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 than the high clear tones of Craufurd addressing his men for the last time.
Then, after many minutes of silence, suddenly the sky over the convent wall opened with a glare and shut again, and we heard the French guns tearing the night. The attack of the Third Division on our right had begun, and the noise of it was taken up by the 95th riflemen, spread wide in three companies to scour the fausse braye between the two breaches, and keep the defenders busy along it. As the sound of the assault spread down to us, interrupted again and again by the explosion of shells, we were marched forward for two or three hundred yards and halted, put into motion and halted again. We could see the city now, opening and shutting upon us in fiery flashes; and, in the intervals, jet after jet of fire streamed from the rifles on our right.
Then someone shouted to us to advance at the double, and I ran blowing upon my bugle, for now the calls were sounding all about me. I had no thought of death in all this roar—the crowd seemed to close around and shut that out—until we came to the edge of the counterscarp facing the fausse braye: and by that time the worst of the danger had passed. The fausse braye itself was dark, and the darker for a blaze of light behind it. Our stormers had carried it and swept the defenders back into the true breach beside the tower. Some stray bullets splashed among us as we toppled down the ditch and mounted the scarp—shots fired from Heaven knows where, but probably from some French retreating along the top of the fausse braye.
While we were mounting the scarp Napier and his men must have carried the inner breach. At the top we thronged to squeeze through the narrow entrance, for all the world like a crowd elbowing its way into a theatre: and as I pressed into the skirts of the throng it seemed to suck me in and choke me. My small ribs caved inwards as we were driven through by the weight of men behind. The pressure eased, and an explosion threw a dozen of us to earth between the fausse braye and the slope of rubble by which the stormers had climbed.
I picked myself up—gripped my bugle—and ran for the slope, still blowing. A man of the 43rd gave me a hand and helped me up, for now we were stumbling among corpses. What had become of the stormers? Some we were trampling under foot: the rest had swept on and into the town.
"Fifty-second to the left," said my friend as we gained the top of the rampart, catching up a cry which now sounded everywhere in the darkness. "Forty-third to the right—fifty-second to the left!" I turned sharply to the left and ran from him.
A rush of men overtook me. "This way!" they shouted, swerving aside from the line of the ramparts and sliding down the steep inner slope towards the town. They were mad for loot, but in my ignorance I supposed them to be obeying orders, and I turned aside and clambered down after them.
We crossed a roadway and plunged into a dark and deserted street at the foot of which shone a solitary lamp. Then I learned what my comrades were after. The first door they came to they broke down with their musket-butts. An old man was crouching behind it; and, dragging him out, they tossed him from one to another, jabbing at him with their bayonets. I ran on, shutting my ears to his screams.