Page:Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan.djvu/158

154 in order to support the position he held. They were brought back again, however, in the evening, which induced the English commander to make immediate arrangements for an assault the same night, a breach having been effected in the curtain to the left of the gateway. At eleven o'clock the ladders were planted to ascend the fausse-braye and a projecting work on the right. The garrison sounded the alarm, and a desperate struggle took place on the breach; the commandant of the fort, Bahádur Khán, heading an obstinate resistance when the British troops gained the ramparts. The assailants, however, overcame all opposition, charging with the bayonet. Then filing off to right and left by alternate companies, they met over the Mysore gate, and descended into the fortress before any help from outside could reach the garrison. The enemy had despatched two separate columns to attack the British, but in both cases they were driven back with great slaughter. The advance of a third body of his troops along the sortie by the Mysore gate was checked by a few shots from the guns on the ramparts now held by the assailants. The carnage had been great, and upwards of one thousand bodies of Tipú's troops were buried, while the casualties in the British army during the whole siege amounted to about five hundred.

Although Tipú had expected that an assault would be made, and had moved his army at nightfall to within a mile and a half of the Mysore gate of the fortress, in order to support its defenders, he was un-