Nor was courage confined to the fighting men. In one fierce sally, at an early stage of the siege, eleven mutineers were captured. A desperate fight was raging at the moment, and every man was required at the front. A rope was hastily passed round the wrists of the eleven captured Sepoys, and they were put into the charge of the wife of a private of the 32nd, named Bridget Widdowson. Drawn sword in hand, this soldier’s wife, who had little children of her own in the beleaguered entrenchments, stood over the eleven mutineers, while they squatted nervously on their hams before her; and so business-like was the nourish of her weapon, so keen the sparkle in her eye, that not one man of the eleven dared to move. It was only when a guard of the stronger sex took Bridget’s place that the eleven, somehow, contrived to escape. Later on in the siege the supply of cartridges failed, and all the ladies were requisitioned for their stockings, to be used in the construction of new cartridges. When before, or since, did war claim for its service such strange material!
The Sepoys, at intervals, made furious assaults on the mud walls, but these were lined by shots too deadly, and held by hands too strong, to make success possible. Had the British, indeed, been the attacking force, they would have swept over the poor earthen barrier, not four feet high, with a single charge, before the siege was a dozen hours old. But, during the whole three weeks of their attack, though the Sepoys, counting fighting men, outnumbered their foes by, perhaps, thirty to one, they never succeeded in even reaching the irregular line of earth behind which the British stood.
Their best chance occurred when, on the eighth night of the bombardment, the thatch on the barrack used as a hospital, took fire. The whole building was quickly in flames, and in their red light the entrenchment, in every part, was as visible as at noonday. The barrack was used as a sleeping-place for the women and children of the 32nd. These fled from the burning building, but not all the sick and wounded could be rescued; some perished in the smoke and flame. That was, indeed, a night of horror. “The roar of the flames,” says Trevelyan, “lost every ten seconds in the peal of the rebel artillery; the whistle of the great shot; the shrieks of the sufferers, who forgot their pain in the helpless anticipation of a sudden and agonising death; the group of crying women and children huddled together in the ditch; the stream of men running to and fro between the houses, laden with sacks of provisions, and kegs of ammunition, and living burdens more precious still; the guards crouching silent and watchful, finger on trigger, each at his station along the external wall; the forms of countless foes, revealed now and again by the fitful glare, prowling around through the outer gloom”—all this made up a strangely terrible scene.