Page:The Earl of Auckland.djvu/158

152 of our nine-pounder guns. By that time the snow began to fall steadily, and the last hopes of a safe retreat were fast vanishing. Sháh Shujá could not make up his mind either to leave the country with his English friends, or to make his peace with the turbulent Kháns, who offered to acknowledge him as king, if he would cease to treat them as his inferiors, and would marry his daughters to them or their sons. The camp-followers were living on carrion, and the horses eating their own dung.

Sturt, the brave and trusty Engineer, now urged the General to break off the treaty and cut his own way to Jalálábád. Macnaghten at one moment implored the military chiefs to march at any cost into the citadel, at another he called upon the Ghilzai and Kazilbásh leaders to rally round the Sháh and his allies. His desperate efforts to save the last shreds of his country's honour plunged him into courses which compromised his own. Which way he turned was hell; and the final exodus was fixed for the 22nd of December. Still clutching at any pretext for delaying or evading the stroke of doom, he instructed the wily Mohan Lál to bribe the Ghilzai and Kazilbásh chiefs into sending him supplies of grain, and making their salaams of fealty to Sháh Shujá. In the event of their taking the bait, he would no longer keep his promise to withdraw from Afghánistán.

Such was the plain English of letters couched in more diplomatic phrases. Macnaghten's better nature