{"book":"adl1197","page":125,"text":"— 112 —\nthat this man would kill any one who comes within range ; and\nthis man was also the bearer of a letter in which Sirdar Abdur\nRashid Khan had indicated his desire to come. This letter fell in\nthe hands of Mohan Lal.\n\nWhen Abdur Rashid Khan escaped from the gateway of Ghazni\nand met his friends, Mohan Lal introduced him to Maughnaton : who\nplaced him directly under the orders of Lord Kein : so that the in-\nformation which Abdur Rashid Khan gave about the defences\nof Ghazni to the military engineer of the English forces one na-\nmed Major Thomson contributed to the blowing up of the gateway\nof Ghazni and the breaking up of the national defences of that city.\n\nThe English arrived opposite the citadel of Ghazni on 21st,\nJuly 1839, A. D. and moved up their forces towards the Kabul Gate\nleading to Kabul, so that all communication between Kabul and\nGhazni could be cut.\n\nThe fact is that as soon as the English forces were sighted\nnear Ghazni, the guns of the Ghazni defences began to fire on the\nenemy ; and Sirdar Ghulam Haider Khan was prepared to defend\nthe city to the last . The army together with the people of the\ntown were ever ready to stand by and defend their town with bra-\nvery and persistence. The wea kness that was apparent in Amir Dost\nMohamed Khan's defence plan, was the rivalry that existed between his\ntwo sons - namely Sirdar Mohamed Afzal Khan and Sirdar Ghulam\nHaider Khan. Under he plan Sirdar Mohamed Afzal Khan was to\ndefend the city from outside, while the last named was to secure\nthe inner defences. At one point, the sensitive brother desired to enter\nthe city, so that both of the brothers could defend the city toge-\nther. This request created a delicate position, with the result that Sir-\ndar Mohamed Afzal Khan left the city to its own devices.\n\nBut this in itself was not a matter of great significance, for\nit was possible that Sirdar Ghulam Haider Khan could continue to\nhold the town, and the English troops could have been annihilated","chars":1987,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl1197/00125.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":205,"title":"Men and events through 18th and 19th century Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl1197/125","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl1197/canvas/125","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/books/adl1197/","source_pdf":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/pdf/adl1197_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."}}