In the pause which followed the fighting in the passes, Wellington strengthened his breaching batteries by guns from England, and after thirty days' blockade, on August 26 fire was opened afresh on San Sebastian. The attack was much more formidable than in the first stage of the siege. The plan was to enlarge the existing breach on the eastern front, establish another to its left, and batter into ruins the demi-bastion at the angle, where the curtain across the isthmus and the river-wall met. Sixty guns were now thundering on San Sebastian, and Rey, on the French side, made but a feeble reply to that unceasing hail of flying balls. He could not fight the English batteries, but he was devoting himself, with rare skill, to the task of making the assault, when it came to be delivered, hopeless, or of ensuring that success should be paid for by a terrific price of blood.

A great siege is a battle of wits as well as of guns, and there is a strain of humour as well as of heroism in the devices used on either side. Thus, the British engineers knew that Rey had sown the breaches with mines, and was ready, when the columns were launched, to pour on them a torrent of fire from a dozen unsuspected points. They wanted to make him show his hand, and so on the night of August 29 a false attack was made.

An officer of the 9th, with the men immediately about him, was ordered to leap from the trench and run up the face of the breach, making all the noise they could in the process. All the formalities of an assault were observed. At ten o'clock three distinct musket-shots were fired as a signal from the trenches. The breaching batteries, which had been silent, opened with fury on the breaches. Suddenly the bugles sang shrilly from the trenches. It was the advance! The batteries shifted their fire from the breach to the walls beyond. The French, by this time, had fully manned their defences, and in the darkness a handful of men, making the utmost noise possible, was launched against the breach.

The Gallent 17

Seventeen men of the Royals, their officer leading, sprang into the open, and running forward, distributed themselves across the whole front of the breach, and proceeded to mount it firing, and shouting at the top of their voices. Success meant death, for it meant the explosion of unknown mines under their feet; and failure meant death almost as surely, for they were seventeen men mounting a breach defended by thousands.

The gallant seventeen, however never flinched, but deliberately clambered up the rough slope of stone. The French, on their part, however, kept their heads, and shot down the little band of heroes in a few minutes, only their leader returning unhurt.

On the night of the 29th a single officer, Major Snodgrass, of the 52nd, discovered a ford in the river opposite the smaller breach. He coolly waded across, climbed to the breach's very crest, and looked down into the blackness beyond, the French sentinels being within five yards of him!

On the 30th the breaches were declared to be practicable. Two wide rugged gaps in the wall within a stone's throw of each other were visible, and the assault was fixed for next day, August 31. Robinson's brigade of the 5th division was to lead.

Wellington, chagrined at the failure of the first assault, had issued an order calling for fifty volunteers from each of the fifteen regiments of the 1st, 4th, and Light Divisions; "men," the order ran, "who could show other troops how to mount a breach?"

In response to that appeal, the whole three divisions named volunteered almost en masse, and there was the utmost difficulty in settling who should enjoy the luxury of sharing the passion of the assault, and teaching the men of the 5th division how to carry a breach.

Costello gives us a glimpse of the effect which that call for volunteers had on the men of the other divisions. Two volunteers were invited from each company. Six immediately stepped forward from Costello's company, and a keen controversy arose as to who should be the favoured two. The dispute was settled by lot, and the envied distinction fell to two privates named Royston and Ryan. The sum of &$163 20 was offered to either of these men by other disappointed privates if they would give up their envied privilege of being one of the stormers, and the offer was refused. But the chance thus eagerly sought was only that of the imminent risk of wounds and death.

The men of the 5th, on the other hand, were furious with the call for volunteers. Leith, who commanded the division, insisted on his own men leading; the volunteers were to be merely in support. There was some risk, indeed, of the men of the 5th firing on the volunteers from the other divisions instead of the French, if they had been given the lead !

The morning of the 31st came, with rain-filled skies and thick mists drifting down from the black flanks of the Pyrenees. A fog like a pall of smoky crape lay on San Sebastian, and for some time the besieging batteries could not fire. Presently the gunners could see their mark, and the sullen thunder of the guns rolled without pause through the damp air.

At eleven o'clock silence fell, as by magic, on every smoking battery, and the stormers leaped from the trenches. Three mines which had been driven against the eastern end of the curtain were exploded; the silent and sorely-battered defences of San Sebastian broke into an angry fire along the two threatened faces, while from Monte Orgullo, rising high above the town, the batteries shot fast and furiously. Some French guns commanded the head of the trench from which the British troops were pouring, and the slaughter here was so great that the bodies of the slain had to be continually drawn aside to enable the stormers to pass.

It was known that the French had driven a mine under a projecting mass of sea-wall for the purpose of blowing it down on the column of British stormers, and a dozen privates, headed by a sergeant, raced forward, and leaped upon the covered way, intending to cut the fuse which was to fire the mine.

The French, flurried by that gallant dash, exploded the mine prematurely, slaying the whole heroic group. A great mass of masonry was thrown on the head of the storming party, killing many, but doing much less mischief than if the mine had been exploded later.

Maguire, of the 4th, who led the forlorn hope, was conspicuous for his stately height and noble figure, and as he lay dead on the breach after the fight was over, his face, as a brother officer wrote, "had the classic beauty of sculptured marble." He had a sure forecast of his own death. A fellow officer found him dressing for the assault with unusual care, as if for some great function. "When we are going to meet our old friends whom we have not seen for many years," he explained, "it is natural to wish to look as well as possible!"

The men of the 5th division, unshaken by exploding mines and falling walls and the roar of hostile batteries, had meanwhile reached the breach and swept up to its crest, only to find themselves practically in a death-trap. They stood on the edge of a perpendicular descent from sixteen to thirty feet deep. The houses in front of the breach had been cleared away and an inner wall erected at a distance of about forty yards, from which the red flames of musketry volleys flashed incessantly. To leap down was death. On either flank the breach had been severed from the wall beyond by deep traverses, covered by the fire of long lines of grenadiers.

The breach was not only scourged by musket-fire at close range; in front and on both flanks the guns from the castle, from the batteries on the hill slope, and from the high central hornwork in the curtain, covered the crest of the breach with their fire. The British engineers, in a word, had fatally miscalculated the difficulties of the assault.

"Nothing," says Sir Thomas Graham, "could be more fallacious than the external appearance of the breach. Notwithstanding its great extent, there was but one point where it was possible to enter, and there by single file."

For two hours the great breach showed a spectacle not often witnessed even in the bloody annals of war. Again and yet again the stormers struggled up the breach, only to fall and die there. The succession of heroic and hopeless assaults never failed.

"No man," says Sir Thomas Graham, "outlived the attempt to gain the ridge; " and still that fatal ridge, beyond which was only death, was edged with an ever-renewed front of daring soldiers. The volunteers in the trenches by this time had been let loose. They were calling out to know why they had been brought there if they were not to lead the assault. When at last the word was given, to use Napier's phrase, "they went like a whirlwind up the breaches." Bub it was only to perish on the splintered and bloodsplashed edge. Of the 750 volunteers, every second man fell.

The fighting at the half-bastion of St. John was equally gallant and equally hopeless. The British stormers could not prevail, but they would not yield; they fought and died with obstinate courage. A column of Portuguese, led by Snodgrass of the 52nd, forded the river, and flung itself gallantly on the farther and smaller breach, with equal daring and equal unsuccess. Graham, in a word, misled by his engineers, or over-urged by the too-daring spirits about him, had committed his troops to an attempt where valour was useless and success seemed impossible.

Sir Richard Henegan stood by Graham's side watching the progress of the assault, the broad red column of the stormers flowing incessantly up the rugged breach and perishing at its summit.

"Occasionally," he says, "the waving of an officer's sword and the gallant upward surge of the soldiers in response to it, kindled a gleam of hope," but the mass of the unsuccessful dead grew ever greater, and the line of the valiant living, who could not succeed yet would not retire, grew thinner.

"It would be impossible," says Henegan, "to describe the working of Graham's stern face as he watched the slaughter of his troops."

At this crisis Graham's stubborn Scottish temper plucked victory out of -what seemed the certainty of failure. A weaker commander would have withdrawn his troops, and perhaps blown out his own brains afterwards. But Graham, to quote Napier, "was a man to have put himself at the head of the last company, and die sword in hand upon the breach rather than suffer a second defeat."

He was watching the assault from battery No. 15, on the farther side of the river, and, after a hurried consultation with Dickson, who commanded the artillery, he suddenly adopted a strange and perilous device. He turned fifty heavy guns on the high parapet of the curtain, which overlooked both of the breaches, and the fire from which was destroying the storming columns.

As an interesting detail, Henegan records that it was Dickson of the artillery who made the suggestion that won San Sebastian. He knew the quality of his gunners, and begged Graham to let the batteries open fire on the crest of the walls, whence the triumphant French were shooting. down the British stormers.

It was anxious shooting, for the British troops were on the face of the breach, only a few feet below the line of fire from the British batteries. But Dickson's gunners knew the range perfectly, and for half-an-hour the parapet of the curtain was swept from end to end with a torrent of shot. Every French gun but two was dismounted. The parapet was strewn with torn and headless bodies.

When the batteries were roaring their fiercest, a great store of shells, grenades, and cartridges, which the French had piled along the rampart, took fire, and ran with a blast of spluttering sound and flame along the crest of the parapet, destroying 300 French grenadiers as with a breath.

Then the British broke through. The traverse nearest the great breach was constructed of barrels filled with earth, brass guns, &c., leaving merely a gap close to the exterior wall, by which a single man could squeeze through.

"Through this narrow entrance," says Leith Hay, "was San Sebastian taken." Through this gap, that is, the British soldiers first burst their way. They broke through, too, by the demi-bastion, and reached the town by the steps running down from it into the street.

Just as the town was won, the low black skies hanging over the city awoke in tempest, and the tumult of earthly battle below was drowned beneath the rolling thunder in the cloudy sky-depths above. It was deep calling to deep - the anger of the sky rebuking the petty anger of the earth. But, heedless of tempest and thunder, men fought like devils in the streets of San Sebastian, and many, at least, of the British, broken loose from all restraint, seemed like very fiends. The town took fire, and ten clays afterwards was still burning. Strange scenes of riot and cruelty were witnessed. Rey himself, with quenchless valour, fell back into the castle, and still held out, only surrendering, indeed, on September 8.

When the garrison marched out with the honours of war, at its head, with drawn sword, walked Rey himself, accompanied by the scanty survivors of his staff, and every officer on Graham's staff saluted the grim old veteran with respect. He had lost San Sebastian, but had not lost his soldierly reputation. Rey was curiously unheroic in personal appearance, but to his gross and aldermanic body he added the brain and daring of a fine soldier.

Wellington paid a great price for San Sebastian. Some 70,000 shot and shell were poured on its defences, and in the trenches around this petty town, or on its breaches, not less than 3800 of Wellington's troops fell; nearly as large an expenditure of life, as sufficed to win the history-making battle of Vittoria. The siege of San Sebastian is a conundrum not easily solved. Never was courage more desperate than that shown in the attack, yet never was courage so long cheated of its just reward. How was it that a third-rate fortress, and in bad condition when first invested, resisted a besieging army with a strong battering train for sixty-three days?

Napier gives a catalogue of "explanations," least important amongst which is the blunders committed by the besiegers.

"Wellington," he says, "was between sea and shore, and received help from neither." The Spaniards, that is, refused to supply carts and boats; the British Admiralty failed to close Sebastian from the sea, or to give reasonable help in the landing of stores, &c.

For the first time in war an important siege was maintained by women; for the stores for the besiegers were landed in boats rowed by Spanish girls. Soult's ten desperate battles in the Pyrenees, Napier thinks, were less injurious to the operations of the besiegers than the negligence and stupidities of the British Government. The over-haste of the besiegers, in brief, the scornful impatience of their valour, added to the sloth of the Spaniards, the serene indifference of the British Admiralty, and the persevering blunders of the British Government, explain why San Sebastian had to be purchased at the cost of so much heroic and wasted blood.

In his Journal of the siege Jones shows how this dreadful slaughter was due, also, to mere neglect of the alphabet of engineering art, and the attempt to make the blood and valour of the soldier, substitute for patience and scientific skill in attack.

The capture of San Sebastian, with an adequate siege train and sufficient use of breaching batteries, he says, would have been an easy and certain operation in eighteen or twenty days, and would have involved little loss of life. A too eager haste spread out that operation over sixty days, and cost the besiegers 3500 men and officers, killed, wounded, or taken prisoners.

Leith Hay gives a vivid picture of the scene offered by the great breach the day after San Sebastian was stormed. "The whole ascent of the breach," he says, "was covered with dead bodies; stripped and naked they lay on the ground where they had individually fallen, but in such numbers that on a similar space was never witnessed a more dreadful scene of slaughter. Behind this impressive foreground rose columns of smoke and ashes, and occasionally through the vapour was to be distinguished the towering castle keep, from whence, and from its batteries, issued, at intervals, an artillery discharge, or irregular and half-subdued musketry fire. Above, all this was distinguishable the thunder of the British mortar batteries, as from the right attack they poured shells upon the devoted rock, whose surface became furrowed and torn by their repeated explosions.

Having walked up the face of the breach, I proceeded along the curtain, which presented a scene of indescribable havoc and destruction. The heat from the blazing houses was excessive; and from the midst of the mass of fire at intervals was to be heard the noise created by soldiers still busied in adding to the miseries that had overtaken the devoted town. Never was there in the annals of war a more decided case of annihilation than that of San Sebastian.

The buildings all having communication, and being very closely arranged, ensured the conflagration becoming general -- roofs falling, and the crashing of ruined walls that rolled down, and, in. some cases, blocked up the passages in the street. The scene was rendered more impressive from the obscurity occasioned even at midday by the dense cloud of smoke that shrouded this scene of ruin and desolation."