Lord Ellenborough was now recalled; and Sir Henry Hardinge, one of Wellington's veterans and a highly accomplished soldier, came out as Governor-General in his stead. The condition of the Punjab was most critical. Ranjit Singh, the great leader and ruler of the Sikhs, had died in 1839, leaving no strong man to succeed him. The succession was of course disputed; and a course of risings, mutinies and assassinations showed that the great Sikh state was sinking into anarchy. All power had passed into the hands of committees of regimental officers, who were in turn partly controlled by the passions of their men. The nominal ruler could think of no better resource than to turn the unruly host across the Sutlej to fight the English, for which some recent frontier disputes furnished sufficient pretext. Lord Hardinge, who had seen what was coming, was ready for them, and some twelve thousand men under Sir Hugh Gough advanced to meet them. Sir Hugh was a very brave man but a very bad commander, who could not see a wall without dashing his head against it. In the first action, Moodkee, he hurried his troops into the fight with every disadvantage, and though victorious lost nine hundred men. In the second action three days later at Ferozeshah, he launched about sixteen thousand British and Sepoys against fifty thousand Sikhs in a very strong position, and was practically beaten at the close of the first day's fighting, though he recovered himself on the second. In this affair he threw away twenty-five hundred men; and on the night after the first engagement the British Empire in India rocked for some hours on the verge of ruin. A month later a far more telling and scientific victory was won by Sir Harry Smith with a detachment of the army at Aliwal; and then Gough made a final blundering attack upon the Sikhs in a strongly entrenched position at Sobraon, where, though the valour of his troops and the devotion of his divisional generals won a decisive victory, it was at a cost once more of nearly twenty-five hundred men.