Beschreibung:

FIRST AFGHAN WAR]. A series of five autograph letters signed by Captain Robert R. Gillespie to his wife, his sister and his mother-in-law, Ghazni, Kabul, Bangalore and 'Poonamallee', 22 July 1839 - 2 October 1842, approximately 32 pages, 4to (all with tears at outer margins, occasional later tape repairs). An evocative series, conveying the enthusiasm and disenchantment of the First Afghan War. The first letter, begun actually 'before the Fort of Ghuznee', recounts with great gusto and lavish praise for the conduct of Sir John Keane the progress of the siege of that place, the major engagement on the march to Kabul, and includes a description of the scenes within the fort ('heaps of the dead & dying piled up in various quarters of the place'). The letter ends three miles away from Kabul, and in this letter and the succeeding one, written in Kabul, the writer provides a poignant picture of the effect of the 'City of an hundred thousand gardens' on the members of the doomed expedition: 'The environs of the place most delightful for miles & miles', 'I have purchased Peaches somewhat larger than a cricket ball at one Rupee for one hundred ', 'The people are particularly civil, they say it is of no use to fight us for we are lions '. The later letters, written on the writer's return to India, reveal the effect of the Afghan catastrophe on the British army in India with a peculiar mixture of outrage and grief. The First Afghan War, an attempt to secure Afghanistan against Russian advances, began in March 1838: the British Army of the Indus met with little opposition, and was in Kabul by August 1839, with Shah Shuja installed on the Afghan throne. At this the greater part of the men, and the commander, Sir John Keane returned to India. Two years later the force of 8000 men left in Kabul was undermined, chiefly through mismanagement, betrayed, and cut to pieces on the march back towards India: only one man of those who left Kabul reached Jalalabad. The passage was one of the great traumas of the Raj. (6)