Three days later,
within a march of Cabul, there was reached the column which Sale had
taken out, and on September 21st Pollock greeted the company of men and
women whose rescue had been wrought out by his cool, strong
steadfastness.
Little more remains to be told. There was an Afghan force still in arms
at Istalif, a beautiful village of the inveterately hostile Kohistanees;
a division marched to attack it, carried the place by assault, burnt part
of it, and severely smote the garrison. Utter destruction was the fate of
Charikar, the capital of the Kohistan, where Codrington's Goorkha
regiment had been destroyed. Pollock determined to 'set a mark' on Cabul
to commemorate the retribution which the British had exacted. He spared
the Balla Hissar, and abstained from laying the city in ruins, contenting
himself with the destruction of the principal bazaar, through which the
heads of Macnaghten and Burnes had been paraded, and in which their
mangled bodies had been exposed. Prince Futteh Jung, tired of his
vicissitudes in the character of an Afghan monarch, ceded what of a
throne he possessed to another puppet of his race, and gladly accompanied
the British armies to India. Other waifs of the wreck of a nefarious and
disastrous enterprise, among them old Zemaun Khan, who had been our
friend throughout, and the family of the ill-fated Shah Soojah, were well
content to return to the exile which afforded safety and quietude.
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