crape-bound banners
"perituraque castra!" Fourthly and lastly, for the solution of that
hideous calamity, whose memory is accursed for ever. But the solution--
is not _that_ plain already? If what we allege be true, if the delusions
exposed under the third head are rightly stated, will not _they_ solve
the ruin of Cabool? Are not _they_ sufficient? No, nothing will solve
it--no causes are sufficient for such a result, unless a strong spirit
of delusion had been inflicted from heaven, distraction, frenzy,
judicial madness. No dangers from the enemy, no pressure from without,
_could_ have accomplished that wreck, had they not been aided by
treachery within the counsels of our own hearts.

It is an old saying of any subject too vast or too sad to measure by
hurried words--that "_de Carthagine satius est silere, quam parcius
dicere_." And in this case, where we have left ourselves too narrow a
space to turn round in, and where no space would exhaust the infinities
of the affliction, it is not our purpose to heighten, or rhetorically to
colour, any one feature of the dismal story. Rhetoric, and art of all
kids, we forswear in a tragedy so torturing to our national
sensibilities. We pass, in sympathy with the burning wrath of our
readers, the madness of dallying and moping over the question--to starve
or not to starve. We pass the infamy of entertaining a treaty with
barbarians, _commenced_ in this foul insult to a British army--that
_after_ we should have submitted to indignities past expression, they
(the barbarians) would consider at their leisure whether it would please
them to spare our necks; a villany that gallant men _could_ not have
sanctioned, an which too certainly was not hurled back in their teeth as
it ought to have been. We pass the lunacy of _tempting_ barbarians to a
perfidy almost systematic in their policy, by consenting to a conference
_outside_ the British cantonments, not even within range of the British
guns, not even within the overlooking of British eyes. We pass the
lunacy of taking out sixteen men as an escort against a number
absolutely unlimited of the enemy, and where no restraint, even of
honour or mutual understanding, forbade that unlimited enemy to come
armed from head to foot. It is a trifle to add--that no instructions
were given to the sixteen men as to what they were to do, or in what
circumstances to act; and accordingly that one man only, out of the
whole sixteen, attempted any resista