The struggling crowd of British officers and ladies reached the bastion and crowded into its embrasures, while the Sepoys from the main-guard below took deliberate pot-shots at them. Presently a light gun was brought to bear on the unhappy fugitives crouching on the summit of the bastion. The ditch was twenty-five feet below, but there was no choice. One by one the officers jumped down. Some buckled their sword-belts together and lowered the ladies. One very stout old lady, Colonel Vibart records, “would neither jump down nor be lowered down; would do nothing but scream. Just then another shot from the gun crashed into the parapet; somebody gave the poor woman a push, and she tumbled headlong into the ditch beneath.” Officers and ladies scrambled up the almost perpendicular bank which forms the farther wall of the ditch, and escaped into the jungle beyond, and began their peril-haunted flight to Meerut. Abbott, of the 74th, had a less sensational escape. His men told him they had protected him as long as they could; he must now fly for his life. Abbott resisted long, but at last said, “Very well. I’m off to Meerut; but,” he added, with a soldier’s instinct, “give me the colours.” And, carrying the colours of his regiment, he set off with one other officer on his melancholy walk to Meerut. [Illustration: LIEUTENANT GEORGE WILLOUGHBY, BENGAL ARTILLERY _Reproduced, by kind permission of his niece, MISS WALLACE, from a photograph of an unfinished water-colour drawing, taken about 1857_] The most heroic incident in Delhi that day was the defence and explosion of the great magazine. This was a huge building, standing some 600 yards from the Cashmere Gate, packed with munitions of war—cannon, ammunition, and rifles—sufficient to have armed half a nation, and only a handful of Englishmen to defend it. It was in charge of Lieutenant Willoughby, who had under him two other officers (Forrest and Raynor), four conductors (Buckley, Shaw, Scully, and Crowe), and two sergeants (Edwards and Stewart); a little garrison of nine brave men, whose names deserve to be immortalised. Willoughby was a soldier of the quiet and coolly courageous order; his men were British soldiers of the ordinary stuff of which the rank and file of the British Army is made. Yet no ancient story or classic fable tells of any deed of daring and self-sacrifice nobler than that which this cluster of commonplace Englishmen was about to perform. The Three Hundred who kept the pass at Thermopylae against the Persian swarms, the Three, who, according to the familiar legend, held the bridge across the Tiber against Lars Porsena, were not of nobler fibre than the Nine who blew up the great magazine at Delhi rather than surrender it to the mutineers.