nd fifty volunteers, and,
evading the Marquis's order, which was implicit rather than direct,
he added an oath that these interlopers should never lead his men to
the breaches.

Rage begets rage. During the misty morning hours of August 31st, the
day fixed for the assault, these volunteers, held back and chafing
with the reserves, could scarcely be restrained from breaking out of
the trenches. 'Why,' they demanded, 'had they been fetched here if
not to show the way?'--a question for which their officers were in no
mood to provide a soft answer.

Yet their turn came. Sergeant Wilkes, that amateur in
siege-operations, had rightly prophesied from the first that the
waste of life at the breaches would be wicked and useless until the
hornwork had been silenced and some lodgment made there. So as the
morning wore on, and the sea-mists gave place to burning sunshine,
and this again to heavy thunder-clouds collected by the unceasing
cannonade, still more and more of the reserves of the Fifth Division
were pushed up, until none but the volunteers and a handful of the
9th Regiment remained in the trenches. Them, too, at length Leith
was forced to unleash, and they swept forward on the breaches yelling
like a pack of hounds; but on the crest-line they fared at first no
better than the regiments they had taunted. Thrice and four times
they reached it only to topple back. The general, watching the fight
from the batteries across the Urumea, now directed the gunners to
fire over the stormers' heads; and again a cry went up that our men
were being slaughtered by their own artillery. Undismayed by this,
with no recollections of the first assault to daunt them, a company
of the Light Division took advantage of the fire to force their way
over the rampart on the right of the great breach and seize a
lodgment in some ruined houses actually within the town. There for
an hour or so these brave men were cut off, for the assault in
general made no headway.

It must have failed, even after five hours' fighting, but for an
accident. A line of powder-barrels collected behind the traverses by
the great breach took fire and blew up, driving back all the French
grenadiers but the nearest, whom it scattered in mangled heaps.
As explosion followed explosion, the bright flame spread and ran
along the high curtain. The British leapt after it, breaking through
the traverse and swarming up to the curtain's summit. Almost at the
same mome