१८५७ का स्वातन्त्र्य समर (वीर विनायक दामोदर सावरकर - अंग्रेजों द्वारा छपने से पूर्व प्रतिबन्धित महाग्रन्थ)

THE CONFLAGRATION
fashioned hands, "tenderer than the very flower," the flash-
ing Damascus blade, "harder than adamant." They
were, also, waiting to drink the blood of the enemy ! To
drink the blood of the enemy, we say again ; for, old as
Kumar Singh was and proudly insolent as his opponent
was, the ambition of Kumar Singh was nothing short of
drinking the enemy's blood ! For, though "reduced to
extremities with hunger, besieged by age,—a picture of
hard misery, with no position, and courting death," as
the lion of the famous poem, our Kumar was still the
king of the forest ! And, therefore, whatever the reverses,
how would he eat the dead grass of slavery ? His ambi-
tion was—one ambition alone could be the ambition of
the lion of the poem referred to—to break open, with his
steel-claws, the skull of the elephant !
With the land belonging to his family for generations as
far as your memory could go now usurped by the stranger,
with his very palace of Jagadishpur in the hands of the
foreigner, and his temples and images pulled down by the
desecrating hands of the enemy, Kumar Singh did not
show any excitement. He did not make a dash for Jaga-
dishpur, nor did he persist in holding Shahabad. His
capital was strictly guarded by the English and his army
was small—only a thousand and two hundred Sepoys
and five hundred untrained volunteers. He did not show,
therefore, the least anxiety to recover his capital imme-
diately. But his great desire was to hold aloft the bright
golden banner of the War of Independence ! The very
day that he gave up Jagadishpur without serious resist-
ance—that very day he had made up his mind to take
to a different mode of warfare altogether. That mode of
warfare is the one mode that goes farthest to secure
success in any War of Independence. It is guerilla warfare.
Therefore, enraged as he was at the loss of his capital,
Kumar Singh sent not his army against the enemy, for
then his soldiers would have perished like moths before
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