force, that is, were
disabled, and yet they won!

There followed twelve days of furious industry, of trenches pushed
tirelessly forward through mud and wet, and of cannonading that only
ceased when the guns grew too hot to be used. Captain MacCarthy, of
the 50th Regiment, has left a curious little monograph on the siege,
full of incidents, half tragic and half amusing, but which show the
temper of Wellington's troops. Thus he tells how an engineer officer,
when marking out the ground for a breaching-battery very near the wall,
which was always lined with French soldiers in eager search of human
targets, "used to challenge them to prove the perfection of their
shooting by lifting up the skirts of his coat in defiance several times
in the course of his survey; driving in his stakes and measuring his
distances with great deliberation, and concluding by an extra shake of
his coat-tails and an ironical bow before he stepped under shelter!"

On the night of April 6, Wellington determined to assault. No less
than seven attacks were to be delivered. Two of them--on the
bridge-head across the Guadiana and on the Pardaleras--were mere
feints. But on the extreme right Picton with the third division was to
cross the Rivillas and escalade the castle, whose walls rose
time-stained and grim, from eighteen to twenty-four feet high. Leith
with the fifth division was to attack the opposite or western extremity
of the town, the bastion of St. Vincente, where the glacis was mined,
the ditch deep, and the scarp thirty feet high. Against the actual
breaches Colville and Andrew Barnard were to lead the light division
and the fourth division, the former attacking the bastion of Santa
Maria and the latter the Trinidad. The hour was fixed for ten o'clock,
and the story of that night attack, as told in Napier's immortal prose,
is one of the great battle-pictures of literature; and any one who
tries to tell the tale will find himself slipping insensibly into
Napier's cadences.

The night was black; a strange silence lay on rampart and trench,
broken from time to time by the deep voices of the sentinels that
proclaimed all was well in Badajos. "_Sentinelle garde a vous_," the
cry of the sentinels, was translated by the British private as "All's
well in Badahoo!" A lighted carcass thrown from the castle discovered
Picton's men standing in ordered array, and compelled them to attack at
once. MacCarthy, who acted as guide across the tang