MASSACRE AT THE KOORD CAUBUL PASS.

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genius still was paramount. A halt was ordered, so another night was passed in the deadly snow, and another day given to the Afghans to prepare. The morning sun rose upon many a snow-stiffened corse, but all the horror of this was forgotten when, on entering the terrible pass, the jezails of the fanatic Ghilzies opened a murderous fire on the helpless multitude. But it is useless, as painful, to pursue this sad narrative of death farther. Every reader knows how more than fourteen thousand human beings perished in seven days! On the 13th, the garrison of Jellalabad, who still gallantly held out, saw a solitary horseman, clinging to the neck of a wretched, weary pony, slowly approaching, although in the last stage of mortal weakness. Colonel Dennie, who, with sad truth, had always foreboded that the army would be destroyed, except one man who would bring the heavy tidings, pointed to the fainting horseman, and said, 'here comes the messenger!' It was as the response of an oracle, for Dr. Brydon, scarcely alive, was led in to tell the horrors of that fatal retreat, and the massacre of those officers of whom he was the sole survivor!

Between thirty and forty officers, ladies, and children were, however, as the reader is aware, at this time hostages to Akbar Khan, and the events of their perilous captivity have been graphically detailed in Lady Sale's and Captains Eyre and Johnson's journals. There were also the sick and wounded, together with the hostages-few in number indeed-who had been marched into Caubul,—and with sad forebodings for themselves did they enter the hostile city; but while their brothers in arms, whose lot had seemed so preferable, were ice-stiffened corses, they received from hostile hands kindness and true eastern hospitality. The Newab Zemaun Khan, 'faithful among 'the faithless,' was resolute to defend the Christian strangers at all risks. He was a Barukzye chief, a near relative of Dost Mohammed; he did all that, single-handed, he could do to atone for the cruelty of his countrymen, and no father could have treated his children more kindly than the good Newab cherished and protected the English hostages who found sanctuary in his house. Nothing, indeed, could exceed the kindness of this worthy and chivalrous Afghan. A lamented relative of the writer of this article, who, wounded in the action on the

I had just formed up a corps to resist a threatened attack, and was moving on again, when I heard the general had ordered a halt. I immediately hurried forward, and entreated him to continue the march, having only come three miles, and assured him that a halt on the snow, without tents or food, would destroy the troops; but he was immovable, and talked of the Sirdar's promises. There was another day entirely lost, and the enemy collecting in numbers.'-Shelton's MS. Records.

Beh-meru hills, was placed in command of the sick and wounded, delighted to bear testimony to the considerate care and kindness with which he had been treated by Zemaun Khan. Every attention was paid to his comfort; the food was, or rather we may say, would have been, excellent, but for that favourite condiment of the Afghan cuisine, assafoetida; his money, jewellery, and wardrobe remained untouched; even his favourite horse was restored to him, and almost pleasantly passed the first months of his captivity in Caubul; a large chest of books which had been sent for the regimental library, forming a pleasant solace for him and his companions. There they remained protected during the strife of the rival tribes in the spring, and during the commotions consequent on the death of Shah Soojah, who was shot through the head by direction of the Newab's unworthy son, as he proceeded in his chair of state to his camp. Even when the Cabulees called on Zemaun Khan to deliver them up to the high priest, he resisted long with prayers and tears; and when at last he was compelled to yield, he actually sent the ladies of his family at the same time to the priest's house, thus putting his English guests under a protection scarcely ever violated by the Afghans, that of the Zenana. Such traits are delightful to meet with in the midst of so dark a record of treachery and bloodshed. Thus perished, save a small handful of men, a mighty army; and there is nothing indeed more ' remarkable in history than the awful completeness, the sublime 'unity of this Caubul tragedy.'

'In the pages of a heathen writer, over such a story as this would be cast the shadow of a tremendous Nemesis. The Christian historian uses other words, but the same prevailing idea runs, like a great river, through his narrative; and the reader recognises the one great truth, that the wisdom of our statesmen is but foolishness, and the might of our armies is but weakness, when the curse of God is sitting heavily on an unholy cause: For the God of recompences will surely requite.'-vol. i. p. 250.

But Britain has much to effect in India; and, therefore, humbled as British power had been, the instrument through which Central Asia may, we trust, eventually receive the boon of a Christian civilization, was not to be cast away; and thus the concluding narrative of the Afghan war is a record of continued victories, a romance of success indeed, especially if viewed in connexion with the subsequent wars in the Punjab, as singular and complete as the tragedy of the first expedition. In this part of his narrative Mr. Kaye very successfully, we think, vindicates the army under General Pollock from the charges of ferocious conduct which have been brought against it.

CAUBUL RETAKEN—THE GATES OF SOMNAUTH.

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Indeed, even when the men after passing for days along a line of road encumbered with the skeletons of their hapless companions, entered Caubul, although the hideous sights of the last few days were still fresh in the memory of the troops, they resisted all temptation to violence and outrage. Not a man was hurt, or a house injured.' The sepoys under Nott were restrained with more difficulty; but even in the case of their excesses ere leaving Caubul, when we remember the ' amount of temptation and provocation,-when we remember that the comrades of our soldiers and the brothers of our camp'followers had been foully butchered in the passes of Afghan'istan,—when everywhere tokens of our humiliation and the 'treachery and cruelty of the enemy rose up, we wonder less that when the guilty city lay at their feet they should not have 'wholly reined in their passions, than that at such an hour they 'should have given them so little head.'

6

As to the spoliation of the Somnauth gates, the whole honour, or otherwise, belongs to Lord Ellenborough alone. But that both the deed, and the celebrated proclamation that recorded it, were follies of the most senseless kind,' as Mr. Kaye remarks, there can be no doubt. Upon the Mohammedans it was an 'open and most intelligible outrage. To the Hindoos the pom'pous offer of the polluted gates of Somnauth was little better 'than a covert insult;' indeed, we have no word very fitly to ' represent the character of the affair. The French would have 'called it a bêtise. It was a bêtise of the first magnitude.' Best of all, it would appear, from a very high authority in oriental antiquities, Major Rawlinson, that it is very improbable the gates ever belonged to Somnauth. The following is an extract from his manuscript journal:

The Moollahs upheld that the gates were really those of Somnauth, and that the inscriptions on the tomb date from the time of the Son of Mahmoud; but this I hold to be morally impossible, for although the Cufic may possibly be of the form used in that age (which, however, I doubt), the inscription in the Nuskh character on the reverse of the sarcophagus, which details the precise date of the Sultan's death, is obviously of a much later age. From many circumstances I feel positively certain that the tomb does not boast a higher antiquity than that of Sultan Abdaal Rizak, who built the present walls of Ghuznee. The gates, therefore, are certainly not those of Somnauth; but it was of course the interest of the Moollahs to keep up the delusion, and to affect for the spot the odour both of sandal and sanctity.'-vol. ii. p. 606, note.

Mr. Kaye's very interesting work concludes with the gathering at Ferozepore,' where the gallant retrievers of our national

honour received a fitting welcome, and with the restoration of that brave chief, now on his death-bed, or perhaps dead, Dost Mohammed, to the land he should never have been driven from.

The second book before us, A Year on the Punjab Frontier in 1848-9,' is a spirited, 'personal narrative,' by an officer well known for his true soldier-like qualities of bravery and humanity, Major Herbert Edwardes, and gives a very graphic detail of the varied and stirring incidents of a most eventful year, and also of what he is justly more satisfied with than any victory he helped to gain before Mooltan, the bloodless conquest of the valley of Bunnoo.' This was gained neither by shot, nor shell, 'but simply by balancing two races and two creeds. For fear of a Sikh army, two warlike and independent Mohammedan tribes levelled to the ground, at my bidding, the four hundred forts ' which constituted the strength of their country; and for fear of 'these same Mohammedan tribes, the same Sikh army, at my bidding, constructed a fortress for the crown which completed 'the subjugation of the valley.' The account of the inhabitants of this valley, and the means by which they were reduced to somewhat of order, forms a very interesting episode in the history of the wars of the Punjab. Remarkably ferocious, with very low notions of justice, and apparently an utter incapacity to comprehend the criminality of falsehood; the task which Major Edwardes assigned himself was indeed a hard one.' But the 'fixedness of purpose, the determination to make many barbarian wills give way to one that was civilized,' combined with rigid integrity and the strictest truth in all matters, the most trivial, as well as the most important, carried the energetic young officer triumphantly through; and when we find that suttee among the Hindoo portion of the population, and infanticide, slave dealing, and forced labour among all the tribes have been entirely put down, we may well congratulate him on his bloodless victory.' Far less acquainted with the usages of civilized life than their brethren of Caubul,

'Nothing could exceed the simple astonishment not only of the Moorees, but all the Bunnoochee chiefs, when they first came in, at every object they saw in my possession. They believed my watch was a bird, and called the tick its song. As for the perambulator with which I measured the marches, they beheld it with perfect awe, and asked me if it was true that it threw itself down on the ground at the end of every mile to let the man who guided it know he had come that distance? One chief wanted to know whether it was true that English people could tell no lies; and appeared from his look of commiseration to attribute it to some cruel malformation of our mouths. Another inquired whether it was true that, when I was young, I had

THE PUSHTOO BIBLE.

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read books for twelve years uninterruptedly without sleeping! A people so ignorant as this is very difficult to deal with, for you never know what extraordinary idea they may take into their heads. On the present occasion, the strength of their imagination was in our favour.vol. i. p. 101.

Major Edwardes, in the testimony he repeatedly bears to the bad faith of the Puthans, to which race both the natives of Caubul and the Bunnoochees belong, incidentally justifies the severe measures resorted to by our army in Afghanistan, and forcibly illustrates the bitter hostility which the sepoys could not but feel towards men, whom not even the most sacred oaths could bind. The success of his severe, but just rule, however, proves that in time these fierce denizens of the mountain and valley may be brought within the pale of civilization, and more, within the fold of the Christian faith. With the following most interesting incident we conclude our notice.

'Ali Khan Gundapoor, uncle of the present chief Gooldad Khan, told me he could remember well when a youth being sent by his father and elder brother with a string of Caubul horses to the fair of Hurdawâr, on the Ganges. He showed me a Pushtoo version of the Bible, printed at Serampore, in 1818, and which he said had been given him thirty years before at Hurdawâr, by an English gentleman, who said to him, Take care of it, and neither fling it into the fire, nor into the river, but hoard it up against the day when the British should be rulers of his country.' Ali Khan said little to anybody of his possessing this book, but put it carefully by in a linen cover, and produced it with great mystery when I came to settle the revenue of his nephew's country, thinking that the time predicted by the Englishman had arrived.' The only person to whom he had shown it was a Moollah, who read several passages in the Old Testament, and told Ali Khan 'it was a true story, all about their own Mohammedan prophets, father Moses, and father Noah.' I examined the book with great interest. It was not printed in the Persian characters, but the common Pushtoo language of Afghanistan. The accomplishment of such a translation was a highly honourable proof of the zeal and industry of the Serampore Mission, and should those pages ever meet the eye of Mr. John Marshman, whose own pen is consistently guided by a love of civil order and religious truth, he may probably be able to identify the English gentleman,' who thirty-two years ago, on the banks of the Ganges, at the then frontier of British India, gave to a young Afghan chief, from beyond the distant Indus, a Bible in his own barbarous tongue, and foresaw the day when the followers of the Son of David' should extend their dominion to the Throne of Solomon.'-vol. i. p. 407.

We have been greatly interested in both these works, to which we have called the reader's attention, and especially have we