I received news of the fight soon after it began, and information of the progress of the combat during the day, one of my customary informants coming every few hours with the details.  This service I subsequently checked by the information given me by Mustapha’s Cretan secretary, who lived in the house next to mine at Kalepa, and by the accounts given by some Italian officers of the Turkish and Egyptian regulars engaged in the siege for the final struggle, and found to be correct.  I believe the account which I gave the world by the next post, and which was the only complete one ever given, is as near the true history as history is ever told.

The heavy artillery soon breached the great gate, and an assault was ordered, but being met by a murderous fire from the convent walls, it was repulsed with great slaughter; and the succeeding attempts on the part of the Turkish regulars faring no better, a battalion of Egyptians was put in the front and driven in at the point of the bayonet by the Turkish troops behind them.  The convent was a hollow square of solidly built buildings, the inner and outer walls alike being of a masonry which yielded only to artillery, and from the windows and doors of these a hail of bullets at close quarters met the entering crowd of regulars and swarms of bloodthirsty Cretan irregulars, all furious at the resistance and wild with fanaticism.  The artillery had to be brought in to break down the divisions between the houses and cells, and the fight was one of extermination until all the buildings were taken except the refectory, the strongest of the buildings.  At this juncture one of the priests fired the magazine, with an effect far greater on the outside world than on the combatants, for it did not kill over a hundred Turks.  The insurgents in the refectory were then summoned to surrender, and, having exhausted their ammunition, they complied, on the solemn promise of Mustapha that their lives should be spared; but, having handed out their rifles, they were all immediately killed.

One of the Egyptian officers—­an Italian colonel—­told me many incidents of the fight, of a sufficiently horrible nature, but he said that he saw things which were too horrible to be repeated.  Thirty-three men and sixty-one women and children were spared, mostly through personal pleas to Mustapha of ancient friendship.  The secretary told me of a fanatic of Canea who had volunteered in the hope of being killed in a war with the infidel, and who had been in all the fights of the insurrection, and, escaping from Arkadi unhurt, went home and hung up his sword, saying that Kismet was against him and he was not permitted to die for the faith.  He also told me that all the ravines near Arkadi were filled with the dead, while Retimo was filled with the wounded; and from the report of the hospital surgeon at Canea, I learned that four hundred and eighty were brought to our hospital, being unable to find shelter at Retimo.