thousand men sit down before a great city inhabited by a quarter of a
million bitterly hostile inhabitants, and defended moreover by strong
walls, a very powerful artillery, and a well-drilled and disciplined
force, at first amounting to some ten thousand men, but swelled later on,
as the mutineers poured in from all quarters, to three times that force.
Never during the long months which the struggle lasted did we attempt to
do more than to hold our own. The city was open to the enemy at all sides,
save where we held our footing; large forces marched in and out of the
town; provisions and stores poured into it; and we can scarcely be said to
have fired a shot at it until our batteries opened to effect a breach a
few days before the final assault.

The troops with which Sir H. Barnard arrived before Delhi consisted of the
Seventy-fifth Regiment, six companies of the Sixtieth Rifles, the First
Bengal Fusiliers, six companies of the Second Fusiliers--both composed of
white troops--the Sirmoor battalion of Goorkhas, the Sixth Dragoon Guards
(the Carbineers), two squadrons of the Ninth Lancers, and a troop or two
of newly-raised irregular horse. The artillery consisted of some thirty
pieces, mostly light field-guns.

Upon the day following the occupation of the Ridge a welcome accession of
strength was received by the arrival of the Guides, a picked corps
consisting of three troops of cavalry and six companies of infantry. This
little force had marched five hundred and eighty miles in twenty-two days,
a rate of twenty-six miles a day, without a break--a feat probably
altogether without example, especially when it is considered that it took
place in India, and in the hottest time of the year.

The Ridge, which occupies so important a place in the history of the siege
of Delhi, is a sharp backed hill, some half a mile long, rising abruptly