At ten o’clock[304] the Italians crept up beneath the ramparts, where the citizens on guard do not seem to have kept a good look out, and delivered their attack. But these raw troops, moving in the darkness, made many mistakes: the chief one was that many of the ladder-party went astray among the water-courses and field-walls, so that the provision of ladders proved insufficient. The garrison of the bastion, however, had been taken completely by surprise, and allowed the head of the column to escalade the twenty-foot wall with no more hindrance than a few musket-shots. The Neapolitan Colonel Ambrosio and the leading files had actually mounted, and driven back the citizens to the gorge of the bastion, when there arrived reinforcements, a company of the Regiment of Ultonia, which charged with the bayonet, drove the Italians back, and hurled them over the rampart. An Irish lieutenant, Thomas Magrath, and a Carmelite friar seized and overturned the ladders, at the cost of the life of the former. When the garrison began firing down into the mass of assailants crowded at the foot of the wall, and the neighbouring bastion commenced to discharge a flanking fire of artillery, the Italians broke and fled. A second attempt at an escalade, made two hours later at another bastion, failed even more lamentably, for the garrison were on the alert and detected the assailants before they drew near the walls. [304] Napier says that the assault was delivered at seven in the evening, before dark (i. 79); but all the Spanish accounts speak of it as having taken place long after dark, though before midnight (cf. Arteche, Toreño, and Minali, quoted by the former); so does Foy (iv. 158), who fixes the hour as ‘between nine and ten.’ Convinced that he was too weak to take Gerona without siege-artillery, Duhesme broke up his camp and fled under cover of the night, marking his retreat by a third insincere attempt to open negotiations with the garrison. He hastily made off by the same road by which he had come, and returned to Barcelona by forced marches, dropping on the way one of his Italian brigades at Mataro [June 24]. In the whole expedition he had lost 700 men[305]. [305] Yet he had the hardihood to write to the Emperor that ‘after some slight skirmishing, he did not think it worth while to make a serious attack on Gerona’ (_Nap. Corresp._, xvii. 347).