On the afternoon of the 15th Campbell made an elaborate reconnaissance on his extreme left, and all night he thundered in that direction with his guns, and the enemy gathered in full strength on that line, persuaded that the British would advance on it. But by daybreak on the 16th Campbell was moving off, light-footed and swift, by his right, exactly where the enemy did not expect him! He had little over 3000 bayonets in his force, but he was strong in artillery, counting in all thirty-nine guns, six mortars, and two rocket-tubes, and he hoped to smash by the weight of his fire every obstacle that stood in his path to the Residency. Yet, be it remembered, he was moving on the arc of a great fortified central position, held by a hostile force not less than 60,000 strong, or more than fifteen times more numerous than his own. Blunt’s guns and a company of the 53rd formed Campbell’s advance-guard. They crossed the canal, followed for a mile the river-bank, and then swung sharply to the left by a road which ran parallel to the rear of the Secundrabagh. This was a great garden, 150 yards on each face, with walls twenty feet high, and a circular bastion at each angle, and from its rear face, as the head of the British column came in sight, broke an angry tempest of musket-shot, a fire which, it must be remembered, smote the advancing British column on the flank. Cavalry and infantry were helpless in the narrow lane, and something like a “jam” took place. Blunt, however, an officer of great daring, with an enthusiastic belief that British guns could go anywhere and do anything, cut the knot of the difficulty. The bank of the lane was so steep that it seemed impossible that horses and guns could climb it, but Blunt, with cool decision, put the guns in motion, swung the horses’ heads sharply round, and, with whip and spur and shout, his gunners drove the snorting, panting horses up the bank into the open space under the fire of the Secundrabagh. Travers, with two of his 18-pounders, came stumbling and struggling up the steep bank after Blunt. The guns were swung round, and, within musket-shot distance of the crowded walls and under a tempest of bullets, they opened a breaching fire on the face of the Secundrabagh. The British infantry meanwhile, lying down under the bank of the lane, waited for the moment of assault. Forbes-Mitchell gives a very realistic picture of the march up the lane, and the waiting under the shelter of a low mud-wall while the breach was being made, through which they must charge. Campbell himself, before the men moved up, had given amusingly prosaic instructions as to how they were to fight. When they swept into the Secundrabagh they were to “keep together in clusters of threes, and rely on nothing but the bayonet.” The central man of each group of three was to attack, and his comrades, right and left, guard him with their bayonets, &c.