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Afghan donkeys will march with troops and carry loads of grain or flour, averaging ninety pounds, without difficulty. The transport animals found in India and Turkestan will be described in the parts of this book devoted to the military resources of those regions. In concluding this sketch of the "Threshold of India," a mere glance at the military history of the country will suffice.
The whole place, you know, has been for long a military beehive and absurdly over-garrisoned, so there is no difficulty about the massing. The difficulty lies in the reason. Three thousand square miles or so of mountain cannot be so dangerous. One would think that the whole Afghan nation was meditating a descent on the Amu Daria."
Now, the stamp and the letter could hardly have come together without hands, for they lay a yard apart, and here, also, on the unwritten portion of the page, was the mark of a small green thumb. Jill had been winding wool for a stripe in her new afghan, and the green ball lay on her sofa. These signs suggested and confirmed what Mrs.
In this case, the profaned garment was sent by the lady to her brother, the son of the then Afghan king, and a bloody vengeance followed, not upon the author of the outrage, but on the king-making vizier, who, falling into the hands of the prince whom he had himself placed upon the throne, was literally hacked to pieces. Dost Mahomed now rose like a rocket.
For three centuries one wave of invasion followed another, one dynasty of conquerors displaced another, but whether under Turki or Afghan rulers, under Slave kings or under the house of Tughluk, there was seldom a pause in the consolidation of Mahomedan power, seldom a break in the long-drawn tale of plunder and carnage, cruelty and lust, unfolded in the annals of the earlier Mahomedan dynasties that ruled at Delhi.
It is, however, scarcely correct to say that Roberts had no line of retreat assured in case of defeat . No serious fighting was to be expected before Candahar; for the Afghan plundering instinct was likely to keep Ayub near to that city, where the garrison was hard pressed. After leaving Ghazni, the Quetta route became the natural way of retirement.
But the rout of the Afghan right had decided the fortune of the day. Its defenders were already dribbling away from the main position when Baker, wheeling to his right, marched along the lofty crest, rolling up and sweeping away the Afghan defence as he moved toward the Sung-i-Nawishta gorge. That defile had already been entered by the cavalry of White's detachment, supported by some infantry.
The Afghan outside the fence was very excited. He muttered to himself, and now and again shouted to his fellow-countryman: "Look out! Look out, I tell you! That is only his way. It is all his bluff. Oh, he is a very bad camel! Look out, I tell you!" The man inside the paddock took no notice of these warnings, for they were quite unnecessary.
Probably the Afghan question, or Nihilism, brought Russia to accept Bismarck's advances; but when the fear of an Anglo-Russian war passed away, and the revolutionists were curbed, this agreement fell to the ground; and after the fall of Bismarck the compact was not renewed .
Lord Roberts adopted the latter course. He had tried it with success in the Afghan War twenty years before, when he marched even more "in the air" from Kabul to Kandahar. The tedious process of "steam-rollering" the Free State was not to his taste, nor would the expectant British public at home have understood it; and it would have been severely criticized by the military experts.
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