 He described how "It had been the custom to rush the auls [mountain villages] by night, when, taken by surprise, the women and children had no time to escape, and the horrors that ensued under the cover of darkness when the Russian soldiers made their way by twos and threes into the houses were such as no official narrator dared describe" Similar atrocities committed in the final campaign of 1859–1864 were recorded by contemporary Russian observers and British consuls.A consul Dickson recounted in an 1864 dispatch