ike the old Roman patriots. At other times they will forsake
a strongly sangared position at the first shot, and thousands will prowl
round a camp at night, shouting grotesquely, but too timid to make a
determined attack on a vastly outnumbered enemy.

The uncertainty of the enemy may be accounted for to some extent by the
fact that we are not often opposed by the same levies, which would imply
that theirs is greatly the courage of ignorance. Yet in the face of the
fighting at Palla, Naini, and Gyantse Jong, this is evidently no fair
estimate of the Tibetan spirit. The men who stood in the breach at
Gyantse in that hell of shrapnel and Maxim and rifle fire, and dropped
down stones on our Gurkhas as they climbed the wall, met death
knowingly, and were unterrified by the resources of modern science in
war, the magic, the demons, the unseen, unimagined messengers of death.

But the men who attacked the Kangma post, what parallel in history have
we for these? They came by night many miles over steep mountain cliffs
and rocky ravines, perhaps silently, with determined purpose, weighing
the odds; or, as I like to think, boastfully, with song and jest,
saying, 'We will steal in upon these English at dawn before they wake,
and slay them in their beds. Then we will hold the fort, and kill all
who come near.'

They came in the gray before dawn, and hid in a gully beside our camp.
At five the reveille sounded and the sentry left the bastions. Then they
sprang up and rushed, sword in hand, their rifles slung behind their
backs, to the wall. The whole attack was directed on the south-east
front, an unscalable wall of solid masonry, with bastions at each corner
four feet thick and ten feet high. They directed their attack on the
bastions, the only point on that side they could scramble over. They
knew nothing of the fort and its tracing. Perhaps they had expected to
find us encamped in tents on the open ground. But from the shallow
nullah where they lay concealed, not 200 yards distant, and watched our
sentry, they could survey the uncompromising front which they had set
themselves to attack with the naked sword. They had no artillery or
guncotton or materials for a siege, but they hoped to scale the wall and
annihilate the garrison that held it. They had come from Lhasa to take
Kangma, and they were not going to turn back. They came on undismayed,
like men flushed with victory. The sepoys said they must be drunk or
drugged. They r