occupation, and Macnaghten weakly yielded. Cotton, who had returned to
the chief military command in Afghanistan, made no remonstrance; the
Balla Hissar was evacuated, and the troops were quartered in cantonments
built in an utterly defenceless position on the plain north of Cabul, a
position whose environs were cumbered with walled gardens, and commanded
by adjacent high ground, and by native forts which were neither
demolished nor occupied. The troops, now in permanent and regularly
constructed quarters, ceased to be an expeditionary force, and became
substantially an army of occupation. The officers sent for their wives to
inhabit with them the bungalows in which they had settled down. Lady
Macnaghten, in the spacious mission residence which stood apart in its
own grounds, presided over the society of the cantonments, which had all
the cheery surroundings of the half-settled, half-nomadic life of our
military people in the East. There were the 'coffee house' after the
morning ride, the gathering round the bandstand in the evening, the
impromptu dance, and the _burra khana_ occasionally in the larger houses.
A racecourse had been laid out, and there were 'sky' races and more
formal meetings. And so 'as in the days that were before the flood, they
were eating and drinking, and marrying and giving in marriage, and knew
not until the flood came, and took them all away.'

Macnaghten engaged himself in a welter of internal and external intrigue,
his mood swinging from singular complacency to a disquietude that
sometimes approached despondency. It had come to be forced on him, in
spite of his intermittent optimism, that the Government was a government
of sentry-boxes, and that Afghanistan was not governed so much as
garrisoned. The utter failure of the winter march attempted by
Peroffski's Russian column across the frozen steppes on Khiva was a
relief to him; but the state of affairs in Herat was a constant trouble
and anxiety. Major Todd had been sent there as political agent, to make a