Tears and distress were visible on all hands now; sickness and suffering increased rapidly, while every night the bugles sounded to arms, and cannon and musketry were discharged at the armed bands of horse and foot which menaced the front and rear gates, or sought plunder in the now abandoned Residency, and the villas previously occupied by General Trecarrel, Captain Trevor, and others.
Pale women clasped their children to their breasts, and men their wives, as if the parting hour of all was already come. The eyes of the soldiers filled and flashed with honest pity and manly indignation at the idea of yielding up civilized women, tender English ladies and helpless little children, to such barbarians as these; while the sick and wounded in hospital were full of horror and dismay at their own helplessness.
CHAPTER XVI.
THE MORNING OF THE RETREAT.
War, dread war, is one of the greatest games in life! "It is a passion even in the lower ranks of the soldiery; while for those in command it is the most intoxicating, the most imperious of passions. Where shall we find a wider field for energy of character, for the calculations of intellect and the flashes of genius? In him who is inflamed by glory, hunger, thirst, wounds, incessantly impending death itself, produce a sort of intoxication; the sudden combination of intermediate causes with foreseen chances, throw into this exalted game a never ceasing interest, equal to the emotion excited at long intervals by the most terrible situations of life!"
In the movement we are about to narrate, there was no room for the display of generalship, though more than enough for endurance and the most heroic courage; but some such enthusiastic reflections as these were floating in the mind of Denzil, when, by the prolonged notes of the trumpet, and the long roll on the drum, the entire troops in the Cantonments, horse, foot, and artillery, began to get under arms on the morning of the 6th of January, to commence that which eventually proved to be one of the most disastrous retreats on record.
How often had the unfortunate Trevor, Waller, Burgoyne, and others, exclaimed, in their weariness of heart—
"Let us fight our way down, destroying everything ere we leave the Cantonments, and at least one-third of us shall reach Jellalabad!" And now the time had come.
It had been finally arranged by the Staff at Headquarters, to pay more than fourteen lacs* of rupees to Ackbar Khan, Ameen Oolah Khan, Shireen Khan of the Kussilbashes, the Ghilzie Chiefs, and other treacherous villains, that our troops might march unmolested; Osman Khan undertaking, with his tribe, to escort them so far as Peshawur, the gate of British India, towards Central India. The money was negotiated on the spot by a Cashmere merchant and some Hindoo schroffs or bankers in Cabul. In vain did Major Pottinger and many other officers raise their voices indignantly against this measure of the feeble and aged Elphinstone.
* A lac is one hundred thousand.