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Its fate was in its own hands, for befall it what might it could hope for no timely reinforcement. It was a mere detachment marching against a nation of fighting men plentifully supplied with artillery, no longer shooting laboriously with jezails, but carrying arms of precision equal or little inferior to those in the hands of our own soldiery.
"I stayed in Ghorband a month, and gave the Governor there the pick of my baskets for hush-money, and bribed the Colonel of the regiment some more, and, between the two and the tribes-people, we got more than a hundred hand-made Martinis, a hundred good Kohat Jezails that'll throw to six hundred yards, and forty man-loads of very bad ammunition for the rifles.
The further hill beyond the gorge was crowded with hostile Afghans from Cabul, and the long-range fire of their jezails across the dividing depression, carried execution into the squares which Shelton had inexplicably formed as if to furnish his foes with a target which they could not miss.
Besides the regular army there is a paid irregular mounted force of about 20,000 men, active and formidable in "hill operations," and known as Jezailchis. The late General Colin Mackenzie, in an account of his experiences in the Elphinstone disaster of 1842, says: "The Jezailchis are so called from their jezails or long rifles. The Afghans are said to be among the best marksmen in the world.
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