our troops visiting it, the _maliks_ denied that the bodies had been seen. Two of the headmen were tied up and flogged, but still refused to speak; but upon a third being seized, he offered to show the officers’ graves. The bodies were exhumed, and were found to be unmutilated. The village has been destroyed on account of the contumacy of the _maliks_, and also because our troops were fired upon from its walls when the guns were lost. Several other missing bodies of Lancers have been found; and on New Year’s Day an impressive funeral of the bodies of Captain Spens, Lieutenant Hardie, Lieutenant Forbes, and a non-commissioned officer took place at the foot of the north-western slope of the Bemaru Heights. We have lost twelve officers killed and fourteen wounded since December 10th, which shows the severity of the fighting; while of the rank and file and camp-followers, ninety-eight have been killed and 238 wounded. _4th January._ One feature of the late investment of Sherpur cantonment which deserves considerable attention is the part played by the powerful Ghilzai tribes between Cabul and Jellalabad. Their attitude, from the 14th of December, was the same as that taken up in the war of 1841-42, and they no doubt looked for a similar result. It might have been foretold with absolute certainty that once a British army was besieged at Cabul, the tribesmen on the route to India would rise to a man and try to block the road along which reinforcements must pass. The _jehad_ which Mushk-i-Alam headed had its origin far from the rocky barrier which shuts in the Cabul plain on the east: its birth was at Ghazni, and its growth extended on the north to Kohistan, and on the south to Logar, the two districts which furnished at the outset its principal strength. The Safis of Tagao were drawn within its influence by their close neighbourhood to Kohistan; but the Ghilzais of Tezin and the valleys about, as well as the more distant Lughmanis, held aloof at first by reason of their position between the two British forces. If Mahomed Jan had failed in his march upon Cabul, and had been driven back upon the Ghazni Road, we should probably have heard little of the hostility of the tribes westward of Butkhak; the preaching of the _moollahs_, which had for weeks before fallen upon the ears of the Ghilzais as the prediction of a great triumph over the Kaffir army, would have borne no fruit beyond an occasional raid upon our convoys.