Captain M’Donald was shot dead while leading his men. His senior lieutenant took the company on, until the charging crowd was stopped by a ditch eighteen feet wide, and from twelve to fourteen feet deep. The stormers leaped, with hardly a pause, into the ditch, but it seemed impossible to climb up the farther bank. Wood, of the Grenadier company, however, clambered on the shoulders of a tall private, and, claymore in hand, mounted the farther side. The spectacle of a Highland bonnet and menacing claymore, making its appearance above the ditch, proved too much for the Sepoys. They fled, and Wood pulled up man after man by the muzzle of his rifle—the rifles, it may be mentioned as an interesting detail, were all loaded, and on full cock! Highlanders and Punjaubees, racing side by side, had now broken into the great palace. Every doorway was barred and loopholed, and the Sepoys fought desperately; but the Highlanders, with the Punjaubees in generous rivalry, broke through barrier after barrier, till they reached the inner square, filled with a mass of Sepoys. “The word,” Forbes-Mitchell says, was “keep well together, men, and use the bayonet,” and that order was diligently obeyed. The combat raged for over two hours, the pipe-major of the 93rd blowing his pipes shrilly during the whole time. “I knew,” he said afterwards, “our boys would fight all the better while they heard the bagpipes.” When the main fight was over, in the inner court of the Begum’s Palace, alone, over 860 of the enemy lay dead. Colin Campbell himself described it as “the sternest struggle which occurred during the siege.” That most gallant, but ill-fated soldier, Adrian Hope, personally led one of the storming parties. It is said that he got in through a window, up to which he was lifted, and through which he was pushed by his men. He was sent headlong and sprawling upon a group of Sepoys in the dark room inside. That apparition of the huge, red-headed Celt tumbling upon them, sword and pistol in hand, was too much for the Sepoys, and they fled without striking a blow! Perhaps the most gallant soldier that perished within the blood-splashed courts of Begum Kothi was Hodson, of “Hodson’s Horse.” Robert Napier tells the story of how, when he was in the act of reconnoitring the breach, he found Hodson suddenly standing beside him, and saying, laughingly, “I am come to take care of you.” The two watched the rush of the stormers up the breach, and listened to the sound of the fierce tumult within the walls. Presently, arm-in-arm, they quietly climbed the breach, and found the last embers of the conflict still spluttering within. Napier was called away by some duty and Hodson went forward alone.