journal of the day. On this "commotion" turned the fate of an army and a kingdom. It is generally agreed, that active means at first might have repressed the insurrection: but those who had been slow to believe the existence were slow to admit the extent of the danger; nor was it from the beginning so slight as has been represented. The ball, of course, grew by rolling; but it grew with tremendous rapidity. If, on the first day, the insurgents were only a few hundreds, by the next they were truly formidable. Whatever the defects of the position of our force, whatever the blunders of its leaders, and they appear to have made all that it was possible, and some that it would previously have been impossible, to anticipate-the outbreak, by which an army of 6000 disciplined troops were so immediately induced to take up a defensive position, can never have been contemptible. Every one has felt the justice of Lieutenant Eyre's remarks on the imbecility which first led to the loss, and then prevented the recapture, of the commissariat fort: and, it is clear that the means which alone could enable the force to maintain its position, ought, at any risk, to have been defended, or recovered : still the attempts in furtherance of these objects, ill directed as they were, must have succeeded, had they not been met by a most active resistance, causing a very severe loss to the detachments employed. It is clear that vigorous and well-directed exertions might have resulted in safety and triumph. But it is out of our power to understand, how any one can, after reading Lieutenant Eyre's account of the first three weeks of the siege, feel justified in calling the Affghans "contemptible enemies." They may seem so to an Edinburgh Reviewer, calmly considering the numerous deficiencies of spirit and sense on our part, which were necessary to counterbalance the superiority of disciplined troops over bands of irregular warriors. Yet no Asiatic nation has successfully resisted us with forces so nearly equal. They did not seem contemptible to the men, on whom, on the occasion of the storm of the Rikabashee fort, (one of the few successful operations undertaken during the siege,) they inflicted a severer loss than that sustained by the conquerors of Ghuznee or Khelât. They did not seem so to Lady Sale, when she noticed how they stood against our guns without having any of their own; when she saw their cavalry, after receiving within a few yards the fire of our advancing columns, rush down the hill upon them-but we must give her own words: "My very heart leapt to my teeth as I saw the Affghans ride right through them. The onset was fearful. They looked like a great cluster of bees, but we beat them and drove them up again." (That "great cluster of bees," - the close, dark, irregular mass, hanging on the side of the hill, is a true touch of wordpainting). The terrible and disastrous defeat of Beymaroo, on the 23d November, brought about as it was by an unexampled combination of errors, -a determination, it would seem, to run all the risk possible, to improve and secure no temporary advantage, marked, as it was, by disgraceful cowardice on the part of some of our troops, -gave rise to exhibitions of daring courage on the part of the Affghans. What are we to say of the Ghazees,* estimated by Lady Sale at no more than 150 in number, who, creeping gradually up the side of the hill, charged, sword in hand, upon our square of infantry, broke it, and drove it before them? On our own side, the few Affghan "juzailchees" in our service, who stood by us to the end with a noble and extraordinary fidelity, were about the most efficient part of our army. The truth is, that the Affghans, in these conflicts for the freedom of their land, fully maintained the character which they have long possessed, and which their Rohilla descendants in India, whether as princes or mercenaries, have never forfeited, of being the bravest among the Asiatic nations. And this is not a little to say in their praise. A thoroughly brave man may, it is true, be a thoroughly wicked one; still for nations, even more than individuals, the foundation of all excellence is bravery. We need not go into any detailed account of the events of the struggle. From the 2d to the 13th November the British forces were struggling to resume a position of superiority; from that date they met with nothing but disaster. On the 15th November Major Pottinger and Lieutenant Haughton, the former slightly, the latter desperately, wounded, came into their camp, with a single sepoy, the sole escaped relics of our force at Charekar, announcing by their arrival the complete success of the insurgents in the district of Kohistan. On the 22d November Mahomed Akbar came to aid the revolt.. On the 23d occurred the disastrous conflict of Beymaroo, in which our troops were driven into cantonments in utter rout, and saved, in Lieutenant Eyre's judgment, from complete destruction only by the forbearance of their enemies; and, from that point to the evacuation of the cantonments, the picture is one of unvaried and increasing sadness; the hope of victory renounced, the hope of safety growing fainter, provisions becoming scarce, reinforcements impossible; lingering negotiations, alternating with despairing and unsuccessful attempts; within the camp, vacillation, famine, disease, and growing dismay; without, an enemy increasing in strength and confidence, and the worst enemy of all, the terrible winter, gradually creeping on. In the whole painful and miserable story, as it lies before us, * The Ghazees are a sect of Mussulman fanatics; the Ghilzies a mountain tribe. The war against us had many of the features of a religious war. We read of Mollahs going into all the villages to swear the people to fight to the last, as in a sacred cause, against the infidels. the most painful feature is the constant recurrence of chances of safety passively neglected, of wasted opportunities, of feats of useless valour. Never did the leaders of a victorious force display more devoted gallantry than was shown by many of the English officers at Cabool. Never in war was made so manifest the all-importance of the one directing mind. Even discipline, for once, was injurious. A body of men, less used to be commanded according to the strict rules of the service, might, perhaps, have been saved, and certainly could hardly have met with so utter a destruction. Had the constitution of an English force permitted it, who can doubt that the officers of the English and Indian regiments might, from among them, have furnished a Xenophon? But it is impossible, on a contemplation of the whole series of events, not to echo the remark with which Lieutenant Eyre sums up his account of the miserable and disastrous day of battle at Beymaroo, into which were crowded specimens of every one of the errors which, throughout, proved so fatal to us : "It seemed as if we were under the ban of Heaven." No Greek tragedy that ever was constructed bore more strongly the impress of an ever-advancing irresistible fatality-a fatality, however, working to its end, as is the case in all similar events, less through outward circumstances than through the characters of men. In the respective positions, characters, and views of the two English generals, there appears to have been a singular, but unfortunate, adaptation. Whatever incompleteness existed in the unfitness of the one, was filled up by the deficiencies of the other. General Elphinstone's position was, indeed, an unfortunate one for a man, to say the least, of no remarkable vigour of character. Disabled, not only by health, but by an accident on the very first day of the insurrection, from taking an active part in the duties of the defence, or from personally seeing that his orders were obeyed, General Elphinstone was still in command, still the person to whom every proposal must be referred. Dependent on others for the necessary information, it was most natural, though lamentable in its results, that he should distrust his own judgment, and exhibit much consequent indecision. He could not decide upon his own knowledge; and, as the statements of others varied, so did the General's opinion. It has been said that a council of war never fights; General Elphinstone's house, during the siege of the cantonments, was a perpetual council of war. On the other side, General Shelton, the acting, though not the sole responsible, commander, allowed himself to be overcome by the difficulty of a position, half supreme, half subordinate. Equal in courage to any one in the army, it is clear that he shrunk from an uncertain share of a divided responsibility. If Lady Sale may be trusted, he frequently declined giving any opinion on the measures proposed. One decided opinion he uniformly expressed, and that, whether right or wrong, was, by a singular fatality, on the only point on which the expression of such an opinion could do nothing but harm. From the beginning, he, the officer in immediate command of the troops, expressed his opinion that they could not hold out for the winter, and advocated a retreat to Jellalabad. The Envoy, the supreme political authority,-protested in the strongest manner against such a measure; and the General, responsible on the one hand for the sacrifice of the objects of his Government, on the other, for the safety of the army, remained wavering between them. The Envoy, in his position, and in the circumstances, was, as far as we can judge, perfectly right; still the opinion of Shelton, had it been at once acted upon, that is, had it been that of a general in sole command, would at least have saved the army. As things were, it had, and could have, only one effect that of depressing yet farther the spirits of the soldiers. It is difficult to say which had the worst effect-the General's universal indecision, or Shelton's single opinion. We do not blame the latter for holding it; we merely point out the singular combination of circumstances working together for the evil of the devoted army. Any one of these authorities, acting independently of the others, would, probably, have saved the troops. Having already in this, and our previous number, expressed our opinion of the conduct of the chief planner of the Affghan war, we are more anxious to do justice to his demeanour through the greater part of the struggle in which he perished. Lieutenant Eyre's account shows him to us in a most respectable light; the spring of every exertion made by the force; the suggester of every plan; the brave adopter of a responsibility from which the military leaders shrunk, and with his foresight uniformly vindicated by the favourable results of his suggestions. He consented to treat only when forced to it; he rejected the offer of unworthy terms with becoming spirit, and his conduct throughout would have entitled him to no mean place among that order of men whose high qualities rise higher against adversity, but for one lamentable and final exception. Our readers will generally know to what we allude. During the actual existence of a treaty between our force and the insurgents, Mahomed Akbar proposed to Sir W. Macnaghten a scheme, at once a test of his sincerity, and a trap to catch him, comprising, among other points, the seizure of certain other chiefs, parties to the actually existing treaty. The Envoy fell into the snare, and went forth to a conference prepared to seize the men who came to it in reliance on his word. Treachery was met by treachery; the countermine exploded under the feet of the miner. He was himself seized, and, resisting strongly, was shot by Mahomed Akbar, not, as it would seem, of previous purpose, but in the fierce passion excited by a violent personal struggle. In Lady Sale's opinion, the Envoy's readiness to accede to the plot suggested to him by Mahomed Akbar against the other chiefs, was justified by the neglect on their part to fulfil the conditions prescribed by that treaty. In questions of strict morality, not less than in questions of speculative truth, a lady's judgment is apt to be biassed by her feelings. With every respect for the feelings which, in this case, misled Lady Sale, we must protest against her opinion. The alleged non-fulfilment of the terms of the treaty could have been honourably met in one way only-by openly declaring that it was no longer binding. To acquiesce in its continuance, and plot the seizure of men who came relying on its faith to a peaceful conference, was an act of detestable treachery, which, up to that time, at least, the Affghans had done nothing to parallel. The arguments by which Lady Sale would justify the conduct of Sir W. Macnaghten, more than justify the counterplot against one already under his own hand convicted of treacherous intentions. The Affghans, in accordance with human nature, slurred over their own part of the transaction, which was bad enough, to dwell upon ours, which was worse, fiercely protesting that they had tried us, and found that we were not to be trusted: and who can tell what share this miserable transaction, with the distrust which it produced among them, may have had in occasioning the subsequent faithless destruction of our army ? That either party should trust the other after what had passed was impossible, and to resume the treaty was madness. Yet the treaty-which bound us, in short, to evacuate the country, the Affghans to permit and assist us to evacuate it in safety-was resumed; resumed, too, in accordance with the all but unanimous decision of a council of war. One man only dissented-the officer who had before saved Herat from the Persians, and whose counsel gave now the only chance of saving the English army at Cabool from the Affghans. He pointed out the risk incurred by the treaty, the impropriety of binding the hands of the Indian Government, and declared that the true choice for the army lay between holding out at Cabool to the last, and at once fighting their way to Jellalabad. It is clear, after the result, that Major Pottinger was right. The first course might still, perhaps, have been successful-by the second, a remnant, at least, of the army might have reached Jellalabad. We must allow for the errors of men placed in a situation of almost unparalleled difficulty; still it does seem inexplicable that they should have adopted the one course calculated to insure destruction. We find, from Lady Sale, that many Affghans warned the English officers once and again, that |