{"book":"adl1197","page":128,"text":"—115—\n\nQuite early in the morning, the English moved nearer the ci-\ntadel of Ghazni; and the troops were led by the traitor Sirdar Abdur\nRashid Khan and Alexander Burnes. Near the city the English were\nattacked by the defenders of the town from their hiding places in\nthe orchards of the city, and when the invaders were within range\nof fire, big guns of the town opened at them. The first engagement\nwhich took place between the English and the Afghans was in the\norchards of the city, especially in one such orchard which was about\n180 yards long and about forty feet wide very severe fighting took\nplace. From the walls of the citadel, which were about thirty to\nforty feet high, the defenders opened fire with their tinder-fired\nguns. Mr: Chamberlain, recording the event, says that when\nthe Afghans saw that the firing of the English did not reach\nthem, they came up the parapets of walls and waved their flags,\nand a group even came up to a distance of only thirty yards.\n\nWhen they arrived so near, Chamberlain says that he intimated\nthe fact to Captain Graves. There They come! The captain ordered\nhis company to fire, but both fires met, the Afghan warriors had\nbecome so excited by coming so near to their enemies that they gave\nno heed to death, and although they fell one after the other as a\nresult of the enemy's fire they continued to push forward,and in this\nengagement Captain Graves received two severe wounds, and Cha\nmberlain was compelled to retire his company, and to take their\nwounded commander on a stretcher to the center of their troops.\n\nAfter this sharp and short engagement, the English force mov-\ned towards the walls of the city of Ghazni,and surrounded the walls\nat a distance, where the Afghan fire could not reach them, and skir-\nting north-west they arrived near the Kabul gate of the city.\n\nAccording to the English records, their troops had no rations\nbeyond three days, and the strong resistance of the defenders was\nlikely to upset the attacker's plans till Captain Thomson,the head-\nengineer, suggested to the commander of the force named Kelvin,that\nthe best plan under the circumstances was to blow up the Kabul\ngate, and this suggestion was readily agreed to. Towards the fore-","chars":2221,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl1197/00128.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":205,"title":"Men and events through 18th and 19th century Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl1197/128","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl1197/canvas/128","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."}}