DEFENCE OF KALUNGA. 
37 
loss on the side of the besiegers,, the fort was aban- 
doned by the survivors among the besieged, amount- 
ing to seventy men out of three hundred, who, fight- 
ing their way through different passes which had been 
strongly guarded to cut off their retreat, eventually 
effected their escape with the loss of very few lives. 
Before daylight the officer who succeeded Colonel 
Gillespie in the command entered the fort, of which 
he took possession, though he found nothing but shat- 
tered walls and blackened ruins covered with the dead 
and dying. Here indeed was frightfully exhibited the 
desperate resistance which had been made by a few 
determined and but half-civilized soldiers against an 
immensely disproportioned force, highly disciplined 
and commanded by the ablest officers then under the 
British government in the East. What the besieged 
had done and suffered was incredible : they had dis- 
played the highest endurance and the most indomi- 
table courage. This was horribly apparent to the 
victors : their ears were shocked by the dismal groans 
of the dying, and their hearts saddened at the sight 
of mangled limbs which had been torn from their 
parent trunks by the bursting of the shells thrown 
into the fort from the besiegers’ guns, and of disfi- 
gured bodies lying black and putrid on the very spot 
where they had fallen when struck down by the shot, 
which was scattered like hail over their weak defences, 
causing a most frightful carnage. The corpses of those 
who had perished early in the siege and had been just 
put under the surface of the ground, were seen pro- 
truding through the earth from their superficial graves 
in a revolting state of decay, exhaling the most 
