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leaders at San Sebastian scorned to postpone the bayonet to the spade or the linstock! So there became visible in the conduct of the siege that óraw haste' which is something more than halfsister to delay.

Batteries were marked out on the night of July 10, 1813; by the morning of the 14th the guns were thundering across the front of the isthmus on San Bartolomeo ; but not till the 20th did the breaching batteries across the Trumea begin to smite with their fire the eastern wall of the town. Even at this early stage in the siege the British began to feel the strength of the defence. Frazer writes in his diary on July 19:-. The enemy has some good head in the fortress; we must feel for it. He fires and takes his measures with judgment.'

Nothing could well surpass the energy with which the siege was pushed. The great breaching battery had ten guns in action, and in fifteen and a half hours of daylight the fire from these averaged 350 rounds a gun; 'such a rate of firing,' says Jones in his - Journal,' was probably never equalled at any siege.' The sustained fury of the fire on both sides, indeed, quickly affected the guns in use. The guns fired from the fortress, for example, gave the appearance of two explosions when discharged; the vent of the gun, in a word, being so enlarged that the flash from it was almost as clear as that from the muzzle; while in the English batteries, Jones records that some of the vents of the guns were so much enlarged that a moderate-sized finger might be put into them.'

The attacks on the two faces of the defence were, of course, part of one scheme, and should have been pushed on with a wise balance of energy. But Graham, apparently, found it impossible to keep the too eager spirits of his force in check; and, as a result, the attack on the isthmus was urged on with fiery energy, and without any regard to the operations against the eastern front of the town. By the 17th, San Bartolomeo was almost knocked out of shape; and though the batteries had not yet opened fire against the eastern front it was impossible to cool the impatience of the attack on the southern face. On the 17th the convent was assaulted. From the engineering point of view the attack was premature; but it was a brilliant and picturesque feat of arms.

The convent stood upon a steep ridge, and was open to the fire of both besiegers and besieged. From the batteries on the

Chofres sandhills, and from the rocky height of Monte Orgullo, the French and British, alike, eagerly watched the fierce struggle for the convent. No less than sixty guns indeed concentrated their fire on the building while the attack raged—the French guns smiting the assailants, the British guns trying to crush the defenders. At ten o'clock the storming party in two columns came over the crest of the hill which looked down on the convent. It consisted of Wilson's Portuguese, supported by the light company of the 9th British, and three companies of the Royals. Colin Campbell, afterwards Lord Clyde, led the men of the 9th. The Portuguese came on slowly, and the four companies of the British pushed forward with impatient eagerness, carried the redoubt, jumped over the convent wall, and thrust the French fiercely out. The French clung stubbornly to the houses which stretched beyond the convent towards the town, but the other companies of the 9th coming up with great resolution the French were still thrust back, while the cheers of the British troops watching the struggle from the further bank of the Urumea, could be heard above the tumult of the fight. The reckless daring of the British carried them too far; they tried to carry the great circular redoubt, which stood betwixt the convent and the town. Musket and bayonet were vain, however, to carry a work so strong, and the too eager soldiers were driven back with sharp loss.

The convent was at once turned into batteries against the southern front of the defence, and the eastern wall of the town began to crumble under the stroke of the guns from the Chofres hills. A parallel was carried by the British across the neck of the isthmus, and in its course laid bare an ancient aqueduct, a great drain four feet high and three feet wide. A young officer, Reid, of the Engineers, crept up this drain ; he found it ran for 230 yards towards the curtain across the isthmus, and ended in a door in the very counterscarp itself. A space of eight feet at the end of the aqueduct was stopped with sandbags, and thirty barrels of gunpowder were lodged against it, thus forming a globe of compression. This was to be fired when the moment of the assault came, and it was hoped would blow, as through a tube, enough rubbish over the counterscarp to fill the ditch of the hornwork, and thus make a way for the stormers.

Meanwhile the eastern wall crumbled fast under the fire of the batteries across the river. On July 23, the great breach was

of its guns.

declared practicable. A day was spent in making a second breach a little to the north of the first, and the assault was fixed for the next morning. When the troops, in the grey dawn, however, were waiting in the trenches for the signal to attack, the houses behind the great breach broke into flames, and the attack was postponed to the next day-a very unhappy circumstance.

The proposed attack was in violation of the simplest rules of engineering. A breach was to be stormed, in a word, before the defences which covered it with their fire had been mastered. Rey had made these defences exceedingly powerful. The hornwork, or cavalier, at the centre of the southern front, rose fifteen feet above the other defences, and swept the breach with the fire

A tower on either side of the breach raked it with a flanking fire; the houses immediately behind the breach were strongly defended. The British, too, could only attack by leaping from the eastern extremity of the trench which crossed the isthmus, and advancing at the double for 300 yards along the slippery strand, left at low water betwixt the Urumea and the undestroyed wall of the town, till they reached the breach. For those 300 yards they were under a flank fire of musketry from the wall; while Rey had piled the parapet with live shells to be rolled down on the struggling British. The attack was directed by Wellington to take place in fair daylight, so that the batteries across the Urumea might keep down the fire of the defenders. Unfortunately, the signal for the attack was given whilst the night was still black, and the batteries on the Chofres hills were unable to open fire on the defenders, except at the risk of smiting their own troops.

The attacking force consisted of 2,000 men of the 5th division: Frazer led a battalion of the Royal Scotch against the great breach ; the 38th, under Greville, was to attack the more distant breach ; the 9th, under Cameron, supported the Royals, while the forlorn hope consisted of twenty men of the light company of the 9th, and the light company of the Royals, with a ladder party, under Colin Campbell. The opening from the trench was too narrow, and the formation of the troops was broken at the very outset.

The space of 300 yards to be traversed was slippery with weeds and rocks, and broken by deep pools of water, while at every step a fierce fire scourged the flank of the broken soldiers. The assault, in a word, from its very first step became the rush of a mob, instead of a disciplined and orderly attack.

The globe

of compression in the aqueduct, already described, was indeed fired with a blast that filled the surrounding hills with its echoes, and the surprise of it drove the French for a moment from their defences.

Frazer and the principal engineering officer, Harry Jones, led eagerly on to the great breach, followed by the soldiers immediately about them; but the mass of the attacking party balted in the dark to fire at a gap in the wall which they mistook for the breach. In a few minutes the halt filled the narrow interval betwixt the wall and the river with a struggling crowd of soldiers, aflame with the passion of battle, but without order or leaders. Colin Campbell, with a few men, struggled past the flank of the crowd, and climbed the great breach, and a few disconnected parties followed up the rough slope. These gallant men reached the broken crest of the breach, but the French had meanwhile recovered from their surprise. Those who reached the crest of the breach saw below them a deep black gulf, beyond which, in a curve of fire, was a wall of flaming houses, and from every quarter a tempest of shot swept the rugged edge of broken stone on which they stood. Frazer of the Royal Scotch, leaped down the further side of the breach, reached the flaming houses, and died there. Greville, Cameron, Campbell, and other gallant officers broke through the tumult of the crowd, climbed the breach, and fell on its crest. Twice Campbell ascended, and twice he was wounded. Meanwhile, the mass of British soldiers below, with the black river-now filling again with the returning tide and climbing the rocks fast-on one side, and the hostile wall, with its perpetual hail of bullets, on the other side, swayed to and fro with sullen shouts and angry answering fire of musketry. But, with military cohesion destroyed, and scourged on both flank and front by the fire of the French, the mass crumbled into clusters, and, surging backwards, slowly regained the trenches. When day broke, Frazer of the Artillery, watching from the batteries beyond the Urumea, thought that nothing more than a false attack had taken place; till, in the clearer daylight, he could see the rough slope of the great breach mottled with red spots, the fallen bodies of officers and men.

This bloody and ill-managed assault resulted in a loss to the British, in killed, wounded, or prisoners, of forty-four officers and nearly 500 men. Perhaps the best account of the attack and its failure, is to be found in a private letter written by Colin Campbell at the time, and published in his life :

It was dark, as you know, when ordered to advance. All before me went willingly enough forward, but in a very straggling order, arising, in the first instance, from the order of formation previous to attack being extended the whole length of the parallel in a front of fours, which it (the parallel) would admit of by packing when halted, but was not of sufficient width for troops to maintain that front when in movement. We thus debouched from the mouth of the opening made from the parallel, which was not quite so wide as the latter, in twos and threes. The space we had to traverse between this opening and the breach-some 300 yards-was very rough, and broken by large pieces of rocks, which the falling tide had left wet and exceedingly slippery, sufficient in itself to have loosened and disordered an original dense formation; and the heavy and uninterrupted fire to which they were opposed in advance, increased this evilthese different causes combining to make our advance look more like one of individuals than that of a well-organised and disciplined military body.

On arriving within some thirty or forty yards of the demi-bastion on the left of the main front, I found a check. There appeared to be a crowd of some 200 men immediately before me, opposite the front of this work—those in front of this body returning a fire directed at them from the parapet above, and which was sweeping them down in great numbers, and also from an entrenchment which the enemy had thrown across the main ditch, about a yard or two retired from the opening into it. I observed at the same time a heavy firing at the breach; and as the larger portion of the right wing appeared to be collected, as I have described, opposite the demi-bastion, it was very manifest that those who had gone forward to the breach were not only weak in numbers for the struggle they had to encounter, but it was apparent they were also unsupported. I endeavoured with the head of my detachment to aid some of their own officers in urging and pushing forward this halted body. They had commenced firing, and there was no moving them. Failing in this, I proposed to Lieutenant Clarke, who was in command of the light company of the Royals, to lead past the right of these people, in the hope that, seeing us passing them, they might possibly cease firing and follow. I had scarcely made this proposition when this fine young man was killed ; and several of my own (9th) detachment, as also many of the light company Royals, were here killed and wounded. In passing this body with the few of my own people and most of the light company Royals, some might have come away, but the bulk remained. Their halting there (opposite the demi-bastion) thus formed a sort of stopping-place between the trenches and the breach, as the men came forward from the former on their way to the latter. . . . On arriving at the breach, I observed the whole lower parts thickly strewed with killed and wounded. There were a few individual officers and men spread on the face of the breach, but nothing more. These were cheering, and gallantly opposing themselves to the close and destructive fire directed at them from the round tower and other defences on each flank of the breach, and to a profusion of hand-grenades which were constantly rolling down. In going up I passed Jones of the Engineers, who was wounded ; and on gaining the top I was shot through the right hip, and tumbled to the bottom. The breach, though quite accessible, was steep, particularly towards the top, so that all those who were struck on the upper part of it rolled down, as in my own rase, to the bottom.

Finding, on rising up, that I was not disabled from ving, and observing two officers of the Royals, who were exerting them