Few now believed the negotiations would do more than buy time, while some such as Henry Durand thought it a huge mistake. “It was a time for action,” he wrote. “Fighting Bob,” he believed, should have been “striking not talking.”74 But the payment did allow Sale to send the wounded back to Kabul with an armed escort in order to warn the authorities there of the scale of the uprising, and for the rest of the column to head on down towards Jalalabad at speed.
