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The Jats from Bhurtpore came up under Suraj Mal, their celebrated leader, and plundered the environs right and left. The Vazir's people, the Persian partly, breached a bastion of the city wall, and their victory seemed near at hand.
Mine, by the blessing of Divine Providence, continued to do well; but I was visited with the most excruciating headaches and dizziness from the wound in my head; and the terrific spectacle of the last scene at Bhurtpore so affected my mind, that scarcely a night passed in which I did not dream of "hair-breadth 'scapes i' th' imminent deadly breach," and fancy I was fighting my battles over again.
While the British troops were besieging Bhurtpore in India, the water in the ponds and tanks in the neighbourhood becoming exhausted, it could only be obtained from deep and large wells. In this service elephants were especially useful. One day two of these animals, one of them large and strong, the other much smaller, came together to a well.
"During the seige of Bhurtpore, in the year 1805, when the British army, with its countless host of followers and attendants, and thousands of cattle, had been for a long time before the city, the approach of the warm season and of the dry hot winds caused the quantity of water in the neighbourhood of the camps to begin to fail; the ponds or tanks had dried up, and no more water was left than the immense wells of the country could furnish.
Our sad failures, on the occasion of this memorable siege, may unquestionably, in my opinion, fairly be attributed to our total want of means. What were four breaching-guns against such a fort as that of Bhurtpore?
The system of shelling had been so improved in the twelve years which had elapsed since the siege of Bhurtpore, that, instead of about one shell in five minutes from a single battery, it was by no means extraordinary to see twenty in one minute, from the numerous batteries which were brought to bear upon this place.
The patient conduct and intrepid gallantry of our officers and soldiers when in the hour of their utmost distress, from repeated defeats, did not pass unnoticed by the enemy; and it is not improbable that the resolution and heroism then displayed by the troops were the means of facilitating that long friendship which afterwards subsisted between the rajah of Bhurtpore and the Company.
"She never mentions her husband's name without saying, 'My husband, the Resident, but for all that she is a kind hearted woman a very kind hearted woman. I pulled a child of hers through who was down with fever at Bhurtpore; he had a very close shave of it, and she has never forgotten it. She greeted me when she came on board almost with tears in her eyes at the thought of that time.
No one but the long-lived elephant could plan and carry through such a war. "Let them run as the men ran from the fields of Bhurtpore, till we have the rain-water for the only plough, and the noise of the rain on the thick leaves for the pattering of their spindles till Bagheera and I lair in the house of the Brahmin, and the buck drink at the tank behind the temple! Let in the Jungle, Hathi!"
The report of Captain Sleeman states, that the crime prevails almost exclusively in Delhi and the native principalities, or Rajpootana of Ulwar and Bhurtpore; and that it first spread extensively after the siege of Bhurtpore in 1826.
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