{"book":"adl0973","page":64,"text":"royal forces and the levies formed a semi-\ncircle stretching from Kafir Koh to the\nWazirabad plain near the aerodrome. A\ncareful observer could easily see that Bacha's\nmen fought with spirit and enthusiasm; they\nwere better disciplined and better equip-\nped. On the other hand, there was no co-\noperation between the royal forces and the\nlevies and cases are known of some soldiers\nhaving been shot down by the latter. The\nGovernment was so incompetent that even at\na time of such imminent peril, it could not\nprovide the men with sufficient food and\nammunition; some of them had to quit their\nposts and come back to the city to fetch\ntheir own provisions. Most of the officers\nwent to the front at 9 or 10 in the morning\nand would come back at 4 in the even-\ning as if they were supervising a sham\nfight in manœuvres.\nGood luck, too, seemed to have deserted\nthe King.\nAeroplanes caught fire by chance, burn-\ning the pilots to death, armoured cars\noverturned or went out of order right in the\nfield of battle. Sayed Hussain had by this\ntime captured Jabl-us-Siraj and the hydro-\n35","chars":1081,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0973/00064.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":315,"title":"Progressive Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0973/64","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0973/canvas/64","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/books/adl0973/","source_pdf":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/pdf/adl0973_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."}}