Windham was out-generalled, and had no choice but to fall back on his entrenchments, and he had to do this through narrow streets and broken ground while attacked in front and on both flanks by a victorious enemy ten times stronger than himself in bayonets, and more than ten times stronger in artillery. Adye says that the retreat to the entrenchments “was made in perfect order, and not a man was lost in the operation”; but on this subject there is the wildest conflict of evidence. Moore, the chaplain of Windham’s force, says “the men got quite out of hand, and fled pell-mell for the fort. An old Sikh officer at the gate tried to stop them and to form them up in some order, and when they pushed him aside and brushed past him he lifted up his hands and said, ‘You are not the brothers of the men who beat the Khalsa army and conquered the Punjab!’” Mr. Moore goes on to say that “the old Sikh followed the flying men through the fort gate, and, patting some of them on the back, said, ‘Don’t run, don’t be afraid; there is nothing to hurt you.’” If there was disorder the excuse is that the men were, for the most part, young soldiers without regimental cohesion—they were mere fragments of half-a-dozen regiments—they had been for five hours under an overwhelming artillery fire, and were exhausted with want of food: and a retreat under such conditions, and through a hostile city, might well have taxed the steadiness of the best troops in the world. As a matter of fact, the men of the 64th, the 34th, and the 82nd held together with the steadiness of veterans, and their slow and stubborn retreat, their fierce volleys and occasional dashes with the bayonets, quite cooled the ardour of the mutineers as they followed the retreating British. At one point, indeed, on the right flank of the British there was a clear case of misconduct, and the culprit was an officer. His name in all the published reports is concealed under the charity of asterisks. Campbell, in his despatch, says:—“Lieut.-Colonel * * * misconducted himself on the 26th and 27th November in a manner which has rarely been seen amongst the officers of Her Majesty’s service; his conduct was pusillanimous and imbecile to the last degree, and he actually gave orders for the retreat of his own regiment, and a portion of another, in the very face of the orders of his General, and when the troops were not seriously pressed by the enemy.” Every man who wears a red coat and a pair of epaulettes is not necessarily a hero, and human courage, at best, is a somewhat unstable element. This particular officer had risen to high rank and seen much service, but some failure of nerve, some sudden clouding of brain, in the stress of that desperate fight, made him play—if only for a moment—the part both of an imbecile and a coward, and surrender a position which was essential to the British defence. He was court-martialled after the fight and dismissed the service.