onquer or die.

But behind the breastworks waited British officers, cool, unemotional,
with their men, British and native, seasoned warriors, disciplined, the
best soldiers in the world. They watched the advancing horde as it came
among the gardens, the moonbeams making a strange play of light and
shade. On they came, and the great guns thundered, and the muskets
crackled, and shouts and yells mingled with the brazen blare of bugles.
Time after time the dusky warriors hurled themselves against the low
breastworks that defended the circuit of the Ridge, coming within a
score paces of them. Hour after hour the din continued, the sky blazing
with the constant discharge of artillery, a shifting wall of smoke
making strange patterns in the moonlight. The moon sank, and still the
firing did not cease; it was not until next day's sun was mounting the
sky that the survivors of the night shambled back, a discomfited mob, to
the rose-red walls of the city.

What had they gained by this tremendous fusillade and bombardment?
Nothing. Their ammunition had been expended by cart-loads; thousands
upon thousands of rounds had been fired; but all the time they had never
seen their enemy, who, behind their entrenchments, waited until they saw
the whites of the rebels' eyes, and then sent them reeling back with
withering volleys. Hundreds of forms lay motionless in the eye of the
rising sun, some in red coats, some in white dhotis, some in the chogahs
of hill-men, with turbans of many colours, amid muskets and swords and
bugles, and everywhere the green flag of the Prophet. And on the Ridge
there was great rejoicing; for this bitter lesson to the Pandies had
cost their masters no more than a dozen men.

Nowhere did the fight rage more fiercely on that night than at the
breastworks before the Flagstaff Tower. But though fierce, the fight was
short, for Rahmut Khan was no fanatic; and when he found, after a brief
trial, that he was opposed, not by warriors with whom his men could
contend in equal fight, but by solid ramparts which burst into flame,
though behind it no men were seen, he concluded that this was fighting
he did not understand, and drew off his men. And Minghal Khan,
approaching with his regiment the spot from which, as he fondly hoped,
most of the Feringhis had been withdrawn to meet the attack against
which he had warned them, was met by a crashing volley so terrible that
a third of his men were stricken down, and he himself