But the contest was too unequal to last long. By the end of the first week our fifty-nine artillerymen had all been killed or wounded at their posts. Of the officers to whom the charge of the guns had originally been entrusted, few had escaped unhurt from the hail of lead and iron, or the hardly less deadly rays of the Indian noon. Sunstroke had killed Major Prout. Captain Kempland was stretched on the floor of the barrack, dazed and powerless. His next in command, Lieutenant Eckford, a soldier of high promise and an accomplished gentleman, while snatching half an hour's repose under the roof of the verandah, was struck full on the heart by a cannon-ball. In the west quarter Dempster had been shot dead, and from the same battery Martin had been carried into the hospital with a bullet in his lungs. For a while volunteers endeavoured to supply the place of the trained gunners; and all was done that could be expected from bandsmen, and opium agents, and telegraph clerks firing six-pound balls out of damaged nine-pounders, while exposed without protection to a murderous discharge from siege guns and heavy mortars. There could be only one termination to such a business. Our only howitzer was knocked clean off its carriage. One cannon lost the entire muzzle. Some had their sides beaten in, some their vents blown out. At length our park of artillery was reduced to a couple of pieces, which were withdrawn under cover, loaded with grape, and reserved for the purpose of repelling an assault. And even of these the bore had been injured to such an extent that the canister could not be driven home. Our poor ladies, accordingly, in rivalry of those somewhat apocryphal Carthaginian dames who twisted their hair into bowstrings, gave up their stockings to supply the case for a novel but not unserviceable cartridge. Since the days when the shopmen of Londonderry loaded their quaint old ordnance with brick-bats wrapped in strips of gutter-piping, necessity has, perhaps, never been brought to bed with a more singular offspring.