For now the first blood was drawn the people rose excitedly and surrounded the little British party in the quarters they were occupying. The British officers found it impossible to hold the original sangar on the cliff by the river, for it was exposed to fire from the opposite bank, and had no head-cover. They therefore decided upon occupying some houses by the polo ground, the very spot where Mr. George Curzon and myself had camped without a single man as escort, only five months previously. In this batch of houses, cover and fire-wood could be obtained, and a certain amount of supplies also. The only drawback in occupying them was that they were more than a hundred yards from the river, and consequently there was considerable risk of their water supply being cut off. The officers hoped, however, to be able to keep the road to the river open by their fire. Immediately upon returning to Reshun, the officers set to work to make the position defensible, and the following account of their brave resistance against overpowering numbers of the enemy is compiled from the report they subsequently submitted to Government. The first work to be done was the construction of sangars on the roofs of the houses (the houses being flat-roofed), the loopholing of the walls, blocking up entrances, and knocking out passages of communication. The materials available for making the sangars were the mud bricks of which the houses were built, roof timbers and other pieces of timber lying about, and boxes, grain bins, etc. An attack was fully expected that same night, and every possible precaution had to be taken before darkness set in. Before dusk the ammunition and the wounded had to be transported from the sangar near the river to the house. Some Kashmir sepoys volunteered for this work, and though they had to run the gauntlet of a heavy fire in crossing the space of a hundred yards which separated the sangar from the end of the garden-wall round the house, they carried it out without losing a single man. "Already dead tired, these men behaved splendidly," say the British officers in their report.