When the little force reached the town, Colonel D’Arcy called for volunteers to break down the stockade with axes. Hodge and another pioneer, who was afterwards killed, answered the call, and plied their axes bravely in the face of the negroes’ fire until a breach had been made. Through this the regiment struggled, but the negroes had been reinforced, and so strongly that they were able to beat the besiegers off for a time. Colonel D’Arcy relates that he found himself left alone in the breach with only Hodge by him. Here he kept firing at the negroes, while the big West Indian, standing coolly at his side, conspicuous in his scarlet uniform with white facings, supplied him with loaded muskets. After a little time the rest of the men re-formed and came once more to the attack, whereupon Hodge went ahead again, breaking a way for them through the bush-work defences. To give his comrades a better chance of storming the place, he at last ran round to the principal entrance, drove off such of the negroes as thrust themselves in his path, and forced open the two great gates which had been barricaded from within. Through these the West Indian Regiment charged with their bayonets, and when they emerged at the other side of the smoke-enveloped village they left some hundreds of negroes dead and dying in their wake. Colonel D’Arcy had done great deeds of valour that day, deeds which were suitably recognised later by the merchants of Bathurst, who presented him with a sword of honour, but he modestly disclaimed the praise due to him. To Private Hodge, he said, belonged the chief honours of the attack, and at the close of the action, before the whole regiment, he saluted the proud pioneer as “the bravest man in the corps.” By a curious coincidence it was in the same quarter of Africa that, twenty-six years later, the third coloured man to be decorated won his V.C. This was Corporal William James Gordon, also of the West Indian Regiment. His act of special gallantry was to save his officer (Major Madden) from certain death at the storming of the town of Toniataba, on the Gambia. Gordon thrust himself between the major and the enemy’s rifle barrels as they were suddenly poked out of the loopholes at the officer’s back, receiving a bullet through his lungs that went within an ace of killing him. The other notable Crosses of the sixties were awarded for deeds of bravery that necessitated the issue of an additional Royal Warrant to cover deeds performed not in action but “under circumstances of extreme danger, such as the occurrence of a fire on board ship, or of the foundering of a vessel at sea, or under any other circumstances in which, through the courage and devotion displayed, life or public property may be saved.” By this special provision a brave Irishman, Timothy O’Hea by name, a private in the Rifle Brigade, was awarded the V.C., together with Dr. Campbell Douglas, and four privates of the South Wales Borderers, then styled the 24th Regiment.