United States or Norfolk Island ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Cavagnari's calm remark was, 'Dogs that bark don't bite. The old soldier earnestly urged, 'But these dogs do bite, and there is danger. 'Well, said Cavagnari, 'they can only kill the handful of us here, and our death will be avenged. The days passed, and it seemed that Cavagnari's diagnosis of the situation was the accurate one.
One of them, the Kotwal or Mayor of Cabul, was proved to have superintended the contumelious throwing of the bodies of the slaughtered Guides of the mission escort into the ditch of the Balla Hissar. Another was proved to have carried away from the wrecked Residency a head believed to have been Cavagnari's, and to have exhibited it on the ridge above the city.
As soon as the news reached him of the destruction of Cavagnari's mission he had promptly concentrated his troops, and so early as the third week of September he was in a position to carry out his orders to create a diversion in aid of Roberts' advance on Cabul by making a demonstration in the direction of Ghuznee and placing a garrison in Khelat-i-Ghilzai.
The man who had made himself personally responsible for the safety of Cavagnari's mission was a strange guest with an army whose avowed errand was to exact retribution for the crime of its destruction.
The chief danger lay in the Afghan troops, particularly the regiments previously garrisoned at Herat, who knew little or nothing of British prowess, and whose fanaticism was inflamed by arrears of pay. Cavagnari's Journal kept at Cabul ended on August 19 with the statement that thirty-three Russians were coming up the Oxus to the Afghan frontier.
He stood in the great breach in the quarters of the Guides where the gate had been blown in after the last of the sorties made by the gallant Hamilton, and lingered in the tattered wreck of poor Cavagnari's drawing-room, its walls dinted with bullet-pits, its floor and walls brutally defiled.