that, generally speaking, had only the option of repelling the enemy in front, or dying on the gibbet erected behind." So they continued for several days, the French blowing up house by house, and fighting with the inmates who tried to oppose their progress; the Spaniards pouring shot upon them from their elevated positions, and sometimes also countermining them. Generally, the advance of the French only exposed them to a more destructive fire; because the explosions with which they dislodged the Spaniards from their houses were strong enough to topple down the walls too, and thus leave them without that shelter which they might have had if the walls had been left standing. To remedy this, the French engineers lessened their charges of powder, so as that the explosion might gut the houses of their woodwork and partitions, without destroying the exterior walls. "Hereupon," says Napier, "the Spaniards, with ready ingenuity, saturated the timbers and planks of the houses with rosin and pitch, and setting fire to those which could no longer be maintained, interposed a burning barrier, which often delayed the assailants for two days, and always prevented them from pushing their successes during the confusion that necessarily followed the bursting of the mines." The fighting was, however, incessant; and on the 7th of February the French had worked their way as far as the Cosso, so celebrated in the former siege. But here was but a new beginning, as it were, of their perilous work. The best part of the city remained untaken; and before any considerable impression could be made upon it, new mines must be dug, new assaults made, and thousands more must be the victims-some, their white skins pierced with the small blue bullet mark; others, their bodies torn and gashed into fleshy shreds by the dragging gunshot; and others, their shrivelled corpses upheaved from underground, with paving-stones and pickaxes, by the explosion of whole barrels of gunpowder in mines running beneath those which they themselves had been digging.

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To make their situation worse, the supplies of the besiegers began to fail. Murmurs of discontent and despair arose. army of 20,000 men to besiege 50,000" this, they said, was contrary to all rule, to all military history. It required all the exertions of Marshal Lasnes to rouse their flagging spirits. At length one or two felicitous explosions, if the phrase may be allowed, one of which blew up the university (the charge in this case being 3000 pounds of gunpowder), laid open important parts of the city, and it became evident that the hour was approaching when the besieged must surrender. Proposals were indeed made by Palafox, but on such terms as Lasnes refused to grant. The bloody work was therefore continued; fifty pieces of artillery, stationed on the left bank of the river, belching their fiery contents against the quay opposite, and mortars incessantly throwing shells into the part of the city still unsubdued, while the main body

of the French army, still burning their way as formerly into the centre of the city, were waiting eagerly for the completion of six enormous mines, which the engineers were preparing underneath the Cosso, and the explosion of which, it was thought, would be decisive. The condition of the besieged was now fearful. "The bombardment," says Colonel Napier, "which had never ceased since the 10th of January, had forced the women and children to take refuge in the vaults with which the city abounded. There the constant combustion of oil, the closeness of the atmosphere, unusual diet, and fear and restlessness of mind, had combined to produce a pestilence, which soon spread to the garrison. The strong and the weak, the daring soldier and the shrinking child, fell before it alike; and such was the state of the atmosphere, and the predisposition to disease, that the slightest wound gangrened, and became incurable. In the beginning of February the deaths were from 400 to 500 daily; the living were unable to bury the dead, and thousands of carcases, scattered about the streets and courtyards, or piled in heaps at the doors of the churches, were left to dissolve in their own corruption, or to be licked up by the flames of the burning houses, as the defence became contracted. The suburb, the greatest part of the walls, and one-fourth of the houses, were in the hands of the French; 16,000 shells thrown during the bombardment, and the explosion of 45,000 pounds of powder in the mines, had shaken the city to its foundations; and the bones of more than 40,000 persons, of every age and both sexes, bore dreadful testimony to the constancy of the besieged." Having lost all hope of holding out the place any longer, the surrender took place on the 21st of February 1809; the siege, one of the most cruel on record, having thus lasted two months.

FIRST BRITISH SIEGE OF BADAJOZ.

Wellington having driven the French out of Portugal (1810), resolved to lay siege to Badajoz, a town situated on the Portuguese frontier, on the left bank of the Guadiana, and which, although not of the first class in point of population, was of great strength, and of much importance in a military point of view. It was much easier, however, for Wellington to plan than to execute a siege. Hitherto the British army had not been trained to this species of warfare; they knew little of military engineering, and were left to oppose great talent by mere extempore sagacity and reckless bloodshed.

Besides the want of nearly all requisite enginery, there was a serious difficulty arising from the limited time which Lord Wellington had at his disposal. Within sixteen days, it was calculated, Marshal Soult would arrive with a force to relieve the place; therefore a plan of attack behoved to be devised, requiring no more than sixteen days of open trenches. As all the regular methods of attack that could be thought of required more than

the allotted time, a less regular but more compendious method was proposed. Badajoz stands on a tongue of land formed by the influx of a small stream called the Rivillas, into the large river Guadiana, the breadth of which is about five hundred yards. At the spot where the two streams meet is a rock about 120 feet high, on the top of which is an old castle, and from this rock "the town spreads out like a fan, as the land opens between the rivers." On the land side, where the town is not protected by the rivers and castle, it is secured by eight regular and well-built fronts. To attack one of these would have been the formal method of reducing the place; but as there was not sufficient time for such a mode of attack, it was resolved to direct the assault first against the fort of San Christoval, situated on a hill immediately opposite the castle, on the other side of the Guadiana. From this fort, once taken, the British could direct powerful batteries against the castle; and it being once carried, the town lying below it, and not separated in any way, could make no resistance. Such ideas being entertained, instructions in conformity with them were issued by Lord Wellington on the 23d of April 1811; and on the 4th of May the place was invested. The besieging corps consisted of a brigade of British, two battalions of Portuguese, and one of militia, amounting to about 4000 men in all.

With all this preparation, not a single step of any consequence was gained. From the 5th to the 13th of May the siege continued, the utmost exertions being used to obtain possession of San Christoval, on the capture of which all depended. From the night of the 8th till the 10th, the men laboured to erect a battery against the fort, exposed, in the meantime, to a heavy shower of musket-balls from the fort, and gunshot and shells from the town opposite. On the 10th, 400 of the British were killed repelling a sortie; and thus, says Colonel Napier, "five. engineers and 700 officers and soldiers of the line were already on the long and bloody list of victims offered to this Moloch, and yet only one small battery against a small outwork was completed." Even this was of no use, for four or five of its guns were soon disabled by the fire from the fort, and many more of the besiegers killed. Ere a single advantage could be gained to compensate for such losses, intelligence was received that Marshal Soult was advancing, and a stop was put to all the operations; the first siege of Badajoz having thus turned out a total failure— a pool of misspent blood.

BATTLE OF ALBUERA, AND SECOND SIEGE OF BADAJOZ.

We have another melancholy instance of the waste of human life in the battle of Albuera, fought on the 16th of May 1811, between the British forces under Marshal Beresford and the French under Soult. Albuera is a village about twelve miles to the south-east of Badajoz. In this terrible battle the British

performed prodigies of-folly; bravery thrown away on a most worthless object. They succeeded in keeping their ground, but at an expense of 7000 men, while of the French 8000 perished. Fifteen thousand corpses lay scattered about in masses on one hill-side; and yet, according to the judgment of Colonel Napier, there was no necessity on the part of the British general for fighting the battle at all, inasmuch as it was risking nearly certain defeat for the sake of nothing. Sad satire upon war, when, owing to a general's incapacity, the poor dead fellows on the field of battle may have not even the consolation of knowing that they were obliged to be dead by unavoidable circumstances! Strange thought! that the hastiness of a general's temper, his deficiency in some particular faculty, or even a casual headache from having drunk too much wine, may be the cause of an unnecessary battle, and so of hurrying a few thousand men out of the world, who might have remained in it with perfect convenience even to the general himself!

A few days after the battle of Albuera, Badajoz was reinvested. Phillipon, the governor of the town, had employed the interval of repose in strengthening the works and taking in provisions. The besiegers commenced their operations on the 25th of May; and on the 2d of June batteries were completed against both the castle and San Christoval, twenty guns being pointed against the former, and twenty-three against the latter. The guns being for the most part of soft brass, and ill-constructed, many of them soon became unserviceable; yet, by assiduous firing, considerable damage was done both to the fort and the castle, although not without loss of men. An apparently practicable breach having been made in the fort, a storming party of 180 men, the forlorn-hope, led by a young lieutenant, advanced to attempt an entrance on the night between the 6th and 7th of June. The forlorn-hope reached the glacis about midnight without being perceived, jumped into the ditch, but found that, in consequence of the rubbish having been cleared away since dusk, they had still seven feet of perpendicular wall to climb, with carts, spikes, and jagged beams of wood placed above it to prevent ingress. Unable to overcome these obstacles, they were retiring, when the main body of the storming party came leaping into the ditch under a fire from the fort, bringing ladders fifteen feet long, with which to scale the walls at other points. The ladders, however, were too short; and after persevering for an hour amid shells, handgrenades, shot, stones, &c. poured down upon them by the garrison, the party were obliged to retire with the loss of 100 men. A second attack of a similar nature was made by a party of 200 men on the night between the 9th and 10th, which proved an equal failure. As the men jumped into the ditch with hurrahs, the French on the walls invited them with mock politeness to come on, seconding their invitation with barrels of gunpowder, shot, and shells. The ladders were now of

sufficient length; but as soon as they were planted, they were overturned by the garrison, or those who mounted them were bayoneted on the top, and flung into the ditch. After 140 men had fallen, the party retired, and as Soult was again advancing, the siege was raised next day-the allies having lost in this second siege of Badajoz 400 men by "proceedings contrary to all rules."

SIEGE OF CIUDAD RODRIGO.

It having been considered necessary to capture Ciudad Rodrigo, a town built on a rising ground on the right bank of the Agueda, a tributary of the Douro, Wellington laid siege to it in January 1812. After the usual preliminary operations and precautions, the breaching batteries were opened against the walls of the town on the 14th of January, just as evening set in. 66 Then," says Colonel Napier, " was beheld a spectacle at once fearful and sublime. The enemy replied to the assailants' fire with more than fifty pieces; the bellowing of eighty large guns shook the ground far and wide; the smoke rested in heavy columns on the battlements of the place, or curled in light wreaths about the numerous spires; the shells, hissing through the air, seemed fiery serpents leaping from the darkness; the walls crashed to the stroke of the bullet; and the distant mountains, faintly returning the sound, seemed to moan over the falling city. And when night put an end to this turmoil, the quick clatter of musketry was heard like the pattering of rain after a peal of thunder." For five days the batteries continued to play; and on the 19th there were two breaches in the walls reported practicable. Accordingly, on that day the stern order was issued by Lord Wellington-" Ciudad Rodrigo must be carried by assault this evening at seven o'clock." As few of our readers may be able to attach any but the most vague idea to this terrible word assault, we will attempt to give as precise a description of the assault of Ciudad Rodrigo as can be given by an untechnical person in untechnical language.

Conceive, then, a town built on a rising ground, and surrounded by two walls-the inner of old masonry, and about thirty feet high; the outer built farther down the slope of the hill, and not higher than twelve feet; affording, therefore, little cover to the other. Running along the base of this outer wall, or fausse braie, as it is called, is a ditch or excavation, about twelve feet deep, and thirty or forty yards wide, so that to cross it would require some time, especially in the face of a discharge of grape. The ditch being about twelve feet deep, and the fausse braie about twelve feet high, the total height of the fausse braie from the bottom of the ditch would be about twenty-four feet. Conceive an army of upwards of 30,000 men stationed round this town, among woods, and near convents and other suburban buildings outside the walls; not all lying in a mass