Once or twice the old General is himself in the press of the fight. He is practically unarmed, because his right hand had been disabled a few days earlier by a blow which he had dealt a camel-driver who was maltreating his camel, and the Scindian's head being about fifty times harder than the General's hand, a dislocated wrist was the result. So intent is he on the larger battle that the men around him are scarcely noticed, and more than once his life is saved by a soldier or an officer interposing between him and an enemy intent on slaying the old chief, who seems to him exactly what he is--the guiding spirit of this storm of war. Thus Lieutenant Marston saves his General's life in front of the Twenty-Fifth Sepoys by springing between a Beloochee soldier and Napier's charger at the moment the enemy is about to strike. The blow cuts deep into the brass scales on Marston's shoulder, and the Beloochee goes down between the sword of the officer and the bayonet of a private who has run in to the _melée_. Again he gets entangled in the press in front, and is in close peril when a sergeant of the Twenty-Second saves him; and as the old man emerges unscathed from the surf of shield and sword, the whole Twenty-Second line shouts his name and greets him with a wild Irish cheer of rapture ringing high above the clash of battle. It is at this time that the drummer Delaney, who keeps everywhere on foot beside his General, performs the most conspicuous act of valour done during the day. In the midst of the _melée_ he sees a mounted chief leading on his men. Delaney seizes a musket and bayonet, rushes upon the horseman, and Meer Wullee Mahomet Khan goes down in full sight of both armies, while the victor returns with the rich sword and shield of the Beloochee leader. There are no revolvers yet, no breechloading arms, nothing but the sword for the officer and the flint musket and bayonet for the men; and fighting means something more than shoving cartridges in at one end of a tube and blowing them out at the other, twenty to the minute, by the simple action of pulling a finger. "At Meanee," says M'Murdo, "the muskets of the men often ceased to go off, from the pans becoming clogged with powder, and then you would see soldiers, taking advantage of a momentary lull in the onslaught, wiping out the priming pans with a piece of rag, or fixing a new flint in the hammer." Sometimes these manifold inducements to old "brown Bess" to continue work have to be suspended in order to receive on levelled bayonets a wild Beloochee rush, and then frequently could be seen the spectacle of men impaled upon the steel, still hacking down the enemy they had been able to reach only in death.