The civilian was wiser than the soldier, and Lord Canning’s views prevailed. But it is worth noting that Colin Campbell’s plan of “bagging” all the mutineers with one vast, far-stretching sweep in Lucknow would have been carried into effect on Lord Canning’s lines, but for a double blunder, which marked Campbell’s own conduct of the siege. It was a great task to which the British Commander-in-chief now addressed himself. Lucknow was a huge honeycomb of native houses; a city more than twenty miles in circumference, with a turbulent population calculated variously at from 300,000 to 1,000,000 people. It had a garrison of 130,000 fighting men, with an overwhelming force of artillery. The Sepoy leaders, too, who knew the value of the spade in war, had spent months in making the city, as they believed, impregnable. Both Havelock and Colin Campbell, in fighting their way to the Residency, had broken into the city from the eastern front; and the Sepoys, with a touching simplicity, took it for granted that the third attack on the city would follow the lines of the earlier assaults. The British, that is, would cross the canal, and force a path to the Residency through the great gardens and stately buildings which occupied the space betwixt the mass of the city and the Goomtee; and they accordingly barred this approach by a triple line of formidable defences. The first was a vast flanked rampart, on the inner side of the canal, and to which the canal served as a wet ditch. The second was a great circular earthwork, like the curve of a railway embankment, which enclosed the Mess-house. Behind it rose what was, in fact, the citadel of Lucknow, the Kaisarbagh, or King’s Palace. Both these lines stretched from the river on one flank, to the mass of houses which constituted the town, on the other flank. They might be pierced, they could not be turned; and they bristled from flank to flank with heavy guns. The third line was a stupendous earthwork, covering the whole north front of the King’s Palace. Its guns swept the narrow space betwixt the palace and the river with their fire. Each great building along this line of advance was itself a fortress, and everything which ingenuity could suggest, and toil execute, had been done to make the defence formidable. The task of fighting a way across these triple lines, and through this tangle of fortified houses, each girdled with rifle-pits, and loopholed from foundation to roof, might well have been deemed impossible.