A new plan of attack was devised by the engineers. Batteries were armed with guns captured from the enemy, and a destructive fire maintained on the chief positions yet held in the city. The attacks, too, were now directed, not along the narrow streets and winding lanes of the city, but through the houses themselves. Thus wall after wall was broken through, house after house captured, the Sepoys holding them were bayoneted, and so a stern and bloody path was driven to the Lahore Gate.
On the 16th the famous magazine which Willoughby had blown up, when Delhi fell into the hands of the rebels early in May, was captured, and it was found that Willoughby’s heroic act had been only partially successful. The magazine, that is, was less than half destroyed, and the British found in it no fewer than 171 guns, mostly of large calibre, with enormous stores of ammunition. The Sepoys read their doom in the constant flight of shells from the British batteries in the city. They read it, in almost plainer characters, in the stubborn daring with which a path was being blasted through the mass of crowded houses towards the Lahore Gate. And from the southern extremity of the city there commenced a great human leakage, a perpetual dribble of deserting Sepoys and flying budmashes.
Lord Roberts served personally with the force driving its resolute way across houses, courtyards, and lanes, towards the Lahore Gate, and he tells, graphically, the story of its exploits. On September 19, the men had broken their way through to the rear of the Burn Bastion. Only the width of the lane separated them from the bastion itself. The little party, 100 strong—only one-half of them British—gathered round the door that opened on the lane, the engineer officer burst it open, and Gordon, of the 75th Foot, leading, the handful of gallant men dashed across the lane, leaped upon the ramp, raced up it, and jumped into the bastion. They bayoneted or shot its guards, and captured the bastion without losing a man!
The next day, with great daring, Roberts and Lang of the Engineers, following a native guide, crept through the tangle of courtyards and lanes, till they reached the upper room of a house within fifty yards of the Lahore Gate. “From the window of this room,” says Roberts, “we could see beneath us the Sepoys lounging about, engaged in cleaning their muskets and other occupations; while some, in a lazy sort of fashion, were acting as sentries over the gateway and two guns, one of which pointed in the direction of the Sabzi Mandi, the other down the lane behind the ramparts, leading to the Burn Bastion and Cabul Gate. I could see from the number on their caps that these Sepoys belonged to the 5th Native Infantry.” The troops were brought up silently by the same route, and leaped suddenly on the gate, capturing it, and slaying or putting to terrified flight the Sepoys whom Lang and Roberts had watched in such a mood of careless and opium-fed unconcern only a few minutes before.