bottom, the rest crowded on the edge, where the French engineers fired the series of fougasses, mines, and powder-barrels which had been laid in the ditch. They worked perfectly, and the result was appalling--the 500 volunteers who formed the advance of each division were almost all slain, scorched, or disabled. Every one of the engineer officers set to guide the column was killed or wounded, and the want of direction, caused by the absence of any one who knew the topography of the breaches, had the most serious effect during the rest of the storm. Of the Light Division officers with the advance only two escaped unhurt. There was a horrible check for a minute or two, and then the heads of the main column of each division reached the edge of the ditch, and began to leap down, or to make use of those of the ladders which had not been broken. The gulf below was all ablaze, for the explosions had set fire to the carts, boats, broken gabions, &c., which the French had set in the ditch, and they were burning furiously--every man as he descended was clearly visible to the enemy entrenched on the top of the breaches. The troops suffered severely as they dribbled over the edge of the counterscarp, and began to accumulate in the ditch. From the first there was great confusion--the two divisions got mixed, because the 4th had been forced to swerve to its left to avoid the inundation, and so was on ground originally intended for the Light. Many men mistook an unfinished ravelin in the bottom of the ditch for the foot of the central breach, and climbed it, only to find themselves on a mass of earth divided by a wide sunken space from the point they were aiming at. To get to the foot of the largest breach, that in the Trinidad bastion, it was necessary to push some way along the blazing bottom of the ditch, so as to turn and get round the end of the inundation. The main thrust of the attack, however, went this way, only part of the Light Division making for the Santa Maria breach, on which it had been intended that all should concentrate. As to the central breach in the curtain, it seems that few or none made their way[269] thither: the disappointment on reaching the top of the ravelin in front of it, made all who got alive to that point turn right or left, instead of descending and pushing straight on. Jones records that next morning there was hardly a single body of an English soldier on the central breach, while the slopes and foot of each of the two flank breaches were heaped with hundreds of corpses. This was a misfortune, as the curtain breach was the easiest of the three, and having been made only that afternoon was not retrenched like the others. [269] This fact, much insisted on by Jones, is disputed by certain Light Division witnesses, but does not seem to be disproved by them.