On June 24—when for nineteen days the wretched garrison had been under gun-fire—Wheeler writes to Lawrence, “All our carriages more or less disabled, ammunition short.... We have no instruments, no medicine: the British spirit alone remains; but it cannot last for ever.... Surely we are not left to die like rats in a cage.” Lawrence writes back on June 27, giving what encouragement he can, and warning him not to accept any terms. “You cannot rely on the Nana’s promises. _Il a tué beaucoup de prisonniers._” By the twenty-first day of the siege the position of the British was hopeless. Food had almost completely failed. Their guns had become unserviceable. The unconquerable garrison was fast dwindling. “At rare intervals behind the earthwork they stood—gaunt and feeble likenesses of men—clutching with muffled fingers the barrels of their muskets, which glowed with heat intolerable to the naked hand, so fierce was the blaze of the mid-day sun.” They might have sallied out and cut their way through their enemies, or died fighting amongst them; and they would have done so fifty times over but for one consideration. They could not take their women and children with them; they could not abandon them. There was the certainty, too, that the Indian rains, long delayed, must soon burst upon them. Then their firearms would be rendered useless; the holes in which the women and children crouched would be flooded; their wall of mud would be washed away. No sign of help came from without. Wheeler’s last despatch, dated June 24, ended with the words, “We want aid, aid, aid.” But not merely no aid, no whisper even from the outer world reached the unhappy garrison. The Sepoys, on their part, were growing weary of the siege. Their losses were enormous. They might batter the entrenchments into dust, but they could not capture an inch of the blackened area these shot-wrecked lines of earth girdled. These Sahibs were fiercer than wounded tigers. They were, indeed, perplexingly and disquietingly aggressive. They were perpetually making fierce little sallies, whose track was marked by slaughtered Sepoys. Nana Sahib felt there was real danger that his allies might abandon their desperate task. He therefore undertook to accomplish by craft what the Sepoys could not do with cannon and bayonet. Nana Sahib unearthed from some gloomy room in the building which formed his headquarters a captive Englishwoman waiting to be slaughtered, and sent her as a messenger to the entrenchments on the morning of June 24. “All those,” ran the brief note, “who are in no way connected with the acts of Lord Dalhousie, and are willing to lay down their arms, shall receive a safe passage to Allahabad.”