Outside of the Residency fence was an immense host of hostile and confident native besiegers; inside it were 480 loyal native soldiers, 730 white ones, and 500 women and children.

In those days the English garrisons always managed to hamper themselves sufficiently with women and children.

The natives established themselves in houses close at hand and began to rain bullets and cannon-balls into the Residency; and this they kept up, night and day, during four months and a half, the little garrison industriously replying all the time.  The women and children soon became so used to the roar of the guns that it ceased to disturb their sleep.  The children imitated siege and defense in their play.  The women—­with any pretext, or with none—­would sally out into the storm-swept grounds.  The defense was kept up week after week, with stubborn fortitude, in the midst of death, which came in many forms—­by bullet, small-pox, cholera, and by various diseases induced by unpalatable and insufficient food, by the long hours of wearying and exhausting overwork in the daily and nightly battle in the oppressive Indian heat, and by the broken rest caused by the intolerable pest of mosquitoes, flies, mice, rats, and fleas.

Six weeks after the beginning of the siege more than one-half of the original force of white soldiers was dead, and close upon three-fifths of the original native force.

But the fighting went on just the same.  The enemy mined, the English counter-mined, and, turn about, they blew up each other’s posts.  The Residency grounds were honey-combed with the enemy’s tunnels.  Deadly courtesies were constantly exchanged—­sorties by the English in the night; rushes by the enemy in the night—­rushes whose purpose was to breach the walls or scale them; rushes which cost heavily, and always failed.

The ladies got used to all the horrors of war—­the shrieks of mutilated men, the sight of blood and death.  Lady Inglis makes this mention in her diary: 

“Mrs. Bruere’s nurse was carried past our door to-day, wounded in the eye.  To extract the bullet it was found necessary to take out the eye—­a fearful operation.  Her mistress held her while it was performed.”

The first relieving force failed to relieve.  It was under Havelock and Outram; and arrived when the siege had been going on for three months.  It fought its desperate way to Lucknow, then fought its way through the city against odds of a hundred to one, and entered the Residency; but there was not enough left of it, then, to do any good.  It lost more men in its last fight than it found in the Residency when it got in.  It became captive itself.

The fighting and starving and dying by bullets and disease went steadily on.  Both sides fought with energy and industry.  Captain Birch puts this striking incident in evidence.  He is speaking of the third month of the siege: