{"book":"adl0957","page":201,"text":"156\n\nin all 16,500 men, marched out of Kabul, intending to go to Hindustan, in reality marching into the jaws of death. Bands of patriots swarmed around the line of their retreat. The British Generals lost their heads and the troops their morale. Women, children and many officers were surrendered as hostages to Akbar Khan. The rest struggled on in misery through snowstorms and constant hail of bullets. The retreat became a rout; the rout a massacre. Seven days later (on January 13) one solitary survivor, Dr. Brydon, half dead with wounds and exhaustion, staggered into Jalalabad to tell the story of the disaster to the astounded British garrison.\n\nLord Auckland, the man mainly responsible for this sad episode, laid down the reins of office and was succeeded by Lord Ellenborough. As soon as the new Governor-General arrived in India, he announced that the British Government would no longer imperil its armies, and with its armies, the Indian Empire. He determined on the immediate evacuation of Afghanistan without any attempt at reprisals or even the rescue of prisoners still in the hands of the Afghans. Nott was ordered to abondon Kandahar, while Pollock and Sale were instructed to withdraw to Peshawar. The Governor-General met the retreating troops with great pomp and show in a big camp at Ferozepore, decorated with triumphal arches. Dost Mohammad Khan was released. He hastily returned to his country, now without a ruler, for the ill-fated Shah Shuja was murdered by his own subjects a few days after the British garrison abandoned the capital.\n\nThus ended the final phase of the First Afghan War. It cost the British 20,000 lives and the waste of more than £20,000,000. Nearly all British historians agree that the war had been an unjust one. Typical is this observation, \"We plunged into a most","chars":1817,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0957/00201.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":377,"title":"new guide to Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0957/201","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0957/canvas/201","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/books/adl0957/","source_pdf":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/pdf/adl0957_download.pdf","rights":{"image":{"statement":"Public domain. NYU states: \"All works presented on this website are, unless otherwise indicated, in the public domain. The images available on this website may be freely reproduced, distributed and transmitted by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial.\"","uri":"http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NoC-US/1.0/","holder":"New York University Libraries","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/about.html","delivery":"Images are served from a copy mirrored by this project, not from NYU's servers, under the reproduction terms above.","endorsement":"This is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or reviewed by New York University."},"text":{"statement":"Machine-generated transcription, dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0. No warranty of accuracy: see the provenance block on every page.","uri":"https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/","holder":"Steps Ventures"}},"provenance":{"text_produced_by":"gemini-3.1-pro-preview","thinking_level":"low","read_completed":"2026-08-09","per_page_confidence":null,"per_page_confidence_note":"Not recorded during the corpus run. No calibrated per-page score exists, and none is estimated here.","human_reviewed":false,"accuracy_context":"Roughly two thirds of characters agree with a modern printed edition of the same text. Much of the disagreement is editorial, not misreading. Treat the transcription as a finding aid and read the page image before quoting.","primary_source":"The page image. The text is an index into it."}}