The attack by our left wing, which I'd witnessed, had been beaten back with heavy loss. Our advance on the other flank and centre had been intended as a feint, but when Paddy saw our left come adrift he changed the feint into a pukka assault, through a murderous hail of fire; somehow our men survived it and stormed the Sikh defences along almost the whole curved front of two and a half miles, and for nigh on an hour it was a hideous hacking-match over the ditches and ramparts. Our people were repulsed time and again, but still they forged ahead, British and Indian bayonets and Gurkha knives against the tulwars, with shocking slaughter; no manoeuvring or scientific soldiering, but hand-to-hand butchery—that was fighting as Paddy Gough understood it, and weren't the Sikhs ready to oblige him?
They fought like madmen—and perhaps that was their undoing, for whenever an attack was beaten back they leaped down into the ditches to mutilate our wounded. Well, you don't do that to Atkins and Sepoy and Gurkha if you know what's good for you; our people stormed back at 'em in a killing rage, and when the scaling-ladders wouldn't reach they climbed on each other's shoulders and on the piled dead, and fairly pitchforked the Sikhs out of their first line entrenchments, almost without firing a shot. Good bayonet fighters will beat swordsmen and spearmen every time, and they ran the Sikhs back over two furlongs of rough ground to the second line, where the Khalsa gunners made a stand—and then Paddy showed that he was a bit of a general as well as a hooligan.
From my eyrie to the Sikhs' second line was a bare half-mile, and I could see their gunners plain as day, for the wind was streaming their smoke away downriver. They were working their field pieces and camel-swivels and musketry until they must have been red-hot; the line looked as though it was on fire, so constant was the roar of the discharges, sweeping the ground and almost blotting out in a dust-storm the outer entrenchments from which our infantry and horse-guns were trying to advance. Between the Sikhs' second line and the river the Khalsa horse and foot were re-forming in their thousands, preparing to counter-attack if the chance arose. Gough made sure it never did.
Directly across from me there was a sudden colossal explosion in the flank entrenchments of the second line; bodies were flying like dolls, a field-gun went cartwheeling end over end, and a huge pillar of dust arose, like a genie from a bottle. As it cleared I saw that our sappers had driven a great cleft in the ramparts, and through it who should come trotting but old Joe Thackwell, as easy as though he were in the Row, with a single file of 3rd Lights at his heels, wheeling into line as they cleared the gap. Behind them were the blue puggarees and white pants of the Bengali Irregulars, and before the Sikhs knew what was up Joe was rising in his stirrups, waving his sabre, and the 3rd Lights were sweeping down the rear of the gun positions, brushing aside the supporting infantry, sabring and riding down everything in their path. In a moment the rear of the second line was a turmoil of men and horses, with the sabres rising and falling in the sunlight, and into it the Bengalis drove like a thunderbolt. Farther down the line our infantry were pouring over the ramparts, a wave of red coats and bayonets, and all in a moment the whole line had caved in, and the Khalsa battalions were falling back to the third line of entrenchments a bare two hundred yards from the river. They weren't running, though; they retired like guardsmen, pouring volley after volley into our advance, while the Bengalis and Dragoons harried them front and flank, and our horse-guns came careering through the outer lines to unlimber and turn their fire on the doomed Sikh army.
For it was done at last. Solid as a rock it looked as it stood in the elbow of the river, squares formed, squadrons ordered, standards raised, and the ground before it heaped with its dead—but it was hemmed in by an enemy who had overcome odds of three to two by sheer refusal to be stopped … and it had lost its guns. Now, as the horse artillery and field pieces cut great lanes in its ranks, it could reply only with musketry and steel to the charges of our horse and the steady advance of our infantry; it swayed and fell back, almost step by step, contesting every inch—and I looked to see the standards come down in token of surrender. But they didn't. The Khalsa, the Pure, was dying on its feet, with its sirdars and generals scrambling up on the broken entrenchments, willing it to stand firm. I even made out the tall figure of the old war-horse I'd seen directing the high command; he was up on a shattered gun carriage, his white robes gleaming in the sunlight, shield on arm and tulwar raised, like some spirit of the Khalsa, and then the smoke enveloped him, and when it cleared, he was gone.49
Then they broke. It was like a dyke bursting, with first a trickle of men making for the river, and then the main body giving back, and suddenly that magnificent host that I'd gaped at on Maian Mir had dissolved into a mass of fugitives pouring back to the bridge of boats, spilling into the river on either side of it, or trying to escape along the banks. In a few moments the whole length of the bridge was jammed with struggling men and horses and even gun-teams, vainly trying to win across; the sheer weight of them and the force of the stream caused the great line of barges to bend downriver like a gigantic bow drawn to the limit. It swayed to and fro, half-submerged, with the brown water boiling over it like a weir, and then it snapped, the two ends surged apart, and the milling thousands were pitched into the flood.
In an instant the whole width of the river beneath me was alive with men and beasts and wreckage, sweeping past. It was like a lumber-jam when great areas of the water cannot be seen for the whirling mass of logs, but here the logs were men and horses and a great tangle of gear bound together by the force of the current. Upturned barges, black with men clinging to them, were dashed against each other, rolling over and over to be lost in the spray or flung onto the mudbanks; for the first time above the din of the firing I could hear human sounds, the shrieks of wounded and drowning men. Some may have lived through that first appalling maelstrom when the bridge gave way, but not many, for even as they were carried downstream our horse artillery were tearing along the southern shore, unlimbering, and wheeling their pieces to rake the river from bank to bank with grape and canister, churning it into a foaming slaughterhouse. The Yankees talk of "shooting fish in a barrel"; that was the fate of the Khalsa, floundering and helpless, in the Sutlej. Farther up, beyond the bridge, the carnage was even worse, for there the water was shallower, and as the great close-packed mass of fugitives struggled neck-deep to cross the ford they were caught in a murderous cross-fire of musketry and artillery. Even those who managed to reach the north bank were caught in the deadly hail of grape as they struggled ashore, and only a few, I'm told, managed to scramble away to safety.
Below me, bodies both still and struggling were being borne past or swept ashore by a brown tide hideously streaked with red, while the shot lashed the water around them; close to the shore, where the current bore in most strongly, the Sutlej was running blood.
Directly across from my position, I could see the red coats of our infantry, British and Indian, lining the banks, firing as fast as they could load; among them were horse-guns and captured camel-swivels pouring their fire into the stricken wreck of an army. Shots were slapping into the bank below me, and I huddled back into my refuge, flat on my face and instinctively clawing the soil as though to burrow into it. How long it lasted, I can't say; ten minutes, perhaps, and then that hellish cannonade began to slacken, a bugle on the far side was blowing the cease-fire, and gradually the guns fell silent, and the only sound in my half-deafened ears was the river rushing past.