{"book":"adl0970","page":116,"text":"79\n\nnoiter the enemy's position. Thus after covering a\ndistance of forty to fifty miles, he would return to\nhis tent. At night he placed a picket of 5,000\nhorses as near as he could to the enemy's camp,\nwhere they remained under arms all the night,\nwhile other parties went round the whole canton-\nment. Ahmad Shah himself would often take\npart in these rounds. He used to say to his Indian\nfriends, \"You better sleep ; I will take care that no\nharm befalls you.\" Personal bravery of a leader\nis of vital importance in an Afghan army. The\nsoldiers will gladly follow such a commander\nanywhere and against any odds ; but if he throws\nthem into danger, while he himself remains at a\ndistance, they lose their enthusiasm directly, and\nare half thrashed before the battle begins. They\nwant a man, who would rush forward sword in hand\nat their head, call upon them to follow, and then\ndash into the middle of the foe. Unstinted praise\nmust be accorded to Ahmad Shah not only for\nhis generalship and bravery, but also for his\ncareful training of the troops and his strict\nenforcement of discipline. His appearance in the\nmidst of his soldiers had an inspiring effect on\nthem, who would gladly follow him through thick","chars":1211,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0970/00116.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":191,"title":"Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0970/116","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0970/canvas/116","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/books/adl0970/","source_pdf":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/pdf/adl0970_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."}}