This frightful conflict lasted eighteen days, the battle always stopping at sunset, to enable the combatants to recover their strength.
And ever and anon the thunder roared, And angry lightnings flashed across the gloom, Or blazing meteors fearful shot to earth.
Regardless of these awful signs, the chiefs Pressed on to mutual slaughter, and the peal Of shouting hosts commingling shook the world.
The Kurus' general, Bhishma, fell on the tenth day,--after a terrible fight with Arjuna,--riddled with so many arrows that his body could not touch the ground.

Although mortally wounded, he lay in this state, his head supported by three arrows, for fifty-eight days, and was thus able to bestow good advice on those who came to consult him.
Darker grew the gloomy midnight, and the princes went their way; On his bed of pointed arrows, Bhishma lone and dying lay.
He was succeeded as leader of the Kurus by the tutor Drona, who during his five days' generalship proved almost invincible.

But, some one suggesting that his courage would evaporate should he hear his son was dead, a cry arose in the Pandav ranks that Aswathaman had perished! Unable to credit this news, Drona called to the eldest Pandav--who was strictly truthful--to know whether it was so, and heard him rejoin it was true in regard to the elephant by that name, but not of the man.
Said Yudhishthir: "Lordly tusker, Aswathaman named, is dead;" Drona heard but half the accents, feebly dropped his sinking head! The poor father, who heard only a small part of the sentence--the remainder being drowned by the sound of the trumpets--lost all courage, and allowed himself to be slain without further resistance.
The whole poem bristles with thrilling hand-to-hand conflicts, the three greatest during the eighteen days' battle being between Karna and the eldest Pandav, between the eldest Kuru and Bhima, and between Karna and Arjuna.

During the first sixteen days of battle, countless men were slain, including Arjuna's son by one of his many wives.
Although the fighting had hitherto invariably ceased at sunset, darkness on the seventeenth day failed to check the fury of the fighters, so when the moon refused to afford them light they kindled torches in order to find each other.

It was therefore midnight before the exhausted combatants dropped down on the battle-field, pillowing their heads on their horses and elephants to snatch a brief rest so as to be able to renew the war of extermination on the morrow.
On the eighteenth day--the last of the Great War--the soil showed red with blood and was so thickly strewn with corpses that there was no room to move.