e to it in a splintered
ankle. I understand now many things which were then a mere confused
hurly-burly: and even now--having arrived at an age when men take
stock of themselves and, casting up their accounts with life, cross
out their vanities--I am proud to remember that along with the great
Craufurd, Mackinnon, Vandeleur, Colborne our Colonel, and Napier, I
took my unconsidered hurt. To this day you cannot speak the name of
Ciudad Rodrigo to me but I hear my own bugle chiming with the rest
below the breaches and swelling the notes of the advance, and my
heart swells with it. But I tell you strictly what I saw, and I tell
it for this reason only--that the story to which you have been
listening points through those breaches, and within them has its end.

To me, watching them day by day from the hillside, they appeared but
trifling gaps in the fortifications. On the 19th I never dreamed
that they were capable of assault; indeed, in the lesser breach to
the left my inexpert eyes could detect no gap at all. What chiefly
impressed me at this time was our enemy's superiority in ammunition.
Their guns fired at least thrice to our once.

Still holding myself strictly to what I saw, I can tell you even less
of the assault itself. I can tell, indeed, how, on the evening of
the 19th, when we were looking forward to another turn at the
trenches with the Third Division, General Craufurd unexpectedly
paraded us; and how, at a nod from him, Major Napier addressed us.
"Men of the Light Division," he said, "we assault to-night. I have
the honour to lead the storming party, and I want a hundred
volunteers from each regiment. Those who will go with me, step
forward."

Instantly the battalions surged forward--the press of the volunteers
carrying us with them as if we would have marched on Ciudad Rodrigo
with one united front.

The Major flung up a hand and turned to General Craufurd. Their eyes
met, and they both broke out laughing.

This much I saw and heard. And when, at six o'clock, they marched us
down under the lee of San Francisco, I saw Lord Wellington ride up,
dismount, give over his horse to an orderly and walk past our column
into the darkness. He was going to give the last directions to Major
Napier and the storming party: but they were drawn up behind an angle
of the convent wall; and we, the supporting columns, massed in the
darkness two hundred yards in the rear, neither saw the conference
nor caught more