de a frontal attack on a strong
position, and carried it without losing a man. Against a similar rabble
it might have been possible to rush the wall with his handful of Sikhs,
but these new Kham levies who held the Karo la were a very different
type of soldier.

The frontal attack was a terrible mistake, as was shown four hours
afterwards, when the enemy were driven from their position without
further loss to ourselves by a flanking movement on the right.

At twelve o'clock Major Row, after a laborious climb, reached a point on
a hillside level with the sangars, which were strongly held on a narrow
ledge 200 yards in front of him. Here he sent up a section of his men
under cover of projecting rocks to get above the sangars and fire down
into them. In the meanwhile some of the enemy scrambled on to the rocks
above, and began throwing down boulders at the Gurkhas, but these either
broke up or fell harmless on the shale slopes above. After waiting an
hour, Major Row went back himself and found his section checked half-way
by the stone-throwing and shots from above; they had tried another way,
but found it impracticable.

Keeping a few men back to fire on any stone-throwers who showed
themselves, Row dribbled his men across the difficult place, and in half
an hour reached the rocky ledge above the sangars and looked right down
on the enemy. At the first few shots from the Gurkhas they began to
bolt, and, coming into the fire of the men below, who now rushed
forward, nearly every man--forty in all--was killed. One or two who
escaped the fire found their flight cut off by a precipice, and in an
abandonment of terror hurled themselves down on the rocks below. After
clearing the sangar, the Gurkhas had only to surmount the natural
difficulties of the rocky and steep hill; for though the enemy fired on
them from the wall, their shooting was most erratic. When at last they
reached a small spur that overlooked the Tibetan main position, they
found, to their disgust, that each man was protected from their fire by
a high stone traverse, on the right-hand of which he lay secure, and
fired through loopholes barely a foot from the ground.

The Gurkhas had accomplished a most difficult mountaineering feat under
a heavy fire; they had turned the enemy out of their sangars, and after
four hours' climbing they had scaled the heights everyone thought
inaccessible. But their further progress was barred by a sheer cliff;
they had reached