The preliminaries accomplished, there was no delay in the operations. Arrangements were at once made for prosecuting the advance on the Kaiserbagh. On the 10th Outram had placed his heavy guns in battery to play on that citadel and on the Mess House, on the former of which a battery of five mortars had already opened. Hope Grant with his cavalry scoured the ground between the Goomtee and the old cantonments. On the morning of the 11th some of the 68-pounders and heavy howitzers were brought up into position near Banks' house. A gradual approach was being made towards the Begum's palace, and the intervening gardens and suburbs were occupied by the troops designed for the assault--the Ninety-Third, Fourth Punjaub Rifles, and some Ghoorkas, under the command of Adrian Hope. It was Sir Colin's design to advance successively through the courts and palaces on either side of the Huzrut Gunj street, and profiting by the cover thus afforded, take in reverse the enemy's second and third line of works instead of sapping up to their front. During this progress on his part the rebels' position would be simultaneously enfiladed from the left bank by Outram's heavy cannon. About 4 P.M. the breach was pronounced practicable and the assault was promptly delivered. Sir Colin well termed it "the sternest struggle of the siege." Captain M'Donald of the Ninety-Third was shot down just after he had led his company through the breach in the outer rampart. About twenty paces further the advance was arrested by a ditch nearly eighteen feet wide and from twelve to fourteen deep. The stormers dashed into the ditch but they could not scale its further face. Lieutenant Wood, hoisted on the shoulders of a Ninety-Third grenadier, scrambled up claymore in hand. He was the first to enter the inner works of the Begum's palace, and when the enemy saw him emerge from the ditch they fled to barricade the further accesses. Then Wood reached down and caught hold of the men's rifles by the bends of the bayonets, so that with assistance from below all his people finally cleared the ditch. Barrier after barrier was then forced, and independent detachments headed by officers pushed on into the great inner square, where the mutineers in great strength were prepared to stand and fight. The numbers were very unequal but the Highlanders did not care to count heads. "The command," says Forbes-Mitchell, "was--'Keep together and use the bayonet!' The struggle raged for some two hours from court to court and from room to room; the pipe-major of the Ninety-Third, John MacLeod, playing the pipes amid the strife as calmly as if he had been walking round the officers' mess-tent at a regimental festival." Within two hours from the signal for the assault over eight hundred and sixty mutineers lay dead within the inner court. The assailants were by this time broken up into small parties in a series of separate fights. A room whose door had been partly broken in was found full of rebels armed to the teeth. The party of Highlanders watching the door stood prepared to shoot every man who attempted to escape, while two of their number went back for a few bags of gunpowder with slow matches fixed, to be lighted and heaved in among the mutineers. Forbes-Mitchell, himself a leading figure in the tragic scene, thus describes how the gallant Hodson met his fatal wound. "The men sent by me found Major Hodson, who did not wait for the powder but came running up himself sabre in hand. 'Where are the rebels?' he asked. I pointed to the door, and Hodson, shouting 'Come on!' was about to rush in. I implored him not to do so, saying 'It's certain death, sir! wait for the powder.' Hodson made a step forward, and I seized him by the shoulder to pull him out of the line of the doorway, when he fell back shot through the body. He gasped out a few words, but was immediately choked by blood." Placed in a dooly he was sent back to the surgeons, but his wound was mortal. Forbes-Mitchell adds: "It will thus be seen that the assertion that Major Hodson was looting when he was killed, is untrue. No looting had been then commenced, not even by Jung Bahadoor's Ghoorkas. Major Hodson lost his life by his own rashness; but to say that he was looting is a cruel slander on one of the bravest of Englishmen."