The column, led by Jones, pushed eagerly on. The Moree Gate and the Cabul Gate were seized, the guns on the ramparts were captured, and the leading files of the advance came in sight of the Lahore Gate. A lane, a little more than two hundred and fifty yards long, led to it; but that narrow, crooked path was “a valley of death” more cruel and bloody than that down which Cardigan’s Light Cavalry rode in the famous charge at Balaclava. The city wall itself formed the boundary of the lane on the right; the left was formed by a mass of houses, with flat roofs and parapets, crowded with riflemen. The lane was scarcely ten yards wide at its broadest part; in places it was narrowed to three feet by the projecting buttresses of the wall.
About a hundred and fifty yards up the lane was planted a brass gun, sheltered by a bullet-proof screen. At the further extremity of the lane, where the ground rose, was a second gun, placed so as to cover the first, and itself covered by a bullet-proof screen. Then, like a massive wall, crossing the head of the lane, rose the great Burn Bastion, heavily armed, and capable of holding a thousand men. A force of some 8000 men, too, had just poured into the city through the Lahore and Ajmeer Gates, returning from the sally they had made on Reid’s column; and these swarmed round the side and head of the lane to hold it against the British.
Never, perhaps, did soldiers undertake a more desperate feat than that of fighting a way through this “gate of hell,” held by Sepoys, it will be noted, full of triumph, owing to their repulse of the attack of the fourth column under Reid already described. But never was a desperate deed more gallantly attempted.
The attacking party was formed of the 1st Bengal Fusileers; and, their officers leading, the men ran with a dash at the lane. They were scourged with fire from the roofs to the left; the guns in their front swept the lane with grape. But the men never faltered. They took the first gun with a rush, and raced on for the second. But the lane narrowed, and the “jam” checked the speed of the men. The fire of the enemy, concentrated on a front so narrow, was murderous. Stones and round shot thrown by hand from the roofs and parapets of the houses were added to musketry bullets and grape, and the stormers fell back, panting and bleeding, but still full of the wrath of battle, and leaving the body of many a slain comrade scattered along the lane.