The Tragedy of Afghanistan

“Those who should hear, they’ll hear nevermore / Destroyed, dispersed is the proud host of yore / With thirteen thousand their trail they began. / Only one man returned from Afghanistan.” On the eve of the 2010 Afghanistan conference in London, The Berlin Review of Books publishes a new English translation, by Gabriele Campbell, of Theodor Fontane’s poem ‘Das Trauerspiel von Afghanistan’. First published in 1848, it tells the story of the sole survivor of a massacre suffered by the British during the First Anglo-Afghan War (1839-1842) in January 1842.