Making a wide circuit to avoid discovery, Keene stole round to the rear of the mango-grove, halted within three hundred yards of it and sent Ensign Symmonds forward to examine the French dispositions. Symmonds was not gone far when he came upon a deep trench, in which a detachment of infantry was taking shelter until its time for action should come. He was challenged as he drew nearer, and could see muskets pointed at him, but answering calmly in French he was allowed to pass and to enter the grove in rear of the French guns. Behind the battery stood a detachment of one hundred French soldiers, all gazing eagerly towards the failing fire of the British cannon in their front, and without any precaution against attack from the rear. Symmonds stole back to his men, avoiding the trench; and the two hundred British advanced silently and noiselessly, by the track of his return, into the grove, halted under the deep shadow of the mangos within thirty yards of the French detachment and fired a volley. The effect was instantaneous. Many of the French fell, the rest of them broke, the artillerymen abandoned their guns, and the whole fled away in confusion, they knew not whither, through the trees, with the British in pursuit. A building in the grove presented a refuge, and there the fugitives crowded in, not knowing what they did, one on the top of another until they were packed so tightly that they could not use their arms. The British presently came up with them and offered quarter, whereupon the whole of them surrendered as prisoners of war. Meanwhile the silence of the French battery told Clive of Keene's success, and his troops in the water-course regained their confidence. Presently a few of the fugitive French who had escaped capture came running up to their comrades with news of the disaster in the grove, and therewith the whole of the enemy's infantry in the water-course incontinently took to flight. The native cavalry was not slow to follow the example, and very soon all sign of an enemy had vanished and the victory was won. Clive gathered his men together, and the exhausted army lay under arms until the moon paled and the sun rose up to show what manner of victory it had won. On the field fifty French soldiers and three hundred Sepoys lay dead; sixty more French had been captured in the grove, and the whole of the French artillery was abandoned to the British. Of Clive's force forty Europeans and thirty Sepoys were killed and a still greater number wounded, no extravagant price to pay for so far-reaching a success.