The Khalsa army held a bridgehead on the left bank of the Sutlej at Sobraon, entrenched, with a bridge of boats behind it. On the morning of 10 February 1846 the British attacked the entrenchments after a two-hour bombardment.
Sham Singh Attariwala Ji, a commander of the old school who had put on white before the battle, refused to withdraw and died in the fighting. The bridge of boats gave way or was cut while men were crossing. The river took a large number. Sikh dead are usually put between eight and ten thousand for the day.
The conduct of Tej Singh and Lal Singh, the commander and the wazir, is the reason the battle is remembered as a betrayal in Punjab rather than simply as a defeat. Both were in correspondence with the British before and during the war. Tej Singh left the field early.
Lahore was occupied ten days later. The Treaty of Lahore followed on 9 March, then the sale of Kashmir on 16 March. The First Anglo-Sikh War was over in under three months.
Sham Singh Attariwala Ji's body was taken back to Attari and burned there. His wife performed sati, which is recorded in the accounts without comment.
The entrenchments ran in a curve about three miles long with the river at the back, dug and revetted over weeks, and the British engineers who walked them afterward described the work as better than they had expected to find.
The British lost around two thousand four hundred killed and wounded in a single morning, almost as many as in the two days at Ferozeshah, and the Governor General was on the field to watch it.
The Treaty of Lahore followed within a month. It is the battle that ended the first war and it is the one Punjabi tradition remembers, because of how the men on the losing side fought.