The two British officers watched them from the central redoubt.  Parker held his binoculars to his eyes with his right hand, while his left forefinger rested on a polished button in a little machine on the table beside him.  The assailants, favoured by the fall of the ground, soon reached the limits of the cantonments, bare now of buildings and trees.  There were trained Chinese troops, some tall, light-complexioned Northerners of Manchu blood, others stocky, yellow men from Canton and the Southern Provinces.  Mobs of Bhutanese with heads, chests, legs, and feet bare, fierce but undisciplined fighters, armed with varied weapons, led the van.  Uttering weird yells and brandishing their dahs, spears, muskets, and rifles, they rushed towards the fort, from which no shot was fired.  Accustomed to the lofty jongs, or castles, of their own land they deemed the breastworks and trenches unworthy of notice.  And the stone barracks and walls in the Fort were rapidly melting away under the rain of shells.

Flushed with victory the swarming masses came on.  But suddenly the world upheaved behind the leaders.  Rocks, earth, and rubble went up in clouds into the air, and with them scores of the Chinese regular troops, under whose very feet mines of the new explosive had been fired by Parker.  And the howling mobs in front were held up by barbed wire, while from the despised trenches and breastworks a storm of lead swept the crowded masses of the attackers away.  At that close range every bullet from the machine guns and rifles of the defenders drove through two or three assailants, every bomb and grenade slew a group.  Only in one spot by sheer weight of numbers did they break through.

But like a thunderbolt fell the counter-attack.  Stalwart Punjaubi Mohammedans, led by Dermot, swept down upon them, and with bomb and bayonet drove them out.  The survivors turned and staggered up the hills again, withering away under the steady fire of the sepoys, who adjusted their sights with the utmost coolness as the range increased.

Again and again the assaults were repeated and repulsed, until the undisciplined and demoralised Bhutanese refused to advance, and the Chinese regulars attacked alone.  But fresh mines exploded under them; the deadly fire of the defenders’ machine guns blasted them; and the Pekin general looked anxious as his best troops melted away.  He would not go far into India if every small body of its soldiers took equally heavy toll of his force.  So he ordered a cessation of the assaults.

But there was no respite for the little garrison.  Day and night the pitiless bombardment by the mountain batteries and long-range fire of rifles and machine guns never ceased.  And death was busy among the defenders.

On the third night of the siege Dermot and the subaltern knelt side by side in what was now the last line of the defence.

“I ought not to ask you to go, Major,” whispered Parker.  “It’s not possible to get through, I’m afraid.  I can’t forget the awful sight of the fiendish tortures they inflicted on poor Hikmat Khan and Shaikh Ismail today in full view of us all.  They tried to slip through last night with their naked bodies covered with oil.  It’s a terrible death for you if they catch you.  It would be much easier to die fighting.  Yet someone ought to go.”