In sheets of lead the heavy juzail balls tore through them on every hand, and they fell faster than ever. Her Majesty's 44th Regiment was now reduced to two hundred men, and every man of the two hundred perished where he stood. But this bravery enabled some of the other corps to proceed farther, and the last final stand was made by those unhappy men on the morning of the 13th January, on the knoll of Gundamuck, when twenty officers, sixty soldiers, and three hundred camp-followers alone survived.
Polwhele was the first who fell here; two balls pierced his chest; and there, too, perished all that remained of Waller's Company. If the fire slackened a moment, the clash of knife and bayonet was heard, with many a yell and groan.
"Dear Bob," cried Polwhele to Waller, as he lay choking in blood, "if you cannot carry me out of the field, take my sword and this ring for my--my poor mother."
But Waller could do neither, for over Polwhele's body there thickly fell a heap of killed and wounded.
After his ammunition was expended, Sergeant Treherne, whom rage and desperation inspired with a fury resembling madness, laid wildly about him, and with the heel of his musket dashed out the brains of more than one tall Afghan. This stalwart son of the Mines had come of a race that in their time had been greater men than miners in Cornwall--_Huelwers_, who were rulers then in the land before, perhaps, a stone of Windsor or Westminster had been laid; and now he stood like a hero on that fatal knoll of Gundamuck, beating down the foe with the butt-end of his clubbed weapon, till he fell, riddled with bullets, upon the corpses of his comrades.
Seeing all lost, Waller, his heart swollen almost to bursting, had now to seek his own safety. Concealed by the smoke and some wild pistachio trees, he found shelter in a cavern, though fearing that traces of his footsteps in the snow might lead to his discovery, and there he lay on the cold rocky floor, more dead than alive with excess of emotion and all he had undergone, panting, feeble, and well nigh breathless.
He had only his sword now, and even if he escaped the Afghans, wolves, bears, or hyænas--the mountains teemed with all of them--might come upon him in the night.
