offensive operations, or worse adapted for replying to them. The French battery on the cliff was too elevated for artillery to reach, while the tower, which prevented their shot from reaching the body of the fort, also prevented any return fire at them, even if the fort had possessed artillery. In consequence of the elevated position of the French on the cliff, they could only breach the central portion of the tower. The lowest part of the breach they made was nearly sixty feet above its base, so that it could only be reached by long scaling ladders[56].’ It is seldom that a besieger has to complain of the difficulty caused to him by the possession of ground completely dominating a place that he has to reduce: but in the course of the siege of Fort Trinity the French were undoubtedly incommoded by the height of the Puig-Rom. The garrison below, hidden in good bomb-proofs and covered by the tower, suffered little harm from their fire. To batter the whole tower to pieces, by a downward fire, was too long and serious a business for them; they merely tried to breach it. [56] Lord Cochrane’s _Autobiography_, i. 303. He adds ‘A pretty correct idea of our relative positions may be formed if the unnautical reader will imagine our small force placed in the nave of Westminster Abbey, with the enemy attacking the great western tower from the summit of a cliff 100 feet higher than the tower, so that the breach in course of formation corresponds to the great west window of the Abbey. It was no easy matter to them to scale the external wall of the tower up to the great window, and more difficult still to get down from the window into the body of the church. These were the points I had to provide against, for we could not prevent the French either from breaching or from storming.’ If the ground in front of Fort Trinity was too high for the French, that of the town of Rosas was too low. It was so marshy that in wet weather the ditches of their siege works filled at once with water, and their parapets crumbled into liquid mud. The only approach on ground of convenient firmness and elevation was opposite a comparatively narrow front of the south-eastern corner of the place.