The pass of Askyph could have been easily blocked, and the army compelled to surrender, being scantily provisioned, but some spy in the Cretan councils warned the pasha, and he broke up his camp at midnight and crowned the heights at the head of the ravine, so that his army was able to pass, though with terrible losses.
It was the most disastrous campaign of the whole war, for the troops were slaughtered almost without resistance, killed by rolling down boulders on them.

Bewildered in the intricacies of the defiles, without guides or provisions, and in small parties, they were dispatched, for days after.

The army which had set out 17,850 strong, Egyptian and Turkish regulars, according to Dickson's official information, beside several thousand irregulars, was reported by Mustapha, after its return and reorganization, as amounting to 6000 men.

We saw them as they defiled past Suda coming in, and the commander of one of the Italian ships took the trouble to count some of the battalions, one of which, consisting of 900 men when it set out, returned with only 300.

The losses were certainly not less than 10,000 men, not counting the irregulars..