ughly beaten, would not be a
lasting one, and would only end in worse trouble in the near future.
The Afghans are an essentially arrogant and conceited people; they had
not forgotten our disastrous retreat from Kabul, nor the annihilation
of our array in the Khurd Kabul and Jagdalak Passes in 1842, and
believed themselves to be quite capable of resisting our advance on
Kabul. No great battle had as yet been fought; though Ali Masjid and
the Peiwar Kotal had been taken, a small force of the enemy had been
beaten by Charles Gough's brigade, near Jalalabad, and a successful
Cavalry skirmish had occurred near Kandahar, the Afghans had nowhere
suffered serious loss, and it was not to be wondered at if the
fighting men in distant villages, and in and around Kabul, Ghazni,
Herat, Balkh, and other places, still considered themselves undefeated
and capable of defying us. They and their leaders had to depend for
information as to recent events upon the garbled accounts of those who
had fought against us, and it was unlikely they would be shaken in
their belief in their superiority by such one-sided versions of what
had occurred. On many occasions I had been amused, in listening to
Afghan conversation, to find that, while they appeared thoroughly
conversant with and frequently alluded to their triumphs over us, they
seemed to know nothing, or had no recollection, of Sale's successful
defence of Jalalabad, or of Pollock's victorious march through the
Khyber Pass and the destruction by him of the chief bazaar in Kabul.

My ideas about the negotiations being premature were freely expressed
to Colonel Colley,[1] Lord Lytton's Private Secretary, who paid me a
visit in Kuram at this time, and had been a constant correspondent of
mine from the commencement of the war. Colley, however, explained to
me that, right or wrong, the Viceroy had no option in the matter; that
there was the strongest feeling in England against the continuance of
the war; and that, unless the new Amir proved actively hostile, peace
must be signed. He expressed himself sanguine that the terms of the
treaty which Cavagnari hoped to conclude with Yakub Khan would give us
an improved frontier, and a permanent paramount influence at Kabul,
the two points about which he said the Viceroy was most anxious, and
to which he assigned the first place in his political programme. Lord
Lytton foresaw that, whatever might be the future policy of the two
European Powers concerned,