{"book":"adl1197","page":138,"text":"125 -\n\nmany years in Kabul, and localities such as the turning and twisting\nhills around Kabul, the mountains of Shair Darwaza, the Asmai\nand the hillsides of Marunjan, and regions of Bibi Maro lay\nwhite under the mantle of snow. And when in Shairpore itself,\nno less than six inches of snow had fallen, and frozen snow\ncould only be detached from the hooves by means of hammers,\nthe people turned out to see the mighty evacuation of the English\nforces from Kabul from such distant places as from the Suburbs\nof Kabul, Chahar Deh, Logar, Kohistan, Koh and Daman. Their\nnumbers could not be less than ten thousand persons, which\nincluded even children. The route upon which the English forces\nwere to leave Kabul was thick with spectators; they had lined\nthe way across the Pul Mustan, past the Darwaza Shah Shaheed\nand Bala Hisar, to the village of Bibi Maro, whilst the patriots of\nAfghanistan were herding the aggressors out at Shair-pore itself.\n\nAccording to the account written by a contemporary historian,\nSir Percy Sykes in his history of Afghanistan, we read as follows:\n\".....after two months of disgraceful delay, which has no parallel\nin British military history; men who had lost all spirit were ready\nto vacate the city...\"\n\nAt nine in the morning General Elphinstone with whose\nname the troops were designated, first emerged from the fort,\nfollowed by artillery, cavalry, foot soldiers, followers and\nothers, all about 17,500 men with several thousand transport\nanimals, making a long line. They moved on from Shairpore to the\nKabul river, and passed over a temporary bridge-built for that\noccasion, near the bridge of Mahmud Khan, and the moving out of\nthis sorry force was hailed by the fire of the Afghan warriors\nas a mark of happiness and satisfaction. The Elphinstone Force,\nas it was called, or again as it was justly termed the \"Hordes\nOf Imperialism\" moving with tremendous slowness at last reached\na point near Bala Hisar. Here throngs ofthe inhabitants (even\nwomen and children wanted to see the retreating force of the\nEnglish) from Siah Sung to Bala Hisar increased, so that the English\nforce was passing through the people of Afghanistan.","chars":2166,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl1197/00138.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":205,"title":"Men and events through 18th and 19th century Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl1197/138","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl1197/canvas/138","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."}}