After this Delhi seemed to him to be the very keystone of the insurrection. To take it there was no risk too great to run--no hazard too perilous to undergo.[344] Though his own position at Lahore was dangerous enough, he threw himself on the people, and staked everything on the fidelity of the Sikhs. He summoned the old gunners of the Khálsa from their fields. The low-caste “Muzbis” he converted into sappers. The fierce chieftains, who had fought against us in ’48 and ’49, together with their followers, he hurried on to the rebel city, thereby stripping his province of local leaders who might have organised a rising. “From, the Punjab arsenals,” says one of Lawrence’s critics, “the siege-trains were equipped; from the Punjab districts vast amounts of carriage were gathered and despatched systematically with their loads to Delhi; from the Punjab treasuries the sinews of war were furnished. Men were raised by tens of thousands to replace the Sepoys--raised, indeed, in such numbers that--as constantly comes out in Lawrence’s correspondence--the dread was for a long time never absent from his mind lest this might be overdone, and new danger might arise from the Punjabis becoming conscious of their strength.”[345] What wonder, then, that in England as in India, where it was admitted that the fall of Delhi broke the neck of the insurrection, all men who knew the circumstances of the case, who knew how he had to stimulate laggards,[346] strengthen faint hearts, overcome jealousies, sweep away obstructions--“all greeted Sir John Lawrence by acclamation as the man who had done more than any single man to save the Indian Empire”?[347] And justly. For had the great and warlike Sikh nation, in the midst of which Lawrence stood like a lion at bay, risen against the British _raj_, “all would have been lost save honour.” He saw, in fact, that the Khálsa banner must be carried into our own lines, otherwise it would be swept into the lines of the enemy; and it was this inspiration of genius that really saved India. Delhi fell before the attacks of the reinforced army, after six days’ fighting, on the 20th of September, and on the 21st the Mogul king was captured by Captain Hodson (“Hodson of Hodson’s Horse”), who next day shot, with his own hand, his two sons, and hung up their bodies in the most public place in the city.[348]