Page 184 - Lohgarh

184 w Lohgarh : The World’s Largest Fort

to postpone an immediate attack on Lohgarh. 3
On 12 October 1713, the Emperor was told that Banda Singh was
present in Lohgarh Fort and he was further strengthening it. The moat
of the Fort was under preparation and Banda Singh intended to fight. 4
It was an indication to the Mughal generals that they should not make
a hasty attack on Lohgarh Fort, otherwise they would have to suffer
heavy losses.
According to Irvine, from the first ridge up to the wall of Lohgarh
Fort, the Sikhs had built fifty-two defensive posts, arranged in such a
manner that each protected the other, thus exposing an assailant to a
deadly fire throughout his advance. The Fort was in more than a dozen
hills, and, all around were bowers of trees, stones and ditches and gorges
everywhere. It seemed that even angels with wings or birds could not
reach there, then how a man or a horse could reach there. It was a
really difficult venture. 5
Having waited for some days more, Abdus Samad Khan began
moving to Lohgarh. He covered this distance in 14 days. When he
reached near the Fort, he pitched his tents there, but he did not launch
an attack. After some days Zain-ud-Din Ahmad Khan (Faujdar of Sarhind)
and Zakaria Khan (son of Abdus Samad Khan) too reached there.
On 13 November 1713, these three armies began a very heavy
artillery attack on Lohgarh Fort. For the next four days guns and cannons
bombarded all the hills of the Fort. It was such a heavy bombardment
that (to quote an idiom used by Muhammed Qasim Aurangabadi) ‘even
6
the wings of the gods might have been burnt’. Banda Singh, who could
watch the movement of the enemy from the tops of the hills, had seen
that a mammoth army had surrounded the Fort from three sides.
Those soldiers who were in the front trenches and first layer of the
hills fought bravely, but the firing made them helpless; hence many of
them were killed and quite a number was captured as well. The Mughal
attack continued for many days, but there was no fighting from the
Sikhs’ side. This made the Mughal army understand that the Sikhs in
the upper trenches and the hills had disappeared; they had escaped
through high hills. Banda Singh and senior Sikh general had escaped