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164 Of the thousands that left Kábul on the 6th of January, a hundred and twenty men, women, and children survived as prisoners in the hands of Muhammad Akbar. Among these were Lady Macnaghten, Mrs. Trevor, and the stout-hearted Lady Sale, whose son-in-law Sturt had died earlier of his wounds. Very few of the camp-followers survived the horrors of that terrible retreat. Of the Sepoy regiments a few score frost-bitten wretches straggled presently into Pesháwar. The tidings of that great disaster, the heaviest and most shameful which had ever yet befallen our arms in Asia, sent a thrill of wrathful dismay through every English heart in India, and became the talk of every Indian bazaar. No outward movement, however, betrayed the drift of native feeling, nor did any of the native courts renew their old intrigues against our rule. They had learned perhaps from past experience the lessons which Hannibal, according to Horace, had learned from his long struggle with the might of old Rome. For our countrymen also there was comfort in reflecting that England's honour was still upheld by Nott and Rawlinson at Kandahár, by Sale and Broadfoot at Jalálábád, by Clerk, Mackeson, and Henry Lawrence in the Punjab.

It would be foolish to speak of such a catastrophe as the necessary outcome of the meddling policy which Lord Auckland had tried to carry out. The utter collapse of that policy, baleful, lawless, and blundering as it was, sprang mainly from the choice of agents ill fitted for their work. Macnaghten's cheery trust-