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Hundreds of brave European non-commissioned officers met a similar fate, and are merely noticed as having perished in the retreat from Cabul. The many acts of coldblooded treachery which disgraced the Affghans, and which ought to have opened the eyes of those in power to the absurdity in trusting to their faith, were merged in the wholesale murders of Khoord Cabul, Jugdulluk, and Gundummuk.
All the bodies were stripped. There were children cut in two. Hindustanee women as well as men some frozen to death, some literally chopped to pieces, many with their throats cut from ear to ear. Snow fell all night on the unfortunates gathered tentless on the Khoord Cabul camping ground.
Next day Sale, with H.M.'s 13th, joined Monteath, and on the 13th he forced the long and dangerous ravine of the Khoord Cabul with sharp fighting, but no very serious loss, although Sale himself was wounded, and had to relinquish the active command to Colonel Dennie.
The task before the wretched congeries of people was to thread the stupendous gorge of the Khoord Cabul pass a defile about five miles long, hemmed in on either hand by steeply scarped hills. Down the bottom of the ravine dashed a mountain torrent, whose edges were lined with thick layers of ice, on which had formed glacier-like masses of snow.
Roberts, surveying the rugged country to the east of Cabul, had discerned that the hill road toward Jugdulluk by Luttabund, was at once opener and shorter than the customary tortuous and overhung route through the Khoord Cabul Pass and by Tezeen. The pioneers were set to work to improve the former.
It was Akbar Khan's last effort, and the quelling of it cost Pollock the trivial loss of thirty-two killed and 130 wounded. There was no more opposition, and it was well for the Afghans, for the awful spectacles presented in the Khoord Cabul Pass traversed on the following day, kindled in Pollock's soldiers a white heat of fury.
Akbar Khan, the leading spirit among the hostile Afghans, came down from the north and occupied the Khoord Cabul Pass, the only way back to Hindustan. Ammunition was failing, food was decreasing, the enemy were growing daily stronger and more aggressive.
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