Castle, the lunette of San Roque, and the San Pedro bastion. The three other French battalions occupied the long range of bastions from San Juan to San Vincente. As there had been many casualties, the total of the available men had sunk to about 4,000, and since nearly half of them were concentrated at or behind the breaches, the guard was rather thin at other points--especially (as Picton had calculated) at the Castle, which, though its front was long, was held by only 250 men, mostly Hessians. [268] These swords were those of the large body of Spanish dismounted cavalry which had surrendered at the capitulation in March 1811. It was a most unfortunate thing that the time of the assault, originally fixed for 7.30, was put off till 10--and that the siege-batteries slacked down after dark. For the two hours thus granted to the besieged were well spent in repairing and strengthening all their devices for defence. An earlier assault would have found the preparations incomplete, especially in the matter of the combustibles placed in the ditch. It would be useless, in the narrative of the doings of this bloody night, to make any attempt to vie with those paragraphs of lurid description which make Napier’s account of the storm of Badajoz perhaps the most striking section of one of the most eloquent books in the English language. All that will be here attempted is to give a clear and concise note of what happened between ten and one o’clock on the night of April 6, 1812, so far as it is possible to secure a coherent tale from the diaries and memoirs of a number of eye-witnesses. Burgoyne and Jones of the Royal Engineers, Dickson the commander of the Artillery, Grattan and McCarthy from the 3rd Division, Leith Hay of the 5th, and Kincaid, Simmons, and Harry Smith of the Light Division, along with many more less well-known authorities, must serve as our instructors, each for the part of the storm in which he was himself concerned.