Page:The story of the Indian mutiny; (IA storyofindianmut00monciala).pdf/197

Six weeks passed before the diary of the chaplain's wife can record, for once, a day without a single funeral. Death was busy everywhere in various forms. Men were more than once buried beneath the ruins of houses crushed by the storm of shot. Delicate women panted for air in crowded cellars, and sickened amid the pestilential stenches that beset every corner of the entrenchment, or despairingly saw their children pine away for want of proper nourishment. The poor sufferers in hospital would sometimes be wounded afresh or killed outright by balls crashing among them. An amputation was almost certain death in that congregation of gangrened sufferers, increased hour by hour. There were daily duties to be done always at the peril of men's lives, and spots where no one could show himself without the risk of drawing fire. "Many a poor fellow was shot, who was too proud to run past places where bullets danced on the walls like a handful of peas in a fry-pan." One building, called "Johannes' House," overlooking the defences as it did, was long a thorn in the side of the besieged, from the top of which a negro eunuch, whom they nicknamed "Bob the Nailer," was believed to have shot down dozens of them by the unerring