Deaf to the overtures still made by Rumbold through his own agent and the Danish missionary Swartz, the fierce old Musalmán prepared in his seventy-eighth year for a campaign which might end in driving the English infidels into the sea. His own army, trained by French officers, would be supported by a great Maráthá gathering which Nána Farnavís had promised to launch against the common foe.
Shortly before his retirement in April, 1780, Rumbold had recorded his belief that Southern India would remain quiet. Even Sir Hector Munro, the head of the Madras Army, seems to have scouted the notion of real danger impending from the Mysore highlands. By the 19th of June it was known at Madras that Haidar had begun his march from Seringapatam; yet even to the end of that month, if not later, Munro and Whitehill, the new Governor, could not believe that mischief was nigh at hand.
On the 20th July, 1780, the storm burst. Haidar's myriads poured like a lava-flood through the hill-passes into the peaceful plains of the Karnatic, and the smoke of burning villages ere long told its tale of fear to the scared beholders on St. Thomas's Mount.
A whole month elapsed before Munro set out for Conjeveram with a force of 5000 men and forty guns. Colonel Baillie, with half that number, was marching thither from Guntúr. On the 10th September Baillie's little force had come within sight of the great Pagoda at Conjeveram, when it was suddenly attacked on all sides by Haidar's army, and after a long and
