Akbar Khan at length startled the English by a proposal that the women and children who were with the army should be handed over to his custody, to be conveyed by him in safety to Peshawur. There was nothing better to be done. The only modification of his request, or command, that could be obtained was that the husbands of the married ladies should accompany their wives. With this agreement the women and children were handed over to the care of this dreaded enemy, and Lady Macnaghten had to undergo the agony of a personal interview with the man whose own hand had killed her husband. Akbar Khan was kindly in his language, and declared to the unhappy widow that he would give his right arm to undo, if it were possible, the deed that he had done. The women and children and the married men whose wives were among this party were taken from the unfortunate army and placed under the care of Akbar Khan. As events turned out, it was the best thing that could have been done. Not one of these women and children could have lived through the horrors of the journey which lay before the remnant of what had once been a British force. The march was resumed; new horrors set in; new heaps of corpses stained the snow; and then Akbar Khan presented himself with a fresh proposition. In the treaty made at Cabul between the English authorities and the Afghan chiefs there was an article which stipulated that "the English force at Jellalabad shall march for Peshawur before the Cabul army arrives, and shall not delay on the road. Akbar Khan was especially anxious to get rid of the little army at Jellalabad at the near end of the Kyber Pass. He desired above all things that it should be on the march home to India; either that it might be out of his way, or that he might have a chance of destroying it on his way. It was in great measure as a security for its moving that he desired to have the women and children under his care. It is not likely that he meant any harm to the women and children; it must be remembered that his father and many of the women of his family were under the control of the British Government as prisoners in Hindostan. But he fancied that if he had the English women in his VOL. XVI.-22 340 JUSTIN MCCARTHY hands the army at Jellalabad could not refuse to obey the condition set down in the article of the treaty. Now that he had the women in his power, however, he demanded other guarantees, with openly acknowledged purpose of keeping these latter until Jellalabad should have been evacuated. He demanded that General Elphinstone, the commander, with his second in command, and also one other officer, should hand themselves over to him as hostages. He promised if this were done to exert himself more than before to restrain the fanatical tribes and also to provide the army in the Koord Cabul Pass with provisions. There was nothing for it but to submit; and the English general himself became, with the women and children, a captive in the hands of the inexorable enemy. Then the march of the army, without a general, went on again. Soon it became the story of a general without an army; before long there was neither general nor army. It is idle to lengthen a tale of mere horrors. The struggling remnant of an army entered the Jugdulluk Pass-a dark, steep, narrow, ascending path between crags. The miserable toilers found that the fanatical, implacable tribes had barricaded the pass. All was over. The army of Cabul was finally extinguished in that barricaded pass. It was a trap; the British were taken in it. A few mere fugitives escaped from the scene of actual slaughter, and were on the road to Jellalabad, where Sale and his little army were holding their own. When they were within sixteen miles of Jeilalabad the number was reduced to six. Of these six, five were killed by straggling marauders on the way. One man alone reached Jellalabad to tell the tale. Literally one man, Dr. Brydon, came to Jellalabad out of a moving host which had numbered in all some sixteen thousand when it set out on its march. The curious eye will search through history or fiction in vain for any picture more thrilling with the suggestions of an awful catastrophe than that of this solitary survivor, faint and reeling on his jaded horse, as he appeared under the walls of Jellalabad, to bear the tidings of our Thermopyle of pain and shame.-History of Our Own Times. MCCLELLAN, GEORGE BRINTON, an American scientist, soldier, and statesman, was born in Philadelphia, December 3, 1826; died at Orange, N. J., October 29, 1885. He was educated at West Point, where he was graduated with high honors in 1846, and joined the army as second lieutenant of engineers. He took an active part in the Mexican War, where he distinguished himself and was brevetted first lieutenant "for gallant and meritorious conduct in the battles of Contreras and Churubusco." He was afterward brevetted captain for gallant and meritorious conduct in the battles of Molino del Rey and Chapultepec. At the end of the war he was appointed to an assistant professorship at West Point, and translated from the French a Manual of Bayonet Exercises. He superintended the construction of Fort Delaware, and was one of three Ameri can officers sent to observe the campaign in the Crimea. On his return to America he resigned his commission, and became director of the Illinois Central Railway. In 1861 he was appointed majorgeneral of the Ohio militia; but was tendered by President Lincoln the position of major-general in the army. After a successful campaign in Western Virginia he was made commander-in-chief, and reorganized the Army of the Potomac, defeated at Bull Run. In the summer of 1862 he |