Now Scindhia, had the Frenchmen been loyal, could have checked the Mahratta princes, but these got out of hand, and one of them, Holkar, drove the Mahratta emperor, the peshwa of Poona, from his throne. The peshwa fled to Bombay, and returned with a British army under Sir Arthur Wellesley. So came the battle of Assaye, wherein the British force of four thousand five hundred men overthrew the Mahratta army of fifty thousand men, captured a hundred guns, and won Poona, the capital of the South. Meanwhile for fear of Napoleon’s coming, Perron, his servant, had to be overthrown. A British army under General Lake swept Perron’s army out of existence and captured Delhi, the capital of the North. Both the capital cities of India fell to English arms, both emperors came under British protection, and that vast empire was founded wherein King George now reigns. As to Perron, his fall was pitiful, a freak of cowardice. He betrayed everybody, and sneaked away to France with a large fortune. And Arthur Wellesley, victor in that stupendous triumph of Assaye, became the Iron Duke of Wellington, destined to liberate Europe at Waterloo. L A. D. 1805 THE MAN WHO SHOT LORD NELSON This story is from the memoirs of Robert Guillemard, a conscript in the Grand Army of France, and to his horror drafted for a marine on board the battle-ship _Redoubtable_. The Franco-Spanish fleet of thirty-three battle-ships lay in Cadiz, and Villeneuve, the nice old gentleman in command, was still breathless after being chased by Lord Nelson across the Atlantic and back again. Now, having given Nelson the slip, he had fierce orders from the Emperor Napoleon to join the French channel fleet, for the invasion of England. The nice old gentleman knew that his fleet was manned largely with helpless recruits, ill-paid, ill-found, most scandalously fed, sick with a righteous terror lest Nelson come and burn them in their harbor. Then Nelson came, with twenty-seven battle-ships, raging for a fight, and Villeneuve had to oblige for fear of Napoleon’s anger. The fleets met off the sand-dunes of Cape Trafalgar, drawn up in opposing lines for battle, and when they closed, young Guillemard’s ship, the _Redoubtable_, engaged Lord Nelson’s _Victory_, losing thirty men to her first discharge. Guillemard had never been in action, and as the thunders broke from the gun tiers below, he watched with mingled fear and rage the rush of seamen at their work on deck, and his brothers of the marines at their musketry, until everything was hidden in trailing wreaths of smoke, from which came the screams of the wounded, the groans of the dying.