Afghanistan: portraits of the Kabul prisoners. Lithographs by L. Dickinson, 1843, after V. Eyre.

"In 1839 Eyre was appointed commissary of ordnance to the Kabul field force. He took to Kabul a large quantity of ordnance stores, arriving in April 1840. On 2 November 1841 the rising took place in which Sir Alexander Burnes was killed. The British Indian force was soon besieged in the cantonments by the Afghans. They made desperate sallies, in one of which, on 13 November, Eyre was severely wounded. A treaty for evacuation was ratified on 1 January 1842. Eyre, still suffering from his wound, and accompanied by his wife and child, started with the column but they were taken as hostages by Akbar Khan. They spent nearly nine months in captivity, with other British captives, moved to different forts, and suffered many privations. The climate, however, was healthy; the captives held public worship and established a school for their children. Eyre kept a diary and sketched the officers and ladies. The manuscript was smuggled to a friend in India then published in England as Military operations at Cabul (1843). In August the captives were hurried off towards Bamian in the Hindu Kush, under threat of being sold as slaves to the Uzbeks of Turkestan. They were saved by Pottinger, who on 11 September bought over the Afghan commanding their escort"--Oxford dictionary of national biography