formed
that it should be otherwise? Within thirty hours this force stormed
an intrenched camp, fought a general action, and sustained two
considerable combats with the enemy. Within four days it has
dislodged from their positions, on the left bank of the Sutlej,
60,000 Sikh soldiers, supported by upwards of 150 pieces of cannon,
108 of which the enemy acknowledge to have lost, and 91 of which
are in our possession.

"In addition to our losses in the battle, the captured camp was
found to be every where protected by charged mines, by the
successive springing of which many brave officers and men have been
destroyed."[17]

Was there ever harder fighting? No--not even a month afterwards at
Sobraon. For two-and-twenty hours, from three o'clock on the afternoon
of the 21st till one o'clock after mid-day of the 22d, the
combat--unremitted, as we have seen, even beneath the shade of
night--endured, and deepened as it endured, having raged with appalling
fury in its very termination. The intrenched Sikh camp was literally a
fortress, occupied by a great army not untutored in European discipline,
and protected by enormous batteries of heavy ordnance, which were served
so rapidly, and pointed so truly, as to elicit the unqualified
admiration of the victims of their efficiency. Against this bristling
rock, while, wave after wave, our sea of battle surged and reverberated,
dark clouds of Sikh cavalry, hovering on all sides, sent forth at
opportune conjunctures their sweeping whirlwinds, which either destroyed
those ranks, whose compact array was broken by eagerness and the nature
of the ground, or more frequently forced our infantry suddenly to form
into squares beneath the iron tempest of a demolishing artillery. With
difficulty and labour our heroic soldiers had but breached, and
surmounted, and gained footing within the fortifications, when the
earth, heaving and opening with the successive explosion of charged
mines, hurled into fragments scores of those who had passed unscathed
through the ordeal of manly warfare with confronting foes. But moat and
mound, cannon and cavern, were at length overleapt, silenced and
exhausted. Still was it "double, double, toil and trouble." With fresh
reinforcements of men, backed as ever by a massive artillery, the enemy
repeatedly attempted to retrieve his loss, and regain his camp. To his
incessant fire, _we could not answer with a single