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Rh Nicholson met it. The alternative on either side was deplorable. Edwardes's view was that the General before Delhi should be told 'that he could have no more men from the Punjab, that he must either get into Delhi with such men as he had, or get reinforcements from below, or abandon the siege and fall back on the Sutlej, leaving Delhi and its dependencies to be re-organised in the cold weather.' ... 'If General Reid,' he wrote to Lawrence, 'with all the men you have sent him, cannot get into Delhi, let Delhi go. ... You have made vast efforts for him, and no one can blame you for now recovering your own Province.'

The security of his own Province, however, had from the outset filled but a part, and not the largest part, of Lawrence's thoughts. He was convinced that the abandonment of the siege of Delhi, or its failure, would be an imperial disaster. He was prepared, if needs be, to make any sacrifice with a view to its prevention. He now pointed out that, even from the Punjab point of view, it would be fatal to leave Delhi untaken and the besieging army to its fate. 'The Punjab,' he said, 'will prove short work to the mutineers when the Delhi army is destroyed.' Nicholson, in a conversation with Lawrence, pleaded that other places rather than Peshawar might be abandoned. 'Give up everything,' he said, 'but Pesháwar, Lahore, and Múltán:' but Lawrence objected that such a measure would isolate those three places, lock up a fine force in Pesháwar, and expose us to destruction in detail.' Dark indeed must have been the prospect