On June 6, with an odd touch of official formality, Nana sent in notice to General Wheeler that he was about to attack his position. Sunday, June 7, was spent in hunting from their various places of concealment in Cawnpore all the unhappy Europeans who lingered there. One trembling family was discovered lurking under a bridge, another concealed in some native huts. They were dragged out with shouts of triumph and despatched. One Englishman, who had taken refuge in a native house, held it against the Sepoys till his last cartridge was expended, then walked out and bade them cut his throat—a request promptly complied with. When the safe and delightful luxury of hunting out solitary Europeans was exhausted, then began the attack on the British entrenchments. The odds were tremendous! In the centre of Wheeler’s entrenchment stood two single-storeyed barracks, built of thin brickwork, with verandas, and one of them roofed with straw. The mud wall, which formed the defence of the position, was four feet high, so thin that a rifle-ball could pierce it, with rough gaps made for the ten light pieces which formed the artillery of the garrison. On the north side of the entrenchment was a little triangular outwork, which the British called the Redan. On its left front, some four hundred yards distant, was a row of unfinished barracks, part of which was held by the British, part by the Sepoys, and which became the scene of the most bloody fighting of the siege. Behind these slender bulwarks was gathered a company of perhaps a thousand souls, of whom more than half were women and children. At first the barracks gave to the non-combatants a brief shelter; but the 24-pounders of the Sepoys pierced them as though they had been built of cheese, and before many hours they were shattered into wreck, and the besieged were practically without any shelter, not merely from the rain of lead, but from the consuming heat of Indian suns and the heavy dews of Indian nights. Sometimes, indeed, the men dug holes in the earth, into which their wives and children might creep and be sheltered by a few planks from the intolerable glare of the sun, and the incessant flight of hostile bullets. Quite as commonly, however, a British officer or civilian, as he crouched behind the poor wall of earth, loaded musket in hand, saw the white faces of his children as they slept or moaned, in the ditch by his side, while the wasted figure of his wife bent over them. There was no privacy, or shelter, or rest. The supply of food quickly failed. There was not water enough to satisfy the little children who cried from thirst, or to bathe the shattered limbs of the wounded. The men had the fierce excitement of fighting; but who shall paint the anguish of English ladies—wives and mothers—who could not find water for their children’s fevered lips, or shelter them from sun and bullet.