Page:A history of the military transactions of the British nation in Indostan, Volume 1.djvu/202

194 To the enthusiasm of superstition was added the more certain efficacy of inebriation; for most of the troops, as is customary during the agitations of this festival, had eaten plentifully of bang, a plant which either stupifies, or excites the most desperate excesses of rage. Thus prepared, as soon as the morning broke, the army of Rajah-saheb advanced to the attack. Besides a multitude that came with ladders to every part of the walls that were accessible, there appeared four principal divisions. Two of these divisions advanced to the two gates and the other two were allotted to the breaches. Captain Clive, awakened by the alarm, found his garrison at their posts, according to the dispositions he had made. The parties who attacked the gates drove before them several elephants, who, with large plates of iron fixed to their foreheads, were intended to break them down; but the elephants, wounded by the musketry, soon turned, and trampled on those who escorted them. The ditch before the breach to the north-west was fordable; and as many as the breach would admit, mounted it with a mad kind of intrepidity, whilst numbers came and sat down with great composure in the fausse-braye under the tower where the field piece was planted, and waited then to relieve those who were employed in the attack: these passed the breach, and some of them even got over the first trench before the defenders gave fire; it fell heavily, and every shot did execution and a number of muskets were loaded in readiness, which those behind delivered to the first rank as fast as they could discharge them The two pieces of cannon from the top of the house fired likewise or the assailants, who in a few minutes abandoned the attack, when another body, and then another succeeded, who were driven off in the same manner: in the mean time bombs, with short fusees, which had been prepared and lodged on the adjacent rampart, were thrown into the fausse-braye, and by their explosion drove the croud, who had seated themselves there, back again over the ditch. At the breach to the south-west the enemy brought a raft, and seventy men embarked on it to cross the ditch, which was flanked by two field pieces, one in each tower: the raft had almost gained the fausse-braye when captain Clive observing that the gunners fired with bad aim took the management of one of the field pieces himself, and in three