So here then, at last, on the 8th of June, our tiny British force had established itself in front of walled and embattled Delhi. Had anything so audacious, not to say impudent, ever been heard of before in the annals of warfare? Troy, surely, was mere child’s play to this, and Sebastopol a game of battledore. But weakness of numbers can sometimes be made up for by strength of inspiration; and every British soldier felt his heart swell to the size of that of twenty men when he looked around the cantonments before Delhi and beheld the still extant traces of the late massacre of his countrymen--the marks of blood, the broken furniture, the blackened walls, the shreds of ladies’ dresses, and even the locks of their hair, and, more maddening than all, the tiny boots of English babies who had been barbarously slaughtered and tossed up on the bayonets of the rebels. What the British soldiers, heroically strong in their numerical weakness, now longed with a fierce and overmastering desire to do was to cross bayonets with those incarnate fiends whom they had already swept back behind the walls of Delhi. These walls, with a circumference of about seven miles, were made of large blocks of grey freestone, crowned by a good loopholed parapet. At intervals along the circumference they were provided with bastions, each armed with ten, twelve, or fourteen guns, a hundred and fourteen in all, in addition to sixty field-guns. The city had ten gates, strong, and aptly named after the cities or provinces towards which they opened--Cashmere, Cabul, Lahore, etc. The walls were about twenty-four feet in height, while in front ran a dry ditch, twenty-five feet wide and about twenty feet deep. The counter-scarp--_i.e._ the outer side of the ditch--and the glacis, or smooth open slope leading away from the edge of the ditch, were such as to move the admiration of the English engineers. One side of the city, the eastern, was washed by the broad and deep Jumna, and could not be thought of. On the other hand, with his tiny force, it was equally impossible for Barnard to invest the whole place. So he selected the northern front of the city as the object of his attack when he should be in possession of heavy enough siege-artillery to breach the wall and let in the avenging flood.