Chárikár, which had witnessed the slaughter of Haughton's Gúrkhas, was utterly destroyed, and McCaskill got back to Kábul by the 7th of October.
Nott, meanwhile, was fretting under the long halt at Kábul, for which he could see no adequate reason. He thought that Pollock gave too much heed to his political officers. He grumbled at the time wasted on McCaskill's raid into the Kohistán. 'Had I commanded' — he writes to his daughter on the 7th of October — 'I would have blown up the famed Bálá Hissár, and at this moment should have had my little veteran army at Pesháwar.' Unfortunately Nott, at this time, 'had nothing to do with public affairs.' Pollock was persuaded to spare the Bálá Hissár, and to destroy instead the Great Bazaar, where Macnaghten's mangled remains had been exposed. Even the brave and pious Henry Lawrence had no word of blame for an act of vengeance which fell most heavily upon the least guilty classes of the Afghán community. It took our engineers two days to blow up the massive walls of the Chár Chatar, or place of 'Four Bazaars,' said to be the noblest building of its kind in Asia[1].
The work of demolishing what Pollock himself called 'the grand emporium of trade in this part of Central Asia,' was hardly finished when the work of unlicensed plunder and violence, as foreseen by Nott himself, began. In spite of Pollock's precautions, soldiers and followers from both camps, impelled by a report that Kábul itself was to be given over to plunder, rushed
- ↑ Stocqueler's Life of Nott; Edwardes; Kaye.
