your bridge home
True Valor
It is called the iron fort and it is made of mud. That is the joke and the lesson at once.
Every fort in north India was stone, and stone is what cannon are designed to break. Suraj Mal built his out of earth, and the British could not take it for ninety years.
The fort at Bharatpur was begun in 1732 and it looks, from outside, unimpressive, low, broad, unromantic. That is the design.
Its outer defence is a massive rampart of packed mud. Wide rather than tall, faced and reinforced.
And around it, a deep moat that could be flooded from the local water system. A cannonball striking a stone curtain wall transfers its energy into the stone, and cracks it.
Enough hits in the same place, and you have a breach. A cannonball striking twenty metres of packed earth buries itself and does nothing at all. The wall absorbs rather than resists.
The British attacked Lohagarh repeatedly. Lord Lake besieged it in 1805 with a proper siege train and was beaten off, after several assaults and heavy casualties. It was one of the more embarrassing British reverses of that period in India. The fort was not taken until 1826, by Combermere.
By then the Jat state had fractured internally and the place had been isolated. And even then it took a formal siege.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.