{"book":"adl1197","page":129,"text":"- 116 -\nnoon of 22nd July, many Afghan warriors gathered from the nearby villages around the hillsides that surrounded the encampments of the English, and mercilessly harassed the English invaders of Ghazni. Several engagements took place between the Afghan warriors and the English scouts. An account of Captain Forrest says that the Afghans at that time used their citadel gun (a fortyeight-pounder). Towards the evening, however, Mr. Marylan Durrand and Captain Pitt covered by their infantrymen, and taking cover of the brick-walls of the orchards managed to get as close to the city walls as 150 meters,and in the waning light of the moon, they came very close to the Kabul gate where the Sappers and Miners laid 900 pounds of gunpowder in twelve bags near the Kabul gate of Ghazni. At 3.A.M. of 23rd July, the night wind had not abated, and darkness hung round still over the wall of the citadel; the inhabitants were still asleep, and the guards still awaited the English attack upon the city, when all of a sudden, the terrific sound of an explosion shook the air, and the Kabul gate was blown up. With it, too, went up in the air certain other parts of the wall. Inside the gateway ran a corridor-some 150 yards long and rather narrow-about 20 yards wide, in the center of which was a yard. According to Mr. Chamberlain's records, in addition to the English regiment, there were the regiment number two of the Bengal Europeans, as also the Indian units of 13-7; 35- 16 and the 48th; which took part in the attack. Between 3. and 4. A. M. in the darkness and in that narrow passage, a sanguinary battle took place between the defenders and the attackers. The attacking force charged with fixed bayonets and the Afghan warriors meeting the attackers' weapons with their shields, used their swords against the English invaders. The battle raged for a time in that corridor, and beyond the clashing of arms, none could see the other in the darkness. When the defenders saw that bayonet could not be fought against the sword in a restricted space, they dispersed into the open inside the city. From every house, from each corner of the street, in the narrow passages-battles raged fiercely, and fire was poured upon the attackers from the roof tops. Chamberlain says that each house was like an armed citadel. The determined Afghan warriors fought to the last man.","chars":2368,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl1197/00129.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":205,"title":"Men and events through 18th and 19th century Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl1197/129","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl1197/canvas/129","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."}}