Burgoyne, the senior engineer present, tells us that he protested all through the siege, at each successive assault, against the paucity of the numbers employed, saying that the forlorn hope had, in fact, to take the work by itself, since they had no close and strong column in immediate support; and if the forlorn hope failed, ‘the next party, who from behind their cover have seen them bayoneted, are expected to valiantly jump up and proceed to be served in the same way.’ He reminded Wellington, as he says, that the garrison at Burgos was as large as that at Ciudad Rodrigo, where two whole divisions instead of 500 or 600 men had been thrown into the assault. The Commander-in-Chief, condescending to argument for once, replied, ‘why expose more men than can ascend the ladders [as at the Guards’ attack] or enter the work [as at the breach in the K.G.L. attack] at one time, when by this mode the support is ordered to be up in time to follow the tail of the preceding party[54]?’ And his objection to the engineer’s plea was clinched by the dictum, ‘if we fail we can’t lose many men.’ This controversy originally arose on the details of the abortive storm of September 22, but Burgoyne’s criticism was even more convincing for the details of the final assault on October 18. The number of men risked was far too small for the task that was set them. The melancholy story of the storm runs as follows. On the explosion of the mine at San Roman, punctually at 4.30, all three of the sections of the assault were duly delivered. At the breach the forlorn hope of the King’s German Legion charged at the rough slope with great speed, reached the crest, and were immediately joined by the support, led most gallantly by Major Wurmb of the 5th Line Battalion. The first rush cleared a considerable length of the rampart of its defenders, till it was checked against a stockade, part of the works which the French had built to cut off the breach from the main body of the place. Foiled here, on the flank, some of the Germans turned, and made a dash at the injured rampart of the third line, in their immediate front: three or four actually reached the parapet of this inmost defence of the enemy. But they fell, and the main body, penned in the narrow space between the two _enceintes_, became exposed to such an overpowering fire of musketry that, after losing nearly one man in three, they finally had to give way, and retired most reluctantly down the breach to the trenches they had left. The casualties out of 300 men engaged were no less than 82 killed and wounded[55], among the former, Wurmb, who had led the assault, and among the latter, Hesse, who commanded the forlorn hope, and was one of the few who scaled the inner wall as well as the outer.