young, so there was steadiness in the ranks and fire
in the leading. Hill and Graham covered the siege, Picton and Barnard,
Kempt and Colville led the assaults. The trenches were held by the
third, fourth, and fifth divisions, and by the famous light division.
Of the latter it has been said that the Macedonian phalanx of Alexander
the Great, the Tenth Legion of Caesar, the famous Spanish infantry of
Alva, or the iron soldiers who followed Cortes to Mexico, did not
exceed it in warlike quality. Wellington's troops, too, had a personal
grudge against Badajos, and had two defeats to avenge. Perhaps no
siege in history, as a matter of fact, ever witnessed either more
furious valour in the assault, or more of cool and skilled courage in
the defence. The siege lasted exactly twenty days, and cost the
besiegers 5000 men, or an average loss of 250 per day. It was waged
throughout in stormy weather, with the rivers steadily rising, and the
tempests perpetually blowing; yet the thunder of the attack never
paused for an instant.

Wellington's engineers attacked the city at the eastern end of the
oval, where the Rivillas served it as a gigantic wet ditch; and the
Picurina, a fortified hill, ringed by a ditch fourteen feet deep, a
rampart sixteen feet high, and a zone of mines, acted as an outwork.
Wellington, curiously enough, believed in night attacks, a sure proof
of his faith in the quality of the men he commanded; and on the eighth
night of the siege, at nine o'clock, 500 men of the third division were
suddenly flung on the Picurina. The fort broke into a ring of flame,
by the light of which the dark figures of the stormers were seen
leaping with fierce hardihood into the ditch and struggling madly up
the ramparts, or tearing furiously at the palisades. But the defences
were strong, and the assailants fell literally in scores. Napier tells
how "the axemen of the light division, compassing the fort like
prowling wolves," discovered the gate at the rear, and so broke into
the fort. The engineer officer who led the attack declares that "the
place would never have been taken had it not been for the coolness of
these men" in absolutely walking round the fort to its rear,
discovering the gate, and hewing it down under a tempest of bullets.
The assault lasted an hour, and in that period, out of the 500 men who
attacked, no less than 300, with 19 officers, were killed or wounded!
Three men out of every five in the attacking