The rear-guard, cut into from behind by the pestilent ghazees, found its
route encumbered with heaps of abandoned baggage around which swarmed
Afghan plunderers. Other Afghans, greedier for blood than for booty, were
hacking and slaying among the numberless sepoys and camp followers who
had dropped out of the column, and were lying or sitting on the wayside
in apathetic despair, waiting for death and careless whether it came to
them by knife or by cold. Babes lay on the snow abandoned by their
mothers, themselves prostrate and dying a few hundred yards further on.
It was not until two o'clock of the following morning that the rear-guard
reached the straggling and chaotic bivouac in which its comrades lay in
the snow at the end of the first short march of six miles. Its weary
progress had been illuminated by the conflagration raging in the
cantonments, which had been fired by the Afghan fanatics, rabid to erase
every relic of the detested unbelievers.
It was a night of bitter cold. Out in the open among the snow, soldiers
and camp followers, foodless, fireless, and shelterless, froze to death
in numbers, and numbers more were frost-bitten. The cheery morning noise
of ordinary camp life was unheard in the mournful bivouac. Captain
Lawrence outlines a melancholy picture. 'The silence of the men betrayed
their despair and torpor.
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