Page:The Sikhs (Gordon).djvu/197

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THE FIRST SIKH WAR.
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far more numerous, heavier, and well served. The keynote of his tactics was a bold intrepid charge—close quarters and the bayonet—to impress the enemy by audacity and daring. He clung with bulldog tenacity to the Sikhs after Ferozeshah, rejecting proposals to harry their rear over the river, waiting to deal a final knock-out blow when his force was refreshed, so as to leave farther advance unopposed. After this had been done our friends in rear and ahead were as thick as flies in summer. He was essentially a fighting general, a hard hitter, whose maxim was "L'audace, toujours l'audace." He grasped success. The generals, among them veterans of the Peninsula, Waterloo, and Afghanistan, were first and foremost in the thick of battle, exposing their lives freely and rousing the daring of their men to the utmost by personal example, several of them falling "in the rapture of the strife," cheering on to victory. With a small determined force it was the only decisive form of conducting the campaign, and every one

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