The imagination lingers pitifully over those groups of British ladies sitting or crouching in the ditches under the earthworks: “Unshod, unkempt, ragged and squalid, haggard and emaciated, parched with drought and faint with hunger, they sat waiting to hear that they were widows. Woe was it in those days unto them that were with child. There were infants born during the terrible three weeks—infants with no future.” There were two wells in the encampment; one which, to quote Trevelyan, “yielded nothing then, which will yield nothing till the sea, too, gives up her dead.” It was some two hundred yards from the rampart, and lay open to the fire of the Sepoys’ batteries. It was turned into a sepulchre. Thither, night by night, the besieged carried their dead, and cast them into its depths with brief and whispered prayer; while the guns of the Sepoys thundered their requiem. Within three weeks 250 English people were cast by English hands into that strange grave. The other well lay also directly under hostile fire, and on it the Sepoy gunners, trained by British science, concentrated their fire night and day. Every drop of water drawn from it may be said to have been reddened with blood. Over this handful of British people, faint with hunger, fevered with thirst, wasted by sickness, half mad with the sun’s heat, roared day and night a tempest of hostile shot. Never before, perhaps, was such a fire concentrated on one poor patch of soil. The Sepoys could mount as many guns as they chose, and almost of whatever calibre they pleased. And they could fire, within a distance ranging from 300 to 800 yards, from under almost shot-proof shelter. From roof and window of all the buildings commanding the entrenchments streamed, with scarcely a moment’s pause, showers of musketry bullets. At night the Sepoys crept within pistol-shot, and fired without cessation. Wheeler’s entrenchments were literally girdled with fire; they were whipped, day and night, with incessant volleys. By the third day every window and door in the poor barracks which served as shelter to the sick, and to the women and children, had been beaten in; and shell and ball ranged at will through the rooms. One who saw the building after the siege wrote: “The walls are riddled with cannon-shot like the cells of a honeycomb. The doors are knocked into shapeless openings. Of the verandas only a few splintered rafters remain. At some of the angles the walls are knocked entirely away, and large chasms gape blackly at you.” Never was a position more desperate; and never was there one held with a valour more obstinate. Wheeler’s men had everything that was most dear to them at their backs, and everything that was most hateful in their front; and under these conditions how they fought may be imagined. In the scanty garrison, too, were over a hundred officers of the regiments in mutiny, fighters of the finest quality. It was a _corps d’élite_; a garrison of officers!