Pushkin

Lady's sale was eating her last breakfast in Kabul, Afghanistan.

She'd had to burn the legs of her mahogany dining table to cook it.

That was her last remaining wood. There wasn't much food either. But it would have to do.

The year was 1842, the 6th of January, not the best time of year to embark on a five-day trek through the mountains.

The cold was bitter, the snow knee high.

Shortly after nine in the morning, they set out. Hundreds of British and many thousands of Indians recruited from an India that was under British control.

There were sea poise or soldiers and the camp followers, civilians, wives and children.

The British-led troops had occupied Afghanistan for three years. It had been clear for weeks now that they'd have to leave their base in Kabul.

It still wasn't clear that they'd get out alive.

They'd been trying to negotiate with the various Afghan rebels who surrounded them, both for the safe passage to the British held fort at Jalalabad and to buy the food they so desperately needed.

The soldiers were on half-rashans. There was nothing at all for the animals. The cattle chewed the bark off trees, wrote Lady's sale in her journal.

I have seen my own riding horse, nor voraciously, at a cartwheel.

Lady's sale's son-in-law had spent the previous night waste deep in the Icy Carval River, constructing a makeshift bridge for the Conroy.

This must have been a galling task because he'd repeatedly told his superiors that the river could easily be forwarded upstream.

May told him, built the bridge anyway.

As usual, every sensible proposition was overruled. Trying to get almost 20,000 people plus pack animals across rickety planks between Icy River banks proved slow-going.

As the day dragged on, a long line of baggage carriers backed up at the bridge. Rebels started to shoot at them. They abandoned the baggage.

And so, as night fell, the Conroy had managed to cover just six miles and lose most of their supplies.

One of the few tents that had made it through was shiverrously pitched over Lady's sale, her pregnant daughter and her exhausted son-in-law.

At daylight, we found several men frozen to death.

Hungry and frostbitten, the survivors trudged on, straight into a carefully planned ambush.

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