{"book":"adl1197","page":141,"text":"- 128 -\nout, the people resolved that the tow forces shall not be permitted to\njoin hands, and thus prevented such a meeting of the two sections of\nthe English forces. Near the city, Sirdar Mohemad Akbar Khan tur-\nned towards Lughman, and taking the hostages with him he had them\ndetained in the house of Mohamed Shah Khan ababakr Khail at a\nplace called, Badia Bad. Mohamed Shah Khan was the travelling com-\npanion of the Sirdar at the time.\n\nEveryone knows that events moved fast in that period of his-\ntory, each of which requires an article unto itself, such as the arri-\nving of a large English force under the command of General Pol-\nlock at Jalalabad, the discord of leaders at Kabul, the going back of\nthe Afghan national forces to Kabul, and the removal of the\nhostages to Bamyan. Here we can hardly go into these points, but\nwill briefly study the position of Sirdar Mohamed Akbar Khan at\nBadia Bad and his treatment of his hostages and others during\nthat period.\n\nBadia Bad had a fort, with high walls about 25 meters, high and a\nmoat surrounded it. The hostages were detained at that place during\nthe three months when General Sale and the town of Jalalbad was under\nseige. The life lived by these hostages had no similiarity with any\nprison restrictions. On the contrary, hospitality to the utmost degree\na noted trait of the Afghans-was shown them.\n\nThe English themselves write that these hostages thought that\nthey would certainly be killed, but they slowly realised that they\nwere really alive and that they were eating their food with Sirdar\nMohamed Akbar Khan.\n\nThey were permitted to communicate with their relatives at\nJalalabad, and indeed, they used to go to see their friends and the\nGeneral in the city itself. And the wonder of all wonders was that\nthey themselves used to return to Badia Bad. Sirdar Mohamed\nAkbar Khan treated his hostages with great courtesy and considera-\ntion, especially the wounded men. On the way to Jalalabad, when they\nbrought a wounded man, one named Melville, he himself (the Sirdar)","chars":2037,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl1197/00141.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":205,"title":"Men and events through 18th and 19th century Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl1197/141","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl1197/canvas/141","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."}}