Nicholson watched the twice-repeated rush of the Fusileers, and the fall, one by one, of the officers who led them. When the men for a second time fell back, Nicholson himself sprang into the lane, and, waving his sword, called on his men, with the deep, vibrating voice all knew, to follow their general. But even while he spoke, his sword pointing up the lane, his face, full of the passion of battle, turned towards the broken, staggering front of his men, a Sepoy leaned from the window of a house close by, pointed his musket across a distance of little more than three yards at Nicholson’s tall and stately figure, and shot him through the body. Nicholson fell. The wound was mortal; but, raising himself up on his elbow, he still called on the men to “go on.” He rejected impatiently the eager help that was offered to him, and declared he would lie there till the lane was carried. But, as Kaye puts it, he was asking dying what he had asked living—that which was all but impossible. Colonel Graydon tells how he stooped over the fallen Nicholson, and begged to be allowed to convey him to a place of safety; but Nicholson declared “he would allow no man to remove him, but would die there.” It was, in fact, a characteristic flash of chivalry that made Nicholson at last consent to be removed. He would allow no one to touch him, says Trotter, “except Captain Hay, of the 60th Native Infantry, with whom he was not upon friendly terms. ‘I will make up my difference with you, Hay,’ he gasped out. ‘I will let you take me back.’” The lane was strewn with the British dead. To carry it without artillery was hopeless. There were no better soldiers on the Ridge than the 1st Bengal Fusileers—“the dear old dirty-shirts” of Lord Lake. When they, on the morning of that day, broke through the embrasures of the Cashmere battery, one of their officers has left on record the statement that “the Sepoys fled as they saw the white faces of the Fusileers looking sternly at them.” They fled, that is, not from thrust of steel and flash of musket, but before the mere menace of those threatening, war-hardened countenances! The 1st, as a matter of fact, had their muskets slung behind, to enable them to use their hands in climbing the breach, and so, when they came up the crest of the breach and through the embrasures, the men had no muskets in their hands. The threat written on their faces literally put the Sepoys to flight. Where such men as these had failed, what troops could succeed? The column fell slowly and sullenly back to the Cabul Gate, the wounded being sent to the rear. Lord Roberts tells us that, being sent by Wilson to ascertain how affairs were going on in the city, he observed as he rode through the Cashmere Gate a doolie by the side of the road without bearers, and with evidently a wounded man inside. He says:—