Ewart found that two native officers had carried the regimental flag into a narrow and dark room, and were defending themselves like wild cats. Ewart leaped single-handed into the room, and captured the colours, slaying both officers. The fight within the Secundrabagh was by this time practically over, and Ewart ran outside, and bareheaded, with blood-stained uniform and smoke-blackened face, ran up to Sir Colin as he sat on his grey horse, and cried, “We are in possession, sir! I have killed the last two of the enemy with my own hand, and here is one of their colours.” “D⸺ your colours, sir!” was the wrathful response of Sir Colin. “It’s not your place to be taking colours. Go back to your regiment this instant, sir.” Sir Colin had a Celtic shortness of temper; the strain of waiting while the madness of the fight raged within the great walls had told on his nerves. He was eager to get his 93rd into regimental shape again; and, as Forbes-Mitchell argues, believed, from his appearance and bearing, that Ewart was drunk! So he was: but it was with the passion of battle! The officers of Sir Colin’s staff read Ewart’s condition more truly, and as this ragged, blood-stained figure, carrying the captured flag, came running out from the furnace of the great fight, they cheered vehemently. Later in the day Sir Colin himself apologised to Ewart for his brusqueness. In the whole record of war there are not many scenes of slaughter to be compared with that which took place within the walls of the Secundrabagh. The 53rd held the north side of the great quadrangle, the Sikhs and the 93rd the east side, and a mixed force, composed of several regiments, held the south; on the west there was no escape. The great mass of Sepoys in the centre of the quadrangle was thus pelted with lead and fire from the three fronts. “We fired volley after volley into the dense multitude,” says Jones-Parry, “until nothing was left but a moving mass, like mites in a cheese!” Of the 2000 or 2500 Sepoys who formed the garrison of the Secundrabagh not one man escaped. Its whole area, when the fight was over, was red with blood and strewn with the bodies of slain men. Four whole regiments of mutineers were simply blotted out. Many of the slain Sepoys wore Punjab medals on their breasts; many, too, were found to have leave certificates, signed by former commanding officers, in their pockets, showing they had been on leave when the regiment mutinied, and had rejoined their regiment to fight against the British. The walls of the Secundrabagh still stand, a long, low mound along one side showing where the great company of slain Sepoys were buried. What other patch of the earth’s surface, of equal size, has ever witnessed more of human valour and of human despair than those few square yards of turf that lie within the shot-battered walls of this ancient Indian pleasure-garden!