Note 118 — Chapter XXI · THE RESCUE AT LUCKNOW, BY SIR COLIN CAMPBELL.

One of the two hard-worked and sorely tried chaplains, in a letter to a relation when the dangers were past, employed a few simple words that really described the position of the Residency enclosure better than any long technical details. English friends had talked and written concerning the ‘impregnable fort’ in which the garrison were confined; to which he replied: ‘We were in no fort at all; we occupied a few houses in a large garden, with a low wall on one side, and only an earthen parapet on the other, in the middle of a large city, the buildings of which completely commanded us, and swarming with thousands of our deadly foes, thirsting for our blood. God gave us protection and pluck, the former in a wonderful degree, or not one of us would be here to tell about it.... The engineers calculated that all those months never one second elapsed without a shot being thrown in at us, and at times upwards of seventy per second, besides round shot and shell.’ This probably means that the average was a shot per second for nearly five months—twelve or fourteen million deadly missiles thrown into this narrow and crowded space.